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Vamping for Jesus

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A brief history of my brushes with Christianity:

I’ve long been attracted to Christianity, from my time as a child in Sunday School to adulthood, enduring full blown sermons.

As a child, I was obedient. I said my nightly prayer that ended in “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” (Now there’s prayer to reassure a kid.) I learned the song “Jesus loves me.” And when the  Sunday School teacher told us to ask Jesus to enter my heart, I’d sit on a swing in the school yard next to our house and say, “Jesus, enter my heart.”

But the truth is nothing ever happened. Nothing that is until age seven. Coming up from the basement classrooms of the Apostolic Faith Church to the main chapel, I found a lady with her skirt up around her neck, flat on her back, heels drumming the floor, foam coming from her mouth, eyes rolled back in her head, and babbling like a lunatic. I was to learn later she was speaking in tongues. I reckon that’s all right for adults, but as a kid all she did was she scare the hell out of me. I ran all the way home and never returned to that place.

My third brush with Christianity happened at the Reese Creek Community Church. My grandparents took me to hear their son, my Uncle Mendal, preach a sermon as a guest pastor. He was on a roll, preaching up a storm and people were looking like they were ready to be “saved.” One man had actually started down the aisle to the altar. But…I had to pee, and the only way to the outhouse…behind the church in those days…was down the main aisle…and I was in a hurry.

I reckon my fast trot to the front door broke the spell Uncle Mendal had cast on the congregation. If he had not been a religious man, I’d say he was pissed…and I’d say he stayed pissed at me for most of the rest of his life. (He mentioned this sad event one time when I was in my late thirties.) I think he had the notion I spoiled the mood on purpose. I was labeled a bad boy, or at least I felt that to be the case. Sure made me wary of church people, especially preachers.

My fourth brush with religion came when I was fourteen. A pretty young woman in my class rode my bus and decided to sit with me going to school and coming home from school. I can honestly say I enjoyed her attention.

She finally talked me into going to church with her. She prayed, she said, for my immortal soul. So when the preacher invited those who wished to be saved to come to the altar, I obliged. After I was prayed to safety, my pretty young friend beamed and patted my arm and blessed me. And I was in love.

My problems didn’t start for almost a week. I knew I’d been had when she started sitting with another boy about a year older than me and trying her best to talk him into going to church. I guess she figured I was a finished product.

I stuck it out at church for a few Sundays until the ranter preacher started telling me if I had an unclean thought, if I coveted, etc., I had sinned and was headed for everlasting hell fire. “Well, shoot,” I thought.  “I’m not supposed to think about girls?” I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

As I studied on it, I knew I was doomed no matter what I did, so I deliberately and loudly said every $*#&! cuss word I knew…and growing up in a logging town I knew quite a few. Took me a while, it did. And so I defiantly and with some sense of freedom quit the church. (I will admit to later finding a profound belief in God and the sanctity of Christ. But not right away. That is a story about angels, and a tale I seldom tell to anyone.)

As for my pretty young friend, she aged right along with the rest of us. In fact, in our late sixties, she was working on an old friend and classmate of mine, working to get him into her church and get him saved before it got too late for his redemption. He was single and interested in her, if not in church.

I laughed when I heard the story. I thought, “Yep…there she is, still vamping for Jesus.”

Good bless her.

Rod

The Last Cookie

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There seems to be something in the human psyche that makes each of us reluctant to eat the last cookie on the plate, especially if the cookie is part of a communal ritual. If a dozen cookies are on the plate and if a group of people are invited to “have a cookie,” no one is reluctant to eat the first one. But the last one might lie there until it turns stale. I have no idea why.

I tested my hypothesis over and over again during a year of my teaching career at Weiser High School. I came to depend on the last cookie, or the last piece of cake to sit in the teacher’s break room and wait for me until my afternoon prep period. The last cookie was always there. And I was grateful for the nice teacher who brought cookies most days.

