On Time

Do you often feel like time warps around significant events in your life? For example, I hardly remember anything significant from late 1993-2001. I was self-employed. I contracted every job imaginable we had two new kids. Life was mostly work, play, and routine. That was seven years, and time moves on.

When I was in transition from teaching in 1991-1993, time slowed into a big warp bubble. I changed careers. I can recall the most insignificant details of my life because the setting was new. That was two and a half years, and time moves on.

Dad’s career at Lewiston was four years. I have had the same pastor for thirty-one years. It seemed like an idyllic eternity, but in reality, it was just four years, and time moves on.

A paving company got the contract to hot tar spray gravel on West Lewiston road. Within a day, Dad was driving a steam roller for them in his coveralls, grinning like a mule eating briars. I think their contract only lasted for four weeks. In his old age, he would describe like a career, but I kind of get it. It was almost the last time anyone compensated him for hard work. This was a career in the span of a month to Dad, and time moves on.

When we left Lewiston, we only lasted about a year and a half in any place he tried to minister. It was just awful. Every year, a new house, a new school. Every bad situation left another scar that changed Dad, and us. Slowly, as kids, we lost our faith and became the new bad kids in every school, and time moves on.

Dad got tired of being forced out of ministry jobs. He did something different. He bought a ministry. I grew up and moved away, and he stayed put till he died there. That was about forty years. My paradox is that I was always forced into moving, but I could never get him to move. Forty years slipped away, and time moves on.

His heart never left the church he cut his teeth on nearly fifty years before. He and mom are buried in the graveyard. His impact of a life well lived as part of a community was so much greater than the sum of short careers. Fifty years was a career, and time moves on.

I have wanted to write about the bad years, but the time wasn’t right. I needed to heal enough to be objective. No one needs to be castigated. I am not venting. It is cathartic to just tell the story and move on. It is finally in my heart to do this in a way that respects my parents and doesn’t belch black bitterness from an angry soul. It happened. It is alright, and time moves on.

Our next stop, “Summit Mississippi.”

The Best Halloween Ever!

So today is Halloween.  This is the kind of the vaguest of all holidays for Christians.  For most of the world it is this fun holiday full of diabetes in a sack.  We celebrate all things fun and creepy.  As I grew older this holiday gave me great angst.  My dad was always the ultimate killjoy.  Sometimes I think he converted to Christianity to have a reason to make everyone else miserable.  He converted from a guy who allowed us to enjoy the Disney movie at the theater to a guy who was in principle against everything fun.  I couldn’t pop off four dozen bottle rockets at once without getting a lecture that the fireworks where made in the same town in China where the Baptist missionary Bill Wallace was martyred.  I needed to read his biography so I couldn’t enjoy being a redneck kid playing with fire.

What is funny is that as I grew older I had a strange fetish for all things forbidden.  As dad grew older his malice toward Halloween grew deeper.  I am surprised that I am not the family with 20 Grand in blow up ghosts and goblins in the yard.  The truth is I am way too lazy for the effort it would take to be a fan of Halloween.

This brings me to a point.  If you would like your children to follow in your Faith, don’t ever make them feel like the greatest drag on earth is being born in a Christian home.  You can of sincere conviction to abstain from all things Halloween, but let them know it delights your heart when they have fun and smile.

This kind of leads me to a soapbox topic.  If you are doing Christian Halloween call it Christian Halloween.  You don’t really change it by calling it Fall Festival or Trunk or Treat.  The worst case is having a spook house and calling it Hell Night.  You aren’t making it better by saying, “We want you to get to go to Heaven, so we will scare the Hell out of you.”

So a close third to the best Halloween was “Operation Nightmare” put on by West Park Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee.  They filed us by a casket brought in the church gym by some local funeral home with some anonymous dead guy.  Some pastor started describing bodies in a morgue. While he was speaking the stiff got up and got out of the casket and walked around.  I was younger and didn’t have incontinence problems then, so it didn’t make the mess it would have today.

The close runner up was “Scream in the Dark” put on in the grounds of a dilapidated mental hospital in Jackson Mississippi in 1975.  The level of cool was that the place was so creepy that you wouldn’t want to walk through the grounds during the day.  It was full of rubber masks, fake chain saws and strobe lights, but the reality is if you had to walk the trail without all the theatrics, it was terrifying.  Given the ghosts of people who suffered there under pre 1960’s psychiatry it was truly an awful place.

