the nuns

Strawberry Point was a wonderful place to be a kid. The tiny peninsula had a great view of Mount Tamalpais, which had taken the silhouette of the love-sick Indian maiden who had leapt to her death there long ago, and of Sausalito, with its houseboats and quaint beatnik mystique to the southwest across the water. Ferries floated out to the south from Sausalito toward the San Francisco skyline. Alcatraz was out there, and he often wondered if any of the dangerous criminals who had unsuccessfully tried to swim to their escape had been eaten by sharks off the shore of his little peninsula. Further off he could see the Oakland Bay Bridge leapfrogging over Yerba Buena Island. And around on the back side of the point, just a big league stone’s throw across Richardson Bay, were more houseboats at Tiburon and more ferries levitating across the hazy expanse toward the City.

It was 1959 and he was eight years old. His family lived in student housing at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. The Southern Baptist school had bought several hundred acres on Strawberry Point that had previously been a game reserve. There were open rolling hills and huge stands of pine and eucalyptus and marshlands and gravel beaches. There were red foxes and deer and cranes and herons and redwing blackbirds and skunks and bluebelly lizards and cottontail bunnies and garter snakes and raccoons. When he was not in school, the Point belonged to him. His parents were consumed with work and study, and he was too young to be responsible for his little brother and sister, so he was free to roam. Often he hunted for snakes or lizards in the woods, or for sand crabs under rocks along the beach, overturning stones to see what he would find underneath. As often as not there would be one or more of the little crabs hiding there. They ranged from the size of a BB up to about three inches across, and he often came home with dozens of them in a bucket. He was allowed to keep them overnight in an aquarium with gravel and a little sea water, but then he must return them to the bay.

Once his father had put his feet up on the coffee table and tipped the aquarium over onto the floor. It was a great adventure! The whole family scrambled and hunted for the scurrying little crabs for the rest of the evening. There were several dozen of them, and they rapidly scampered for cover in every corner and under every object in the little apartment.

Strawberry Point School was about a mile up East Strawberry Drive from the east entrance to the seminary on the Tiburon side of the point. He rode the bus to school most mornings, waiting at the bus stop and doing his best not to be mortally wounded in the perpetual rock fight that preoccupied the half hour before the bus arrived.

In the afternoon, he only rode the bus when the weather was disagreeable. He much preferred to walk up the road between the tall shaggy eucalyptus trees, sometimes taking a shortcut over the hill behind old man Mason’s place. There was adventure in this, because old man Mason was the head grounds keeper for the seminary, and it was he who usually interfered with the mighty deeds of valor that young boys embark upon in such a pristine wilderness as a seminary campus. He was the closest thing they had to an enemy. All the other adults were engrossed in studies and rarely were seen in broad daylight except when rushing from the housing complex across campus to classes. In reality, Mason was not particularly concerned with the kids on campus, and rarely interfered with them, but he was legendary—the campus ogre—and to cut through his back yard was an extraordinary feat of bravery, and worth all the adrenaline his glands could produce. Usually he was not all that brave. It took an encounter with the nuns to push him to such extreme measures.

The road to school was also the address of a huge old boarding house that was home to a large contingent of Catholic nuns. It was years later when he learned that the place was a retreat center where nuns came to rest and replenish their strength. As a child, he had no idea what went on in the nunnery, and the place filled his little unexamined Baptist heart with fear and suspicion. He had never been around Catholics before. The heartland of the Texas panhandle was home to his family for generations, and Catholics were few and far between in the little farm towns where he had lived. His parents had ventured out from the Texas high plains a couple of years before seminary to live in south western Washington, but even the northwest lumber town of Longview had not exposed him to nuns.

Now he found himself sharing the road home from school with nuns on a regular basis. The eucalyptus trees that lined the road were enormous, with trunks exceeding three or four feet across. They reached up to join hands 70 feet or more above the road, forming a dark, cool tunnel that rustled and creaked and permeated the air with mystery and pungent invisible vapors and secrets. The sounds of traffic and city life were swallowed up within this passage, and it held its space in a timeless secret stillness that was rarely interrupted except by its own rustling and the barking of squirrels and the still small sound of an occasional seed pod falling onto the pavement. The nuns made no sound at all when they walked along the road, unless they spoke pleasantly to him in passing. But he was careful not to allow this to happen.

As he walked up the road toward home, he was ever watchful for nuns. If he spotted any of them in the road ahead of him, he would climb the hill and risk capture by old man Mason. If he turned and saw nuns coming along the road behind him, he would quicken his pace to get past the nunnery before they caught up with him. On nice days, it seemed that there were always nuns lurking somewhere along the road.

One of the most remarkable things about the nuns was that they were so stealthy and swift and seemed able to materialize out of thin air. Countless times he had suddenly and unexpectedly found a pair of silent nuns swishing past him in their black robes and speaking softly and kindly to him as they passed, regardless of his most diligent efforts to watch his back as he made his way along the road. Their ability to appear right behind him in the road was uncanny, and absolutely terrifying.

The following year was election year. Shortly after his ninth birthday, Eisenhower’s term as president expired. He had never known any other president, being an infant at the beginning of the Eisenhower years. The election was the talk of all the campus kids. None of them had ever known another president either. Most everyone was intensely concerned with the outcome, and uniformly pro-Nixon. On the other hand, his teachers, and most of the kids from the community outside the campus favored Kennedy.

On the night of the election, everyone suspended their studies to focus on election coverage. His family did not have a television, so they sat around the radio until late that night.

“Why don’t we want Kennedy to win?,” he asked his mom as she finally tucked him in an hour or so after his regular bed time.

“Well, the problem with Kennedy,” She explained thoughtfully, “is that he’s a Catholic. And Catholics answer to the Pope. The Pope is the head of the Catholic church, and whatever he says, they have to follow.”

He lay there in the dim light filtering in from the hallway, the muffled sounds of election coverage in the background. She continued.

“We’ve never had a president before who was a Catholic, and many people are concerned about what a Catholic president would do if the Pope asked him to make a decision that was not good for our country. The Pope is not an American.”

The gravity of this situation slowly sank in.

“Can I stay up and listen to the radio?” he asked, now seeing just how serious the Kennedy threat really was. Now he had good reason to fear the nuns, and the Kennedys, and the Pope.

“No, dear. We’ll let you know how it came out when you wake up in the morning.”

He lay very still after she left the room, hoping to stay awake, and to hear enough detail to follow the fate of the nation as it unfolded on the radio. But all was in vain. Long before the night ended, he was deep in sleep, and America had fallen into the grasp of the nuns and their Italian Pope.