Going To Sunday School, Sorta, Part I

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE KID, (in a sense I still am), I went to Sunday school a few times, accepting someone's offer. My parents, to their everlasting credit, never made any attempt to influence my religious beliefs or decision concerning church attandance. Sunday school didn't seem like "school" to me. I didn't learn much, if anything. I'm glad I didn't, for had I, I might have been resentful at having been tricked into attending school on what I justifiably considered a sacred day off, and I might not have liked what I learned. If memory serves, we children spent most of the time singing, about red and yellow, black and white, and probably brown children, and how much Jesus loves them all. It was never epxlained how this love tangibly benefitted anyone. Although I saw Bibles lying about and carried around, I cannot remember any of my Sunday school teachers ever reading to us from one, nor even picking one up. Much as I enjoyed singing, the other kids didn't seem to be very good at it. I became increasingly curious about the mysterious contents of the big thick black book everyone kept close at hand but never seemed to open and read. At length I determined to sneak a quick peak inside for myself, uninvited, like the poor soul who found the fordidden contents of the ark of the coveneant irrestible. Much to my dismay I found that it was written in some foreign language, similar to but different than American, American being the only language I knew until I went to college and studied German. Instead of regular words ike "me, you", and "mine", it had weird ones like "thee, thou, and thine". All the verbs had the letters "eth" or "est" on their backside, and the words seemed out of order. I was already a voracious reader by third grade, and I knew darned well what kind of words a book should use. All the books I read about outer space, about maybe someday humans landing on the moon, about the American frontier, and baseball sure as heck didn't use those fancy sounding words, typed in that fancy squiggly looking print. But I opend the Bible, and, undaunted, I readeth on. Or at least I triedeth. In third grade I wasn't quite ready for the material. Truth be told I didn't actually read the Bible, cover to cover, until high school senior year, over Christmas break. We had several inches of snow (back then, it still occasionally snowed in the lower midwestern United States), which I thought was poor timing and unfair, since we were already on vacation and the snow gave us no extra glorious "snow days" out of school. I spent most of my Christmas break indoors at home, except for one night when a couple of friends called and invited me to walk over to their house and drink beer. I didn't want to go; I wanted to stay home in the warmth and read the Bible, but they nagged me incessantly, and offerd me free beer. They told me that several beers had my name on them, so to speak. Reluctantly, I put the bible down, and walked through the snow. When I arrived, I got chewed out for not bringing beer, which I thought deceitful, carrot and stickish. I got drunk anyway, but managed to walk home to resume my Bible study. Evidently I was staggering a bit, and a cop stopped me, noticed I was staggering drunk, laughed at me, and told me to go home, which I was doing anyway. He didn't bother to offer me a ride, which I thought was rude. I don't know whether any of my high school classmates read the Bible, but they and I sure as hell drank a lot of beer, often while driving drunk up and down Main Street in cars with big engines burning cheap gas, looking for sex, which we seldom but sometimes got. If the cops pulled us over, we hid the beer beneath the seat, they told us to slow down, and let us go. In those days, it was almost impossible to get arrested for driving while drunk. Ask any old drunk person. The only other grand adventure during senior year christmas break was the night a friend called me, then came by and picked me up and we drove three hours in the middle of the night to stand in sub freeaing weather to view the flag draped casket of Harry S. Truman lying in state. But that's another story, as they say, and, as they asy, I digress. Back to bible study....