This happened a very long time ago and it happened to me while I was sleeping and my father did it. It happened because I would, on occasion, hold my breath as I slept, at least, that’s what I have always been told.

I had to be watched through the night and shaken awake from time to time and be reminded to take air. My parents took shifts, my small room lighted by a candle. They each kept an alert vigil, their eyes intent on their sleeping son. My mother would sometimes rest a light hand on my chest so she could know certainly that air was going into and leaving my lungs. I was keenly aware of their presence, even to the point of including them in my dreams as observers.

I was six years old. I knew all my prayers and what it meant when you crossed yourself. I was envious of my older brother, John, because he was an altar boy. My mother believed that he took his duties too lightly, and she warned him against letting his mind drift elsewhere when he served early Mass every Sunday morning.

While it’s true that John would always grin when it came time for him to sound the bells at the moment of transubstantiation, when the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, it’s necessary to understand that John, no matter how hard he tried not to, grinned because the bells never failed to remind him of an approaching ice cream truck, not, as my mother feared, because his faith was less than serious.

But still, like my mother, I would chide John for his blasé approach to his responsibilities during the Mass, and I made a promise to myself and to my mother and father that when the time came for me to become an altar boy, I would surely understand the consequence of being an acolyte.

I was a very solemn little boy, too solemn, my father believed. I got ahold of advanced catechisms and set to memorizing each question and the proper response. I remember asking my father late one night, after he had pinched my cheek, shaken me slightly, and whispered for me to breath, if he would quiz me on what I had taught myself from a fifth grade catechism.

“Put that away,” he said. “You’re suffocating yourself with scripture.”

My father liked his beer and he had a great many friends in the neighborhood pubs. It’s safe to say that he had had a few that night, for no sooner had I closed my eyes did he leave my room and return with his straight razor and a lathered brush. While I slept, my father shaved the crown of my head.

I think now of John’s grin of consecration at the sound of the bells, and the way my shaven pate itched a week after the fact. Now, on the eve of my Profession, when myself and the eight other Novitiates in my class gather in the rectory to be instructed on tonsure, I laugh at the idea of a little boy who held his breath while he slept until the night his father shaved a spot on his head, and of how he grew up to become a happy priest.