MY LATE SON

"Scorsese on the Cross" is an essay by Vince Passaro that appeared in the July 2011 issue of Harper's.

This is the first sentence of the essay:

"On the wall of my kindergarten classroom at St. Aloysius School, among the many typical decorations, hung a gaudily colored print that I used to stare at with fascination."

"On the wall of my kindergarten classroom at St. Aloysius School" is a linked chain--a concatenation--of prepositional phrases that starts this sentence. This is something that we have to get through before we get to the subject of the sentence. We have to wait for the subject. We are being played with in this first sentence. "On the wall" is a prepositional phrase. "of my kindergarten classroom" is another prep phrase that modifies the one right before. "at St. Aloysius School" is another prep phrase that modifies "classroom."

The saint was a Jesuit. When I think of kindergarten, I think of getting traced on the floor. I think of carpet that smells like cornchips.

"among the many typical decorations" is another prep phrase.

"hung" is the main verb of this sentence. It is an intransitive verb--it has no direct object. In fact, the prepositional phrases that start with "On" and "among" both modify this main verb.

"a gaudily colored print that I used to stare at with fascination" is the subject of this sentence, even though it comes at the end of the sentence. This sentence is inverted. It is in a strange form, so it must be in this form for a reason.
--"a" is an indefinite article.
--"gaudily" is an adverb that modifies "colored."
--"colored" is a past participle that works as an adjective. It modifies "print."
--"print" is a noun. It is a count noun and is the simple subject of this sentence.
--"that I used to stare at with fascination" is a relative clause that functions as an adjective since it modifies "print."
--"that" is a pronoun, I guess, since it's the object of the preposition "at" in this relative clause.
--"I" is the subject of the relative clause.
--"used to stare" is the verb phrase of this clause. "to" is not a preposition here. It is not the "to" in the infinitive--like "to eat." No, it goes with "used." It's maybe what's called a semi-auxiliary.
--"stare" is the main part of the verb.
--"at" is a preposition. Its object is "that." The writer could have written, "at which I used to stare with fascination," but that sounds silly and stuffy. To write like that would have been a snoot move.
--with fascination" is another prepositional phrase. Lots of prepositional phrases in just this first sentence. Bryan Garner, in GMAU, says this about prep phrases:

"In lean writing, it's a good idea to minimize prepositional phrases. In flabby prose, a ratio for one preposition for every four words is common; in better, leaner writing, the quotient is more like one preposition for every ten or fifteen words."

The above sentence, which is 29 words long, has six prepositions--six prep phrases--in it. That means we have a prep for every 4.8 words.