Somewhere in the mix is our own local to Community Bible Church in Easley, SC is  “The Abyss.”  We would string together miles of 10 foot black plastic into tubes filled by blower fans.  The trails would open into rooms inhabited by creeps.  Dianne and I used to love to occupy a room.  This allowed me in my fifties to act like I was in my twenties.  Ponce de Leon could have never found a better fountain of youth.

Another honorable mention is falling off a hayride at Ruth School in Summit, Mississippi.  At the scary moment “Ghosts” would come out and shoot fireworks at us.  I reached out to snatch the sheet off of a ghost I recognized, while Robbie Stinson, a ninth grader a bit too occupied with two girls in the cab of the tractor with him gunned the tractor and left me running behind the wagon.  I ended riding back to the school with the ghosts.

And then I will try to describe the “The Best Halloween Ever!”  My dad would have just died if he knew what was going to happen.  Before I get into the details, I need to tell you about my good friend, Martha Lewis.  The year was 1972.  I would have just turned eleven.  This leads to something I am so passionate about.  You can never underestimate the value of someone in their twenties, who stays in the church and tries to be a mentor to the youth under them.  The reality is that many children hit eighteen, and never darken the door of the church again.  It is really a time when it shows if all the sermons they endured at gunpoint really stick.  So many kids start thinking that this Christianity thing is really not for me, and the last day I am obligated to stay will be the last time I will be there. 

The impact of someone in their twenties, staying in the church and mentoring other kids is just beyond huge.  I used to drive a van when I was in college and pick up little mill kids in a country town.  We reconnected years later and I can see that it had that kind of level of impact on their lives.  In short it helped.  My mom used to mildly complain that her dates with my dad were in a car full of slum kids in Nashville he was taking to church.  It became the basis of their ministry together for decades later.  My son’s mentor the youth group kids to this day.

Martha Lewis, Miss Martha was just that level of cool.  We had about ten Junior, Junior High, and High School kids in that little church.  Miss Martha taught Sunday school.  I still remember with fondness a Red Revised Standard Bible with my name in gold letters on it I received from her for memorizing the books of the Bible.  She cared enough to invest her time in us.  Most importantly she was fun.  The rewards of writing your memoirs when you are alive are that you get a chance to say thank you for people who made you the person you are.

The stage is set for “The Best Halloween Ever!”  I made my own costume that year.  This is so out of character, but I went as a clown.  I was a fun clown.  I sewed a stocking together with a tuft of red yarn in it to make a wig.  I duded up my face with cold cream and made a big greasy smile with mom’s lipstick.  For the baggy pants I stole a baby blue pair of Dad’s Pajama bottoms, and some worn out Sunday shoes.  Then there came this problem caused by the discrepancy between the diameter of my eleven year old waist fitting in Dad’s massive PJ’s  No problem, I grabbed the red yarn and fashioned a belt which worked almost as well as fifteen Washington DC bureaucrats.  So all night it was walking three steps, and picking up the pajamas hanging on my ankles.

The party was set at an abandoned house in the country occupied by the long deceased Rosa May Varnado.  It was built around the turn of the century and had all the peculiarities of a house with additions to accommodate new innovations like running water, a kitchen, and yes even indoor plumbing.  The house was vacant but barely habitable.  The yard had overhanging live oak trees with Spanish moss.  We had a bonfire, candy apples, roasted marshmallows, and everything was right in the world.  Of course my pants fell to my ankles with a frequency you could set a clock too.  It was good training for the years I spent doing plumbing.

Miss Martha had a partner in crime, Miss Kathy Dale Forrest.  Miss Kathy went on to become an icon in her community.  I saw her about a year before she died a couple of years back.  She taught school for decades, and mentored a lot of us.  The last time I saw her she was laughing having spent the morning wrestling calves.  We kind of knew that we knew each other.

So at the apex of the evening we were summoned to the house for a Séance. I think as a warmup Miss Martha did “The Telltale Heart.” While we were still stinging from the beating of the heart she cascaded to the climax of the evening.

