The Academy
By Pat Garrison
Assignment Three

We came from all over the world to a small town nestled in the hill country of Texas, half way between San Antonio and Austin. We carried Aruba, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Kuwait, Liberia, Libya, Mexico, Nigeria, Panama, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore British Crown Colony, seventeen states of the United States of America including Washington, D.C., and Venezuela in our hearts. We were the sons and daughters of ex-patriots, diplomats, missionaries, oil workers, plantation owners, and military families. We came from all walks of life, the super wealthy, middle class, and poor. Some of us were as young as eight years old and others as old as nineteen. Very few of us came voluntarily. Our stories varied from divorced parents, parents too busy to be bothered with their offspring, rebellious kids, or no educational facilities past the eighth grade were available for us. Among us there were over fifty sets of brothers and sisters, sisters and sisters, and brothers with their brother. We became one big family living in four different dorms on sixty-four acres of rolling hills answering to numerous authority figures.

All of the boys, no matter their age, were members of the National Defense Cadet Corps and were assigned to A Company, B Company, C Company, or D Company in the First Battle Group. The Second Battle Group consisted of Junior High students and they were assigned to A Company or B Company, C Company was made up of elementary students. The boys wore uniforms and marched from their dorms in Talbot Hall, Abney Hall, and Alexander Hall to Class in Lattimore Hall, to meals in Carroll Hall, and on the Parade Grounds on Saturday mornings. They wore their hair in a proper military cut reminiscent of boot camp. They shined their shoes and brass daily and endured countless inspections. They awoke to reveille and went to bed to taps. They raised the flag in the morning and lowered it at sundown. They learned to clean their rifles and fire a machine gun. They studied two hours every night and participated in sports. Some worked as waiters in the dinning room for extra spending money.

The girls lived in Elizabeth Hall, a good mile at the opposite end of the campus from the boys. Our lives were a little easier in that we did not wear uniforms, have our hairstyles regulated, or march everywhere. We did, however, have daily inspections of our rooms and on Saturday a white glove inspection. We walked to class, to meals, to the infirmary when we were ill, and to church on Sunday wearing a hat, heels, and hose with the seam properly in a straight line up the backs of our legs, with gloves. That was our uniform of the day. The fist floor housed the youngest girls in one wing, and the junior high students in the other wing with the college aged chaperones who were working their way through Southwest Texas State College in between the two wings. The second floor was where all the freshmen and sophomores lived with their housemothers, Miss Bessie and Granny. Juniors and seniors along with Miss Susie and Mrs. Tanner inhabited the top floor. Report cards were issued every six weeks and if one was in danger of failing a subject, she must report to a supervised study hall every night until that grade came up to at least a “C”. Otherwise, students studied in their rooms between 7:00pm and 9:00pm, with lights out at 10:00pm. Each floor had a kitchenette, and we could make fudge after buying five cent bags of sugar and coca from our housemothers. We lined up on Friday afternoon for our allowances so that we would have money to go into town on Saturday morning and Tuesday afternoon. We did our best to avoid five demerits, which would cause us to loose our town privileges for a week. Being tardy to anything, failure to turn in homework, and a poor attitude are three of the rules that I remember that might bring a demerit. I never accrued five demerits.

All of the students lived two to a room. The girls’ rooms were divided into suites with a bathroom between two rooms. The boys’ dorms had a large bathroom at each end of the hall. Our lives intersected in the dining room, in the classroom, for thirty minutes after school we could sit together on the lawn and buy a coke or candy bar from the school store to share, in Chapel, or club functions, football games, basketball games, The San Antonio Symphony, and at Church on Sunday. At meals we ate family style with six students on each side of the table, boy, girl, boy, girl and a male member of the staff at the head of the table with a female staff member at the foot of the table. This setting arrangement rotated every six weeks so that every student got an opportunity to meet every staff member and every other student at the school. Prayers were said before every meal and good table manners were encouraged.

All students took college preparatory classes and the virtues of a college education were extolled.

