Fightin' Irish

    Once upon a time, when the world was new,  I taught third grade at a parochial school in Delmar.  My class consisted of 51 students because although the class size was set at 50, one child was moving, and there was a waiting list so they allowed the child into class  before the other child moved away.  A lot of kids, but absolutely no discipline problems because the school and the parents of the students wouldn't have allowed any problems.
    Except for one other lay teacher, all the other classes, K to 8th grade, were taught by nuns, who were a fairly youthful and pretty dynamic lot  back then.  They pretty much stayed to themselves, instruction-wise, and allowed me and the other teacher freedom inside our classrooms, without any criticism.  I would say they never criticized anything I did, except that would not be entirely true: on one occasion they all descended on me like a pack of avengers:
      I drove myself to that job, in my 1957 Chevrolet BelAir.   One evening, while I was driving my sister to a doctor's appointment, a drunken realtor came speeding  down Stillwater's Lake Avenue and smashed into the side of the front of my car as it was stopped to make a turn.  (Ironically while his big old Olds, or whatever, was stopped on the road with the police on the scene, another car drove right up behind it and pushed it forward quite a good distance.  That driver was also obviously inebriated, but nobody paid any attention to that back then.  Hard to believe, but true.)
     My car had some fairly minor damage, but was still drivable.  A few days later, while it was parked outside the school, the adjustor from the other insurance company came to investigate and was taking pictures, unbeknownst to me.  The street where my car was parked was right outside the window where the nuns hung out, to eat lunch, have their prep periods, etc.  They were not supposed to socialize  during those times with us 2 non-nuns, so I was taken by surprise when a contingent of nuns burst into my room, and announced that somebody was taking pictures of my car, WITHOUT my permission.  And was I going to allow it??  I was a new driver then, and this was my first accident, so I hadn't really thought about the protocol involved.  I indicated as much to the questioning nuns. 
     The head nun, Sister Anne, who thought of me as kind of her protégé, drew herself up, and obviously disappointed in me, exclaimed (the only word for it):   "Well, I thought you were Irish!"
     If every tale has to have a lesson, I guess the takeaway here would be not to let everybody walk all over you.  And this from a group of peaceable nuns.