As a teenager, I took up smoking small cigars.  It was a rebellion against the cheerleaders who rode the bus with me to Catholic high school.  I figured if they wouldn’t stop stinking up the back of the bus with their cigarette smoke, I would stink it up worse. I had also found out that if you are fourteen, you can’t buy cigarettes yourself.  But if you buy Tijuana Smalls, and say that they are for your Dad, the store clerk believes you.

I continued smoking Tijuana Smalls off and on, even when I wasn’t riding the bus.  I became involved in a Catholic youth organization, and would occasionally smoke one during our fellowship sessions.  That’s what I liked about that group.  They accepted me for who I was, and didn’t shun me for my sometimes outrageous behavior.  Once I sat next to Father Mike in the circle.  I was smoking a cigar, and eating red shoestring licorice.  I found out that the licorice was hollow, like a straw.  While he was expounding on some religious thought, I reached behind him, with one end of the licorice in my hand, and the other in my mouth.  Unknown to him (until everyone burst into laughter), I blew the smoke, and made it look like it was coming out of one of his ears.  When he realized what was happening, he laughed, too.

One day, when I went to him for confession, he said he wanted to talk to me about my cigar smoking.  “Uh oh,” I thought.  “Here it comes…” I thought I was going to be reprimanded for my unladylike behavior.  With fake concern on his face, he reached into his desk and pulled out a box of Garcia y Vega cigars.  “Have one of these,” he said, passing me a fat cigar.  He took one, too, and gave us both a light.  Leaning back in his leather chair, he said, “Now that’s a cigar.”  It turns out he was only concerned with the lack of quality in my choice of cigar.

Catholic University School of Library Science, graduating class of 1949

A few nights ago, I spent part of the evening sitting on the love seat with a book in my lap, a magnifying glass in one hand, and a black-and-white photograph in another.  The photograph, taken in 1949, is of my mother’s graduating library school class at Catholic University.  The book was Thomas P. McCarthy’s Guide to Catholic Sisterhoods in the United States, or as I like to call it, The Field Guide to the Identification of Nuns.  Having been published in 1958, it was perfect for the task I had set for myself: to identify every order of nun that appeared in the photograph, or fall asleep trying.  When I was done, I had fourteen different names of orders scribbled down, from the Sisters of St. Ann to the Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

As I sat next to the couch where my husband was doing a Sudoku puzzle, I thought about how similar my activity was to his, except mine was more like those word find puzzles where you try to find the words hidden in what looks like a matrix of random letters.  But this was harder, because my puzzle didn’t tell me what nuns were there to be found; I had to take the visual clues I had in the photograph and match them up with what was in the book.

The task also resembled another of my pastimes, bird watching.  Nuns, in the era of my mother’s graduation (not to mention the early years I spent in Catholic elementary school), were at least as consistent in their habits (manner of dress) as birds are with their plumage.  If I could match the headdress, robes, and other accouterments from a nun in the photograph to one in the book, I had a certain identification.

Daughters of Charity, St. Catherine Laboure School, cira 1960

The arrangement of a field guide to birds is much more friendly to the bird watcher than this book was to a nun watcher.  Guides to birds are arranged by species, which means that birds that are similar in size, shape, and color are grouped together.  Not so with my field guide to nuns; it contains approximately 300 different orders of nuns and sisters arranged alphabetically, which has nothing to do with how they look.  Sometimes, I had to flip through the entire book two or three times to find,for example, the nun with the black veil with white lining, black robe with the white collar, and the silver cross around her neck (Sisters of the Precious Blood).

I was surprised that none of the nuns in Mom’s graduating class were of the same order that taught me for the first eight years of my education.  I would not have needed McCarthy’s book to identify one of them.  Even if I hadn’t known what the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul looked like, their habit is so distinctive that it would be hard to confuse it with any other.  As McCarthy put it, “…the white cornette and blue gown of the Sister of Charity is easily identified, even in a convention hall crowded with a thousand nuns of various orders.”

Catholic University School of Library Science, graduating class of 1949 (with annotations)

I spent about an hour this past Saturday morning updating a digital copy of the photograph, adding the name of the sisterhood and an arrow pointing to one of the nuns who belonged to it.  I don’t know why I felt compelled to create this image.  I guess it’s because nuns are part of my past, but I’ve never fully figured out why someone would want to be one.  Why would a person feel that in order to serve God, they had to separate themselves from the rest of the world physically and socially, if not withdraw completely from it.  I am aware that nuns have always worked in schools and hospitals and even libraries, but I never understood the need to dress like 17th century French peasant women.  But I feel drawn to these old nuns in a way that seems almost spooky to me.  They were the authority figures of my youth, and I never felt that I fully measured up to their expectations.  I might have stayed a Catholic if I felt that they (and the priests) were more human, and less idealized.  I would also have liked them to be more feminist in their theology, but that is just wishful thinking on my part.

This is my response to the 25 things challenge.  It was originally posted on Facebook, but I removed it during the Facebook Terms of Service shit storm of February 2009.  Since then, I’ve decided to use Facebook only for social networking.  Any of my creative output, such as photos or writing, will go on my own web sites, or on Flickr, where they respect their users’ intellectual property.  Occasionally, I will post links on Facebook.

I enjoyed writing my 25 things, and truly enjoyed reading other people’s 25 things.  That’s not narcissistic (as some newspaper stories about the trend alleged).  It’s a way to connect with people who are interesting.  As far as relationships go, the rest is up to us to follow through on.  A social networking site can’t do that for us.

Here are the rules:  “Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.”

1. I love tea. I hardly ever drink coffee. I love tea so much that I coined the phrase, “Tea…the other brown drink.” Yeah, that was me.

