Spelling

an essay for the radio by Philip Gerard

While the other kids in my seventh-grade class at the Holy Angels School were out on the playground, I spent lunch hours up on the hill, in the kitchen of the convent, with Sister Stanislaus, a very ancient nun. I was entered in the regional spelling bee, and it was her job to hear my spelling words.

The convent was a mysterious place, just as nuns were mysterious-- uniformed in floor-length black habits girded at the waist with cincture and rosary, their faces boxed into stiff white wimples. They floated above us, saintly, and whispered confidentially among themselves.

We didn't know if they had hair on their heads or real bodies or what secret things they did behind the closed doors of the convent. We imagined a relentless marathon of prayer and Holy Communion.

So the first time I knocked at the back kitchen door, I was nervous. A wizened face appeared at the curtain, and the door clicked open. Sister Stanislaus was tiny and bent, well into her eighties and hard of hearing.

She motioned me to the kitchen table and we both sat. I handed over my spelling lists, and without any small talk we began. Always it was the same routine.

"Parbuckle," she would say. "Portcullis. Premillennialism." And I would spell each word. We settled into a rhythm of recitation: the word, the spelling, the word repeated. Sister Stanislaus would check off each word I missed with a number three pencil. I didn't miss many.

In my memory, all those sun-washed lunch hours spent in the convent kitchen with Sister Stanislaus meld into one long afternoon of spelling. I did not know the definitions of most of the words I studied-- I don't know them now.

The words existed for me as little nuggets of sense-- not meaning, sense. I would roll them around on my tongue like lemon drops before letting them go-- xanthous, prestidigitator, syzygy.

There was magic in the sounds, in the unlikely combinations of letters. Each word was a little universe of possibility-- Sister Stanislaus pronounced the word, it leaped from the page and floated in front of my eyes, pure word.

The right combination of letters could capture it absolutely and forever. For that moment it existed as a thing outside of definition, bigger than definition. It had color, weight, and shape. When you plucked it with your tongue it sang, resonating off into the imagination-- chromophore, janissary, snickersnee, trireme, welkin.

Chromophores were aquamarine blue, I imagined. Janissaries were happy messengers who came out after Christmas. Snickersnees roamed the fields at night. Triremes tasted like chocolate and creme cookies, and welkins smelled like old leather.

On many occasions, Sister Stanislaus's head would droop, the spelling list would sag in her hand, and her eyes would go out for a little while. I would let her nap until something in her dreams brought her back. Then we'd go on with the lesson.

That year I won first prize in the spelling bee -- a hundred dollars. They spelled my name wrong in the newspaper.

Sister Stanislaus died not long after, and the Sisters of St. Francis soon adopted a modern habit that showed them to be flesh and blood women, not saints. I'm all grown up now.

But Sister Stanislaus and her mysterious, holy sisters, like all those incantatory spelling words, are still locked in my head somewhere, waiting only for the right letters, artfully assembled, to call them back.