Liturgical Omens

Today is the feast of Our Lady's Seven Dolours and yesterday was that of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Back in the middle of the last century when I was still diagramming sentences and finding the value of X under the tutelage of what were then The Good Sisters, these two feast days were fraught with deep meaning. For it was either on one or the other of them that the summer vacation effectively ended and the fall school term began. Sorrows or the Cross. Holy Mother Church understood schoolboys.