Errata, addenda, et corrigenda
The reaction to my last piece was interesting, and it occurs to me now to fix a couple of things, add a few things, and just generally clean up a few nagging details. In connection to the Twitter dissemination of my piece, someone tweeted a link to a book about military kids, and I think someone added a note to that link, saying something like, “Civilians will never get the life behind the fortress.” That’s exactly right. Pastor’s kids—the ones who moved a lot—share a large part of the framework with military kids, but, in my experience with military kids, there is a highly defended gate through which none without the countersign may pass, and it is abruptly and mercilessly enforced, the emotional equivalent to “Here and no further,” with pointy sticks and loaded rifles. There the pastor’s kids and the military kids part ways.
The corresponding metaphor for pastor’s kids is “inside the fishbowl.” I mentioned that a handful of pastors, who were not pastor’s kids themselves, have interacted with my little booklet on the life, and they are in general aghast. One left a scathing review that amounted essentially to “and I hope my children never write thusly about the life.” I paraphrase, but that’s the gist. I’m very proud of that review because it basically confirms that the punch landed. They’ll never understand. That’s okay, because an atheist friend of mine read my piece about being attacked by a satanist, and without knowing I was the author, cast aspersions upon the veracity of the tale. He apologized profusely when I asked him why he would doubt what I said. It’s true, though: I can turn a tale. Fortunately, there are witnesses to that one: as I mentioned, they were all transfixed and seemed unable to react. I judge them, but perhaps unfairly.
How does one relate life inside the fishbowl? The exacting judgment on the pastor’s children—the title of the most offensive chapter, by the way, is “The Cobbler’s Children…” which is the saying that the cobbler is so busy making sure the townsfolk have shoes that he neglects his own children, a truism which relates to grace within the fishbowl—the exacting judgment upon the children by the pastor, the wife, and those who are paying the pastor, along with all the vultures, hyenas, and bottle flies, is a long-term trauma, I submit. One’s hair must always be combed, homework always complete, and you can never, ever sin. Forgiving grace is for everyone else. My father caught himself on one occasion: I had stolen a watch and he had to spank me, so that the principal of the school would know, you see. Usually, when Dad took off the belt, the following moments were bound to be wroth, but on this occasion, he saw that it was the fishbowl doing it. O belt, where is thy sting? He barely laid the leather to my hide; the punishment was perfunctory, a truly urbane moment if there ever was one in my father’s bloodstream.
My mother is the hero of the story, but I think our relationship is permanently damaged. I hasten to add that we love each other a great deal, and we speak frequently and frankly, but when she turns to venerating my sainted father, I hasten to end the conversation. Anyway, she’s the hero of the family story because she managed to put her finger right on it in a couple of events and then later in a couple of lucid moments in the aftermath of my dad’s precipitous death.
Dad was careless with himself, and he put himself at needless and fruitless risk, mostly to demonstrate his self-worth to an increasingly irreligious world. This is a Lutheran pastor, mind you, in central Appalachia, not quite your Lutheran-friendly Milwaukee or Saint Louis suburb intermingling with the civilized Roman Catholics (stop laughing), Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. Northwestern North Carolina, circa 1980, was, religiously, different. Anyway, Dad was desperately vying for relevance, himself feeling the anxiety of being constantly new, and he had a habit of putting himself into dangerous situations to make a name for himself as quickly as he could.
Somehow, in the course of running around thusly in the remote places of the mountains, he contracted Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and it went straight to his brain. Mom had to drive him to the hospital, where they turned him out immediately; on the basis of the hallucinations and dissociative behavior, they diagnosed him as just another tweaked-out dope fiend. He was beyond the bend, as it were, so Mom had to carry him out of the ER. Her English at the time was still rudimentary, and I don’t think she entirely understood what was happening, and she couldn’t make herself understood, considering the desperate circumstances. She said she felt her arms breaking under the weight of his body when, suddenly, it began to rain, which broke the fever instantaneously (if you believe that), so that he came to and was at least able to lean on her without doing her further harm.
I have a vivid memory of the bruises on her forearms. Perhaps it was dislocation, not stress fractures. Dad swore he heard a voice in the rain saying, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” which is Psalm 27, his favorite psalm. He was hallucinating, of course. Wasn’t he?
