Sunday School
The little house that sat off of I-65 and Alford Avenue was situated on a quiet little dead-end street that was skirted with quaint '70's-era homes and thick-trunked hardwood trees like oaks and maples. The asphalt had turned gray long ago and the edges of the street had begun to crumble as little sprigs of grass wormed their way up from beneath. The dead end of the street was halted by a densely wooded slope. It was there that a little trail wound its way from the road down through the trees to the parking lot of a modestly sized church. Conveniently enough, this was the church that we attended. On most Sundays when the weather was fair, we would stroll down the road in our Sunday clothes and follow the trail through the woods. Correction: Mom and Dad would follow the trail and Em', Joel, and I would dangle from their clenched fists like limp little tiger cubs as they staggered over the treacherous braids of tree-roots. It's just low-bred to do anything on a trail besides hike or camp and emerging from the woods into a public place like that just wreaked of hillbilly-ness. A family of five spilling out of a hobble-trail into the parking lot was a real show-stopper. Fortunately I was too young to be embarrassed by much of anything other than falling down or getting yelled at by big people.
It's rather silly, the institution of Sunday School is. It's not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. That's because the Brits invented it. They invented it so that they could collect and torture orphans for a couple of hours every Sunday. Then the big people decided that it wasn't fair to torture only orphans on Sunday so all kids were dragged kicking and screaming into little rooms full of paste and construction paper where they were taught to glue macaroni pasta to stuff. This is really confusing because they tell you about all the poor starving children that don't live in America. If these kids are starving to death, then why the hell are we gluing perfectly edible macaroni pasta to xeroxed black-and-white portraits of the baby Jesus? You'll only ever ask the big people that question once because they'll make you sit in the corner until your parents come to get you.
With a biblical name like Joshua, it's hard not to be importuned with all that Jericho business. How you "fit" some damn battle or something. I had my own song and the teacher would always wink at me collusively when we sang it. "And the walls came a tumbling down..." Ho f-ing hum. Everytime you turned around, some condescending big person was telling you what your name meant. Then they would tuck their jaws into their triple chins, raise one of their eyebrows, and stare at you as if you were suddenly going to worship them for enlightening you.
And the clothes. Of all the psychologically degrading rubbish you could be exposed to. The Summer clothes were egregious. After church, the playground always looked like a Summer camp for aspiring rodeo clowns. I think that on some Freudian level, Church clothes are why nudist colonies exist. I admit, some kids are exhibitionists from birth, but when you're hiding in a miniature fortress made of railroad ties, and you're tearing a hideous pair of seersucker britches off, the last thing you're thinking about is showing people what you've got. Aside from being dreadfully uncomfortable, they restricted your mobility. Not so much physically. Sure, they were tight in all the wrong places, but if you so much as thought about mud or dirt or grease or tar or persimmon juice or blood, you were sure to get covered from head to toe in the sh!t. I mean that stuff would be on you like Michael Jackson on a bus load of drunken cub scouts. So you ended up walking stiffly past mud puddles like you were sneaking past a den of rabid werweasels. You never left the sidewalks and you got funny looks for wearing your raincoat all the time.
After the baby Jesus was sufficiently burried beneath a veritable mountain of macaroni pasta, cotton balls, sequins, paste, and glitter; and after you had glued your hands together, the big people would make you sing silly songs about your "little light" or never marching in the "infant tree." The "little light" song was really perplexing. You hold your index finger up and sing: "This little light of mine. I'm gonna let it shine." Is it a flashlight or a candle or what? They don't tell you. And then it gets to the part: "Hide it under a bush? Hell no!" Ok, I'm with them there. I mean, if my "little light" is a candle, then I certainly don't want to put it under a bush. But, "hell" was a word that got you a mouthful of dish detergent and here we were singing/shouting it in Sunday School! It was very confusing. Once I tried to sing it as: "Hide it under a bush? Dammit no!" And I got the taste slapped out of my mouth.
