It's a rare, beautiful seventy degree day in February. I have the doors and windows open and Alexa is playing music from 1974 (because I asked her to!) and I am remembering...Remembering what it was like to be a 12 year old in a small town in Ohio with two older siblings and a baby brother. I had a bestfriend, Kim, with whom I shared sleepovers, and pool days and bike rides and picnics under the big oak tree by the creek in my 6 acre yard. 

We went to a very small church, New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, where there were only one or two kids my age, except for when I could convince a friend to spend the night on Saturday night and go to church with me on Sunday (I actually won a new Bible for bringing the most visitors when they had a campaign to bring people in.)  They kept up with attendance and offerings and what hymn numbers we were going to sing that day on boards at the front of the church. (From what I remember, attendance was mostly in the 30's.) There was a baptistry at the center of the front of the church, where I was baptized standing on the last step that led to the water, because I was six years old and too short to stand in the pool without it being over my head. It had a painting of a tree lined river behind it where I frequently got lost in my imagination during the sermons.

Bathrooms and Sunday School rooms for the kids were down a dark and steep winding staircase where my mother broke a stiletto heel on her good shoes one Sunday.  It led to the basement where we would sit in little wooden chairs and look at illustrations of Bible stories, sometimes have potlucks and Christmas parties where the kids always got gifts. The girls got plastic tea sets or nail polish kits...and I have no memory of what the boys got. 

There were a bunch of old men who would gather at the altar during prayer before the sermon and they would all pray out loud at the same time while one man cried and wailed and wiped his face with a white cotton hankie.  (I guess women weren't allowed.) This started out in normal voice tones and would rise to a feverish pitch before it wound back down. It went on for what seemed to be forever before the men went back to their seats. Every Sunday, I wondered what they were wailing and crying about and would try to listen, but one man's voice would drown out the other and it just sounded like a chaotic bunch of noise. 

The preacher, Brother Raymond, who screamed...a lot, would get worked up every Sunday during the sermon so much that he had to wipe the little white balls of spit from the corner of his mouth...also with a white cotton hankie. One Sunday, I was playing with my mother's beaded necklace during the sermon and it broke. The sound of hundreds of little beads dropping on the hardwood floor seemed to last an eternity but at least it broke up the monotony of the screaming preacher.

Occasionally,  there would be someone to play the piano while we sang old hymns out of a book with shaped notes, but mostly it was acapella. My mother had a very strong alto voice and sang the harmony notes and frequently someone would ask Sister Opaline to "come sing a song for us". Many times she would sing a song with words that said "I'm looking for a stone that was hewn out of the mountain" and she would walk up and down the hardwood floored aisle as she sang and would eventually pick up a Bible off the old wooden table at the back of the church where the display holding gospel tracts hung on the wall. She would hold it up like a prize as she sang "I found the stone that was hewn out of the mountain". Everyone loved it and if they weren't Baptist, they might have even clapped! For some reason, this made me cringe inside and I wanted to crawl under the pew and die from embarrassment. 

The pews were hard wood with no cushions and had a cross carved out on the outside sides. When I was lucky enough to get to sit on the end of our family row, I would reach over the edge and trace the top part of the cross with my finger. (I can still feel the indention in my mind today). There was a slatted, wooden rack on the backs of the pews that held the hardback hymnals and a Bible. I'm certain these pews were designed by someone who believed that if you weren't tortured while you were sitting through the sermon, you weren't doing it right. There was absolutely no way to get comfortable , but in spite of that, I still managed to fall asleep every Sunday during the sermon. 

I wore patent leather shoes that always pinched my too wide feet, dresses that had puffed sleeves that pinched my too fat arms, and itchy crinoline, lacy slips. One Sunday, I had slipped my shoes half-way off my feet so that my heels were out but the toes were still in the wider mid part of the shoe. As I fell asleep, I jumped as you sometimes do when you nod off (anybody know why that happens?) and as I did, my legs catapulted my shoes, sending them sliding on the hardwood floors under the pews, all the way up to the altar where the preacher was doing his thing. 

I was mortified. 

We were there...every Sunday and every Sunday night. Dad never went with us, and Mom never missed. It was a great point of contention between the two of them with my dad accusing my mom of having a boyfriend there and wanting to know why we were late getting home. Sometimes we would go out to eat after Sunday morning church or go to Eden park for a picnic or to the flower conservatory. After, the evening service, we might stop at the United Dairy Farmers for milk and bread for the week and would sometimes be treated to an ice cream cone (my choice was always pineapple sherbet). We would frequently have hot dogs for dinner that were boiled in an aluminum loaf pan on the top of our electric coiled stove. 

We built a lake house on Lake Cumberland in Kentucky near where my dad was raised. According to my memory, he wanted to go almost every weekend in the summer, but mom fought it because we wouldn't be home to go to church on Sunday. Even on vacations, she would want to find a church to go to, but dad fought that too. Saturday night sleepovers were forbidden at a friend's house unless there was a plan for their family to go to church on Sunday morning.

God/Jesus was just an image portrayed in the handful of pictures in my red-letter, King James Bible, the paper characters on the flannelgraph and the watercolor images on posters and little cards we took home from Sunday School. Nothing at church peaked my imagination or created a desire to know more. All I knew was that the night I was baptized, my mom was proud and something about this God stuff was more important than your relationship with your husband, and anything else that you might want to do on Sundays. 

Christianity to me was all about two things...control and shame. The Bible was there to keep you between the guardrails and not go off the straight and narrow, only one way to heaven (and that was by being good and not doing bad) and number two, to tell you how ashamed you should be of yourself if you should veer off the path. They constantly warned of the dangers of backsliding and the punishment that was sure to come from the Mighty right hand of God if you did.