At first I was reluctant to break the communal taboo. There was something almost sacred about the last cookie, but I finally decided I had enough strength of character to eat. If it was a sugar cookie, I’d dunk it in my coffee and enjoy.

Rod

Moccasins and the Romance of Wild Country

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I think I’ve reported before about reading my first full-length novel at about age seven…a Western novel. I can’t remember the author’s name, but the story sparked a latent penchant for the romance of the mountain men and the wild men who came before them. There was something about the notion of wandering wild country without the interruption of roads, fences, or power lines which just seemed the right state of things.

When I reached the ripe old age of nine, I was allowed to wander the hills up behind the house, the western edge of an area some ten miles square. I didn’t know as a boy it was manged by the Bureau of Land Management. I thought of it as wild country, a place to explore. And I came to think of it as my personal possession. At any rate, it was my private domain for the next six years.

I built lean-to shelters in various places in the hills…just in case I got caught out in the hills and couldn’t get home before dark. I explored the head of each little creek that trickled down the canyons, found salt licks and hunted for caves. The best caves were simple rock overhangs, although I did find a mine shaft dug into the side of a hill up Indian Creek. When I told Dad about the mine, he told me to stay out of it, especially since it hadn’t been shored up. I did as he said. (He had a way of keeping me in line. He’d say, “If you want to go hunting with the men this Fall, you better behave yourself.” That was enough to do the trick.)

When I joined Boy Scouts, I took the boy scout motto to heart: always be prepared. So I learned knot tying, how to sharpen an axe and a hunting knife, and I learned to make laces from round circles of leather, and how to make moccasins. I was in love with the notion of owning a pair of moccasins. I was pretty sure if I wore moccasins I’d be able to slip silently through the woods and sneak up on any critters living there. And when I saw a kit for making moccasins, I saved my allowance and bought it. When the stealthy moccasins were finished, I was pretty proud of my handiwork.

The Saturday routine at our place on the Rogue River was to get our chores done in the morning because that meant freedom for the rest of weekend. So one fine Saturday afternoon, chores done, I laced up my new moccasins…home made, sort of…at least I could say I made them even if it was from a kit…strapped on my hunting knife, stuffed some prunes in a jacket pocket, along with my snake bite kit, filled another pocket with .22 shells, matches, and salt, then grabbed my .22 rifle and headed for the hills.

I thought I’d take the first canyon upriver from the house and hike east over the top and into the canyon running below Bear Mountain. I figured to hunt the salt lick and then come back over the mountain and walk the cattle trail down to the Old Ferry Road.

It didn’t quite work out. The first thong on my left moccasin broke along about the time I crested the first ridge. I knotted it back together and started on downhill to the salt lick, and then the leather thong on my right moccasin broke. Before I had gone another two-hundred yards, the laces in the seam of the left moccasin broke, and I cut a piece of thong and tied what was left of the moccasin to my foot. You can probably guess the rest of the story. By the time I reached the salt lick which was up high on the north edge of the canyon below Bear Mountain, the thongs I’d used to tied each moccasin to my feet were worn in two, and I was barefoot. I guess you could say my new moccasins just disintegrated, and I hadn’t walked much over two miles.

There was no going back over the ridge barefoot, but I figured if I could reach the old road running down the bottom of the Bear Mountain canyon from the old cinnabar mine and out to the Rogue River, I’d have an easier time of it, even if it was about four miles further. I spent a lot time watching my step and cussing a little at the people who sold me the moccasin kit, but I finally got down to the old road. I can still remember the rocky road and how tender my feet were. I can also remember a long muddy stretch and how much better the mud felt than the rocks.

It was dark by the time I hooked up with the sandy trail running alongside the river, but the soft sand made for easier going, and I jogged the last mile home, hoping like crazy I wouldn’t step on a rattlesnake. I can tell you I was really hoofing it along the river. I figured I’d be gone before a snake could bite me.