Dating was allowed between high school students. The young man would ask the young lady he was interested in, to go out on either Friday night or Saturday night by Wednesday noon. Then he must sign up for the date line in the office at Lattimore Hall. Students didn’t dare have a fight and break up between Wednesday and the week-end because once a couple was on the date list, they were going on the date regardless of any circumstance other than being confined to the infirmary for illness. After the evening meal the students would meet their dates in the parlor at Carroll Hall and the evenings chaperones (two male and two female college students) where roll would be called and then the Friday date line would vote on which movie to see. The Saturday night date line would then go to the other theater in town. Date line rules and behavior were discussed and then we would proceed to walk down the hill into the town square where the theaters were located. Tickets were purchased; we walked in and found our seats on the left hand side of the theater, and sat together in a group. We were allowed to hold hands on the walk and in the theater, but no other touching was allowed. If the chaperones didn’t have a date themselves that night we would get to see the entire movie and maybe even get to stop by the drug store on the way back to the dorm for a soda. We had to be in the dorm by 10:00pm for lights out at 10:30pm on Friday and Saturday night. We were allowed five minutes to say good night and we were allowed a modest kiss. Our chaperones had a midnight curfew and were not really given that much more freedom than we were.

Yet we managed to find ways around the rules. Each Monday morning some ingenious student had changed the letters above the high school entrance from Lattermore Hall to Lattermore Hell. Hiding places for cigarettes, poker cards, and other contraband was constantly changed in an effort to stay one step ahead of housemothers and dorm staff. We short-sheeted each other and play silly tricks on each other.

It was Us against Them. It was a much more innocent time. And even though we missed our real homes, San Marcos Baptist Academy, with all its’ rules and structure became our home away from home with family too numerous to count. This year S.M.B.A. is celebrating its’ one hundredth anniversary. Ad Viros Faciendos. Go Bears!

Assignment # 3

By
Reiss J. DuPlessis

There once was a city, a wondrous city, a grand dame that was decorated with beautiful mansions, streets lined and arched by magnificent trees of oak and where banquettes
and balconies were shaded by breathtaking magnolia trees, trees that wore enormous white flowers between their lush, green leaves.

There once was a city where women were famous for beauty and grace beyond
compare, whose flashing eyes were the inspiration for song, novels and operas.

There once was a city where a party was a citywide celebration to honor life and to
prepare for the solemnity of the season that followed.

There once was a city where food was a religious experience and God was honored
by its perfection.

There once was a city with a river that was the port of entry for bananas, coffee, spices
and people and, from which our nation’s products where sent to far away places.

There once was a city that gave birth, reared and nurtured musicians, writers and
artisans who were the pride of the land.

There once was a city whose breath, life and soul blended to create the American contribution to the world of music: Jazz.

There once was a city.

By Pat Garrison

Assignment Two
Seventeen
When I look in the mirror, I am always shocked to see my mother looking back at me, although her hair was jet black well into her seventies and bobbed short and my hair is half way down my back, and a grayish-brown color, it’s the same hairline, same cheekbones, and same upper lip. But I’m still seventeen in my mind!
What happened to that seventeen year-old girl with long brown curls and her twenty-two inch waist? What mistakes did she make that brought her to be who she is today?
The first mistake she made was believing that she could do anything she set her mind to, if she only tried hard enough, if only she cared enough. (But I really like that about her and I want to believe that she can still accomplish anything she puts her heart and soul into! Seventeen, right? See, I told you, I AM seventeen in my mind.)
So, within one week of her high school graduation, and two months shy of her eighteenth birthday, she boarded yet another Greyhound bus (What was it with this family and Greyhound buses? Oh yeah, no car) and headed to the State Hospital in Big Springs, Texas.
And did she ask to visit her mother? No…She asked to see her mother’s doctor. And what they talk about? What else? Releasing her mother from the hospital. Did the doctor discourage her? No…Did the doctor tell her what to expect? No…Did the doctor give her a diagnosis? No…Did the doctor ask her mother what she wanted to do? No…Did the doctor make her mother a referral for ongoing outpatient psychiatric care? No…
Did she think to ask her mother if she wanted to leave the hospital and go with her? No…Never mind that she hadn’t seen her mother in over four years, just before her daddy died. Never mind that she had only visited the hospital when her father had been able to afford the trips from El Paso, maybe once a year when she was between the ages of five and thirteen. Never mind that her mother never answered her letters. Never mind the last thirteen long years apart.
That idealistic seventeen-year-old girl wanted to make everything all better for her mother (and recreate her own childhood), so in the time it took to pack a suitcase, pick up a prescription, and hail a cab to the bus station two lives changed forever.
Forty-five years later would that seventeen-year-old girl in me make the same mistake? Well, my hair is not as curly, and the brown is almost gone, the waist is now a belly, but Yes. Even though I know better, that seventeen year-old girl inside my brain, she would probably make the same mistakes I made.

