When I Was A Kid...

One of my earliest memories is of acting up in church during the service and my Mom taking me out and spanking me for embarrassing her. She walked me all the way back home and sent me to my room. I was humiliated and five years old.

When my brother and sister came back later that morning, I had to stay in the room, but I was bored. So I opened the second-floor window, whose screen had long since been removed, and devised a clever plan to smuggle cereal to kids on the sidewalk below, using an Easter basket on a length of string. I was an enemy of the state, and it passed the time.

I used to look forward to going to church every Sunday, even though I hated the boring, endless services. The reason I liked it was because there would always be refreshments in the community area after the service, and we never got sliced cheese and crackers at home. It seemed like a good reward for letting Mom drag me to the house of God every weekend when I'd much rather be at home watching NASCAR racing with Dad and trying to use telekinesis to make Dick Trickle crash.

I wanted to harvest all the cookies at the end of every service, just so I could have my very own clever little snack spread. Each week, I pilfered a few of my favorites in the bright red napkins and stuffed them in a pocket or my Mom's bottomless, mysteriously aromatic purse, where they'd get crumbly and turn the napkin spotty with grease. They never tasted as good later.

I also loved the taste and cuteness of the tiny cups of grape juice we had for communion. The tray had rows and rows of little holes so the cups wouldn't tip over. When the collection plate was passed, I wondered what God would think if I put food stamps in it instead of money.

On the most boring days, I would go hunting for art supplies from the craft closet, even though it never had anything good, just butcher paper and cheap markers with half-flattened white caps that bore unmistakable signs of having been chewed on by small children.

There were rhododendron flowers in the courtyard, and I liked to pick little bouquets and give them to my Mom. The courtyard was perfectly green, like a fantasy forest, but the hedges were all mercilessly sculpted and even then I didn't care for their artificial geometry.

The halls of the church were full of locked doors and mysterious stairways, and I liked to explore during fellowship time while my Mom was mingling with the other Presbyterians. There was a playroom with miniature household fixtures. You could pretend to wash little plastic dishes in a little plastic sink, or play with baby dolls near the bunk beds and cribs that were probably used the for day care or sunday school. I liked to pretend the crib slats were prison bars, and I was locked up.

Next door to that was the preschool, with its large tub of rice. I liked to pass my hand through it and feel the grains slip through my fingers over and over again. The rice was old. It smelled musty and stale and there was always some scattered across the floor.

Even as a child I was already nostalgic for the mornings only a few years before, when the big maroon van would come and pick me up and take me to this very preschool. I loved to zone out in the rice tub. There were little plastic buckets and shovels stuck in the rice, but you couldn't really do much with them except scoop up and dump out the grains, pretending it was beach sand.

I especially liked to bury things and excavate them from the rice, a fascination which would later develop into a rather morbid hobby of disinterring long-expired family pets to see what they looked like after being buried for months.

When I was 10, I started refusing to wear dresses to church and would only go in jeans, hoping desperately to be challenged by an adult so I could throw a righteous fit and get kicked out and thus become a rebel against the sexist dress code. The confrontation never happened, and I never quite got over the disappointment.

I used to sit in the pews and struggle with flashes of hardcore pornography I'd seen once on the cover of a magazine at a pawn shop. I thought I was committing a terrible sin every time I tried to clear out the unholy thoughts and the image of a wrinkly, hairy nut sack clamped between a woman's teeth appeared yet again in the forefront of my mind. I wondered if Jesus could read my thoughts and see the picture too. I wondered if you would go to hell if you weren't even sure if you were sinning on purpose.

One day my siblings and I were running around the fellowship hall after services, wild with energy and desperate to get Mom's attention away from the stodgy quiet-voiced church wives. She had long since lost her authority over the three of us, and we paid no attention to her escalating threats and scolding. The new pastor stepped in and ordered us all into his office. He then shut the door and said he wouldn't let us leave until we handled our family conflict and learned to respect each other and listen to our mother.

We didn't like this new pastor. Our old pastor had been a family friend, a nice guy with a pretty wife. They took long walks together and had once comforted me after a vicious bully beat me up and sent me running down the street in tears. They had moved to Japan and still kept in touch, sending us little souvenir boxes (which is how I got addicted to Pocky).

This new guy was bland and unremarkable. He just didn't do it for me, and I think Mom was offended by his particular approach to Bible interpretation. We'd been giving him the benefit of the doubt up until this point since he was still new.

Now, though, I could see the rest of my family were all thinking the same thing I was. This dude thought a little hyperactivity and scolding was bad enough for a Heavenly intervention? Good thing he never came over to our house on one of Mom's drunken blackout weekends! We were united in solidarity against this well-meaning stranger, who clearly had no idea what he was up against with the four of us, and had rather overestimated his powers of peacemaking and problem-solving.

We chose to express this unity via further squabbling, complete with mutiny from all three children against the new pastor and his dubious authority. Eventually, I think the poor man just plain gave up. He let us go with a lecture about family bonds and togetherness, and was probably as relieved to see us heading out the door as we were to be leaving.

All of us were bristling with indignation at the pastor's bumbling efforts to fix our broken family. Mom was the angriest of all. She never made us go to church again.

The lessons I learned from the Bible have since mostly faded from my memory, but the image of a woman biting a man on the nut sack remains vividly in my mind's eye to this very day.