The house was lit up when I got home, and I think Mom and Dad were a little anxious before I opened the back door. Dad asked me what had happened, and I sheepishly reported my moccasins gave out. My parents tried hard not to laugh, but they just couldn’t hold back, and before it was over, I was laughing, too.

I’ll confess I felt a little dumb for trusting my homemade moccasins, but I never lost my love of wild places, or the desire to explore new mountains and country sides. I blame it all on the romance of Western writers. Now, if I could just find better leather for the next pair…

Rod

p.s. The “salt lick” was a place where the chemicals in the soil were concentrated. The deer would actually eat the soil for the chemicals. At the time of my story they had eaten quite a chunk out of the hillside. I hope you’ll trust my memory when I tell you the area was about twenty feet wide by thirty feet long and a couple of feet deep in places. You could tell the deer had been at it quite a few years. It was the only one of its kind in my part of the world.

ESP

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The longer I live, the harder it becomes to ignore the dozens of times over they years when the thought of a friend or family member pesters me until I call them. When they answer the phone, I sometimes  just say, “You were on my mind, and I thought I’d better find out what’s going on.” I can think of very few times when my “something is going on” feeling was wrong. I suspect some will dismiss this as coincidence, but I’ve come to believe in ESP…or at least in something like ESP.

When I was in High School, our American Problems teacher Mister Chamberlain brought up the subject of ESP. I don’t know why he did that. But the class jumped in with all sorts of opinions from ESP being nonsense to it is the work of the devil. Just for fun, I wrote the names of five of my classmates on a scrap of paper with a list of times I would “mentally” wake them up during the coming night. Then I handed the list to Mister Chamberlain.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll wake up five of you sometime tonight. I’ll ‘think’ you awake. Your job is to write the time down. Then we’ll see if it matches what I’ve given Mister Chamberlain.” (In truth I wasn’t very serious about the “experiment.” I was just having some fun with the notion of ESP.)

I might have been cheating some because I knew the bedrooms of the classmates I had chosen so I could visualize where they were sleeping.  (And, no, none of them were girls. We weren’t allowed in a girl’s room in those days.) Anyway, I woke at 1:00 a.m. and visualized Bob’s bedroom and told him to wake up. I concentrated until I figured I had about used up my ESP power for a while. And I repeated the exercise for the remaining four people at different times during the night.

The next day, four of the five classmates turned in their “woke up” times to Mister Chamberlain. The fifth didn’t wake up during the night. But I nailed the times almost exactly as reported by the four who did wake up. And I think I scared all of us into moving on to other more comfortable topics. We did not repeat the experiment.

Do I believe in ghosts? I’ll give that a strong maybe, although I’ve never seen a ghost, but I have “felt” the presence of people I was close to after they had died. Other family members have seen ghosts…or at least they tell me they have.

Do I believe in Angels? Absolutely. Once I had this conversation…well, it was more like a butt chewing than a conversation…with an Angel. I highly recommend you not try to bargain with God.

Do I believe there is magic in this old world? Absolutely. It’s all around us. How else can you explain thousands of varieties of flowers, the pattern of butterfly wings, life in a dry seed?

Do I believe in ESP? Yep, but do I think I can control it? Not really, but I almost always follow up on my “something is going on” feelings.

I wonder how many other people have had the same experience? More than those who admit it, I’m willing to bet.

Rod

p.s. I don’t know if this counts as seeing a ghost, but it just occurred to me it might. I was in the little waiting area next to the birthing unit at Salem Memorial Hospital waiting for the birth of my first child. I was alone until the elevator door opened and a man who looked just like my dead grandfather Truman Collins got off.

He came in, sat one chair over from me, unfolded a newspaper and read while never saying a word. When the doctor came out to tell me I was the proud father of a healthy baby girl, the silver haired old man folded his newspaper, walked to the elevator button, got on the elevator when the door opened and left. I was so dumbfounded by his appearance…and his disappearance…to mention the event for about ten years. Spooked me, it did. But was it a ghost? I’ll never know for certain.

