A Legacy Project

“As it was in the beginning / is now and ever shall be / world without end / Amen.”

I can still remember the way my throat felt when I sang those lines in the Freeland Methodist Church. The muscles contracting, vocal cords constricting, it wasn’t a choking sensation exactly. Just generalized discomfort; a throat ache. We went every Sunday. We got all dressed up. I had “church pants” and a special shirt I wore. Some Sunday mornings my dad polished our shoes. He always wore a tie and jacket to church. My mom got dressed up in her best school teacher attire. The service was at 11:00. Thelma Bell played the organ. We sang mournful Methodist hymns and recited the Apostle’s creed, which you were supposed to memorize. If I saw someone I knew in another pew (wood, uncomfortable, probably on purpose), I waved a wave of commiseration. The minister preached about the forgiveness of sin, which for me was just an abstraction. You were supposed to like him, but none of the three ministers I remember was remotely likeable. They seemed like damaged men. At that point in my life the closest I got to knowing about sin was my father’s lectures at the dinner table after church, which I later attributed to what he had learned in the military in WWII. He warned me and my brother about VD. We weren’t even in high school yet. He warned us about dope. “If you open a pack of cigarettes and it doesn’t have the blue seal on top, it probably has dope in it.” He said one night at the drive-in theater, in a car near ours, two people were having sexual relations. I didn’t understand that term, “sexual relations,” but I knew it was bad. He said no, my brother and I were not going to grow long hair or wear blue jeans. He said he had seen a boy wearing blue jeans. “And I could see the outline of his penis.” My brother and I shriveled. Our dad had said penis at the dinner table on a Sunday. 

For a few years we were also taken to Sunday school, taught by well-meaning old ladies, and worse yet, Bible school in the summer. Bible school was a dirty trick. Nothing good came from further study of the Good Book. On the bright side, however, there were Sunday afternoons at the roller skating rink in Midland or Saginaw. Girls and boys on wheels, going fast, risking the fall. One Sunday after skating, a half a dozen of us ended up at Patty Meyer’s house. Me and Dan Leman and Ron Fritz and Bob Young, and Dawn Wiltse and Patty played spin the bottle. The game was definitely tilted in favor of the girls. You didn’t need to understand math to see they would be kissing more than the boys. If a boy spun the bottle and it pointed at another boy, I guess we shook just hands. Better luck next time. Kissing. On the mouth. So that’s what it feels like, you thought. You wanted more.