I loved going to school. And so, when Mother asked me if I wanted to go to Sunday school, I eagerly said yes. School was school in my mind, and if I liked the one, I would surely like the other. Mother enrolled me in Sunday school at the Randolph Heights Presbyterian Church that she had attended as a child and started going to services there herself.

Going to the Protestant Church was something that we didn’t want to tell Grandma about. She was an old-school Catholic who thought that all non-Catholics were heathens. She refused to sing the Christmas carol “Away in a Manger” because, as she told us grandkids, it had been written by the Reformer Martin Luther.

Evidently there was a like-minded Catholic in our neighborhood who told the Catholic priest in our area that I was attending the Presbyterian Sunday school. The priest told Grandma’s priest and he warned Grandma about my heretical behavior.

One day while I was in the basement at 1900 Tatum helping Grandma with the wash, she confronted me with what she had heard. “You’re Catholic,” she said. “You were baptized at St. Luke’s Catholic Church.” Yes, I had been baptized there. Mother told me that Grandma had organized the baptism herself shortly after my birth. Grandma had wanted to make sure that her first grandson became a good Catholic.

The way Grandma confronted me gave me the feeling that I should have a guilty conscience about attending Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church. But I didn’t have – and surely didn’t want to have – a guilty conscience about something that I really liked. And I really liked Grandma, too. It was the first time in my life that I experienced a serious conflict of interest: Loving Grandma and loving Sunday School.

As usual, Mother helped me deal with the situation. She was good at putting things into perspective and explaining how the Bloomfield family functioned.