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In the spring of 1968 a dozen progressive parents leagued up to drive out the principal of our county school. His name was Reilly. He was a choleric, paunchy man of sixty with a sneak’s gait who stank of liquor and often smoked two cigarettes at once. Not a single child in the school–not the most innocent first grader–had been spared Reilly’s thirty-inch cedar paddle, which he called Skipper.

It will sound dead on like an infomercial when I confess the truth. That is because at the beginning — no, for ten years before the real start, when I actually dwindled — the cable hucksters spoke to me at all hours in their baby lisps and daddy nostrums and lover landishments until the world split into food and joy and I chose joy.

One by one the lepers’ tongues slithered fot the Host. Father Lawrence White looked down upon the surfacing faces–one without a nose, one without ears, one with a whorled cavity in the cheek. He raised each wafer with an austere flourish, brought it near the supplicant’s tongue and then, like a deft croupier, tossed it in.