I think of them every time I look down at a chess board, examine a drawing by Escher, or pass by White House/Black Market in the mall.  But these days I am more likely to encounter a zebra than I am to run into a real-life black-and-white nun. 

    Where have all the Sisters gone?  In my childhood, nuns were everywhere.  I'd see them in all  the conventional nun-ish places:  kneeling in the front pew of church, cruising the aisles of my catechism class, policing the prize table at Easter Bingo.  But it also was not uncommon to run into a nun buying black rubber boots at Sterling Sussman Dry Goods Company.  Or catch a Mother Superior purchasing a dozen cornetti at Leon's Bake Shop.  We saw nuns picnicking at Fort Nathan Hale Park and nuns ice-skating at Wolman Rink.  There were nuns behind the wheels of station wagons on the Jersey Turnpike.  They were even nuns in the cheap seats at Yankee Stadium.   Eating Cracker Jacks! 
    The sixties were the heyday for hippies and the end of an era for American nuns.  Gradually the half dozen nuns at our church convent began to die off or--in one famous case--just disappear overnight.  Later the scandal would surface:  she had run away with the priest from the next parish over.  Whoa!  We gleefully contemplated how many Hail Marys the defrocked Father and Sister would get for penance when they made their next Confession.
    I don't know why I feel nostalgic for the nuns of yore.  Our parish nuns seemed to take delight in scaring the bejesus out of us.  They scolded and pinched.  They told us over and over again that we were the worst type of sinners, destined to roast like Oscar Meyer wieners in the fires of hell.  I disliked and feared them so much, I can't even remember their real names, but recall them only as Sister B.O., Sister Thick Spectacles, Sister Pray to Die Before You Commit Sins of the Flesh, Sister The World Will End on Thursday. 
    Maybe I mourn their passing for the same reason I mourn the loss of my squishy snow boots and dull-bladed ice skates and all the rest of the paraphernalia I associate with being a kid in 1960s Connecticut instead of a forty-something woman in twenty-first-century Florida.  If I could only bring the Sisters back, then I could feel like I was six years old again, when the next box of Cracker Jacks--and all sorts of delicious sins!-- lay just around the corner.