I’ve always hated gluesticks. Perhaps it’s because they have a tendency to malfunction in my hands, to the point where kindergarten John would routinely glue his projects to his own skin. Perhaps it’s because I have the comprehensive artistic ability of a paralyzed dog. The likelihood that the Elmer’s Glue Corporation would dedicate an entire product to my demise is unlikely; equally as unlikely is the possibility that I will ever again lower my guard around those cylinders of stickiness. I digress.

It’s Day Three of the 2015 Franciscan University New York Mission. Spirits are high as our mission team enters one of the many nursing homes run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, this one the Jeanne Jugan Residence in the Bronx. Once inside and familiar with the layout of the home, our team was divided into halves and provided tasks: painting and organizing.

I was asked to read at their noon Mass, a proposition to which I readily agreed. As Mass approached, I was led away from my mission team to an open room near the chapel, where a collection of smiling seniors were in the middle of a story and craft activity. A volunteer noted my interest and gestured for me to join. She sat in the middle of a formed semicircle, and read a particularly touching insert from "Chicken Soup for the Soul."

She soon concluded her story and turned to address the gathered members of the nursing home and the volunteers: “We’ve prepared such an exciting craft to follow our story! In front of you are strips of paper, already cut. Each one of us is going to make our own pair of sandals!” The senior citizens grinned as volunteers moved to aid them in their respective crafts, which essentially involved attaching crossing strips of paper atop a paper sandal, to create a Birkenstock-like sandal cutout.

As the craft began, the volunteer gestured for me to join her at the front of the semi-circle, and I did so, because to reject the hopeful faces of a room full of elderly citizens is an action against everything good and holy. We joined a woman, Gladys, a 92-year-old specimen of pure innocence. She had trouble speaking, but she’d long ago trained her eyes to speak volumes. I watched as the patient volunteer slowly helped Gladys glue the pieces of paper together, painstakingly tracing the edges of the sandal. The end product found Gladys grinning from ear to wrinkled ear.

Left sandal down, right sandal to go, and the female volunteer turned to face me. “Your turn,” she said.

Glue sticks.

Confidence gone. Play time was over.

Gladys and I, in that moment, joined the vicious struggle against craft incompetency, my very reputation as a capable teenager at stake. We were locked in the trenches of artistic impotence, one successful paper sandal from victory, one gluey sandal mess from my mother signing me up to retake kindergarten. The struggle was very real.

Gladys looked at me with expectant eyes. I pointed to the glue stick, and watched as she struggled to uncap it. The glue stick had glued itself shut. She handed it to me with expectant eyes, like I was some kind of glue stick Jesus.

I wrapped one hand around the glue stick, the other around its cap, then pulled, and the cap flew off and hit the far wall on the fly. The laughter of an entire room of toothless, feeble bodies deflated my ego faster than an atheist flees a Latin Mass.

Great start.

I find I’m coaching myself through the process. Breathe. I pass the glue-stick back to Gladys, who still hasn’t spoken to me at this point but hasn’t quite stopped laughing, and she takes it. I point expectantly to the pieces of paper which still need to be glued to one another before this Ghost of Kindergarten Projects Past is laid to rest, and Gladys shoots me a confused expression.

I should’ve stopped there. I should have called the female volunteer back over. But this headstrong hiker already halfway up Mount Glue Stick wasn’t about to back down. I pointed again at the pieces of paper to be glued, and once again was met with only two blank eyes and a confused expression.

“We’re gluing these pieces of paper together to make a sandal, right?”

Gladys nodded.

“We’re going to do this sandal just like the other one, right?”

Gladys nodded.

Most of the other seniors finished their crafts, so now we have a gathering audience around our table, a wheelchair cheering section for Gladys and friends, the tag team poster children for craft inadequacy. Brilliant.

It occurred to me that maybe Gladys had simply forgotten how to glue. Perhaps this woman shared my hatred for glue sticks, and was joining me in my distaste for sticky messes waiting to exist.

Regardless, I did not bus the six hours from campus to the Bronx to lose to a glue stick. I refused to be labeled a failure by the traditional parameters of craft specifications. This was the day that I would strike back, for every kid who colored outside of the lines, for every child routinely put black in their rainbows, for every prepubescent juvenile whose report card was marked “Needs Improvement” in the art category because they ate the uncooked macaroni destined for a wooden picture frame. This was something I had to do.

I stole from the courage usually reserved for something more daring than a craft and a nursing home, and stood up, until I towered over Gladys. I picked up that glue stick and dropped it into her hand, then closed her fingers around that plastic cylinder of adhesive opportunity. My hand clasped, I forced hers over the paper, lathering it and the entire table in glue.

We were going to glue these pieces of paper together, I had decided so. Legends would be written about how well we glued these pieces of paper together. And when we finished gluing, our hands would stick together in a high five made of undiluted victory.

After five minutes, the sandal was completed, and Gladys looked close to death. The sight of a 92-year-old woman panting and sweating onto a nursing home craft table still wasn’t enough to dampen my hopes that the monument they would surely erect in our honor would be held together completely by glue sticks.

In the seconds that followed, I marveled at the difference between the volunteer’s success as compared to my own. She had with ease guided Gladys’ hand over the pages, and the first sandal accordingly was completed in a matter of seconds. My approach had lasted 10 minutes, and was almost documented as Gladys’ cause of death. A sister approached to take Gladys back to her room for an afternoon nap, but before allowing herself to be wheeled away, Gladys turned to face me. In the time it took for her to transfer all of her energy from her fingertips to her vocal chords, I began rehearsing my gracious defeat speech.

She slowly began to move her lips, and I leaned in close to make out the words, still confused as to the discrepancy between my guidance and that of the volunteer’s. Gladys locked eyes with mine, and spoke three words which to this day characterize my weakness in the craft department.

“I’m left-handed.” She shot me a grin, lifted her crudely-made paper sandals from the wrecked table and was wheeled to her room.

I had dropped the glue stick into the non-dominant hand of a 92-year-old woman, and paid the price.