At my age, memory is like a Magic 8-ball
I’ll just be sitting at the window watching squirrels run along the wires and my brain will just stir slightly and a card will float out of the murky depths.
This time the card displayed in the window said, “D. Flea.”
It took a little tugging at loose ends but I remembered. Some of you likely don’t know I was born into a family of 8. Our parents were a Baptist preacher and his Baptist preacher’s wife. I spent an average of 10 or more hours a week in church.
In junior year two things happened. My two best friends were devout Catholics. Nobody cared, but it did represent different experiences growing up. The second thing was that a trio of male Gospel singers, none of them older than 19, started playing the circuits of revival meetings, youth fellowship meetings, even in customary Sunday morning worship.They were, by our standards, three fine young men. Because we knew no other men.
For us, it was comparable to the BeeGees coming to town. Often. Mad secret crushes developed. Conveniently, each in my friend group liked a different one.
My friend Dee, Irish Catholic, with a mop of black curls, net this group at a tent revival, one week long. A short time into the first meeting, Dee had a painful grip on my arm and was whispering in my ear, “Are they going to hurt us?”
She was referring to three or four worshippers who on occasion would jump over a folding chair chanting “Hallelujah for the fire!” Or dance up the aisles like Native Americans in a war dance.I too found them a trifle distracting, but I had the luck to be already Baptist.
Dee fell for the tenor, slender, blond, glasses. In days Dee was Baptisting harder than anyone I’d known. The singer’s name was artistically drawn on the cover of every schoolbook. His name and hers were drawn in hearts on her notebook. All the notes she passed in school contained a verse of Scripture. Then she decided to concentrate on Scriptural art.
Not art like you see in Bibles, but her own take. She was a decent artist.
One day, she dragged me to her school locker. She threw open the locker door and proudly pointed to a new artwork of hers.
It was intriguing. It was a rendering of a pastoral scene. A few cattle grazing on a hill, a little brook gurgling through the field and the whole shebang protected with a white picket fence. A few men in bathrobes were running up the hill. On top of one of the fence posts, there was a bug, fat-bodied, skinny legged, with a maniacal leer on its face and wild eyes.
Above the bug’s head was a word balloon, like in the comics. The text read, “The wicked flea that no man pursueth.”
I said, tapping the bug’s statement, “What does this mean?”
She wrinkled her nose at me. “You oughta know. It’s in the Bible.”
It was then I understood the reference. “Dee, that verse says, “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.”
She frowned and muttered, “I need to get a Bible.”
I came away with the realization that you could hire a thousand people to read the Bible, and they would finish the assignment with a thousand different interpretations.
This time the card displayed in the window said, “D. Flea.”
It took a little tugging at loose ends but I remembered. Some of you likely don’t know I was born into a family of 8. Our parents were a Baptist preacher and his Baptist preacher’s wife. I spent an average of 10 or more hours a week in church.
In junior year two things happened. My two best friends were devout Catholics. Nobody cared, but it did represent different experiences growing up. The second thing was that a trio of male Gospel singers, none of them older than 19, started playing the circuits of revival meetings, youth fellowship meetings, even in customary Sunday morning worship.They were, by our standards, three fine young men. Because we knew no other men.
For us, it was comparable to the BeeGees coming to town. Often. Mad secret crushes developed. Conveniently, each in my friend group liked a different one.
My friend Dee, Irish Catholic, with a mop of black curls, net this group at a tent revival, one week long. A short time into the first meeting, Dee had a painful grip on my arm and was whispering in my ear, “Are they going to hurt us?”
She was referring to three or four worshippers who on occasion would jump over a folding chair chanting “Hallelujah for the fire!” Or dance up the aisles like Native Americans in a war dance.I too found them a trifle distracting, but I had the luck to be already Baptist.
Dee fell for the tenor, slender, blond, glasses. In days Dee was Baptisting harder than anyone I’d known. The singer’s name was artistically drawn on the cover of every schoolbook. His name and hers were drawn in hearts on her notebook. All the notes she passed in school contained a verse of Scripture. Then she decided to concentrate on Scriptural art.
Not art like you see in Bibles, but her own take. She was a decent artist.
One day, she dragged me to her school locker. She threw open the locker door and proudly pointed to a new artwork of hers.
It was intriguing. It was a rendering of a pastoral scene. A few cattle grazing on a hill, a little brook gurgling through the field and the whole shebang protected with a white picket fence. A few men in bathrobes were running up the hill. On top of one of the fence posts, there was a bug, fat-bodied, skinny legged, with a maniacal leer on its face and wild eyes.
Above the bug’s head was a word balloon, like in the comics. The text read, “The wicked flea that no man pursueth.”
I said, tapping the bug’s statement, “What does this mean?”
She wrinkled her nose at me. “You oughta know. It’s in the Bible.”
It was then I understood the reference. “Dee, that verse says, “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.”
She frowned and muttered, “I need to get a Bible.”
I came away with the realization that you could hire a thousand people to read the Bible, and they would finish the assignment with a thousand different interpretations.
