Monday , November 18, 1963
Joey Moreno was a boy in Maria Popaluski’s English class.
He was not in any of my classes but I wish I was there the day
he farted real loud while Brother Ervin was lecturing
about Shakespearian dramas.
Maria said the class laughed hysterically but it had nothing to do
with Hamlet or MacBeth or Romeo&Juliet.
Brother Ervin sent Joey Moreno to detention for “flatulent disruption.”
But no one is laughing about Joey Moreno today because he got run over by a truck
while walking home from church yesterday. I hope he had just received Communion.
The church is St. Alban’s in Flushing, near St. Abacus High School.
If he had been from St. Luke’s I definitely would have known more about Joey
other than that he once farted in class and then he died.
He was fourteen years old.
Sometimes Death knocks softly on the door, like two months ago
when Rita Conners’ seventy-seven year-old grandfather
died in his sleep in South Hampton.
Other times, Death grabs a stranger by the collar and yells “Surprise!”
like he did when Joey Moreno, a ninth-grade boy, crossed a street
hile walking home from church which is something
millions of Catholic ninth-graders do every week of their lives.
We will dedicate the basketball game between the St. Abacus Firsts
and the Archbishop Molloy Spartans to the memory of Joey Moreno.
He will never fart in public again but there are so many other things
he could have been doing in some place other than heaven.
Our God is a merciful God who would never ever send a teenager to Hell
even though that teenager was already sent to detention at St. Abacus High School.
Teenagers are too young to commit mortal adult sins like adultery
and we don’t know how to covet anything.
If you think that God doesn’t laugh when a kid farts in class,
then you don’t really know God.
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Footnotes
ONE HUNDRED DAYS OF 1963 (© 2001) only differs in format.
St. Abacus was called the Firsts because it was the first
experimental Catholic High School of its kind.
The "Joey Moreno" fart is fictional but his sudden death is not.
The author apologizes to the Archbishop Molloy Stanners
but "Tina Manicotti" will always remember the Spartans.
For this page of diary, which was a mandatory writing project,
an English teacher worth his or her salt would have a red pen alert.
There no other fart jokes in the novella.
The 11/22/63 diary entry is here.
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