Agnes Brown

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In my late-thirties, I paused long enough to remember the people who had helped me on my journey, and then I sat down and wrote each of them a heartfelt thank you. Unfortunately, I waited too long to express my thanks to Agnes Brown, my teacher during four of my eight years at Shady Cove Grade School. By the time I realized how much Agnes had influenced and helped me, she had died. To my regret, I will never be sure she knew how much I admired and loved her.

Agnes was my protector, disciplinarian, and inspiration all rolled into one. All of five feet tall, Agnes was a stern task master. Once when I had gotten the top score on a test, Agnes gave me a grade of 2. When I asked her why a 2 when my score was the highest, she told me I wasn’t working up to my potential and until I did I wouldn’t be getting any 1’s. I understood from that point on I wasn’t in competition with my classmates as much as I was in competition with myself.

I’m not sure why she fell in love with our class, although I’m sure we were lovable rascals. But I’m sure she did fall in love with us. She maneuvered her way enough to be our teacher in the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth grades. But she wasn’t easy on us. Once in the second grade, she paddled my butt when I walked in a mud puddle in my new shoes. I can still hear her saying, “Your parents worked hard for those shoes. You make them last.” (We were still living in a one-room shack next to the school yard while Mom and Dad worked their way out of the monster recession which followed the end of World War II.)

Once, in the eighth grade, I must have misbehaved because she told me to hold our my hand and then she swatted it with a rule…aka, a “ruler.” (She was very precise in her use of language, and always called that twelve inch stick a “rule.”) I turned my back to the class and worked hard to keep from laughing. She just wasn’t big enough to hurt her big eighth grade boys any more.

The last time I saw Agnes was at Benny Nork’s funeral. Our class members had just reached the prime age of 37 when Benny was killed in a logging accident. I made sure I was late for the funeral so I could sit in back. (I don’t do well at funerals. I cry and I’m not much good at helping the walking wounded. I am the walking wounded. I can hold the tears as long as the other people don’t cry. If I see a tear, mine start to flow.) But Benny’s wife held up the service until I got there, so I had to be strong.

And there was Agnes to say goodbye to one of “her boys.” I got a hug, but Agnes didn’t say a word, and I’m glad. I can do the hard things, but sympathy does me in.

I didn’t get word of her passing in time to make it to her funeral, but I was truly sad when she died. And I’ve always regretted my failure to write and tell her how much she had helped me…and how much she meant.

Some wise man…maybe Mark Twain…wrote it isn’t what we have done that brings regret. It’s what we didn’t do.

So, belatedly, “Thank you, Agnes Brown.”

Rod

The Voodoo Lady

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All of my aging friends talk now and again about slippery memories, and how they forget things they could once bring to the forefront of their minds…and their conversations…without effort. I, too, have experienced moments when I fish hard for a specific word, but after nearly eighty years I reckon my data banks are pretty crowded, so I don’t let it bother me too much. Besides, it isn’t a failure on my part. It’s all because of the Voodoo Lady. You see, she’s trying to put a hex on my life.

If you ever watched the old voodoo movies, you know how it works. The Voodoo Lady steals personal items to decorate a doll that looks…sort of…like the person she is hexing…and then sticks pins in the doll. This causes pain for the hexed. (I know darned good and well that explains the sudden onset of pain in my various extremities from time to time.)

That also explains why I search the house and the garage for items I know I put on the workbench or the island counter top. They simply disappear. It took me quite a while to finally figure it out: the Voodoo Lady has been stealing personal items to use in hexing me. Sometimes she returns the items and I find them in out-of-the-way places like in a dresser drawer or hiding behind the salt shaker in the kitchen.

The Voodoo Lady serves a purpose from time to time. When I can’t find an item, I can just blame it on her and not on my shaky memory.

However, I do wish she hadn’t taken my polarized sunglasses.

Rod