Kids of St. Mary's connect

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

They wanted me to write about them.

I said no because I generally don't. Really, where's the story, I thought?

I go into schools now and then and talk about how I got started as a writer. I tell a couple dozen kids that if you do something long enough, if you try hard enough, you eventually get better at it.

There's no magic to writing, I say. Writing is learned, like everything else. You can be whatever you want to be. It may sound trite, but it's fact.

And it's not a story - not usually.

In all the years I've been doing this, I've never talked to kids I haven't liked. All kids are wonderful. I think it's because they still have one little toe in Heaven - even the pre-teenagers, especially the pre- teenagers. The world hasn't ruined them yet.

When I walk out of a school, I take with me far more than I came with. Kids give off enthusiasm and hope and joy, and that's what I carry home with me. It happens all the time, and yet it continues to surprise me.

The kids at St. Mary's in Beverly, however, got to me in a special way. There they were, about 100 of them, sitting not in comfortable auditorium seats or in a big classroom, but in the basement of an old Catholic school in hard metal chairs, right after lunch, not slumped and tired and bored like kids might be, but eager like hungry birds in a nest.

I looked at them - the girls in plaid jumpers and white blouses with matching plaid ties, the boys in white shirts and ties, another group still in their gym-uniform sweatsuits - and I felt instantly connected to them.

I should have been scared. There was Sister Grace the school principal, looking for all the world like my old eighth grade teacher, a.k.a. Sister Philip Julie. You know, the one who made me diagram sentences on the blackboard again and again until I got them right. The one I was afraid of. The one I was sure didn't like me.

But I wasn't that eighth grader anymore. And she wasn't Sister Philip Julie.

And this wasn't about impressing other adults. This was about walking into a room and stepping inside a small circle and being enveloped by friends.

The kids must have felt it, too. Sometimes when you talk to a group, you see someone gazing out a window, or scribbling a note, or whispering to the person beside him. You always know who doesn't want to be there.

But there wasn't one child in this group who acted bored. They took in everything.

And because of that, I probably gave them more. I wasn't afraid of losing them, so I took them places I hadn't been in a very long time. I took them back to my own eighth grade, shared some memories, read them a poem, told them a story.

When it was time for questions, they had a million.

"What happens when you run out of ideas?"

"Do you ever procrastinate?"

"If you finish something and you don't like it, what do you do?"

"How long does it take to write a column?"

"Are your kids embarrassed by what you write?"

"Do you get a lot of mail?"

"Did you ever want to do anything else?"

"Are you going to write about us?"

I can't write about you, I told them. I don't know you well enough. There isn't a column in anything that happened here today. That's what I said and that's what I believed.

But I was wrong.

"Do you ever change your mind when you're writing?" one of the boys asked. "Do you start off believing one thing and end up believing another?"

I did today. I thought I didn't know these kids. I thought they were strangers. But the truth is I have known them all my life. They are Mary Olson, Carol Curtis, Barbara McKenna, Jimmy Wood, Bobby Graham and Billy Ahlgren - in a different uniform, in a different school, in a different time.

They are the kids I knew when I was a girl. They are who I was a long, long time ago.

That is why I felt connected. And that is why I write about them now.