Dedication and sacrifice

Sister Agnes Clare had a Napoleon complex and a mean right hook. She was 5 feet nothing and I feared her more than any living thing on earth.

One day, in second grade at Cheverus School in Malden, she marched over and clasped my nose between her index and middle fingers. It is possible that Sister Agnes Clare learned this particular form of behavior modification from The Three Stooges, because Moe used to do it to Curly with some regularity. My transgression was talking in class to my pal Domenic D'Angelo. My mistake was going home and complaining that Sister Agnes Clare had twisted my nose.

My mother cuffed me on the head. It was 1967 and if the nuns hit you, you deserved it.

The other day, I went back to Cheverus for the first time in 35 years, and naturally I took Dommy D'Angelo with me. Dommy always had my back, and I wasn't taking any chances that Sister Agnes Clare might be lurking in a closet, waiting for me.

Sister Agnes Clare wasn't there. The Sisters of Providence taught at Cheverus for 86 years, but many of them are now dead or retired, and there hasn't been a nun at Cheverus since 1994.

Still, the school that Susan Degnan now runs with a lay staff is vibrant. Inside a second-grade classroom, Kristin McNair's charges welcomed us. Like the nuns before her, McNair, 26, a Boston College grad, is not in it for the money. She makes 22 grand.

"It's a calling," McNair said.

"What kind of doctor are you?" one of the kids asked Dommy.

"I'm an eye doctor," he said.

When we were kids, everybody at Cheverus was Irish or Italian. And there was Joey LaFreniere, who was French, like the first bishop of Boston the school was named for. All of us were Catholic.

The kids at Cheverus today are a rainbow. They come from 30 countries. Some are Muslim. They will leave Cheverus more worldly than me and Dommy did. But we had it over them. It took us years to appreciate it. But at some point, it dawned on us that the nuns who taught us had taken a vow of poverty and dedicated their lives to kids, for no other reason than they believed in it.

I was about 15 years old, a couple years out of Cheverus, when I saw one of my old teachers, Sister Miriam Patrice, struggling under the weight of some groceries near Mal's market. Sister Miriam Patrice was always nice to me.

I volunteered to carry her groceries and we had a good talk on the walk back to the convent. I told her I wanted to write because I couldn't imagine actually working for a living. She laughed.

I put the bags down and Sister Miriam Patrice thanked me, told me to keep writing, and told me not to fool around so much because you only get one shot in life.

"God," she said, "has a plan for each one of us."

I never saw Sister Miriam Patrice again.

Last week, me and Dommy D'Angelo were standing outside the vacant convent. It's vacant and it's being converted to condos.

"How much are these going to go for?" Dommy asked.

"A lot," a construction worker replied.

Yesterday, Cardinal Sean O'Malley celebrated Mass at Sacred Hearts Church to celebrate the 100th birthday of Cheverus School. The upper church was so full that people spilled into the lower church.

As O'Malley talked about the sacrifice of the Sisters of Providence, a tiny, old, Vietnamese woman shuffled through the lower church and knelt to the side and clasped her hands.

And as she prayed, I smiled, because for some reason I can't explain, she reminded me of Sister Agnes Clare.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com