Posted by:
Beth
(
)
Date: October 08, 2022 05:18PM
What are you doing?
This is a true story. (Right now the Squids on this board are like, No it’s not, but it is. Shut up, Squids.)
So, back in the day, my mom used to volunteer for all sorts of church stuff because she liked volunteering. What she didn’t like was following through.
That’s why she had me!
So, she volunteered to spend Saturdays going to The Youth Study Center with our church group. As Hervey will attest, The Youth Study Center was actually juvenile hall. No one was studying, but they were languishing, some because their parents simply would not pick them up. They were young boys, so young, and I suppose not eligible for foster care, so their they stayed.
Okay. Let it be known that I am not opposed to visiting these kids. But when *I* was a kid, I was strongly opposed to missing cartoons and the old movies that followed in the afternoon. Plus I was the only kid there that wasn’t locked up, although I was there against my will. I just happened to know when I’d be leaving, and there was a lot of comfort in that knowledge.
So.
It’s been established that adults volunteered for this church thing, and I was the only kid who was voluntold. Furthermore, visiting these kids had nothing to do with listening to them or having any meaningful personal interaction.
We preached.
Alright.
Fast forward a decade when I was in Bootcamp. People went to church because it was something different to do. You heard about the outside world. No one yelled at you. Sometimes there was a TV.
I can’t speak to the veracity of the paragraph immediately above because I never went despite people telling me about all the good stuff that happened there. Pfft. I’d rather go on a crazy long ass run with a Company Commander I absolutely hated than do the church thing, TV or not. I hate running, and there are no cartoons on Sunday.
The kids at The Youth Study Center probably went to these dry ass services, which were actually an exercise for the adults to practice public speaking for that preacher job they imagined they might get if they just learned to channel their internal preacher altar call, for a change of scenery, a different, albeit boring, yackety yackety. We didn’t show cartoons which would be a better way to spend a Saturday morning, but maybe they weren’t allowed to watch them. I never had a chance to ask.
Well
My mother volunteered to compile the lesson plans into a binder for Pastor Approval, because even god didn’t know what these hapless motivational gurus might say. The compilation of said nutter butter entailed editing dubious interpretations of dense mumbo jumbo often scrawled by a non-dominant hand on the back of repurposed junk mail envelopes one usually puts on the fridge to remind you to buy milk. (Okay. That’s a lie. It was usually loose leaf paper.)
So
The mom took one look at this pile of crazy and told me to edit it. I was like, I’m a kid. I’m 11 years old I already do your taxes and balance your checkbook and write checks for bills that you later sign until you tell me to sign them because it’s easier for me to forge your name than for you to sign your damn checks and I didn’t volunteer to edit this pile of pictographs and I’d rather be watching cartoons.
I edited the lesson plans and wanted to cry they were so so bad. If we had a typewriter I probably would have been told to peck and check these things despite my mother’s type touching skills that enabled her to type 60 words per minute and that is true.
She took them to work and typed them and relieved the job’s supply cabinet of some three ring binders and a hole punch and a label maker and dividers and hole reinforcers that you had to lick and tasted like cancer.
She had a big purse.
So
Today I’m going to read Euripides because that’s a thing I think I’m supposed to do and work on my Cormac McCarthy syntax and attitude and make carrot cake that I’ll eat warm before I can frost it because that’s how I roll and feed the sourdough starter and maybe clean something and most definitely watch the ducks do duck things and watch cartoons.
I haven’t proofread this. Maybe later.