This probably wasn’t the best thing for a Baptist church to do.  Like I say dad would have died.  Then again we all knew this was staged, if not entertaining.  Miss Martha led the Séance; I sat to her right side.  To set the stage for this you would have to understand the Rosie Varnado house.  We were in a room that was an addition.  There was an interior hallway that passed by a formerly outside window that was between our room and the interior hallway.

Miss Martha, had us cross our hands and legs and sit with all our crossed hands touching each other as well as the flat of our feet touching each other.  It makes more sense if you think about it.  In the center was a slender white candle.  Then we heard the story.  It was about the late Marylyn Monroe.  “I would have liked to love her, but I was just a kid.”  Actually I didn’t remember her at all.  Then we heard about her troubled life, and in the depths of her desperation she decided to end it all.  She took an overdose of sleeping pills, and then realized that she still wanted to live.  But it was too late to call out for a rescue!

“Marylyn, YOUR SPIRIT IS TROUBLED!  REACH OUT TO US!!”  and then Miss Kathy walks by the window outside our room and inside the house, in a blond wig and a white dress holding a slender candle.  She stood in the window, paused for a minute and walked by.  The room was full of whispers of “Who is that?”  We knew it wasn’t a ghost, but we wondered who on this side it was.  My friend Norman Wayne Travis had his back to the window and never saw the apparition.  And then Martha screamed.  I have never a scream like that.

Then I jumped, and my pants stayed there.

It just doesn’t get better than that!

Happy Halloween Miss Martha, and Miss Kathy Dale

A Weekend on the Church Field

So the weekend church was called “The Church Field” in the slang of the Seminary.  It was the place for new preachers to get a little experience under their belt.  The church had been pastored that way for decades.  Dad tackled the job like he did most things.  He gave everything he had.

On Saturday he would get up early and start calling on people.  Honestly he visited most of the church every weekend.  Most of his church members were dairy farmers.  The reality of that life was that udders have to be exercised twice a day twelve hours apart every day all year.  A farmer may have three fourths of his herd in lactation all the time.  In addition to just the mechanics of milking, the farmers usually keep a big garden.  Cows have to constantly be pregnant to go into lactation; there is always a calf pen full of calves that are the side effect of a working dairy barn.  The people worked hard.  The concept of a preacher that works as hard was an instant hit.  Dad would talk to anybody about anything at any time forever.  I actually loved going calling with Dad.

This leads to some funny stories of people that I remember in the community.  My neighbor Ralph Lewis and his wife Louidell, and their daughter Martha are going to get their own entry at a point in the future.  Ralph’s mother Mrs. Pauline was married to a second or third husband, named Sam Jones.  Pauline and Sam kept different books in life.  This led to a recurring discussion about her and Sam constantly selling a cow back and forth to each other.  Nothing is funnier than hearing Pauline say I sold Sam the cow today.  You know if you kept selling  the same cow back and forth to each other at a $5.00 dollar profit, you and he both are making a good living off that cow.

I wish my mom wrote down her memoirs.  Dad really didn’t get paid that much.  The one thing that showed an amazing level of love that the community paid back to him was that they would often show up with a big bag of vegetables out of their garden.  When you realize how much work goes into a garden, a big paper bag of groceries represents love.  It took all afternoon to either shell or snap peas.  We used to run up and see what was in the bag.  Tomatoes were so cool, because they represented you didn’t have to shell or snap them.  It was hard not to see the disappointment in our eyes when the bag represented an afternoon of hard work.

The reality is that a can of green beans or black eyed peas tastes so good when you realize the toil that it takes to produce something in your diet.  Mrs. Pauline brought some beef to my mom one day.  She said, “This kind of tastes funny to me so I am giving it to you.”  Mom said, “She appreciated the gift, but she wished that she hadn’t been so honest why she was receiving it.”  One time Mrs. Pauline told Mom she was going to give her a cow, but that cow got hit by lightning.  Dad was gracious not to preach sermons about bringing the lame for sacrifice.

After a good day visiting, it was early to bed to get ready for the most unrestful day of the week for a preacher.  Sunday morning Dad was up at work going out to pick up kids whose parents struggled to be get them there.  We would all go in for Sunday School for an hour, and usually read from the quarterlies from Broadman Press.  Broadman had come full circle because Mom used to arrange the books in the Sunday School library years before for the same writers of the curriculum.

