Reminiscent of Sunday Times 1979

1979 - Windy, age 10. On families that attend church.

I never met an early Sunday morning that I didn’t dread. The entire family was always acting cranky to one another with all the rushing around the house and getting all dressed up for God as if He doesn’t already know what we all look like in our birthday suits. My mother was busy selecting 4 sets of clothes, including my father's. He'd dress himself, but then she'd tell him he did it wrong - right down to a mismatched belt and shoes. I found this humorous. Then she had to iron several items and prep dinner for Sunday afternoon. Whether it was a roast in the crock pot or one in the pressure cooker was directly related to the amount of time my mom was working with that morning. I found the latter fascinating and I enjoyed listening to its rhythm ...something very specific about the sound of its fast hiss, hiss, hiss as it fired its steam up into the kitchen air with scents of promises of what was to come this afternoon.

My mother would interrupt her own getting ready for church, come down into the kitchen and  announce to me, “Let me do something with that hair,” as if it was greasy or flying all over the place. I was even less thrilled at the prospect of being on the receiving end of getting prepped for Sunday School hair. But, my mom was a fan of curls and not strings, so I stood in front of the kitchen stove and waited for my beauty work.

I don’t know what happened to the curler set where 3 different sized rollers securely sat on slightly larger or smaller heated metal poles, and then the whole thing closed nicely in some sort of plastic case while everything heated up.  That was long gone, but somehow the spiky curlers remained. Those suckers were boiled in hot water against their will and the manufacturer's warranty, and then rolled into my hair against mine.  My mother jammed each one up against my face and the back of my neck  and snapped them securely. I would move my head around as they were cooling and it would look, feel, and sound like I had a half dozen hard boiled eggs all trapped in my hair.  When they were cooled off enough, I was allowed to remove them myself and then my mom would comb it just right. I didn't need to look in the mirror to know that I looked like a blonde mushroom, but at least my mother no longer thought I resembled a Muppet.

Meanwhile, my dad was always on the verge of being mad that we were going to be late for Sunday School, but he had only himself to get ready and his black shoes to shine. I can still smell the tangy sharpness of the shoe polish and see him propping his feet up one at a time on his wooden shoe shining kit.  A white rag turned grey with black smudges would shuffle smoothly and quickly back and forth when he shined the tops. Once he decided he looked spiffy, he was usually the first one to be ready and he would threaten to walk to church, which wasn’t a big deal when we lived less than a mile away. He followed through on this often.  Sometimes my sister and I were ready early and we'd walk with him. But, when we moved 12 miles away, his threat became ridiculous and especially so the few times that he actually did start walking.  By this point, my mom was madder than a wet hen because she had too much to do to get everybody ready and she didn’t need his rooster beak pecking at her neck.  So off my father would go and I didn’t know if we’d ever see him again or not, but I anxiously kept a close eye out of the car windows for him as my little teary eyes fought the blur to discover him on the sides of the roads, parking lots, fast food places, and various business as we drove on by. I'd look out the front windows, the sides windows and the rear windows just in case we missed him. I remember frantically asking, "Are we going to pick up Dad? Are we going to find him?" I learned that my mother wasn't necessarily looking.

I remember her stopping the car along the way to pick my father up beside the highway. I also recall  her blowing right by him at 45 miles an hour and not picking him up at all. Even as a ten-year-old, I knew this was counter-intuitive. We were going to worship God and learn how to apply the bible to our lives, but my mom and dad are fighting or ignoring one another on the way there? God really does miracles because my dad somehow showed up at church anyhow. I realized our neighbors spotted him on their way to the same church and must have picked him up. What in the world kind of explanation did my father give to them as to why he was walking to church from so far away? He would have missed the entire services by the time he showed up however many hours later with blisters on his heals from his thin nylon dress socks and shoes had they not picked him up in their car. Then we all had to stand next to one another in the pews like one big happy family that had dysfunctionally survived the morning and arrived to sit and stand and sing happy songs at the top of our lungs together.  I would peer up my father who always sang this way no matter what.  Then I would steal a glance at my mother who was still very perturbed, but trying to hide it and herself behind her ruffled feathers. I didn't yet know about statistics, but I knew there was a good chance that at some point in the service we would all be asked to join hands.  This wasn’t a problem if I was sitting in between my folks because I was their safe connection.  Otherwise, I worried that they wouldn’t join hands and they would get a divorce. This made the communion cracker sit dryly in my throat. One swipe of the tongue's worth of grape juice in those tiny glasses wasn't going to wash down anything other than one sin at a time.

