It was a Monday in November, and I was making s’mores with Sister Mary Dolan. Despite the group of teenage girls chatting and laughing around her, Sister Mary, as she was known to the students, looked as serene as always while standing in front of the firepit’s glow. When she stepped back and turned toward me, the marshmallows she was roasting were perfectly golden.
“The trick is patience,” she told me as we admired her handiwork. “You can’t get impatient.”
I recognized a familiar sentiment behind her advice: Do every little thing well, so the big things have strong foundations. This was how things were done at Notre Dame School of Manhattan, my high school alma mater, and the place where I first met Sister Mary and her fellow sisters of the Society of St. Ursula, the congregation that had founded the school.
