this is my story

Today, I leave the world of poetry and get personal. Very personal. I have been writing this for a few years, rewording it, putting it away and bringing it out again. Why do I tell it? Because it happened and to get it off my chest.

This is my story.
By Henry David Rosso


This June I reach the 66 milestone – Medicare and truly a senior with almost six decades of memories behind and still much to look forward to. While some memories fade into oblivion, others stick around to either warm us and make us smile or haunt us.

My parents did something to me almost 60 years ago that continues to haunt me. And while I savor most of the memories of my childhood, the years between ages 7 and 9 still have a chilling effect on me.

I started my life surrounded by my Italian relatives in Princeton, New Jersey, and wonderful memories – the garden beside the house that gave us fresh peas, lima beans, corn, tomatoes and a small orchard of cherries, peaches and apples.
The garden had spin-offs: Aunt Mary shelling the peas, the fresh fruit from the trees that went into the home-made ice cream that we produced by cranking an oaken bucket with the ingredients, ice and rock salt.

The house had a two-car garage and a dirt floor and a root cellar with a dirt floor that stored Aunt Mary’s labors — canned vegetables, potatoes from the garden and lots of secrets.
I grew up with seasons, and summer and winter were my favorites: summer with the green life that surrounded us, and the winters for the snowy wonderlands.

When I was growing up in Princeton, The House had neighbors on one side. But on the garden side there was nothing between the house and the lake down Princeton-Kingston Road but trees. In the summer, we could watch regattas on the lake from our roof. On other summer days, my cousins and I would grab baskets and buckets and go into the fields to pick blackberries, raspberries and blueberries and then try to sell them door-to-door – our profits reflected the fact the neighbors had the same access to the fields we did, a basic business lesson learned too late.

Wintertime was just as wonderful in other ways, mostly white and peaceful. I loved waking up, looking out the window and seeing fields of unmolested snow. The birdbath in the backyard would have a six-inch cap of snow, under which was a miniature ice rink. Ice sickles hung menacingly from the roof, some reaching to the ground, long, thick, hard and sharp. I loved to snap them off and lick them, getting my tongue stuck to the frozen pop sickle.

My family moved to Syracuse, New York, when I was barely out of diapers, but we made almost annual visits to Princeton where I also spent many summers.

The most vivid memories during this time are of the cousins all gathered on the large stairway to the second floor. We were seated on the steps, while aunts and uncles would put up a screen or a sheet on the front door and set up the projector and show black and white silent movies of “T’was The Night Before Christmas,” and Felix the Cat and others. Then we would go to bed. When we went upstairs, our Christmas tree was a plain green tree standing in a stand. When we woke up in the morning, it was brilliantly decorated and loaded with presents.

Then things changed. My special life was disrupted.

Even now, 57 years later, the memory is so vivid I can still feel the apprehension I felt as I walked down the strange dark hallway lighted by bare light bulbs. I was 7 years old when my father drove me there in the night. When we arrived, my father held my hand. It was the last time I was ever to hold his hand except for a cursory handshake decades later.

We came to a room and were greeted by a woman dressed in white. My father and the woman talked. I don't know what they said, but I knew something was not right. I knew I didn't want to be where I was. I don't remember if my father hugged me. Maybe now -- or then -- it doesn't matter. I remember I cried. I felt a loss and then my father was gone and I was alone with the woman in white.

I was taken to a large room and directed to a metal-frame bed. It was along a wall and in a row of other beds, all occupied by other boys. I got in the strange bed, pulled the covers up over my head and wondered over and over: Where am I? Why am I here? Who are these people? There were no answers then.

When I left that place, I was nine. Those were years when a boy wants someone to look up to, to be hugged and loved, to be tucked in at night, to have someone to answer all those questions young minds have.

I had concrete floors and bars and confusion and anxiety and a curiosity that was answered with the most unimaginable measures. I was not an individual. I suddenly became part of a pack, a group. I did not know and never got to know any of the other boys in that dormitory.

Men dressed in white woke us up in the morning and directed us to showers and then to a dining hall for meals and then to classes. I saw these same men in white pick up children and throw them against radiators.

There was an outside world, which we usually saw through barred windows or from an inside play area from which we could look through the bars. I felt like an animal in a zoo. I saw people in straitjackets, adults spitting at us and yelling unintelligible sounds and pissing on the walls.

Alone, without parents and in strange surroundings, there was not much awareness. Learning was a daily experience and such experience was a fresh imprint on a ready brain. There was so much discovery.

