I'm not a big Easter person. I like Cadbury Cream Eggs and Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs but other than that the whole zombie risen from the dead thing kind of creeps me out. I'm not sure I've shared this story with you yet, I'm sure my family will not be pleased if I do but,that has never stopped me before so…
When I was a kid we used to go to church. Every weekend. My mom used to give us a dime to put in the plate. It was pretty much all we could afford. We were very poor. (I'm not kidding when I say we were very poor.) In the early 80's a teacher in rural Maine did not make a lot of money. I think Stephen King wrote in his book "On Writing" that he made all of $7500 in the Bangor, ME area, which was significantly higher than what rural Maine would have seen at the same time. I digress. In my family we did not talk of money, that was for adults only. Church, I was writing about church. My mom would give my brother and I a dime each, we would put it in the plate and all the other kids would put nickles and dimes in as well. It did not pass my notice that the kids of the families who were better off than us put in quarters. Some of the adults put in bills, folded up so you could not see the denomination, occasionally an old lady would put in a check, which I used to refer to as the colored paper in the plate.
We went to the local Union church. Sort of like a Unitarian Universalist, except, well more like a Baptist, but not. There weren't any sermons on hell fire and brimstone just some boring old dude jabbering on about jesus and god and taking jesus into you. Some of the sermons, looking back on, I would find very creepy, with bizarre subtexts. At one point we had a Reverend who was really into baptism and brought in a big tub of water to dunk people into. Her sermons were really weird and had people standing in the aisles raising their hands up and talking about taking jesus into their heart and getting dunked in the dirty water in the tub.
What I really liked was Sunday School, after the sermon was half over the kids would be sent from the main part of the church off with a couple of the older kids and one adult to the basement, where a series of tables and chairs were set up. Here some photocopies and mimeographed sheets would be passed out to us and the older girl would read a story to us. We'd them color in the sheets and answer questions.
The church had no bathroom. Which meant if you had to go you had to hold it or go outside behind the church. You weren't allowed to leave Sunday School. So you had no choice other than to hold it. At one point, it must have been around '81 or '82 the state said that churches had to have bathrooms. I suppose the law must have said that "large meeting areas" had to have bathrooms. The church decided that they would set up a port-a-potty thing in the basement behind a screen. It was a toilet seat with legs with a heavy blue plastic bag hanging off the underside of it. You can see already that this will not end well.
During one of the Sunday school lessons an elderly lady came clattering down the stairs, ran behind the screen and sat down. The noises she made behind the screen made all the kids giggle, until we smelled the stench. That basement had no ventilation and that stink settled upon us all like a thick rank fog. The elderly lady went back up stairs but we were left in the basement with our eyes tearing up. I remember complaining to my mom about the stink but she said it must not be that bad, she hadn't been in the basement.
The next Sunday I didn't want to go back, summer was fast approaching and I wanted to play outside and not be stuck in the basement with a toilet seat on legs with a bag full of shit hanging off it. My parents were surprised but sent me to church anyway.
That Sunday the "toilet" had been used a few more times and the basement smelled of raw sewage and strong urine. Even the Sunday school teacher tried to cover up the smell with a lavender spray that merely combined with the smell of shit that hung low in the air to create an impenetrable force of flowers and feces. Those of us who could stand it previous to the air freshener now sneezed in pure revulsion. The combined odor was enough to even make the hardiest child gag.
The following Sunday I begged my parents not to force us to go back, that the sun was out, we could go to my grandparents early and I'd help cook. I wanted to be sure that I never went back to that hell hole. Still my parents forced me to go back. Each week the smell got stronger and stronger. The Sunday school teacher stopped showing up and fewer and fewer kids were showing up.
Shortly before the shit bag hanging off a toilet seat with legs was instituted a new Reverend had been hired. Apparently my parents did not much care for her style and had a discussion about not sending us to church. My incessant nagging to not go, not wear a dress, actively resisting putting on my church clothing only helped them to decide not to send us back to church. This all occurred right around Easter when I was 6 or 7.
I saw Sundays as freedom from then on. I had a discussion with my Dad years later about why they didn't want to send us to church anymore. He mumbled a bunch of crap about crazy ladies and said something I really appreciated, "If you want to find god, you go take a walk out in the woods. We live in the middle of god's country." While I'm not a believer it's stuck with me that sometimes if you need to find something- an inner truth, an answer or something of that nature, if you take a long walk in the woods you'll find your answer, eventually.