Then there was the whole “Did you read your Bible today?” thing that happened on any day of the week other than Sundays because, of course, that was taken care of when we were at church. “Are you reading your bible every day?” mostly by my father.  Or when my mother thought I was acting up, “Have you been reading your Bible?  I notice a difference in you.” That wasn’t meant in a positive light.  Really?  I was like 11.  I wanted to ask her plenty of times if she read hers and if so I wanted to know which verses to cross out  because they apparently weren’t working because I thought she was quite irritable a time or ten.  However, I obviously valued my hair even in naivete that it was curled to resemble the head of a man's penis, and I didn't want it yanked out or my mouth slapped, so I didn’t say such a thing.  Guiltily, but not sure exactly why, just being born into sin, I guessed, I would trudge up the orange carpeted stairs to my Holly Hobby bedroom and locate the shortest Psalm in the bible I could find. I might as well see what old David was up to, which was mostly singing and dancing, killing a giant, playing the harp, watching a naked lady bathe, and having her husband killed in battle so he could marry her himself.  How he was considered “A man after God’s own heart,” while I never stole a cookie let alone anyone’s husband or wife, but was still a sinner, I had no idea.  I was, however, grateful that I was born after the New Testament times and not during the Old Testament times or as comedian Kathleen Madigan calls it, “The Bad Bible.” 

Speaking of the Old Testament being the scarier part of the bible because God was often so angry, I did not like the story of Lot’s wife.  I never viewed a salt shaker the same way again and I am afraid to buy salt in bulk, not that I need to, but I don’t want a pillar of any kind in my house.  God turned the woman into salt!  Why salt?  Why not just strike her dead?   Were their children with them?  Bet they never salted a dog gone thing in their lives again after that either.  I am sure their blood pressure was high as adults, but I guarantee you it was from seeing their mother turn into a pillar of salt and not from eating salt themselves ever again. 

My father would be considered a man that knows how to pray, but he would never say or think that about himself.  But, he had this certain boldness about him that puzzled me.  We’d just be sitting around doing whatever and he’d get up from his chair and say, “Praise the Living God!”  As a child, this is just startling and confusing.  I’m just sitting here eating my HoneyComb cereal,  we already prayed for our meal, what is he talking about and why?  We learned that the bible says even the rocks will cry out and worship God if we didn’t or something like that. I never looked at a nice sized rock the same way again and I often wondered if one was going to start talking to me and what kind of voice it would have? A man's? A woman's? The devil's? Kermit the frog's? Was I going to walk by a big boulder one day and have it shout at me, “Praise the Lord!” all of a sudden and then roll over on me if I didn’t join in?  No wonder why I was near paranoid and afraid of things that non-church-going children probably weren't.

My father would go door to door witnessing and often took me or my sister with him.  I didn’t like it.  I didn’t trust the dogs.  I certainly didn’t trust the people opening their doors.  If an older lady answered the door with a lit cigarette, I knew she was going to invite us in.  I was allergic to her dog and her smoke. First, I'd try not to look at the spot common to all elderly lifetime smokers -- that dried out wrinkled space above her lips but below her nose. I’d watch that cigarette teeter around between her lips, travel east and west as she still somehow managed to talk while smoking it, hands free, smoke rising right back up into her eyes as she squinted to keep it out. The better the person was at mouth mashing that cigarette, the more I knew she needed Jesus in her heart to help her stop that smoking.  

In Sunday School, we were taught how the bible characters lived, mostly right like Moses with his dusty walking in the desert sandals trying to tell God's people what to do, but they wouldn't listen and roamed around for 40 years because of it. Then there were tortured souls like King Saul, sacrificial fellas like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace where a figure with God’s image  appeared just in time to lower the heat several hundred degrees. 

Speaking of hot ovens, regardless of what happened before church or during church service, the absolute best part of Sunday for me was not long off. My father never threatened to walk back home, somehow God fixed everything between us all, so we road mostly in peace and we were hungry. I will forever remember my parents parking our car in our driveway and as my sister and I walked around the sidewalk toward our front door, we could smell the roast from 15 feet away! Returning home to the smell of rump roast was heavenly! At last, the morning was over and hello Sunday afternoon! Now, please pass the mashed potatoes, but hold the salt.

What were/are Sundays like at your house?

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