My deepest memories are hopelessly muddled in mystical romanticism with
my search for God in church, synagogue, Nature, and books, especially the works
of Spinoza. Nature? Pantheistic
mysticism in my first reading of Spinoza at an abstract level. But down to earth and more concretely? Well, girls—if you must know. OK. Maybe woods and mist and swamps and oceans with giant
harvest moons and phosphorescent surf, especially while swimming in the nude
with some college girls who picked me up one evening, a shy high school senior,
for a ride to the beach. Pretty
innocent, I’m sorry to say. That’s
about as much of a confession as you can get. I led a pretty celibate life in practice—though not in
theory. If one’s reach should
exceed one’s grasp, I did all right.
To be somewhat honest, I never did a lot of grasping even when luscious
fruit was within reach. Too much
the Southern gentleman—my Mama’s moral teachings.
(I exclude
band road trips, remembering—suddenly--one where I sat comfortably ensconced
with a voluptuous girl—a big girl—in a bus seat, entwined in darkness for the entire
trip in delightfully passionate embrace, a girl I did not know.
I can still recall the warmth of her closeness and those passionate if
more or less innocent kisses. “Ah, happy, happy boughs….” Keats Ode On A Grecian Urn, one of my favorite poems in those hormone
rich days. He should have been in
a high school band traveling back from a football game late in the
evening. No “forever out of reach”
but forever remembered with gratitude—and longing for what never happened. It
could have led—but did not—to a happy, happy marriage perhaps with her Pappy
holding a double-barreled shotgun to help us celebrate.)
Church was a great place for a shy
young man to meet young women not always equally shy. Besides, in the South, churches were—and
perhaps still are—a major feature of one’s social life. Way out on the little dirt road where I
lived, a pick-up truck with a loudspeaker announcing “Vacation Bible School”
was a welcome sight, despite the dusty cloud it left hanging in the air. It did not take long for me to convince
my Mama. After all, it was
scarcely a half mile walk to the church in question. And I was already there often enough for church services and
Sunday School (with guest appearances by the John Birch Society to warn us
about that Communist Eisenhower) . We made What-Not stands in the pattern of a
ship’s anchor, sanding, shellacking, and glueing on the little shelf to hold
kitchy knick-knacks. Not much
sophisticated carpentry but, as compensation, there were an unusual number of
girls in the VBS (Vacation Bible School) class, mostly doing other things more
feminine like baking or sewing something—in this pre-feminist era. More ogling than any real interaction
but pleasant enough and better than anything on the TV.
Church
socials for young people were mostly of the picnic variety where you could
converse easily with some girl you found attractive, not only over lunch but especially
over the sink while washing dishes.
Probably led me to love dawdling over the sink, washing dishes, and
socializing for the rest of my life.
(I even washed dishes one summer in Rockport, Massachusetts in The Blacksmith
Shop, a resort restaurant with a lot of college girls to talk to and look
at. Looking at pretty girls is a
life long pleasure for some of us. Not always with innocent consequences but
always with a zest for life—and probably, it is said by some scientists, an
activity leading to greater longevity.)
I
remember looking out the kitchen window of one little church somewhere in the
backwoods of Georgia at the river nearby and watching as various candidates for
baptism walked into to the water for the ritual dunking in a white robe. Just
like a similar scene in The Apostle where
Robert Duval does the baptizing. I watched with a kind of contemplative
detachment, thinking only how much I remembered swimming in that same river. (I had been taken to this church by a
neighbor’s family on a visit to their upcountry relatives. The water was the
color of the sandy clay soil that muddied it but it was very clean and brightly
reflecting the summer sunlight. If
you opened your eyes while swimming under water you could only see a foot or
two. I never knew until I swam in
Bermuda that water could actually be clear for swimming, so muddy are the
rivers and creeks near coastal Georgia.
No surprise to me to learn about a blues singer years later called “Muddy
Waters.” Seemed a perfectly good
name to me.
It is
impossible to really understand evangelical Christianity, called
“fundamentalism” by outsiders, without having been inside it. (Pentecostal enthusiasm is not an
intelligible sport for spectators.)
Even today I just ignore the remarks I hear that betray outsider
ignorance of a reality I once knew and still vividly remember. I touch, even today, a large version of
the King James Bible with reverence, remembering my grandfather on a visit to
our home in Savannah, sitting in silence and preparing his Sunday sermon—Rev.
John Elijah Strickland, pastor of the Lower Mill Creek Primitive Baptist Church
near Statesboro, Georgia. He had
come to give a guest sermon at a Savannah church, the one my mother attended
when she could and my father only when he could not easily avoid it—his father
having subjected him to many such visits.
My Daddy’s religion was mostly practiced in fishing the tidal creeks
around Savannah. When I went flounder
gigging with him one evening, he looked like a country version of Poseidon with
his great trident, a 3-pronged fork with barbs on the end of a pipe-extended
contraption that resembled an extra long spear. The Coleman gas lantern in the boat kept attracting jumping
mullet who could whack you in the face if you were not careful. It is not an accident, I’m sure, that
the image of Christ is a fish and that many disciples were fishermen. My Daddy was not as far from his
origins as he and others might have thought.
These
were my favorite excursions with my father, in the darkest nights, gliding
silently through the marsh looking for the tell-tale gleaming eyes of the
flounders on the mud flats at low tide, occasionally coming so close to a
startled snipe that you could have plucked it out of the marsh and bagged it
without much effort. I always
wondered why college hazings had so many silly young men holding bags in the
marsh on a so-called “snipe hunt.” They were usually left all night in the marsh as an
initiation rite. A good country
boy would have surprised them with a bag full of snipe if he had carried along a
strong flashlight. I was happy just to see the birds and had no desire to catch
them. That startled face near
enough to touch was miracle enough for me in my father’s religious excursions
among the labyrinthine marshes of those Georgia tidal creeks.
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