File:Autumn Temptation (15477437566).jpg

English: As the school year kicked into low gear and the nights lengthened, strangely the days got longer as well, especially those fall afternoons. The time between noon recess and our release at 3:30 seemed to extend a little more every day. While the nuns droned on and the sun continued its journey toward Capricorn we children would watch through the impossibly tall school room windows as glorious warm afternoon light was frittered away in the tedious hours beneath the stern scrutiny of nuns who constantly titrated their dosage of discipline upward to levels sufficient to quell the increasing antsy-ness of their charges. Despite the liberal application of the business edge of brass rulers on tender knuckles, we children, like the comically plump squirrels on the freedom side of the great glass panes became more and more animated as the light of the day and the year slipped away. The falling leave at first made the fountain even more enticing. Dabs of Golden Delicious Yellow, Tobacco Gold, Sinclair Green, and Lucky Strike Red would decorate the edges farthest from the spouting finial, ringing the outer rim of the pool in a farewell riot of color. These were the priceless jewels that temped boys beyond the bounds of the ephemeral region known as "The State Of Grace". These were the prizes that enticed us from the solid, dry, obedient side of the rail to follow the lure of the fairies and risk our immortal soul or at least our mortal bodies on the slippery side of the rail. Those flaming reminders of the summer that had slipped away would not melt the railing even if they could burn our imagination. It was the glistening shimmering watery sheath on each leaf that gave us the idea. First our eternal souls streamed through the hoops of the railing, blithely unaware of the symbolic meaning of the iron trefoils within the hoops, an obvious reference to the demonic trident, and in the next instant our corporal bodies followed, flowing over the rails with the same oblivious ease as the water passed over the leaves.

How long is the time between when the leaf is and is not attached to the stem. That is how long the railing held us back once the fairies called us to the other side. Countless hours spent preaching the need for absolute obedience in all things wafted away like the smoke from the leaf piles gathered in the gutters and burned each autumn filing the air with aromas that made bacon mundane by comparison. There would be time to honor thy father and mother later, perhaps after the bell of the Number 8 sounded and we were all bundles into the very last bench at the far back of the trolley, just behind the black men with the brown paper bags neatly twisted at the top to hide even the hint of the deep amber glass within. For now though there would be dance.

Of course none of us boys were aware of our dance, and surely we never would admit to the crime, but a clerk who might happen to the glance from the window of the great stone building to the scene below could hardly guess that anything less than ballet practice was happening in the north circle of the yard. Gripping the iron hoops in their left hand, and balancing on their left foot, the boys would reach down passed the inner ledge where the perched to the brilliant leaves floating on the water below, and with that movement their right leg would elevate of its own accord creating the needed balance and a rough arabesque in one upward swoop.