And that was the setting one day as I sat in a classroom next to a girl. Until that day, a girl was just another person, another body whose hair was longer.
But this day there was to be a discovery and, as with most great discoveries, it was to be announced with pure innocence.
I looked down at this body next to me who had longer hair and was wearing a dress and to my amazement I could see her underpants. They were quite loose, loose enough, in fact, to allow this 7-year-old boy to make my great discovery.
"Look, she's not the same!" I shouted to no one in particular, but heard by everyone in the classroom, including the habit-frocked nuns who descended upon me immediately, their large crosses dangling from chains around their midriffs flailing the air and striking me in the head.
My exclamation created quite a stir among the students, who chattered excitedly and giggled at my misstep.
But the nuns, those bastions of Christian love and understanding and forgiveness, were not amused, were not forgiving, were not tolerant. They picked me up out of my seat and half dragged, half carried me out of the room to the delight of many of the students and shock of others.
Two nuns led me down the long, bureaucratically green hall to another room, where they stripped me down to my underpants. Then they grabbed a handful of clothes and I felt myself being dressed again. All this time, I had no idea what was happening to me until all the commotion had ceased, all the dust had settled. There was only one more bustle of activity before I was to be subjected to the cruellest lessons in my limited education.
The nuns grabbed my by my tiny shoulders. They had to bend at their black-draped waists to reach me. They turned me so I was facing a full-length mirror.
In the dim light from a bare overhead light bulb, I looked into the mirror. There, before my eyes, I stood flanked by the floor-length, ever-present black habits. The blackness of the clothing only emphasized my dilemma. What I saw shocked, scared, confused and dreadfully embarrassed me.
I saw myself. I was bareheaded. My neck and part of my chest was bare. My arms were bare from fingertips to shoulders. My legs poked out, white and skinny from just above the knees to my bare feet. The rest of me was covered in a girl's dress. And, yes, if I sat just right, other people would be able to look up my dress and at my underpants and if those underpants were loose, others would be able to see that I was different from girls. But now I was also different from boys. I was wearing a dress.
My immediate embarrassment was just a teaser. Those good Christian nuns, their crosses hanging from all those well-fingered beads at their waists, had only begun. My turmoil was to reach its climax not within the confines of that room in front of the other nuns.
I was now to endure the ultimate humiliation for having the audacity of making a youthful, innocent discovery. The nuns marched me out of the room, back to my classroom.
Every head turned as I entered the room. I kept my eyes on the floor. I felt the heat rise through my body and almost melt my face. My eyes met nobody. I was guided to my seat in the front of the class, across from the girl who had unintentionally showed me that boys and girls were different. I took my seat. I brought my hands up to my face and tried to hide. That is how I remained until the class was over.
There was no hiding. I was forced to endure an entire day of face-flaming humiliation. I moved from class to class up and down the sickly green hallway that kept making me sicker to look at. I had to stand in lines that moved inexorably slowly through the dining hall and then I had to sit at the long table to eat my meal with the other boys. But the boys were wearing what boys usually wear. I wore a dress.
My day of shame finally and mercifully ended at night when I was allowed to take the dress off and go to bed. With the dress off, safely surrounded by the sheets and the blankets, I was a boy again. I had what girls didn't have and I was no longer wearing what girls wear. At the age of seven, by myself, surrounded by people I didn't know, my parents nowhere in sight, abandoned, I had learned what many learn easily. It was to be a traumatic experience that was to remain with me for the rest of my life.

I remember times that I was allowed to go outside into a courtyard.

One day I walked from the confines of the courtyard to an adjacent field. I enjoyed the freedom without knowing it was freedom. It all seemed so natural to walk from the concrete through the grass to the knee-high weeds into the sunshine and a blue sky above. I and another boy spent what seemed like hours walking in the high grass, examining the flowers and the bugs and breathing the air in the sunshine.

And then, late in the day, the nuns came to take me away from my new, fantastic outdoor world. They let me know I had to be punished. I wasn’t sure what for.

They took me back inside, down the long green hallway past the dormitory where the boys slept and into a small room with a bed and a window that looked out on the fields I had just enjoyed.

I was told to take off all my clothes and get on the bed and they left me alone.

A short time passed and two men dressed in white returned carrying a large bucket, which they put on the floor next to the bed. One of them reached in and pulled out a sheet dripping water. He rung it out and laid it out on the bed next to where I lay, along the length of my body. He then began to wrap the cold, wet sheet tightly around my body. My arms were placed along my side and the sheet held them in place. Another sheet was used until I was wrapped tightly with cold wet sheets from my neck to my feet. The attendants then left the room, shutting the door behind them.

This was punishment. I fought off a slowly progressing panic. Fingers, toes and head were all that I could move. I did not know how long I had been there, but the light level in the room had diminished significantly by the time I was unwrapped and allowed to return to the dormitory. The memory of that incident has stayed with me all my life and I have retained the panic I felt being confined and helpless.

My parents never visited me during those two years. I had a couple of visits from aunts and uncles who picked me up and took me someplace to eat. I don’t remember where or what I ate. I know that I talked non-stop from the moment they picked me up and all during our visit. And I remember that I said nothing during the trip back; I just looked out the car window. I was afraid and confused and didn’t know why I had to go back.

About two years after the trauma of the nuns' version of sex education, I was once again united with my family. My father picked me up and returned me to my waiting family. It was a strange reunion. There was an awkward embrace between me and my mother and a distance between my brothers, now 5 and 3, and me. Now there was also a baby sister of 1 year. It is doubtful she experienced anything one way or the other over this reunion.

It was very much like the entry of the new boy on the block rather than the return of a brother after a long absence.

I, who had spent a traumatic two years not knowing where I was or who I was or why I was where I was or even who my family was, was suddenly back with my family, those who had delivered me to the jaws of the nuns. Should I now just feel safe with these people? How could I?
I was now 9, but there was no knowing if, under the circumstances, I had actually grown to nine. It was almost as if I had stood still in time. After all, what was there to mark the time? What is there besides the calendar? The physical age advanced, as it must. But the emotional age can die while alive, like a record playing with the sound off. When it is over the record is finished, the arm retracts but nothing was gained with the sound off. The needle picked up dust. The record grooves were carved a bit deeper. But everything that went into the record was lost. It was the tree falling in the forest without anybody to hear the sound. It was death in life.