re: #205 Decatur Deb

I am Stubborner Than Thou. Did 5 teenaged yrs in a minor seminary —mass at least once a day, 0530 wakeup, rigid Latin/Greek based curriculum, no girls in sight, food worse than any mess hall. Finally my spiritual adviser said: “You’re not really taking this seriously, are you?”

Ha! We had a service every day, no open toed shoes (toes were the devils work I guess) or shorts were allowed, a family meal 3x a week we all had to dress up for and attend, but there were girls. You had to keep 6” apart and they weren’t allowed to be in an opposite sex dorm. OTOH, to be crude, the line “I want to be a minister and I think I love you” worked like a charm for the first 3 weeks.

Nobody told me a thing about any of that until the day I showed up on campus. I remember being met at the car by a group of smiling too wide white kids using the world “glorious” too often and way too excited to meet me and thinking right away that it wasn’t going to end well…