After three summers of day camp and six years of teaching, I decided to take off during the summer of ’79. Alicia was going to work that summer with her parents at a camp out west; she gave me a bicycle for my birthday before she left. I had an upright piano and was taking lessons. I made a chart to keep my days full of useful things. In June I went to see my mother and made a side trip to my college. I ran into an English prof I’d had who was also theologically savvy. After we talked for a while, he gave me a reading list of Christian thinkers and took me to the bookstore, using his discount to get some of them for me. I stopped in at the library where I had worked; my reference buddy from student days had become director. It was good to touch base with him, to be in a place that felt like home. A friend from college and I went to Stratford Canada’s Shakespeare Festival. Then it was back to West Palm to read, ride my bike, abuse the piano, walk the beach. I finally had time. What I didn’t have was money; I ate a lot of ramen noodles, too proud to ask my mother for some cash. Near the end of the summer, I borrowed a dollar from one of my students so I could buy a head of lettuce. I think I was courting scurvy. But I woke up that lazy summer, reading deeply, thinking alone. I’d put my brain in mothballs; no one seemed interested in theology to the extent I was, and I didn’t need my brain for the sermons I heard. I was teaching on autopilot, having taught each English course at least once, and some of them six times. Between growing concern over my mother (she was fine, but shouldn't I be closer, now that she was a widow?), a general homesickness for the Eastern Woodland landscape of Ohio, and all the reading I was doing, by the time school started that fall, I wondered, What am I doing here?
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Baptist GirlI was a conservative Baptist girl who grew up to become a career Christian, working first in a Baptist school and then in a Baptist college. For about three decades, it was very good until it wasn’t, and I had to leave. But the Baptists formed me. This is my homage to the good times and good people of the world I left, finally, at forty-three, when I became an Episcopalian. These are my memories; others might disagree with my recollections. So be it. Archives
January 2024
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