As an aside, I will remark that it was an interesting life being around Dad; something was always bound to happen, usually involving, guns, fish, snakes, law enforcement, or a combination thereof. I wonder if his tepid response to the satanist attack was less because he didn’t care and more because the guy was going for a mere knife.
Another aside for you military kids (or interested parties in that realm), and a bit of a mystery: Dad served in the US Navy from 1959-1961, an otherwise unnoticed era in United States military operations (except for that brief excursion near Cuba). In that short time he rose to Chief Petty Officer Gunner’s Mate. How’d that happen? Well, he never talked about it, except the random occasion he mentioned something like pulling headless bodies aboard from the Gulf of Some Shit-Filled Hellhole. As children, we feared getting ill in the night because if we accidentally awoke him while trying to get Mom to take care of us, he would wake up swinging his Popeye-sized forearms and screaming. So, no, we don’t know how he rose to Chief so fast. He was aboard the USS Braine, DD630, if you want to help us complete the narrative.
As I was saying, Mom is the real hero of the story, to be sure. She put her finger right on it about a year after he died, observing all this, how anxious he was to be effective, and with immediacy. It was true: he was a great man in many ways, and won the respect and admiration of many people. Inasmuch as we moved a lot, he firmly believed it was because his work was done, as the religious equivalent to Pulp Fiction’s The Wolf. “I always make peace,” he said. “I never leave unless I’m positive I’ve made peace with everyone.” Indeed, a great man.
Yet my mom said, in a moment of clarity, “Your father set many ships to sail, and they all sank.” This is most certainly true. It must be true. In the pastoring business, the last thing you want around your neck when you meet the Good Shepherd is an accomplishment. Nevertheless, he set those very many ships, dinghies, rowboats, and leaky lifeboats to sail from within the fishbowl; great men sin greatly, I say.
Hey, have you ever pondered Isaac, the son of Abraham? Martin Luther says of Abraham raising the knife to slaughter his own son, “He believed God would raise him from the dead.” Well, yeah, but what did Isaac think about that? What else do you know about Isaac, just from that? I venture to say that Isaac had a difficult time forging relationships, not because he wasn’t trying, and not because he was otherwise deficient, but because that experience bent him, man. Even his relationship with Rebekah is wild. Something went terribly wrong in Sarah’s tent, if you know what I mean. If you don’t, to wit: “Then Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother and took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death” (Genesis 24:67).
I mentioned my sisters and I are isolated from each other because we moved so often, even though we still lived through all the same things together, more or less. It’s such a strange isolation, too, thinking about how the place I hate most, the central Illinois location where we arrived on January 2, 1989, they love the most. I see that place as Vienna of The Third Man, the wreckage of a family life piled everywhere. They see it as Arcadia. I understand it intellectually, but psychologically I can’t make peace with it. I was the oldest of the four of us, and I was coming of age 800 miles down the road; they were yet to come of age in 1989.
In this paragraph I intended to tip the fishbowl a bit, and reveal too much information about us, but it wouldn’t be fair to them. Suffice it to say that all four of us struggle mightily in making friends. There’s more to that, but I mean this follow-up piece to be helpful to someone who might not understand why he or she has such difficulty in such things, so I won’t air dirty lingerie for the leering critic. I’ll speak for myself: I don’t even like to touch friendships, the ones I have. I set them on pedestals like Ming Dynasty vases, fearful something so valuable will break. “No, let’s not talk, because I’ll say something so repulsive, unknowingly, again, and, well…”
Like a late-night TV commercial, I’m blaring on mindlessly now: “In common conversational situations, do words come out of your mouth, nouns, verbs, subjects, objects, and the like, but every person you try to relate to understands nothing of you? Well, throw those dictionaries and lexicons and hipster arcane record albums in the dumpster! How much are you willing to spend on a fruitful relationship? PUT THAT CHECKBOOK DOWN! There’s much, much more.” This whole thing is basically one side of a phone conversation; I’m talking to someone who needs to hear, I hope. Someone who needs peace, or at least knowledge that there’s a path open to redemption and peace.
So that, I believe, is enough errata, addenda, and corrigenda. I am an honest Puck. If I have unearned luck now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue, we will make amends ere long. This stuff is hard and can awaken some pretty nasty radioactivity within hearts. Taking up the reaction to my last piece into my mind, I thought a follow-up might help someone make sense of something somehow, at the very least that you might know we are of a particular class of people, and not overlooked by a great redemptive force. Else the Puck a liar call.