Crafts and activities. "Crafts" and "activities" were the rudiments of the Sunday School ritual. Everything was centered around "crafts" and "activities." Crafts were pretty straight forward: you glue macaroni pasta to stuff. But activities were a product of big people's desperation to maintain some semblance of order when things went awry. Invariably all activities began with enticing the snotty-nosed lot of us to sit in a circle, be it around a table or on the floor. It didn't matter, the point was you and your inmates were all sitting in a circle facing each other. The big people accomplished this feat with the promise of food or the application of reverse psychology. Really, you can't deny the brilliance of it. "Hey, kids, by all means keep throwing blocks and lawn darts at each others' heads. But whatever you do, don't sit in a circle...HEY! I SAID DON'T SIT IN A CIRCLE!!!" So you are all assembled in a circle, or some geometrical abortion that passes for a circle. It's then that the big people toss a random pile of household items in front of you and proceed to give you "instructions" to follow. That was a mistake. The big person would say: "Follow the instructions, Josh." And I just shrugged and thought to myself: "Follow 'em where? Around the room? You tools already told me I couldn't go out in the hall." Invariably, the big people would get flustered and shove you aside. "No! Like this!"
You could tell that they were making it up as they went. The activity that I always love to bring up is so retarded that you can't even give it a name that has fewer than twenty words in it. As always, they would compel us to sit around a table. Then a bowl was placed in the centre of the table. At the age of four, my qualitative analysis skills were as yet terribly undeveloped. Theretofore, such skills had only been employed to deduce the constituent ingredients in strange and unappealing casseroles and quiches. Now, with the advantages of college chemistry and life experience in general, I can maintain with confidence that the bowl held a solution that was a mixture of paint, dish detergent, water, and high-fructose corn syrup. I'm most confident about the latter ingredient because that sh!t's in everything. Anyways, before we had time to decide our own fates, they would shove plastic drinking straws into our glue-covered hands and command us to "blow bubbles." We were kids but we weren't stupid. Everyone knows that big people snort and fuss and swat at you when you blow bubbles in your milk or your juice. We all looked across the table at each other with confused expressions as if to say: "You think this is a trick or a test?" We were kids but we weren't stupid. We just looked at one another and with our eyes, we were asking: "What does this have to do with gluing macaroni to baby Jesus?" And so a few seconds of silence would pass, marked only by the occasionaly sniffle of a snotty nose. "Like this!" A big person would snap impatiently, as they leaned over and blew bubbles in the mysterious concoction. We would look at each other skeptically and one by one we would lean forward and blow through our straws. It was pretty exciting...at first.
Indeed, the bubbles began to fill the bowl as we puffed. And as children are wont to do, we grew very preoccupied with the activity. Though I've never seen it accomplished, I think this activity was originally intended to be a craft. That is, when the bowl began to overflow with bubbles, a piece of white paper was placed over the top and as the bubbles beneath the paper burst, they would leave behind beautiful patterns. Again, I'm only surmising here because we never got that far. The idea that this activity had no pratical purpose; has, for me, been the cause of extreme mental anguish. Thus in the years following the incident, I spent many a sleepless night tossing and turning as I struggled to comprehend the purpose of such a cruel and seemingly pointless activity.
As I was relating, this bowl full of mystery goo was set in the centre of a round table and we were directed to blow bubbles in the goo using the drinking straws that the big people had handed out. The table was rather broad, so we were forced to stand in our chairs in order to reach the bowl; some of us even had to army-crawl to the centre of the table. We blew through the straws as hard and as fast as we could. The big people looked on and urgently prodded us to "blow faster." I blew as hard as I could and I could feel my face turning bright red. My cheeks were throbbing and I was beginning to hyperventilate. I emptied my lungs through the narrow straw and I suddenly started to feel very sleepy and I saw little pink and purple dots of light flickering all around me. This was very distracting and when I went to inhale, I forgot to take the straw out of my mouth. I sucked up a mouthful and half a lungfull of the bubbly blue concoction. My eyeballs thrust the lids aside and climbed out of their sockets. My stomach went tight. BLECH!!! Blue stuff burst from my nose and mouth and a cloud of blue mist obscured my vision. When the cloud settled, the kids across from me looked like little smurfs. I blinked in horror. Their little blue faces blinked back at me, mouths gaping. Before I could react, my stomach tightened once more and my cheeks ballooned. BLECH!!!! I opened my eyes to find that I had contributed a stomach full of soggy Cheerios to the bowl of blue sludge. BLECHHHHHHHH!!! I had initiated a chain reaction. We emptied ourselves like confetti cannons.
In under a minute, the tabletop was hidden beneath a writhing mass of vomiting three year olds. BLECHHHHHHH!!! Torrents of Fruitloops, oatmeal, Lucky Charms, scrambled eggs, sausage, marmalade, and grits spilled out onto the table. The smell was revolting. Some of the big people gagged and coughed, the rest just gasped and ran to get paper towels. Those of us who had finished retching, began to scream in terror. It was pure pandemonium. I'm still in therapy.
