The day is perfectly lovely. It is 80° with a strong breeze from the north. The den is dark and cool. This is a busy week for me with ukulele just about every day, four concerts, practice and a lesson.

I found a book in the back of my bedroom bookcase. Finding it was happenstance as I was looking for something else. The book, Dorothy Lamour and the Haunted Lighthouse, had been a stocking stuffer. What made this book special was its publishing date, 1947, the year I was born. The book was published by Whitman Publishing, the company in which I invested my weekly 50¢ allowance when I bought mystery books like Trixie Belden and Donna Parker. I started reading my find. The book is dated but readable. The pages have yellowed.

My father used to tell us stories. They involved men with hooks instead of hands and things that go bump in the night. I was not so much frightened as wary. A strange noise in the house gave me pause. I listened but nothing ever came of it. The wind banging against the windows had my imagination running wild, andI was alert for one of those things that go bump in the night, but I never saw anything. When I walked home in the dark, my footsteps echoed on the sidewalk, and, just in case, I would check behind me. No one was ever there. At some point, when I was older, I didn’t notice the sounds anymore. I didn’t look for shadows. I stopped being wary.

I still have a strong imagination. My coffee maker is a Black and Decker. You lift up the top to add the coffee grounds and the water. When the top is up, it looks just like Darth Vader’s helmet, black and with the same shape. The good thing is it doesn’t talk or make breathing sounds.

When I asked Alexa the weather around 2 this morning, she told me the rain would start in 11 minutes. She was off by only a few minutes. The rain started quietly. It was still raining, a little more heavily than last night, when I woke up this morning but has since stopped. It is a damp, cloudy 72°.

Sunday has never been my favorite day. When I was a kid, I was stuck. I had to go to mass then hang around the house until Sunday dinner and then maybe, after dinner, travel to my grandparents’ house. With school the next day, I had to go to bed early. I never understood that. Every other weekday night my bedtime was later. I guess my mother figured my routine had been disrupted by later to bed Friday and Saturday nights so I needed to be retrained. Sunday was a ruin of a day.

In grammar school, I had nuns every other grade except both sixth and seventh when I had regular people both years. I had some really good teachers and a couple of bad. My first grade teacher, Sister Redempta, was scary. Nobody talked and nobody moved without permission. Everything was regimented. My classroom was on the first floor of the old school. The room had two doors, giant windows and a cloakroom right outside the classroom. There were so many of us desks filled every available space. You had to walk sideways up and down the aisles. We moved row by row to form a line when we went anywhere like to the bathrooms down in the cellar area, or to the schoolyard for recess or to the cloakroom at the end of the day. Nuns seemed to embrace the line as the best mode of movement.

My eighth grade teacher, Sister Hildegard, was the worst. She was also the oldest, too old for eighth graders. We ran amok. One kid, whose name I think was Luke, used to spill milk in the waste basket, show Sister Hildegard and volunteer to wash the basket. Out he’d go with the sabotaged basket. He’d be gone for an hour. Sister Hildegard never noticed how long it took or that it happened sometimes three times a week. I admit I also took advantage. I’d hide my lunch then leave for lunch. I’d arrive back late. Other times I’d ask permission to leave early telling her I needed to go to the library. She always let me go.

She hated all of us. She told outlandish stories, sort of a nun’s version of Aesop fables. I remember she told us about a couple of kids who skipped out of mass and both were hit by a train. Another story was about a girl who was not a Catholic who stuck her tongue out at the Blessed Sacrament. Her tongue stayed stuck out until she converted. Sister Hildegard told us she was going to write one message on the blackboard in the largest letters she could when we graduated, “Thank God they are gone.”