My dad, an alcoholic, always used to skip the wine during Eucharist. When we got married, my wife and I were the Eucharistic Ministers. I remember being slightly panicked when my father lined up in front of me and took the chalice from me. He raised it to his lips and then kissed the rim. It was the most reverent…

After a lifetime of Catholic school, I am full of these stories.

After a very long (and very booze-filled) night of camping, my boyfriend and I went to his nearby hometown to pick up our idiot dog his parents had graciously watched. Instead of hopping into the car like she was supposed to, aforementioned idiot dog made a mad dash through town, galloping her way through people’s…

I have a bus story too!

An old employer of mine did that at a university interview (complete with trying to get out of the room without admitting he had a dead leg) and got offered what he called ‘a quite generous’ bursary for disabled students. (He turned it down, obviously.)

I suppose.

When I came home from my first day of kindergarten I told my grandma I wanted to quit school because they hadn’t taught me how to read yet and that was the only thing I was interested in. After she stopped laughing she sat me down and wouldn’t let me off the couch until I had read “Green Eggs and Ham”. I already knew…

Are you secretly Junie B. Jones?

In first grade, I don’t remember what happened but my first grade teacher, Mrs. McCarley, threatened to paddle every single one of us until whoever did The Thing confessed to doing it. (This was the 80s, so paddling was still a thing.) I did NOT do the thing, and I sure as hell wasn’t getting paddled for it, so I went…

I had miserable periods in high school. I could go 20 days on my period, 10 days off, with 4-5 days psycho heavy. I even ended up with severe anemia. Anyway, one time I was stupidly wearing white pants (didn’t think I was due) and filled up my chair I was sitting in, my pants had blood all the way to my knees. Once I…

My family moved to a new town and I had a first day of school in kindergarten. I got seated next to kid I would realize was forever covered in cheetodust. That’s not thisstory.

What a sweet driver!

When I was a kid, my dad did our laundry at the laundromat for some reason. We were at my grandparents’ house. He looked out the window and then he took off running out the door. He had dropped a few pairs of mine and my mother’s underwear on the driveway. They were at least clean.

I went to Catholic school, first through eighth grade. It was the first day of third grade, 1967. We had mostly nuns teaching, but this class was taught by a lay teacher (that would be a non-nun, for you public school kids). Anyway, since this was our third year in Catholic school, we were no dummies. We knew they…

This is kind of a humiliation/triumph hybrid. When I was starting 3rd grade, we got a hot (for the 80s) new bus driver who I immediately started crushing on. He wore head-to-toe denim and played Bon Jovi for us on the morning of the first day. On the way home that afternoon, I realized fairly quickly that I needed to…

I have so many wonderful back-to-school stories. My dad convinced me to chop my beautiful long hair into A Princess Di cut. Fantastic Sam’s was not the place to go for that. I cried for 24 hours straight. School was starting in a few days, and my dad felt like he had to make it right, so he let me go to the mall for a…

It was recess and these two boys thought they would chase after my friend and I. I told them to stop chasing us but they said we really loved it and actually wanted them to chase us. Ah, rape culture at 6 years old! As the two boys were about to run at me to catch me at the same time, I dove out of the way and they…

Many years ago, I taught at a small boarding school. One of my students—I’ll call him “James”—was in sixth grade, and he was a difficult, petulant young man.

Remembered another one!

First day back from break in Grade 4, during a writing exercise, I had to ask my teacher how to spell the word “of”. I just had this massive brain fart where I couldn’t remember how and no matter what I wrote it somehow looked wrong. Not a proud moment.