When, One Day, I Wear Long Pants

Parochial school was an interesting experience. I went to St. Nicholas of Tolentine in Jamaica, Queens from the second grade until the seventh grade, when, right before we moved to New Jersey, I got to wear long pants.

When, One Day, I Wear Long Pants
Christopher Bogart

When I went to parochial school, I lived in a world of
casement windows and wooden window poles,
of high sculpted tin ceilings painted white, over and over,
and of walk-in cloak rooms.

I learned to walk straight lines,
to know my catechism by heart,
to read Ideals magazine and placed its pictures on walls,
in halls, and on bulletin boards.

I wrote with a fountain pen,
a green one, the same as all the others in my class,
to trace the swirls and loops of the Palmer Method
pinned to the cork above the chalk boards.

And I wore knickers,
not the silk or cotton ones that George Washington wore,
but thick navy blue woolen knickers, and long blue woolen socks,
held in place by rubber bands, wrapped around my knees
and left red rings deep in the flesh of my calves.

When it rained or snowed,
I stuffed an extra pair of blue woolen socks in my knickers pocket
to exchange with the wet ones I had to hang over the bathroom stalls
to dry during the day, so I could roll them up, stiff and dry
at the end of the day to bring them home with me.

I rubbed red rings,
from around my calves, angry red rings, made by tight
white elastic that held my long socks up, I tucked
my knickers in my socks, and swore that I’d not forget
the day I entered seventh grade, and earned the right
to wear long blue pants, and to become a young man.