I'd be remiss, if I did not mention the practical lessons that we learned in Sunday School. For instance, one Sunday, I unwittingly demonstrated for the class the wrong way to stand on a folding chair. Consequently, I also demonstrated the wrong way to patiently and calmly wait for assistance after being eaten by a folding chair. After wrestling with folding chairs, I learned that despite the amazing similarities, brown crayons do not taste like Tootsie Rolls. And for those of you who may not know this, you can make orange Play-Doh by mixing yellow Play-Doh with blood.
It's rather silly, the institution of Sunday School is. It's not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. That's because the Brits invented it. They invented it so that they could collect and torture orphans for a couple of hours every Sunday. Then the big people decided that it wasn't fair to torture only orphans on Sunday so all kids were dragged kicking and screaming into little rooms full of paste and construction paper where they were taught to glue macaroni pasta to stuff. This is really confusing because they tell you about all the poor starving children that don't live in America. If these kids are starving to death, then why the hell are we gluing perfectly edible macaroni pasta to xeroxed black-and-white portraits of the baby Jesus? You'll only ever ask the big people that question once because they'll make you sit in the corner until your parents come to get you.
With a biblical name like Joshua, it's hard not to be importuned with all that Jericho business. How you "fit" some damn battle or something. I had my own song and the teacher would always wink at me collusively when we sang it. "And the walls came a tumbling down..." Ho f-ing hum. Everytime you turned around, some condescending big person was telling you what your name meant. Then they would tuck their jaws into their triple chins, raise one of their eyebrows, and stare at you as if you were suddenly going to worship them for enlightening you.
And the clothes. Of all the psychologically degrading rubbish you could be exposed to. The Summer clothes were egregious. After church, the playground always looked like a Summer camp for aspiring rodeo clowns. I think that on some Freudian level, Church clothes are why nudist colonies exist. I admit, some kids are exhibitionists from birth, but when you're hiding in a miniature fortress made of railroad ties, and you're tearing a hideous pair of seersucker britches off, the last thing you're thinking about is showing people what you've got. Aside from being dreadfully uncomfortable, they restricted your mobility. Not so much physically. Sure, they were tight in all the wrong places, but if you so much as thought about mud or dirt or grease or tar or persimmon juice or blood, you were sure to get covered from head to toe in the sh!t. I mean that stuff would be on you like Michael Jackson on a bus load of drunken cub scouts. So you ended up walking stiffly past mud puddles like you were sneaking past a den of rabid werweasels. You never left the sidewalks and you got funny looks for wearing your raincoat all the time.
After the baby Jesus was sufficiently burried beneath a veritable mountain of macaroni pasta, cotton balls, sequins, paste, and glitter; and after you had glued your hands together, the big people would make you sing silly songs about your "little light" or never marching in the "infant tree." The "little light" song was really perplexing. You hold your index finger up and sing: "This little light of mine. I'm gonna let it shine." Is it a flashlight or a candle or what? They don't tell you. And then it gets to the part: "Hide it under a bush? Hell no!" Ok, I'm with them there. I mean, if my "little light" is a candle, then I certainly don't want to put it under a bush. But, "hell" was a word that got you a mouthful of dish detergent and here we were singing/shouting it in Sunday School! It was very confusing. Once I tried to sing it as: "Hide it under a bush? Dammit no!" And I got the taste slapped out of my mouth.
Crafts and activities. "Crafts" and "activities" were the rudiments of the Sunday School ritual. Everything was centered around "crafts" and "activities." Crafts were pretty straight forward: you glue macaroni pasta to stuff. But activities were a product of big people's desperation to maintain some semblance of order when things went awry. Invariably all activities began with enticing the snotty-nosed lot of us to sit in a circle, be it around a table or on the floor. It didn't matter, the point was you and your inmates were all sitting in a circle facing each other. The big people accomplished this feat with the promise of food or the application of reverse psychology. Really, you can't deny the brilliance of it. "Hey, kids, by all means keep throwing blocks and lawn darts at each others' heads. But whatever you do, don't sit in a circle...HEY! I SAID DON'T SIT IN A CIRCLE!!!" So you are all assembled in a circle, or some geometrical abortion that passes for a circle. It's then that the big people toss a random pile of household items in front of you and proceed to give you "instructions" to follow. That was a mistake. The big person would say: "Follow the instructions, Josh." And I just shrugged and thought to myself: "Follow 'em where? Around the room? You tools already told me I couldn't go out in the hall." Invariably, the big people would get flustered and shove you aside. "No! Like this!"
