The Class of '65 at Bishop McDevitt High School had some five hundred members. Multiply that by four and you get a pretty big school. That was in the days when nearly all Catholic families in the area sent their kids to Catholic schools. There were plenty of teaching sisters to fill the classrooms (although our class size was a bit larger than that at public schools), and the diocese (through the parishes) was able to support the school sytem completely, thus there was no tuition charged. There was so much growth that a new Catholic high school had opened on the West Shore. (Mine was the last class to cross the river to go to McDevitt. My sister graduated from the new Trinity High. I am forever grateful, on many levels, for this circumstance.) It was expected that soon another suburban Catholic high school would be needed.

By the early 70s, though, things were changing. Vocations declined and the Catholic schools had to hire more and more lay teachers who demanded higher salaries than the stipends the sisters worked for. Tuition fees were imposed, modest at first but soon approaching those at private academies. Other factors such as a lessening of strong Catholic identity also contributed to the fall-off in the numbers of families who chose parochial school for their children. 

Plans for the suburban East Shore school were scrapped and the land sold to a developer who put apartments there. Bishop McDevitt and Trinity continue as strong institutions where an excellent education is offered, but their student bodies are quite reduced. Currently, Bishop McDevitt has in four grades only a few hundred more students than my class alone sent through its hallowed halls.

Yes, "hallowed halls" is a cliche, and I tend to run to sentimental diction when I discuss my high school experience. Unlike some people, I loved school. I loved every single day I spent at Bishop McDevitt. I taught in a conventional public school for thirty years and now have a seventeen-year-old, so I've never lost touch with adolescent culture. But I can't relate personally to the popular image of high school as a climate of wrenching emotional degradation where youngsters are subjected to relentless abuse by peers and teachers alike. School was the only place I experienced unconditional love, acceptance, and emotional support. School saved my life. I suspect any school would have. But Bishop McDevitt is the school I went to, and even though for a number of reasons I have chosen not to send Lynn there, it remains so dear to my heart that it is the only school I've attended that I continue support financially.

Tonight I met with some of my classmates to begin planning our forty-year reunion. Around the table were about a dozen people who've shared a common past. In fact, my history with two of them goes back more than fifty years. Some of us see each other periodically, some of us only at reunions. Among us are a state representative, a county judge, a civil engineer, an interpreter for the hearing impaired, several employees of the Commonwealth, and a famous television producer who has returned to the area to care for his mother in her final years. (The sisters always told us that if we wanted to know how a man would be likely to treat us, we should observe how he treated his mother. They were right.)

It was an evening of warmth, laughter, and remembering, old friends taking joy in the best of what we were and the best of what we have become. Not one mean or petty thing was said, not about nuns, nor church peccadillos, nor anything else. I do confess to feeling a certain sadness when in the course of the conversation we named the parishes we now belong to, and I was the only one who not only does not belong to a Catholic parish, but actually professes membership in a Lutheran congregation. This revelation elicited joking rather than judgment, and the sadness springs entirely from within me.

I left the restaurant with a number of e-mail addresses, the date of the next meeting marked in ink in my book, and a certainty that my depression, at least for this season, is under control.