Then it was time for the meeting.  I still love those old Stamps Baxter Southern Gospel songs.  Mom played the organ, and to this day I never hear the exact mix of songs from that time.  I relate this to Dianne as, “You and I know the same hymns, but I know some you don’t know.”  The choir loft was almost as full as the pews.  We all sang.  There was a lustiness and intensity that I have only heard a few times in my life.  Then Dad would preach.  At some point I am going to do a blog on Dad’s preaching style.  It was usually at a minimum very intense.  I would watch Dad expend more energy in a forty-five minute sermon than an Olympic runner heading for the finish line.  Then we would have an invitation.  Dad would plead, and Dad was sincere.  He wanted you to meet Jesus.

We would do lunch, often as the guest of a family in the church.  Then we would take a nap.  The water heater in the parsonage was grounded out to the church fence.  Somehow he slept soundly enough to crack the mortar in the parsonage walls with his snoring, but could hear the footsteps of a little old lady about to get her eyes lit up with that fence.  We would run to the breaker panel to avoid catastrophe.  It has been the story of my life.

Then we had choir practice, even though we all knew the songs by heart, Training Union which was second Sunday School, because we didn’t get enough in the morning, and night church.  We said our goodbyes.  Mom and Dad would tuck us safely into either the floorboard or the back window deck of the Fury and we would pull another ride back to the Seminary.

Dad and Mom got up the next day and went to classes looking forward the finishing another five days of classes, so they could get back to the work they really loved, another weekend in Lewiston.

Of all Things Fun and Muddy!

The best thing about Lewiston was it was just set way out in the country.  Way out!  On top of that it was in the late 60’s. It was really harder to get much further down a country road than Lewiston. There were just miles and miles of open pasture, woods, ditches, creeks, sloughs, gravel pits, and cemeteries to just run and play.  Yes a graveyard is a great place for a kid, just as long as he is on top of the ground.

We could wander for miles.  We had some friends roughly our age in the community, but most of our friends were more at the church meetings.  As far as friends our age in the immediate neighborhood we were limited to a few people, and we never established that deep of a friendship.  That gave us a great deal of time for our own adventures.  The biggest adventure was constantly exploring.  We could wander to the end of a cow pasture, and climb over, under, or through the barbed wire to the next field.  This sequence would go on forever.  We would somehow find our way through back fields to known roads, and always seemed to make it home.  Somehow mom and dad never seemed to care.  We always seemed to make it home.

It is funny when you think about what is safe for a kid.  There was always the danger of getting lost.  Perhaps this was actually a danger, but we were never aware of it.  The reality is exploration is a pretty good metaphor for life.  You start with a little sphere that is your comfort zone.  Then boredom sets in and you start looking over a fence, and you start asking, “What is beyond the next field?”  After you hop the barbed wire into the unknown, you find a new area you become comfortable with, and your world gets larger.  Later you make connections with other fields you have reached.  Eventually you become increasingly comfortable with the concept of always pushing the boundaries of your small comfort zone.

It trained me for a life as a self-employed contractor and so many other areas of my life.  Here is where I tell you that honestly I have spent much of my existence, way beyond my comfort zone, and bidding into the unknown.  I take jobs, just to rent a new piece of equipment.  Parts of a job are totally new to me.  I just figure that I can borrow the brains to get from the known to the unknown.  Part of my idea in this blog, is to give advice of the aging.  Teach your kids to hop the fence, and go into the next field.

Another great adventure is following water.  In Louisiana land is sold by the gallon.  We were actually at the apex of the altitude of Tangipahoa Parish. At a whopping 308 feet mean sea level all the water flowed away from us.  If a ditch was live and going it was on the way to the Gulf of Mexico.  Water knows how to get there.  What is cool is that if you could find a ditch that headed to a low point.  This magical point was on Griegot Road (I never knew it was named that without Google Maps.) 

