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“Why don’t we let him decide?” said my mother.

That brought to an end the battle about whether I would go to Roman Catholic School or to Public School.

My mother was raised Anglican in the Church of England. Her father was a blacksmith. The automobile had killed that trade. Her mother washed floors and cleaned houses to help support them. They literally lived on what is called the wrong side of the tracks. Railway tracks separated their part of the village from the main part.

My father’s family were Roman Catholic. They lived at the top of a hill in the Village of Minto called Hartt’s Hill. We lived in a small house on the left side close to the top. My uncle Emmett and his family lived at the bottom on the left. On the right lived my Aunt Ella and her husband. On the right at the bottom on the main thoroughfare lived my uncle Clement and his large brood.

The battle over whether I would go to public school or Catholic school had raged. I can still hear it. It ended when my mother said, “Why don’t we let him decide?”

That night alone she said, “Do you want to go to Catholic school with the bad kids or to public school with the good kids?”

The next day I happily trotted off to be with the good kids.

I came home at noon. As I walked up the hill I met my Catholic cousins of whom there were considerable. They threw sticks and stones at me. They called me a name  I had never heard before. I did not know what it meant but from the way it was screamed at me I knew it was bad. I know what the name means now. It was Protestant. The wound from the name calling went deeper than the bruises from the sticks and stones. I almost died.

But I had learned the single most important lesson of my life. That lesson has helped me through many dark times. That lesson was that people who are our friends one moment can turn against us for to good reason the next.

That was the day I set my foot firmly on the strait and narrow path.

It was the best thing, looking back, that ever happened to me.

–Reg Hartt 1/26/2019.

strait: enormously difficult, almost impossible. a path only a few, perhaps just one person at a time, can walk.

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