Sunday, August 31, 2003
Prototypical Church.
I suppose because it was the church of my youth, the one at 6th & Washington looks like I think a church should look. West and North doors enter the vestibule below the bell tower, steps lead to the sanctuary where rows of polished wooden pews face a pipe organ as tall as the stained glass windows you see on the west and north side of the church.
If my parents had to be away, I stayed with the preacher and his family in the antique furnished manse one door south. The meals were prettier than at my house but not as tasty. If it was summer, kids slept on the screened sleeping porch upstairs in the back, got up early and played baseball with a gang in the vacant lot at 6th and Hulman until dark.
One day some guys wearing neckties told us we couldn't play there anymore and erected a tent for a revival meeting. We were pissed off and made plans to cause them trouble.
When the meeting started, we climbed into a large tree that hung over a part of the tent meeting not covered by canvas. We tried to time our interruptions, the kind of rude noises 11-year-old boys love to make, for maximum effect but we were ignored. After a while, most of us went home.
I noticed that one of the neighborhood kids my age stayed out on a limb to listen to the kind of evangelical rhetoric none of us ever heard in the Presbyterian or Methodist churches. He grew up to be known as Brother Jed, of Usenet fame, who travels from campus to campus insulting students for Christ.
