Sister Jean Clare
Some people and places just stick with you.
Sister Jean Clare is one of those people.
She was the principal and I a pupil at St. John’s Catholic School in Spring Green, Wisconsin, in the early 1960s.
Everybody called her Sister Jean Clare. Not Sister. Not Sister Jean.
Even in my first-graderness I knew that Sister Jean Clare was not like other nuns at St. John’s. Certainly not like spindly Sister Bernadine, whose skin always looked pasty and was the kind of nun whose habit you wanted to lift up or you wanted to aggravate just for the hell of it.
Sister Jean Clare could have been a soccer player or a CEO. A compact, olive-skinned beauty with fiery coffee bean eyes and hair, what we could see of it, the color of black licorice sticks. One look from her told you she knew exactly what you were up to and even what you were thinking about being up to.
And no habit lifting with Sister Jean Clare. I was afraid that she’d whoosh up her skirt in both hands and invite me to have a real look, saying something like, “Just like yours, only bigger!” Then I would have been stuck with not only having to go to confession for blasphemy against a nun, but the trauma of verbalizing the whole thing to Father Fellenz.
Sister Jean Clare also taught the eighth grade at St. John’s. She made the eighth graders buddy up with first graders for fire drills and to walk to morning Mass each school day. Something about modeling good behavior.
All that modeling would be lost on me until years later when Catholic school recall kicked in.
For the time being, I was too busy watching Sister Jean Clare’s coffee bean eyes.