Kathleen.

I don’t remember her last name, but sometimes — like when a Christofascist is installed as Speaker of the House — I remember her and wonder where she is and how she remembers her early school years.

She was the only one in my elementary years whom I knew wasn’t LDS. She was Catholic.

The Supreme Court declared mandatory public school prayer to be unconstitutional in 1962. I started school in 1967. Despite that ruling, we had prayer in our first grade classroom in Sandy, Utah, every day, offered by one or another LDS kid — the same kids I walked to Primary with one afternoon every week.

Early in the year we took a vote in our class about whether or not to say a prayer in the morning. I suppose now that was to overcome the “mandatory” part of the Supreme Court ruling.

I don’t have any memory of how Kathleen voted, or whether she ever said the prayer in our room. But I understand now that a specifically LDS prayer, and never a prayer that would have been familiar in her tradition, was a mandatory part of every school day for her.

Anyway, I think about Kathleen sometimes.