I began the fifth grade in September of 1958. It was a momentous school year for two reasons. First, I finally had a really good teacher and second, Michael started first grade. It was fun to have a sibling attending school with me at long last and my teacher, Mrs. Powers was quite wonderful in my eyes. She was strict, but not in a cruel way like my fourth grade teacher had been. She was quite smart and had a large family of her own. She knew how to handle children by setting limits with love. 

Michael proved to be a bright fellow just as we knew he would be. He was always quiet so his teachers did not see his intellect right away. He quickly learned to read well, but it was math that caught his fancy. He wanted to know how things worked and he dreamed of humans traveling into space. As a youngsters he had walked around the house with one of my father’s books about travel to the moon cradled in his arms. He studied the drawings of the rockets and the space orbits for hours. The book was by Wernher von Braun and it became my brother’s guide for future travel in space. With confidence he told everyone how it would happen and hinted that one day he would be part of the adventure.

He was always taking things apart to see how they were made. One time while our father was still alive he dismantled one of my favorite dolls. I became hysterical when I saw what he had done but Daddy seemed almost proud of Michael as he explained to me that my brother just needed to understand how the doll’s eyes opened and closed and how its arms moved up and down. Once in a fit of anger I vengefully took the head from Michael’s Dennis the Menace doll. Nobody was amused even though it was easy to repair. They understood that my motivation had been to harm, not to learn. Their response was a good lesson for me to realize the difference. I never did such a thing again. 

Life was good and we felt quite settled into our home, our neighborhood and our routines. We had learned to cope without our father and I was no longer afraid of catastrophe without him. Time began to accelerate at a rapid pace. Before long it was 1959, then 1960 and not only was Patrick heading to first grade, but our mother had been hired to teach fifth grade at Mt. Carmel Elementary School. I was entering the seventh grade and Michael was moving up to third, so all of our lives began to center around the school calendar. 

I was coming off of a second year of having a teacher that I totally enjoyed. In the sixth grade I had been fortunate enough to spend my days in Mrs. Loisey’s classroom and she would forever remain on my list of favorite people. In the seventh grade I would have different teachers for different subjects for the very first time. I really enjoyed the variety of personalities and teaching styles, but English, History and Science were my favorite subjects. I was a member of the Mt. Carmel drill squad as well. Mama had made sure that I took twirling lessons and I had become rather proficient with the baton. She was thrilled when I became one of the twirlers. I always got the idea that she had wanted wanted me to shine in ways other than just academics, but I always felt like a klutz save for when it came to manipulating that baton.

Michael and Patrick were both athletic. They were on Little League teams and we spent hours at the baseball field for practices and games. I on the other hand avoided anything having to do with catching or throwing or hitting a ball. I had not yet matured and I overheard my mother quietly worrying that something might be medically wrong with me. I don’t think she would ever have told me such a thing herself but I was always listening to her conversations and that bit of news began to worry me as well. I was not only a year younger than most of my peers but I was apparently a very late bloomer. My confidence began to waver a bit, but only my good friend Lynda knew of my fears. She and I consoled each other in believing that we were ugly ducklings who would no doubt become childless spinsters. I suppose that we thought we were the first young adolescents in history to feel this way, little understanding that it was only a phase that overtook almost everyone to some extent or another. 

In the spring of 1961, my science teacher, Mrs. Colby, was so excited about the upcoming launch of the first American in space that I became as interested in that dream as my brother Michael had always been. Mrs. Colby almost breathlessly taught us about the seven astronauts and the race into space between the United States and the Soviet Union. When I watched the brief but exhilarating adventure of Alan Shepard launch into space it felt as exciting and wonderful as Christmas. I thought about my little brother Michael with his moon book and began to believe that just maybe we would one day land on the moon just as President John Kennedy had challenged our nation to do. 

In the meantime, my English teacher Sister Mary Lester had taught us about propaganda. Of course we all knew that the Soviet Union was sending out disinformation constantly, but we were stunned to learn that lots of institutions did the same, including the United States. I was incredibly excited to learn something that seemed so adult. It felt as though I knew a secret that most people did not. Since that time I’ve tracked evidence of her assertion over and over again and I believe that she was quite right. 

The Cold War was roaring at an icy rate. We heard the piercing roar of the noonday air raid every Friday. At times we practiced ducking and covering our heads in the event of a bombing attack. I remember wondering who thought that just going under a desk and putting our arms over our heads would be sufficient to save us from harm in the event of an attack. It all seemed quite silly, but we politely complied with the drills in spite of our doubts about their effectiveness. 

Times were changing and I often found myself wondering what my father would have thought of our family and our world. He was such a history and science buff that surely he would have wanted to talk about what he saw. I wished that I might know him as someone who was attempting to grow into and adult. I liked to think that he would be happy with all of us, especially our mother who had devoted herself to us and who kept telling wonderful stories of how much our father loved us. I was proud of each of us and I think Daddy would have been so as well.