(I can’t help myself my mom for two decades at least has asked each one of us what kind of cake we want for our birthdays which she then bakes except when she doesn’t have time then she picks one up at a local grocery store bakery so never liking to celebrate my birthday I’ve always picked Lady Baltimore cake whose tricky icing always throws my mom)
(this is interesting in a family-dynamical way my older brother and I tried to replace the birthday standard with one derived from the viral badgers song that was going around the ‘net, oh, around 2004, but instead of “badgers, badgers, badgers . . . mushroom, mushroom . . . snake, snake” we’d sing “birthday, birthday, birthday . . . ice cream, ice cream . . . cake, cake, oh, it’s a cake” but that would mean my brother and I would be establishing a birthday tradition, something my mom could never allow so she came up with a different tune “happy happy birthday to you to you to you, hey!” which we’ve sung since oh 2006 though I and perhaps my brother thought ours was way more hip)
(“everybody” means in this memory my mom my grandmother and my older brother and not my father since he and mom divorced when I was a year and a half old so you have to picture four of us in November 1962 or ’63 and if ’63 then JFK had just been assassinated so that adds another layer)
(picture a 1200 square foot post-WWII stick built wooden-shingled 3/1 “ranch” if you can call a cramped drafty greatroom kitchen bed bed bed bath a “ranch” that’s six rooms and the kitchen was separated from the greatroom only by a half-wall so when I say “den” I mean one of the bedrooms though come to think of it if mom had a bedroom and by brother and I shared one and the third was a den then my grandmother must have lived elsewhere)
(I recognize that I’ve the advantage of having a better than most memory since I swear and my grandmother can corroborate that I remember an event from when I was 2 weeks yes that’s 2 weeks old and a year and a half and two years etc. though I may have constructed false memories)
(I’m from Alabama so when and if we’d go to the beach we’d go to PCB though my grandmother’s sister and her family lived in Florala so that was closer to Fort Walton beach so my pier memory may be from FWB instead of PCB which was much sparser in those years – think of the old black and white Cracker Jack commercial and how everything seems sear and empty and hot and dry that’s my memory of FWB)
(my mom was dragging me out you understand because back then even though Dr. Benjamin Spock had already spoken very wise words about childrearing but to my knowledge my mom never read his book so she was dragging me out to help me “get over” my fright though to be fair I didn’t know how to swim and in fact wouldn’t learn until I was thirteen in the pool at the Spyglass Inn in PCB)
(I know you’ve seen pictures like the one I just saw yesterday no lie of a little child sitting on Santa’s knee and wailing absolutely wailing in terror well that was me after waiting in a long line at a department store this is before malls you see and thinking I’d be brave but by the time I’m perched on a stranger’s knee which is way intimate and the stranger is more strange by wearing a fake beard we all knew it was fake and anyway in how many strangers’ laps did you sit when you were that young)
(and how many times do you get to hear your family sing unless you’re one of those from a musical family where everyone plays and instrument and you’ve got all four or five parts covered I imagine some families even have someone on the descant)
(believe me divorce in Alabama in the early sixties though known was extremely rare and carried a lot of shame not just for my mom and my grandmother and my great-grandmother all divorcees but also for my brother and me though of course we didn’t understand shame the way I do now after a lot of socio-anthropological research as biblical hermeneutic)
(in my memory is a picture of Jack Dempsey or I should say in my memory of my mind’s eye at the time I remembered a picture of Jack Dempsey so I adopted his rather classical and stylized boxing stance though my torso was not bare and I was not wearing tights and knee-high boxing boots)
(when I say “maid” I’m mean one of two women from a nearby African-American neighborhood this was the early 1960’s in Alabama so neighborhoods were largely segregated as they are in most places in the United States still to this day to our shame but either Miss Barbara or Mrs. Pearl would “sit” us while my mother was at work because she had to work because there was no man in the house so she could stay home and raise us)
(today we say “assaulted” which is by no means inaccurate)
(one could call the former “fearing fear” which is alliterative and pithy and is also a form of fear too)
(though honestly though mice seem to have a sufficient amount of fear they do seem to be preoccupied a lot of the time and not necessarily vigilant at least from the expressions on their faces when I empty the traps we have to set because we live in the middle of a field so we have field mice taking advantage of the warm and dry house we’ve built but from their expressions they don’t seem to have anticipated the trap’s snapping their skulls or necks or backs in two so I can’t imagine it’d be all that different if a cat were to pounce from the mouse’s perspective out of the blue)
