Past waters

Today, as I drove my kids to school and the windshield wipers shook Niagara Falls crashing down on my car, I was reminded of how painful it was for me to go to school as a child on days like this. I never liked school. I wasn’t a good student like my friends (who always had their faces sprawled on the honor roll), nor did I make up for it with sport. The music was good, but who wanted to know about music in a religious school in the 90s? Being good at music was like being good at making lego, a hobby. After I had already graduated from college, the parents of my childhood friends still asked me: “So, do you still have that music craze?”. Music was just that, a craze.

The highlight of my week at school was the “Good morning”, when we got together with other classes in the church to sing religious songs, all of them very uninteresting, but I was singing and outside the classroom, and that was enough. Sometimes, after the “Good morning”, confession followed. We sat on the long benches in front of the confessional, hastily trying to disenchant the sins of 11-year-olds and recapitulating the act of contrition. When it was our turn, we would go in and kneel. The priest would place a hand on each of our cheeks and hit them as he spoke. He had earned the nickname of Father Bate Chapas as a consequence of this practice. “Who is your best friend?” she asked. “Hmm… Pilar”, “No! Oh God! He prays two Hail Marys and two Our Fathers.”

I would be lying if I said that I suffered all these years. I didn’t like school, but I liked my friends and there were many days when I couldn’t wait to get out of my mother’s car and pass by Mr. Fernando, the doorman. There was only one factor that made me wake up before the alarm clock and smile when passing the doors of the school, a factor that, as time went by, happened more and more regularly: passion.

When she was in love, or with a crush on someone (as we said at that time), school became the perfect setting for an exchange of glances, for a paper under the table or for an invitation to lunch. On those days the hours passed by quickly, rain or shine, and each break was an opportunity for a breakthrough in the relationship.

My first school crush was Diogo, whose nickname for Mirc was Pezinhos de Pano. After classes we would explore the art of kissing on a park bench in front of a friend’s house, while she tried the same art with a friend from Pézinhos de Pano on the bench next to her. I remember thinking that kissing became boring after an hour, I remember that my tongue went numb, I remember that I lost the novelty, but I knew how to be an adult, and that was good.