You could tell that they were making it up as they went. The activity that I always love to bring up is so retarded that you can't even give it a name that has fewer than twenty words in it. As always, they would compel us to sit around a table. Then a bowl was placed in the centre of the table. At the age of four, my qualitative analysis skills were as yet terribly undeveloped. Theretofore, such skills had only been employed to deduce the constituent ingredients in strange and unappealing casseroles and quiches. Now, with the advantages of college chemistry and life experience in general, I can maintain with confidence that the bowl held a solution that was a mixture of paint, dish detergent, water, and high-fructose corn syrup. I'm most confident about the latter ingredient because that sh!t's in everything. Anyways, before we had time to decide our own fates, they would shove plastic drinking straws into our glue-covered hands and command us to "blow bubbles." We were kids but we weren't stupid. Everyone knows that big people snort and fuss and swat at you when you blow bubbles in your milk or your juice. We all looked across the table at each other with confused expressions as if to say: "You think this is a trick or a test?" We were kids but we weren't stupid. We just looked at one another and with our eyes, we were asking: "What does this have to do with gluing macaroni to baby Jesus?" And so a few seconds of silence would pass, marked only by the occasionaly sniffle of a snotty nose. "Like this!" A big person would snap impatiently, as they leaned over and blew bubbles in the mysterious concoction. We would look at each other skeptically and one by one we would lean forward and blow through our straws. It was pretty exciting...at first.
Indeed, the bubbles began to fill the bowl as we puffed. And as children are wont to do, we grew very preoccupied with the activity. Though I've never seen it accomplished, I think this activity was originally intended to be a craft. That is, when the bowl began to overflow with bubbles, a piece of white paper was placed over the top and as the bubbles beneath the paper burst, they would leave behind beautiful patterns. Again, I'm only surmising here because we never got that far. The idea that this activity had no pratical purpose; has, for me, been the cause of extreme mental anguish. Thus in the years following the incident, I spent many a sleepless night tossing and turning as I struggled to comprehend the purpose of such a cruel and seemingly pointless activity.
As I was relating, this bowl full of mystery goo was set in the centre of a round table and we were directed to blow bubbles in the goo using the drinking straws that the big people had handed out. The table was rather broad, so we were forced to stand in our chairs in order to reach the bowl; some of us even had to army-crawl to the centre of the table. We blew through the straws as hard and as fast as we could. The big people looked on and urgently prodded us to "blow faster." I blew as hard as I could and I could feel my face turning bright red. My cheeks were throbbing and I was beginning to hyperventilate. I emptied my lungs through the narrow straw and I suddenly started to feel very sleepy and I saw little pink and purple dots of light flickering all around me. This was very distracting and when I went to inhale, I forgot to take the straw out of my mouth. I sucked up a mouthful and half a lungfull of the bubbly blue concoction. My eyeballs thrust the lids aside and climbed out of their sockets. My stomach went tight. BLECH!!! Blue stuff burst from my nose and mouth and a cloud of blue mist obscured my vision. When the cloud settled, the kids across from me looked like little smurfs. I blinked in horror. Their little blue faces blinked back at me, mouths gaping. Before I could react, my stomach tightened once more and my cheeks ballooned. BLECH!!!! I opened my eyes to find that I had contributed a stomach full of soggy Cheerios to the bowl of blue sludge. BLECHHHHHHHH!!! I had initiated a chain reaction. We emptied ourselves like confetti cannons.
In under a minute, the tabletop was hidden beneath a writhing mass of vomiting three year olds. BLECHHHHHHH!!! Torrents of Fruitloops, oatmeal, Lucky Charms, scrambled eggs, sausage, marmalade, and grits spilled out onto the table. The smell was revolting. Some of the big people gagged and coughed, the rest just gasped and ran to get paper towels. Those of us who had finished retching, began to scream in terror. It was pure pandemonium. I'm still in therapy.
I'd be remiss, if I did not mention the practical lessons that we learned in Sunday School. For instance, one Sunday, I unwittingly demonstrated for the class the wrong way to stand on a folding chair. Consequently, I also demonstrated the wrong way to patiently and calmly wait for assistance after being eaten by a folding chair. After wrestling with folding chairs, I learned that despite the amazing similarities, brown crayons do not taste like Tootsie Rolls. And for those of you who may not know this, you can make orange Play-Doh by mixing yellow Play-Doh with blood.
posted by Reckless at 12:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home