(though children the age she was when she wrote this often come to a painful awareness of death of the fact that we’re all going to die some day for me that realization came oddly enough from watching “The Greatest Show on Earth” at the part where the trapeze artist tries a triple somersault without a net and he or his catcher misses the grab and he falls to the ground and injures his right arm ending his circus career though in Hollywood fashion he eventually gets back the use of his arm and flies again but for some reason I understood right then our mortal frailty explicitly in terms of my mom mind you I knew then that she’d die some day and that there was nothing I could do about it I was six or seven at the time and after that I’d have nightmares about being stranded on the roof of our house with me and mom and my brother surrounded by a rising flood and knowing that I was the one who would have to swim my mom to safety and I’d have to choose her over my brother and at this time I still didn’t know how to swim though ironically both my mom and my brother did so who’s saving whom)
(if I’m honest not even by avoiding my birthday)
(and yes I think having crossed a half a century I can speak about when I was a child and not expect the chortle I got from an English professor in college who read one of my poems that had the line “when I was a child” and thought I had not lived long enough to write about reflecting on my childhood being only twenty-one at the time well she’s dead now and I just turned fifty-one so I think I’ve got some perspective and I mean no disrespect to her by mentioning that she’s dead now and for those of you who were at Maryville the same time or around the same time I was there I’m not talking about Dr. Blair for whom I have the greatest admiration and still a bit of a crush and who died a couple of years ago in a nursing home near Birmingham and I didn’t know she was ill or I would have tried to see her)
(and honestly I’m trying to be honest here)
(too many sloppy tenets for me like when does one get a soul at conception or at birth what makes a soul immortal do animals have one when does it leave a dead body what does it look like what does it weigh etc.)
(by and large though being multi-valent one can find a lot of different things in Scripture and surely one can find references to something that sounds like our modern or post-modern conception of an immortal soul though really we’re talking about the modern conception of soul in that a soul is an immaterial identity and animating force that on the death of the body persists with all our memories and personality whereas the post-modern conception of soul and its persistence after physical death sound more like composting)
(and in those places primarily in Luke and Acts both written by the same author you understand one may argue and many have just ask me for a bibliography since this is my field that the authors of these instances are trying to be accommodating to a Graeco-Roman culture steeped in belief in an immortal soul though the more middle-Eastern convictions of most of those writing Scripture embraced the body as complete and concrete with the soul referring to the combination of the body and the Deity’s animating breath or spirit or wind)
(at least among the cognoscenti in the PC(USA) my own ordaining denomination though if you pressed very few of us Presbyterians would either know or believe my reading of Scripture above though it’s seriously right)
(reading such amateurish profundity in comments to news stories where you can log on and comment with an alias so that no one can actually find you and tell you how if you’d taken at least one religion course in college you’d know how ignorant you are and would keep your ignorance to yourself always makes me both laugh and feel frustrated and please know when I say “you” I’m not accusing you dear reader of this essay but I’m using “you” in that more general second-person universal sense)
(if you’d taken even just that introductory course in college you’d know this)
(and those were in high school where I was a part of a deeply faithful though young so young church youth group and I did believe wholly in my immortal soul and its sure future rest in the arms of God)
(though there have been more times that I haven’t attended church regularly which should be distinguished from “being religious” but to be more precise I would say “I’ve always been firmly pious” because “pious” is a technical term referring to a person’s being committed to living a faithful life and holding faithful tenets about God and the meaning of life)
(my nagging depression low-grade to be sure dates from that period)
(best described in Sartre’s “Nausea” if you’ve read it and if not please do and you’ll hopefully feel existential nausea which is quite different from simply being nauseated)
(believe me, television is a potent soporific against dreading death)
(and that is still a possibility only committed atheists argue otherwise and they have quite a job proving God does not exist the most they can argue is disbelieving in God’s existence is a better alternative to its obverse)
(I certainly did not consider this a probability)
(though one can say quite a bit more about the former, and I may)
(again, “Preacher, where’s your faith?”)
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