Et tu, Don
by Wendel Potter
September 1, 2008
To this day, I still feel sorry for Don Johnson.
I’m not talking about the Miami Vice/Nash Bridges actor. I don’t feel sorry for him. He has plenty of money.
The Don Johnson I refer to was a classmate of mine at St. Joseph Elementary School in New Hampton, Iowa. I attended 4th and 5th grade there and Don was my friend.
In 5th grade, the males in our class were invited to become altar boys. Actually, we were invited to prepare to become altar boys because not every boy who signed up was able to make the final cut to serve Our Lord at Mass.
The theatrics involved were fairly easy. Dressing up in black cassock and white surplice (my mother called it a blouse), we bowed, genuflected, and criss-crossed the altar in synchronicity.
We carried the Holy Missal from one side of the altar to the other because the Church had, after much deliberation, deemed that the priest was obviously too lazy to pick up the book and move it himself.
We ran and fetched the glass cruets of water and wine. I guess there weren’t any laws prohibiting little boys from serving wine to the priest as long as we ourselves didn’t imbibe.
The best part was holding the gold plated paten - the flat metal dish - under the chins of those parishioners receiving communion. For some reason,
Science - which we didn’t give a hoot about in the classroom - suddenly became a curiously enjoyable thing.
We discovered that if we drug our feet on the carpet, and then held the paten close enough to the communicant’s throat, static electricity would create a wonderful snap, crackle, and pop, causing the person to jump and almost bite his tongue.
Servants of the Lord can have fun, too.
But the big kicker in becoming an altar boy was learning the Latin. These days, language is no problem in this department because the Mass is now said in the native tongue of the community.
In 1963, the Latin Mass was said almost exclusively throughout the world. The thinking was that, since catholic means “universal”, you could conceivably attend Mass in any country and you’d feel right at home with everybody else who didn’t understand what the priest was saying.
For altar boys, there were several prayers and responses that were required to be recited aloud. So, in order to serve Our Lord in spirit, while not screwing up the scripted Mass, we had to learn the Latin.
We didn’t necessarily have to know what any of it meant. We just had to know what needed to be said at the proper time and it had to sound like we knew what we were saying.
So Sister Mary Grace Ellen undertook the task of teaching us the Latin of the Mass. It was difficult work. Especially for Don Johnson.
Poor Don could not memorize Latin to save his soul. Fortunately, as it turned out, it wasn’t a soul-saving requirement. You just had to learn it if you wanted to dress up and play altar boy.
Don struggled for weeks. Finally, at the end of the Latin learning gestation period, we received our grades. Don would not be joining us in the ranks of the acolytes.
I remember how heart broken he was. Sister Mary Grace Ellen was devastated. It truly pained her to have to tell Don that he could not be an altar boy.
In her sisterly heart, she knew this wasn't fair.
Had Don been born just a few years later, he could have nailed the theatrical portion and would not have had to master a foreign…really foreign….language.
For God's sake, the poor kid didn’t want to be a Roman senator, he just wanted to be an altar boy!
He just wanted to carry around the holy book and the wine and water and ring the fancy bells and snap people’s heads back with a jolt of static electricity.
He wanted to serve his Lord!
Who knows. Maybe a couple of years later, he was invited to join the ranks, when Mass in English was finally allowed. I hope so.
Now, I just wish my son could find a decent job here in the Heartland of America. One that didn’t demand he be bilingual.
Maybe I should teach him Latin.
Copyright 2008 Wendel Potter
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