2. I avoid wearing light blue shirts or blouses because they remind me of the uniform I wore for eight years in Catholic school. Needless to say, saddle shoes are totally out of the question.

3. I went to the first 15 years of the Clifftop old-time music festival, and then got completely burnt out on the festival camping. I miss the people, the music, and the dancing, but not enough to camp there.

4. A few years ago, I finally found a sweet man who is at least as smart, if not smarter, than me. So, I married him.

5. I got married for the first time the day after I turned 52. Better late than never.

6. I have two black and white cats. One is named after the late, great Dave Grant. The other is not.

7. I was in Washington, D.C. working on Capitol Hill, on September 11, 2001. Ever since then, I always make sure I have comfortable shoes with me at work, so I can walk the ten miles home in an emergency, if I have to.

8. I learned Appalachian clogging in 1980, and picked up the banjo in 1986. Now I’m learning to play the ukulele.

9. I have three sisters and two brothers. I’m the third.

10. I had never heard of the Weekly World News until my younger sister was in it for teaching Bible study in the nude.

11. Most of my life, I haven’t worn make-up. I guess I’m more interested in cosmology than cosmetics. However, I have begun to wear a little lipstick now and then, because I am tired of seeing photographs of myself in which I look like I don’t have any lips.

12. Until I got on Facebook, I thought my name was unique. Then I got a friend request from someone named Julie Mangin. I checked her friend list, and she had another Julie Mangin already on it. Every once in a while my FB feed says something like, “Julie Mangin is a fan of KFC chicken,” and I think “how do they know?” before remembering it’s the OTHER Julie Mangin.

13. My niece and I share a birthday. On my wedding day, she went into labor and had to leave fifteen minutes before the ceremony began. If her daughter had been born a day earlier, all three of us would have had the same birthday.

14. I have souvenir plates from the Maryland amusement park, The Enchanted Forest, which I sell on eBay.

15. I’ve always wanted to do something on stage in the Galax band contest that would cause the Moose Lodge to create another contest rule. It would be referred to as the “Julie Rule.”

16. Every weekday, I read the Washington Post comics section on the subway in the morning. If I have time, I do the sudoku, too.

17. I’m thinking of retiring in a couple of years.

18. I’m the first person to win a prize in the Washington Post’s Style Invitational contest for an entry that they deemed too vulgar to print. Gene Weingarten called it, “a hilarious entry too revolting to be published on any planet inhabited by sentient beings.” I didn’t think it was that bad.

19. I used to be known as the Clog Mogul of D.C., but I always preferred to be called an impresario.

20. I have the world’s largest collection of Mark Eden Bust Developers. They are among the many tacky treasures I collect.

21. I have had one of my photographs published in People Magazine.

22. If I could start my own religion, I’d make Girl Scout Thin Mints the communion wafer. I would encourage meditation while listening to Uncle Bunt Stephens play “Candy Girl.” One of the sacraments would involve crabs, fresh tomatoes, corn on the cob, and beer.

23. I used to smoke a pack and a half of cigarettes a day until the late 1970s. I quit because I was struggling through music school, and I needed to drop the smoke breaks to get more study and practice time in.

24. When I was in my 20s, I learned to drive a motorcycle. On the first day of driving class, I kick-started my motorcycle in gear, launched myself six feet in the air, and landed on all fours. On the last day, I got the highest score on the driving test. The instructor called me his most improved student.

25. I received a masters degree in library science about 25 years ago, and started working as a librarian. Now, I’m a web developer who writes dynamic pages in PHP/MySQL. What the hell happened?

When I was a kid, I grew up in Glenmont just north of Wheaton, Maryland, which at that time was considered a distant suburb of Washington, D.C.  Our house was built in 1951.  You should see the area now.  You’d have to drive out another ten miles to see rural scenes.  But in the 1950s, there was a horse farm on Georgia Avenue, where the subway station is now.

We lived on a sloping street with a row of brick, one-story Cape Cod houses on either side.  The late 1950s and early 1960s were my earliest memories.  Wives and mothers stayed at home all day while their husbands went to work.  Some of the wives didn’t even drive, and even if they did, it was rare in my neighborhood for a family to have two cars.  And because it was so far from the city there wasn’t dependable public transportation, the men had to drive to work.  The Washington Metro didn’t open until 1976, and the Glenmont station didn’t open until the mid-1990s.

That’s why, in the 1960s, Mr. Simmons made a living driving the grocery bus.  It was a little mom-and-pop stop on wheels, a full-sized school bus painted red and silver, with “Simmons Market” across each side.  The seats inside were gone, replaces by store shelves.  There was even a working refrigerator for milk and eggs.  Way in the back, fresh produce was stacked up: lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, etc.  As a kid, I have the clearest memory of the candy counter.  The Bazooka bubble was in the front row, with candy bars and other kinds of sweets behind it.  Every weekday, Mr. Simmons came through our neighborhood and stopped at the bottom of the hill.  He blew the horn three times, and the housewives would come out of the houses to shop.  The kids would come from wherever they were: backyards, the tetherball court, even the trees to crowd the candy counter.

My favorite treat was the chocolate Turkish Taffy.    I can still imagine the taste.  Before opening it, I would slam the candy on the sidewalk to break it into pieces.  It was too thick and sticky to bite pieces off of it.  Oh how I loved hat stuff.  If I were to eat it now, all I can think is that it would probably pull out my fillings.

I don’t remember what Mr. Simmons looked like.  I only had eyes for the candy.  I also don’t know when Mr. Simmons’ grocery bus stopped cruising the neighborhood.  I don’t remember it at all during my high school years, which started in 1969.  I only wish I had a photograph of the bus to prove to people that we really had a grocery bus in our neighborhood.  All I have are my memories, and my ability to write.