Penultimate Nun Story . . .

This is me, lying (laying?) on the beach in Daytona on spring break, 1961.  Mom decided that we should go on a trip for spring break because she didn't want us to ever think we were poor.  Mom, and I and David, and mom's friend Eileen drove to Florida and back.  It took us four days to get there and four days to get back.  We spent two days there, one in Daytona Beach, and one near wherever the Citrus Tower was (is?).

Mom and Eileen took turns driving, and since my brother Ken had a different week off than David and I did, we dropped him and Mary off in Washington, D. C. for the weekend and we went on to Florida.  Up until that trip, Mom had never driven anything but an automatic, and Eileen's car was a standard.  Which led to lots of exciting moments when she tried to brake with her left foot . . .

This was before Disney, before there was a Space Coast, before I-95 was even completed.  There were lots of Parrot Jungle and Aligator Farm sorts of places, and we drove on the beach in Daytona.  And we rode on an air-boat.  I remember it being so loud that we couldn't hear each other talking.  So of course, I availed myself of the opportunity to scream aloud every cuss-word I could think of, and blissfully escape the consequences that would have ensued, had anyone been able to hear me.  And there were other anachronistic types of things that since have vanished from the landscape, at least, if not from the public consciousness.

Somewhere in Georgia, or maybe North or South Carolina (maybe even Virginia- I don't remember for sure), after spending absolutely hours in the car and being on the brink of starvation, mom pulled off the road in some tiny little town into a bright and well-lit restaurant parking lot.  (The knowledge was slowly beginning to dawn on me that one could take all one's meals in restaurants, and never eat at home.  What a concept!)  It looked like a great place, to my rapidly developing cosmopolitan senses, but I was taken aback when we got to the door, where hanging dead center was a sign that read:

I was astonished.  Here was objective reality, that heretofore in my life had been only subjective.  This was wrong.  Extremely wrong.  God-damnable wrong.  Wrong with every fiber of my being wrong.   My mom taught me that it was wrong.  My recently departed dad had taught me it was wrong. My teachers, the nuns in St Lawrence School (which that year had admitted it's first ever black student), taught me that it was wrong, and if they taught it was wrong, then you knew under pain of Mortal Sin that God-On-His-Throne-In-Heaven thought it was wrong as well.  So I did the only thing a good, principled, Catholic boy could do in a situation like that.

I refused to go in.

And then I learned about principles of convenience.  It was the only restaurant in miles.  The parking lot was well lit (two women traveling with young children and all).  We did, after all, have to eat.  Yes, it was wrong, and we'd never do this at home (we'd never even seen this at home), but we're not at home, are we, and yes, God thinks this is horribly wrong, but God thinks disobedience is wrong as well.  And no, you can't wait in the car . . .

So I went in.  I could go to hell later for eating there, or I could go to hell now for being disobedient.  I chose later.  As we entered the restaurant, I looked around, and for the first time in my life, I noticed that there were no black people in the room.  It had never occurred to me before to notice that.  It had never even occurred to me to notice that there were no black children in my school until there was one.  Her name was LaMonica.  It never occurred to me that she must have been as courageous as Rosa Parks to be the first and only black child in a previously all white school, even if it was in Connecticut.  Even if it was Catholic . . .

What I did notice, to my everlasting and ongoing horror, were the four nuns at the table next to us.  Surely NUNS would have known better!  Surely NUNS would have stood on God and principle and NOT eaten in a "White Only" restaurant.  Surely holy women, right next to God women, SHOULD have known better.  But there they were.  And when they were done eating, Eileen picked up their check, as if somehow, she would get some eternal points by paying for their food, despite our collective wrongness for even being there in the first place . . .

(And in all fairness to mom, I don't think it ever occurred to her that we'd encounter a sign like that.  And being a grownup, dedicated to preserving the life of her highly principled, if incredibly naive, son, I'm sure that there was far more that she took into consideration than I did from my single-issue perspective . . . like the Magi, we didn't stop there on the way back.)

But you know what's really wrong?  That sign.  That's not a photograph of a sign on a restaurant door, somewhere south of Washington, D. C. from Spring Break in 1961.  I wish it was.  That's a copy of a photograph of a sign available this morning on "Amazon.com" for $24.95.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same" (Quark, last words, last show, Deep Space Nine).