Meaning, I began to have an acquaintance and a familiarity with Bernadette almost before I was aware of it; so that, several years later, after I’d gone to college and had started grad school, and had begun to be interested in writing and art, and had drifted from the faith (even if I hadn’t abandoned it completely), I would, on encountering her story or her name in some piece of literature or iconography, recall the fact that I’d spent four years in a school that owed its identity to a place whose renown was attached to a very mysterious and beautiful event that had happened to her. And I would feel, in retrospect, that all along I’d been brought under the gaze or the shadow of her influence. As had everyone else who had spent, or would spend, their formative years there (even if the same thought never occurred to them).