The is an excerpt from a yet-unnamed memoir of my high school years spent in a seminary continues to chronicle my first days there. The school is in Bucksport Maine, and the year is 1960. In this vignette, I write about my first morning. The memoir is in progress.

The is an excerpt from a yet-unnamed memoir of my high school years spent in a seminary continues to chronicle my first days there. The school is in Bucksport Maine, and the year is 1960. In this vignette, I write about my first morning. The memoir is in progress.

At 5:45, it was still dark outside, night really. Except for an occasional mumble, the regular breathing of boys in deep sleep was the only noise punctuating the quiet of the dormitory. Perhaps we were all back home in our dreams, with our families once again.

Suddenly—Brrr!

The “bell”— an electric ringer really,  resounded loud and insistent in the silence.

“Laus tibi, Christe,” shouted the head Fourth-Form admonitor from his bed in the center of the dorm.
Only from the deep-voices of the other two admonitors at the opposite ends of the room was there an answering “Deo gratias!”<!–more–>

It was as if the three older Juniors were having a conversation which we were not intended to be privy to, a conversation whose meaning was hidden in a language we did not speak. Many of us that morning must have sat up in bed dazed, wondering how could we do this morning after morning? 5:45! Still so dark outside! Some boys continued to snuggle in for a bit more sleep, but the room was now flooded with light. The night was over, and our first morning at the seminary had begun.

“Claim a sink right away,” Ernest had advised the night before at supper, “or you’ll be scrambling at the end of wake up time to get ready for chapel.”

I grabbed the towel draped over the head of my iron bedstead. Eager for what the new day might bring, wanting to begin the life that I had fantasized for so long, I rushed toward the sinks—perhaps striking against a few beds and evoking a “what the…?” that resounded in the silent dormitory, now bright with overhead lighting. The sinks were in a row against a wall that ran from an outside wall to the center of the room—behind that wall of sinks was a  large room with  the toilets and showers and, beyond that, next to the stairs, the prefect’s room. (The prefect had turned out to be Father Boucher who had sat at the table on the dais in the refectory.)

Other boys, from around the dormitory, were now making a run for the sinks, too. The idea was to throw a towel or a toilet kit into it to stake a “claim.” Naturally a morning person, I was one of those who got a sink that first morning and, as I walked back to my bed to fetch other articles I would need, I noticed boys lingering in bed, rubbing their eyes, holding on to dreams—dreams of home perhaps that we thirteen- and fourteen- year-olds had so recently left for the first time.

Boys in brand new pajamas raised the window shades—there might have been twenty to twenty-five windows in all—allowing the dim morning light to penetrate the edges of the room—too weak really to counter the glare of the electric lights which reflected off the glossy green walls.

That first morning set a pattern for how on other mornings we would rise and prepare for the day. Several styles were evident. There were those boys who were first—and would always be. Perhaps we were the morning persons. It was as if we were waiting cocked for the bell to ring and, when it did at last at 5:45, we shot towards the sinks like bullets—making competition with us impossible. The slower boys had to cede to us. Those who wanted a sink in the second round dressed slowly filling in the time before their access to the sinks. Along with some boys still in bathrobes, they stood behind us in their t-shirts. Then finally came those boys who had lingered in bed, the boys who found it difficult to rise at all. But, rise they would have to as the bell summoned us to the chapel. Five-minute bells and final bells. In all, we had twenty minutes to transition from sleep to morning prayers.

Morning prayers, recited from the book we had first used the previous evening, began at 6:10—there was a five minute transiton to allowed 150 boys to get from the dormitory to the chapel—with meditation following prayers at about 6:20. For the thirteen-year-olds—feeling sleep close and insistent, meditation was especially difficult. We sat, 150 of us, silently, something we First Formers had never done. Heads nodded, eyes roamed all over the chapel, bodies squirmed.

How could one meditation period last for such a long time!

Finally 6:40 came—time for Mass. We were all boys who from our corners of New England had felt the call to be celebrants of Masses, and so going to Mass was something we probably all did willingly—but surely few of us had ever gone to Mass daily. I certainly had not. The ritual of daily attendance that was to be ours for as long as we persevered in the seminary began that morning.

The Ordinary of the Mass was later to alternate, like the prayers, between English, French and Latin for a week at a time, but in 1960, the priest recited the Mass entirely in Latin and there was no congregational response. The music and any homily however was to be done in either English or French. Latin was always in force and could be used anytime the celebrant wished to.

“Introibo ad altare Dei,” the priest intoned. This was Latin many of us knew from altar boy days. “I will enter the alar of the God.”

“Ad Dei qui laetificat juventutem meam,” boys in back of us responded and we First Formers joined them. “To God who gives joy to my youth.”

We may have been sleepy, but wasnt it reassuring to now that we were at least joyful?