One day in August 1967, E.A. Brandt must have wondered if she needed glasses – badly – or if she’d instantly lost her short-term memory.
Now a Sartell resident, Brandt lived in Olivia at that time. Her faux pas during registration day at St. Aloysius Catholic School still has the awful power to make her blush at the memory.
Recently, Brandt sent me a letter about that day in response to a column I wrote about “dumb” things people do, those embarrassing times when they’re not wearing their thinking caps. Well, no doubt about it, Brandt must have misplaced her thinking cap that day.
The following is a paraphrased and condensed account of what Brandt wrote:
She had gone to the Catholic school to register her two children, Julie and Frank. She was told a nun named Sister Felice would be doing the registrations.
In an upstairs room, she saw a nun in the traditional nun’s black habit, her back turned to the blackboard where she was decorating with colorful paper cut-outs of autumn leaves. Brandt approached the desk.
She turned around and observed my approach without expression. I gave her my best bright smile, which was not returned.
“Are you Sister Felice?”
“No, I’m Sister Diane,” she said, unsmiling.
Brandt explained she was there for registration. Sr. Diane offered no conversation other than Sister Felice would be in the school shortly. Sister Diane was still cool, unsmiling. Brandt’s attempts at conversation fizzled. Brandt left the room, feeling uncomfortable, squirming, thinking that had not gone well. Not at all.
Brandt stepped into a nearby room and chatted with a neighbor, who was a lay teacher at the school. She then stepped into the hall and saw down the hallway a nun sitting at a desk in the eighth-grade room. That would be Sr. Felice, Brandt was thinking. She walked into the room, up to the desk.
“Are you Sister Felice?”
“No, I’m Sister Diane.”
I was highly embarrassed and tried to cover it with a flash-flood of conversation. I think I said something about not being able to tell one Sister from another, that they all looked alike to me, or something equally horrifying. I babbled. I asked her where she had come from, and she said St. Catherine’s College. I grabbed at that lifesaver, saying that I, too, was a SCC graduate! No comment. No welcome light of recognition. Just more silence from Sister Diane.
Humiliated, Brandt walked out of the room and then went to have another chat with the lay teacher, who convinced her to return to the classroom she’d just visited. Brandt, still feeling mortified, walked back to the eighth-grade room. She saw a smiling Sister who did, thankfully, answer to the name Sr. Felice. Vastly relieved, buoyed up by a pleasant, friendly conversation, Brandt’s next task was to find the nun who taught music.
With my blunders behind me, I headed down to the first floor in search of the music nun. There was a bustle of activity with several new Sisters in black habits moving about, setting up registration tables in the wide hallway. As I came down the steps, one Sister was sitting at the foot of the stairs, preparing to register students. She watched me as I came down the stairs. I smiled as I approached her table.
“Are you the music nun?”
“No, I’m Sister Diane.”
Another wave of burning embarrassment. Brandt finally found the music nun, registered quickly, then dashed out of the school as if fleeing for her life.
On the way home, at the grocery store, she met a friend and neighbor, Ann. In her burning humiliation, she had to tell somebody what had happened.
“Oh, Ann,” I blurted. “Have you ever embarrassed yourself so monumentally that you wanted to drop through a hole in the ground and never be seen again?”
Ann raised her eyebrows, smiled and answered without hesitation: “Every day.”
Back home, Brandt’s daughter Julie wanted to know every last detail of how the registration went. Julie, aghast, listened and after several shocked expressions of disbelief, said with finality, “I’m never going back to that school again!”
That September Julie did return to school. It wasn’t the end of the world, after all, but for many days scorched by hot humiliation, E.A. Brandt thought the end was surely nigh.
