the blue envelopes

If my grade school teacher Sister Michael had lived in the city and did things like roam by herself with a cloth shopping bag and a dirty-cuffed coat zipped up against the rain, and had exposed hair tied back in a salt and pepper ponytail, and if her eyes were darker with the worries of a world not held at bay by convent walls -  then this woman I’m looking at right now could be her.

She’s paying for a coffee at the cash register and as she waits for her change she’s looking at the pastries in that rueful way people have when they are on either a budget or a diet.

The coffee shop is steamy with heat and drying clothes. Through the foggy windows I can just discern the outline of passing umbrellas on the dark sidewalks. People are chatting in twos-and-threes in this mingled fug of house music, coffee beans and wet wool.

Sister Michaelina is also dead. She has not grown out her hair and she is not buying coffee in Vancouver B.C. on this February evening. She hasn’t released herself from her vows to pursue a different sort of life of poverty in the anonymous city. She died of natural causes after a surgery for breast cancer that went smoothly, except for her fearful conviction going in that she would not survive. It was an odd case. The surgery was “routine”; her vitals upon entry to the Recovery Room were fine. But her fear had been so consuming for the preceeding weeks it was as though her brain was triggered into thinking it was the end! The nurse found her an hour later, not sleeping but dead, face to the wall and already cold.

Sister Michael called me a jerk in Grade 2 and at the time it stung like a slap, but a slap that felt like a kiss. I was being a jerk at the time, and she kindly asked me if wasn’t that so? And I was forced to agree, recognizing that punching one of my soft and pretty classmates was not kosher. I was not one of the cute, stupid children who could get away with being mindlessly naughty. I was an ugly, smart, poor child whose tuition to attend the school was covered by the parish, so really I had no margins of error. I was not safe and Sister Michael let it be known. But kindly, gently, because she was not safe either. She missed her family, her brother most of all. She was half a world away from where she was born and knew – even then I could not comprehend such knowing – she knew she would never be able to see them again. So in calling me a jerk she was only being honest, the most brutal sort f kindness. She had no place and ad traveled so far, with her misbegotten convent. A coven of 15 nuns sent all over the globe as the Roman Catholic budget allowed, in an effort to find a place for them. From Malta, to Peru, to India, to fucking Still Harbour, B.C. where they rot yet -what Papal punishment might this be? – the sole remaining Sisters of the Holy Ghost teaching grade school and doddering about town dangerously, in a minivan provided for them by the archdiocese.

Only one nun, Sister Maria, can drive and she can’t see over the windshield and her colostomy bag makes it hard for her to use the stick shift. “THIRD!” she screams to Sister Clara beside her (goes the story), engaging the clutch as sweaty-lipped Sister Clara wiggles the stick into position, her palms damp with the stresses of Still Harbour traffic looming outside their beige-leather interior. Logging trucks and SUVs. Terror…

Sister Michael, most useless of them all in a vehicle with the front seat making her carsick and no license either so all the responsibility fell on poor Sister Maria. Sister Michael would sit in the back, her eyes (that I remember as purple, but a monster purple…like blackberries) combing the road for threats. She would call out every street light and stop sign and threat of a person crossing.

In the summer time for several years she was my special correspondent. I loved writing letters but had no friends. Sister Michael would write to me. She’d tell me about her chores involving chickens and laundry.She encouraged my reading and read my stories. For the years I knew her I churned out fistfuls of pathological little tales involving a criminal fox. He could talk. She read each one and offered criticism. She was also the person who noticed the way I screwed up my face to see the blackboard and she recommended glasses and less TV.

I feel betrayed now by her fear, widely reported by town gossip and available to me fourth-hand via telephone conversations with the relatives who eagerly reported her death and her fears leading up to it – like a death that was a bolt out of the blue.

Sister Michael was a nun and she was honest enough to call me a jerk and also support the tedious, manic stories of a lonely, ugly-inside child. Her envelopes in the mail were robin’s egg blue, the precise colour of hope. Perhaps they were a gift of stationary she had received in times past from perhaps a family member who perhaps, most likely, she would not see again. The way I will likely not see her again, because we are not promised more time with anybody who is lost, except in the fleeting instances of ghosts.