I’m sometimes surprised at the things I can still remember from my childhood, even though I can often be forgetful about more recent events.

I guess those old memories helped shape my life, so they stand out more than things that happened recently.

Just last week I was doing some grocery shopping. While I was there I wandered down an aisle of back-to-school supplies. Seeing all the pencils, pens, crayons and notebooks brought me back to some of my earliest memories of school.

I remember walking with my older brother and sister the one block to St. Mary’s Grammar School for the first day of school in 1962.

My brother was starting third grade. My sister was in second grade. It was my first day of first grade. Since I had gone to kindergarten in a different school, I hadn’t ever been in the school before.

I didn’t know the procedure everyone followed. But soon a bell rang. Everyone went quiet as one of the teachers started  getting all the kids separated by grade. We all lined up along the wrought iron fence to march through the big front doors. She told us that we needed to line up in the same spot every morning before school.

St. Mary’s was an old three-story brick school building. It housed both grammar school and high school. But the younger kids never ventured upstairs to the third floor where the high schoolers had their classrooms.

The hallways had what looked like marble floors with inlaid tiles of different colors. Along the walls in the hallway were tall, unpainted wooden doors leading to a classroom. Each door had a large window. I believe the windows there so teachers could peer in from the hallway to make sure the students were behaving.

Our group of first-graders marched up the first flight of metal stairs to the second floor, then down the hallway to the last door on the left.

When we got into the room we saw our first-grade teacher, a nun named Sister John Regina, standing by a huge oak desk in the front of the room. As she called out each person’s name, she directed each of us to our desks. (We sat in alphabetical order).

The huge windows in the classroom faced east, overlooking a small courtyard where our class would eventually spend time at lunch playing.

I can’t remember much about the actual schoolwork we did, but I can still remember most of the kids’ names from that first grade class and some of the great times we had playing in the courtyard.

Memories!