Age is just a number
At 103, Sister Jean publishes memoir of faith and basketball
Sister Jean of Loyola University, who stands atop Chicago’s A-list of celebrity clergy, waited until she was 103 to write her memoir. Clearly, she didn’t take the advice packed into its title: “Wake Up With Purpose! What I’ve Learned in My
First Hundred Years.” Clearly, what she learned in her first 100 years was how to procrastinate. Certainly, she’s not alone in waiting until later in life to write a book. Laura Ingalls Wilder waited until her 60s before writing her first “Little House” novel. And Norman Maclean waited until his 70s, after retiring from the University of Chicago, before he wrote his first book, “A River Runs Through It.”
I guess Sister Jean was just a whole lot busier than Laura Ingalls Wilder, who spent several decades tramping around the Midwest, tending crops and building sod houses.
When I asked about her centurylong case of writer’s block, Sister Jean said, in fact, she really had been too busy to think about writing a book. In 2018, when she became a ubiquitous media darling just as her beloved Loyola Ramblers men’s basketball team reached the Final Four, several publishers approached her. She was busy. Now that she has written a book (with sports journalist Seth Davis), “it’s really been the busiest time of my life.” Lately, she’s blessing all of the dorms.
She’s talking to Access Hollywood, NPR and Good Morning America. And that’s beside her main focus: the Ramblers’ season.
She said this with her signature twinkle.
But I wasn’t buying it. Sitting in her office the other day a few hours before the Ramblers played the Saint Joseph’s Hawks of Philadelphia, I was determined to poke a hole or two in that beatific, saintly sparkle. In 103 years, had she ever been in a physical altercation? Physical, no. “Verbal, yes. Probably with brothers and sisters.” Is there anyone she doesn’t like? She looked at me as if she had never considered the idea. Or she just wouldn’t be sucked into this nonsense. In my defense, she wrote a memoir about a long life, and memoirs — think Prince Harry, Matthew Perry — air feuds, settle scores, talk trash, wallow in regrets.
No, she chuckled, shaking her head, unfortunately, she hasn’t known that kind of life.
But she does have a breaking point.
She will stop to take selfie after selfie (she wonders in her book if she has become a selfie machine). She will listen to your stories. She will let you lean into her face and talk to her as if she were a toddler in a pram. But do not talk to her when the Ramblers are playing. Do this and — without breaking her gaze from the court — she will wave a dismissive hand at you, ever so slightly, yet definitively, with the finality of a Mafia don.
Not that there’s nothing juicy about the memoir of a 103-year-old nun.
Monkey business
First of all, don’t call her a nun. Although the titles are often interchangeable, she prefers “sister.” A nun leads a life of quiet contemplation and relative seclusion, while a sister — at least this one
— is more of a social butterfly. Second of all, while reading “Wake Up With Purpose!,” I stopped dead at the earnest way in which she related a weird, unexpected detail: Her family owned a monkey. But someone cut a hole in his cage and stole him.
“I wish we knew who stole our monkey,” she told me.
Who steals monkeys? I asked.
“I wish we knew,” she sighed. “My dad made a big cage for our monkey, which went in the yard. He made him slides and a swing. We had him five years. When he vanished, we asked neighbors, we put ads in the paper. Nobody came forward. His name was Jerry. We had a family friend who was an engineer on a cargo ship that traveled to South America. One night he was at the house and asked if we wanted him
to bring back anything. We shouted ‘A monkey!’ I could see the look he gave my parents. Like, impossible. But in South America, they got word to bring back a female monkey for the zoo. That monkey gave birth on the trip back. He lived with us. My mother knitted him a red sweater to wear every night. In the morning he had coffee. Lots of cream and sugar. He would dunk his toast in the coffee. People ask what kind of monkey he was. I don’t know. I thought of him as an organgrinder monkey. And we were so sad to lose him.”
Don’t feel too bad. After Jerry, the family got an alligator.
Before her fame
Sister Jeans speaks softly and steadily. She looks good for 103. She seems good. It’s wise she chose a less contemplative order: Her office is at the busy hub of the student center. Its door stays wideopen. Students drop into her chairs and complain about their day. She listens. Evidence of her fame is all over her office: Sister Jean bobbleheads, Sister Jean cookies, a bottle of Sister Jean beer (from Great Lakes Brewing Company), a bucket of Sister Jean pins. What’s missing are images from the years before her fame. You probably didn’t know her full name is Sister Jean Dolores Bertha Schmidt, or that she is the oldest of three children, or that she is technically a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which trains in Iowa. She grew up in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco.
Writing a memoir gave her life a shape, she said. Her first memory, for instance, is