I can't remember if I was in first or second grade when Father Pat screwed up my life. I can tell you the left side of my desk faced the front of the room, where he spoke a while about something unimportant, apparently, and gave us the most difficult assignment ever--get your nubby primary colored crayons out and, on the one piece of paper allotted to you, take a few minutes to draw what you think heaven looks like.

I was fucking stumped! A part of me was so focused on the unusual situation of a blind man asking me to draw him a picture (yeah, Father Pat was the only blind person I knew), but mostly I hadn't ever considered heaven looking like anything.

The kid next to me was working on a blue sky with fluffy white clouds, the girl perpendicular to me same thing. Now I couldn't get past those clouds. My own version of cloudy sky found its way into my head. I could see it on that blank piece of paper in front of me. Maybe my statement was that heaven was all colors and no colors; white. But a priest told me to draw something!

Accepting that fact, my blank paper was now filled with the possibilties of colors and lines and everything I had ever found beautiful, yet troublesome if not impossible for me to render. Not to mention the size of the paper and the time it would take me to finish it. How can you turn in an unfinished picture of heaven? Heaven is very finished! Clouds, or whatever. I could go to hell for not seeing 'heaven' through to the end, even if Father Pat couldn't see it.

I turned in a cloudy blue sky and only did confession with Father Lenny after that.