Okay, I got it, Dear.
She knew the mass in Latin better than any alter boy, and was pissed off that she couldn't be one. She was the smartest, hardest working girl in every class. When her brother got an assignment to write an essay for the City of Boston Columbus Day contest, she wrote it for him and won the contest. He got the credit and sat next to Senator Kennedy at the awards lunch. She got to watch.
Since idle hands are the devil's workshop, in her spare time between being the smartest student and reciting the mass in Latin every Sunday, she went to work at 16 as a candy striper in the nursing home a few blocks from her house. From one thankless task to another.
In the early 70s the Veterans Administration started farming out the old demented veterans. A bunch of them went to my wife's nursing home. The sweet devout candy striper who wrote uplifting Columbus Day essays was about have her education take a new path.
The demented veterans were pretty much completely out of control. The candy stripers were prey. A nursing home staffed with 16-year-old candy stripers was the Serengeti. Hungry hyenas versus baby gazelles. The nursing home's young gazelles learned fast to stay out of the grab and grope of the hyenas. But being out of reach wasn't protection against being hit by a bed pan and its contents when the hyenas were in a foul mood. Or being called a "dirty diseased whore" for some obscure reason possibly having to do with magazines or cigarettes.
The ordeal of the Serengeti ended after a year for the candy stripers when the veterans were moved to a facility better able to handle or ignore them. A new group was moved in from a mental hospital.
My wife had never met her father's mother, who had been severely disturbed for many years. The grandmother was a very bright woman who had came to America from the north of Spain, married and had two children. Her disease became severely dysfunctional when my wife's father was a little boy. She began to see insects everywhere and stuffed rags into the spaces around the doors to seal the bugs out of her son's bedroom at night. By the time my wife met her, the grandmother had been locked away in an institution for over thirty years. She recognized her granddaughter right away, though, was quite lucid most of the time, and very talkative. What do you talk about with your granddaughter when you've done nothing for thirty years except look at the walls and try to brush off invisible bugs. The two of them managed to find some common ground, maybe they even prayed together in Latin or Spanish. I'll have to ask my wife about that some time.