Dave Blodgett - Assignment #1

In the middle of the night I am dreaming. I have to pee. I get up, go to the bathroom, take out my tiny penis and pee. I wake up in a puddle of urine that soaks the sheets of my narrow bed.

I burst into tears. Mother comes running, switches on the light and cradles me in her arms. I feel the warmth and softness of her bosom.

“There, there. Don’t cry. You had an accident.”

She takes the urine soaked, stinky sheets off and tucks me into fresh, clean sheets.

My kid brother, alarmed and rudely awakened is angry. “Davy, did you wet your bed again?” All this ruckus rouses my three older sisters in the adjoining bedroom.

The only person who snores on is Dad. He eschews any responsibility for child rearing or housework of any kind. That’s women’s work.

Primary functional enuresis—bed wetting—is the single most powerful independent variable shaping my lifelong character and behavior, accounts for my extremely low self-esteem, introversion, shyness and self-denigration and cripples me with a multitude of phobias that make life almost unbearable.

I don’t dare speak in public (glossophobia), am terrified when I have to put something in writing (graphophobia), know that I am going to fail however hard I try (atychiphoia), am scared to death of Frankenstein’s Monster (bogyphobia), fear going to bed because of recurring nightmares (clinophobia), am really afraid of my desktop computer (cyberphobia), can’t express my opinions on controversial subjects (doxophobia), am tongue-tied and unable to express myself (laliophobia), fear death (necrophobia) and poverty (peniaphobia) and most of all fear all my phobias (phobophobia).

In the 1920s all kinds of myths were associated with bed-wetting. Guilt feelings prevailed. Bed-wetting was seen as punishment for misbehavior. Today we know better. Post nocturnal enuresis (PNE) is caused by physical and physiologic factors, not stress, poor self-esteem or emotional immaturity.

Today, some medications help overcome PNE—Imipramine and Desmpressin acetate may help. More effective are retention control training where the child is asked to control urination by postponing it to increase bladder capacity and strengthen the muscle that holds the urine back. Night-lifting is effective. Waking the child periodically throughout the night and walking him to the bathroom many times. Moisture alarms can cure PNE. When the child begins to pee, an alarm is set off, wakes the child, sends him to the bathroom and then back to sleep. Finally, hypnosis is being used to re-program the brain so the child will respond to a full bladder while asleep the same as when awake.

Unfortunately, none of these cures were available in the 1920s for poor little me. PNE shattered my dream of becoming a well-integrated, creative person comfortable with himself and phobia free. PNE is a choking albatross I shall carry to my grave.

Diane Marcus

I slowly walked to the front door annoyed by the banging and knocking of some anxious child, not necessarily mine, needing a drink of water or the bathroom, or mothering or most likely wanting to tell me that my son Randy did something. Few of the neighborhood children spoke English but my children were undeterred and understood Italian as though it was their second language. I on the other hand, well what can I say? When I called the gendarme, the policeman a washing machine he was kind enough not to arrest me but instead corrected my language skills, quite often as it turned out.
"Una momento piacere. One minute please. You’re going to break the damn door." I was serious. I wasn’t joking because two months after we moved into this brand new luxury building off the Via Cassia in Rome, Italy, across the Tiber River from the Vatican I leaned on the bathroom sink which disconnected from the wall, breaking pipes and flooding the apartment. Had it happened three weeks earlier it would have made no difference, but our furniture arrived from the states only two weeks before and there were still some cardboard wardrobe closets and boxes as yet unpacked in all the rooms.
Today my frustration mounted because the children were out playing in a very safe area, with several parents standing about talking while their eyes never left the sight of the kids. Ah yes, at last I was going to take advantage of the time to read. Just as I was about to find out something profound and important to the meaning of the words on the pages the tumult began. It’s impossible to have even fifteen minutes of alone time. Is that too much to ask for? My father, an A type personality, would say if you want peace go to a cemetery. Nobody will bother you there.
Looking down, expecting to find someone whose head reached about to my waist I saw a pair of worn out dirty hiking boots. I raised my eyes slowly and cautiously subdued, not sure what to do and decided to follow his legs upward. Clean dungarees, with new darker colored blue patches at the knees his hands in his pockets [I began to feel safer.] He was wearing an alpaca lined jacket that matched the jeans and a blue, yellow and maroon cherkered shirt.
But it was his face that made me put my hand over my mouth and make a soft yelping scream. The smile that I recognized but was out of place here made me think it can’t be him. Even his turquoise eyes that glimmered like prisms when he was happy belonged to him. Then the mouth moved.
“Hey sis, you gonna let me in?"