It’s telling that Bill O’Reilly has titled his memoir after what a Catholic nun called him in third grade: “a bold fresh piece of humanity”. Here he is fifty-some years later -- after having been described by thousands if not tens of thousands of people – and he chooses to refer to himself, or at least his memoir, the way that nun did.
Did that religious sister define him or did she simply recognize what was already in him? Did she, by nature of her vocation, possess an authority greater than the others who would label him? Or did she simply recognize, by dint of her vocation, his "bold freshness"?
Teachers have an especial ability, I think, to see differences in kids that parents can’t. While most families may have three or four children in which to compare, a teacher has the advantage of thirty or forty every year for decades. A teacher is in a good position, if he or she is paying attention, to see the essence of a given child simply by virtue of having seen so many. They are in a place to point a child towards his or her destiny. And it’s telling that one perceptive nun saw Bill O’Reilly and assessed him as a “bold, fresh piece of humanity”.
At the time Sister Ruth said it I didn’t take it seriously as I didn’t consider teachers as having too much sense. If they were so smart, what were they doing teaching us? Shouldn’t they be doing something important with their lives? It’s funny how a line from a teacher we’ll remember to our dying day, like O’Reilly and his third-grade teacher. My fifth-grade teacher called me “a dreamer”. I would that I recall her catechesis as much as her description of me, but those who would define us at an age when we’re trying to find out who we are have power.
I never thought of myself as a dreamer and at the time dismissed it as humorous. But I secretly cherished it as a compliment; I might've been called far worse. And in the years post-collegiate it seemed downright prophetic. She was of German stock, so I still half-tried to dismiss it by thinking that practical Germans would think of the Irish as dreamers, but… I couldn't be sure if she hadn’t seen something in me I’d missed for being too close. I suspected that she'd been right all along.
Like it or not, I spend far more time in the associative rather than disassociative mode nowadays. But it's with great fondness I half-recall those halycon half-drunk days at Victory's, when you could stare at the sheen of the bar wood profitably. Isn’t it remarkable that a few moments, among the zillions spent there, stick out so profoundly, moments that were otherwise completely uneventful?
Girls appeared like gazelles in the mid-distance, grazing on beer nuts and cocktails. Marty led the charge with his “walk of champions”, which roused us from our reveries like a call of revelry. I went through the motions for his sake.
There was, in that time, the expanse of time. Must you waste time in order to feel its expanse, or is it that its expanse is not meant to be felt but in periods of drudgery? Marty was the actuary of excess, an accountant who insisted we keep a “beer log” in order to make even that a competition. That this tendency is ingrained is scarcely deniable; it can easily be imagined Adam betting Eve on how long it would take an ant to travel to a piece of fruit. I thought he was far too analytical given such a disassociative activity as drinking.
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