This was the point of great memories.  A 24 inch drain culvert crossed the road.  On the upstream side of the road, we had our own version of quicksand.  The ditch was washed out clay filled in with sand.  You could start wriggling your toes into the muck and gradually work your way into the filth until you were sitting there with a head sticking above grade.  We used to dream of the day a car would stop and see these little beheaded kids grinning in their deviousness.  I once buried my bicycle in the same mud pit. Dad gave me a big lecture about how it was going to ruin the bearings and I was going to have to take the bicycle apart and clean and rebuild it. That took about two hours. You can’t threaten a mechanically minded kid with an easy project he was going to do anyway.

A Tonka loader would make it through the culvert and then when you were swimming in the collection pool the adventure begins with the opening slough. We used to stretch limbs across the pool, and then drape bitterweed plants across it.  Is it strange that fifty years later I remember that we called this bitterweed hut?

The way to thoroughly enjoy water was to catch it right after a good rain storm.  Puddles became torrents.  Sloughs became rivers, and instead of navigating the bush in the woods you could just float or crab walk finding out where the water goes.  I can vividly remember coming home converted to orange, (Clemson Colors), but strangely mom never seemed to mind.  We would get hosed down in the yard and forced to strip and head straight for the shower.  She didn’t seem to care that we got muddy, but somehow I think she knew how much we loved it. 

Later in my older middle age,  I would take some left over Bobcat rental and push up a dry pond in my back yard.  We affectionately called my creation Lake Sid.

(Seen below) 

The mysterious crop circles are the product of the young hippies I hang out, with, like Mark Loder and Zach Lara, that like to do doughnuts in my yard. I am the crazy old fart who actually enjoys seeing them have fun. If I blame it on them, I don’t have tell you which circles are mine. I am trying to attract aliens with the crop circles, and magnetic vortexes created by scrap metal. So far it barely diverts them from the trailer park down the road.

Nothing delighted my heart more than seeing my eleven year old Benjamin loading up his SCUBA equipment on his wagon to take a dive in Lake Sid.  Visibility was always below three feet in a three feet deep lake. He would totally disappear for a half an hour. The nice thing about that lake is we never had anyone taken ill with decompression sickness.

We would have a celebration of all things muddy with the kids from Community Bible Church, called Mudfest at Lake Sid, complete with a band on my flatbed trailer.  There is nothing that compares with being responsible for three weeks full of orange hair roots on all the Youth Group Kids.

This is one of my favorite photographs of my son Benjamin. Literary credit goes to The Lord of the Flies.

I am sure that if we had a picture of God forming Adam out of the dust of the ground it would look something like this.

One of my favorite people in life, Briston Burns gave his heart to the LORD at this time. This is the smile of a clean heart!

I have more to write, but until then. Stay muddy!

Let me Reintroduce Myself

So I am a couple of weeks into a social media fast. I am finding that it has been quite therapeutic for me.  Part of the madness behind the method of getting off Facebook is that everything has just gotten so ugly out there.  The combination of election year politics with the stupid Coronavirus has just made everyone migrate to a small world of people of like tribe.

The reality is that if you think deeper than a meme flaming your opponent, some of these things require deep thought. Most of our worldviews are highly processed, but rarely challenged. It is possible to believe that the virus can be deadly, and people can be exploiting the fear for some type of agenda.  It is possible to be highly principled in political view, and not really be satisfied with any option in a given election cycle.  Life is rarely that simple.

So I used to view social media as a fun place to exchange ideas.  On some level it still is with people who like to discuss things in a respectful tone.  The problem is we, myself included, say such bitter hateful things we forget that we are interacting with people.  The really sad thing is we might be in a bitter feud with a software bot just designed to push our buttons.  The reality might be that I died a couple of years ago, and you are reading a post from a bot designed to emulate Sid. Jeremiah just said that no one could emulate you. The bot just inserted this in the text into this file as part of its predictable algorithm.

So consider this an intellectual project on my part.  I want to unpack my mind and leave a written legacy that can be passed down to other generations.  My grandparents died out between the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties. My mother and father died out nine and four years ago.  I have lost most of my uncles and aunts.  I used to love to hear their stories of life.  Now I am confined to my memories.  I wish I could call them up and remember more of the details.

Life is short.  I used to enjoy telling my life in this blog.  It is time to start writing again. I am planning to get several posts done and publish them in the future. See you soon. Until then laugh with me.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD7eG-k0pv71b6vI-_LYkIA