December 19, 1964
It really isn’t the 19th now. It’s been the 20th for 4 hours. The Os just got home and so did I. Mr. O was drunk. In fact, he paid me $6.25 for eight hours work. I had a tooth filled today and almost died in the chair. Painless dentistry! Bah, Humbug! Next Saturday I go swimming at Canterbury. Heh, heh, heh! I got Bob’s vest pattern at Grants and told the people at Bartons not to bother with the order.
December 19, 2022
When I change the subject so many times in a single entry, it’s hard to decide how to respond. I am picking the most obscure note: “Next Saturday I go swimming at Canterbury. Heh, heh, heh!” Canterbury was the local boarding school. A Catholic BOYS boarding school, just a short walk from the town green. (It’s still there, still Catholic, but now coed.) As a transplant from elsewhere, I was totally unprepared for the whole boarding school thing in New England. At first, I assumed (from reading the orange biography of Clara Barton) that kids were sent to boarding schools because their parents wanted to be rid of them, and that, like Clara, they were desperately lonely and miserable. Then, at the end of eighth grade, when nearly all of my honors class left for private boarding schools, I learned that only stupid and/or poor kids went to public schools. Finally, as a “townie” I was informed by my more worldly-wise friends that prep school boys (“preppies”) were simultaneously highly desirable and completely untrustworthy with a girl’s virtue.
So when one of my Catholic friends started to babysit for a teacher at Canterbury and suggested I join her for a swim at the school’s indoor pool, I was thrilled. Also feeling a wee bit naughty: “Heh, heh, heh!”. Sadly, it never happened. In fact, I have still never been to Canterbury School. But I did marry a preppie.