April was here pg 10

                                       Conviction

                            (and all that that implies)

          When I was twelve, my life changed completely.  My mom the bar hopper, sometimes mother of five, lover to many, ex wife of two, found religion. “The worst sinners make the best Christians”.

          Her friend “The one with eight kids” took her to church the first time and from that night on, our lives changed, allot. Now we won’t get into any kind of discussion on religion. My views are biased, so I won’t impose them on you.

          On one of those first few nights we were at church, my mom got saved. We started going to church allot after that. Things changed so fast and furious for us, some of the changes were good. She started showing more attention to us. She quite going out to bars all of the time. Church filled our lives; she made us go almost every night, and twice on Sunday.

          I was changing all on my own. On top of watching my mom and our lives change drastically, I was growing up and out. I was coming into my own age of rebellion.

          We joined “Del North Baptist” a little church in Tucson. It sat right behind “Flowing Wells” Junior high and high school. At that time I was still in sixth grade but would eventually go to both.

          I remember in sixth grade two big things happened to me. One was that I started my period and went through puberty. The day I started my period, we were going to a swimming party and my mom thought it was funny enough to tell everyone there, why I was sitting by the pool instead of getting in it. I was horrified. I also had another one of my most embarrassing moments that year. I was walking home from school one day.  I was crossing a fairly busy street, walking across a drainage grate. In Tucson, when it rains, it floods, and there are things that look like cattle crossings, only they are drainage ditch covers for all of the water, they are everywhere. Well, one of my legs slipped down in between two of them and it wouldn’t come out. So here I was in the middle of a busy intersection, with my leg stuck down in between two metal bars. Luckily no one drove over me, but I definitely stopped traffic. Many people tried to pull my leg out of its trap, but it wasn’t going to come out of there without a fight. The more they pulled on me. The more sore and swollen my knee became. It was so embarrassing, and spooky. I had blocked traffic in four directions. Finally a police officer came, took a bucket of black grease out of his trunk, rubbed it all over my leg, and yanked with all of his might. Out popped my leg. He drove me home in his police car and I had a sore knee and leg for a week, never a dull moment.

          Church filled almost every need that my mom had. It supplied her with friends, money, food, clothes, and a social life. They even helped her get a real house, and it gave us all something to do after school. It did what a church should do. And I was always glad when she was happy because it made life easier for all of us. At Christmas they would even send us a box of food and presents. It even supplied her with a man, “of course he was a married man”. In fact, he was the minister of the church, some thing’s never change.

           He was very good looking. He had a beautiful blond wife and two beautiful small, blond children. He appeared to have the perfect, life but appearances can be deceiving.

          Now I can not make judgments or even statements about things that I did not see with my own eyes, but I do know that the minister and his wife divorced, and it was a big scandal at the church. His wife had been a big part of the church. She taught the Sunday school class and their children were the prince and princess of the church. So this really rocked the boat at church.

          I know that he and my mother liked each other and I do know that they went places together and he came over to our house, allot. I liked him; he was a very nice man, but the church was all aflutter.          My mom had become very involved at the church. It was her whole life. They weren’t flagrant or anything, they didn’t kiss or hold hands at church or anything like that, but I was old enough to here people talking. And I know what they were like away from church. I don’t even know for sure that the divorce wasn’t already inevitable, but none of that would matter for long.

           This young, good looking, preacher had other hobbies. He loved to parachute. He went every weekend. Well one weekend, his chute didn’t open, and it devastated my mom and the church. Does this mean that God really is a God of wrath, or was it just really bad luck? Come to think of it, none of the men in my mom’s life had very good luck, Prison, death, ruined lives and now this. If it wasn’t “her” bad luck, it was still bad luck.

          After Dick died, my mom threw herself into the church even more. She went back to college and we hardly ever saw her. The church got a new pastor, and things settled down. We lived in Tucson for the next couple of years and I ended up going to Flowing Wells Junior High School. We went back to Oklahoma only for visits, or my grandparents would come out to visit us. 

          The summer that Kari Jo and I were thirteen; my grandparents came to Tucson to visit us. Of course they came in their old “pick em up truck” with a camper on it. Tucson Arizona has some real beauty around it. It sets at the base of the Catalina Mountains and on the outskirts there is a little mountain called Mount lemon. You can drive straight up it to snow covered greenery, and within forty five minutes you can drive back down and be in one hundred degree weather again. We decided to take a day trip up there, we all piled into my grandpas truck. All six of us kids got in the camper and grandpa, grandma, and mom rode in the front, we had a blast. Of course any time I was with them I was happy. When we got to the top and got out, mom and grandpa were frustrated and miserable. Grandma had started freaking out on the way up there, begging my grandpa to let her out of the truck, she was crying and really frightened. We stayed up there and played for a few hours and grandma calmed down some, but she did not want to go back down that mountain when it was time to go, she actually begged my grandpa to leave her there. Of course we didn’t do that. Kari Jo and I put her in the camper with us, and held her hand while she lay on the bed, and cried, the whole way home.

          It was so hard for me to see the strongest woman in my life act like this, but other things were happening to her too. One day she asked my mom to hand her a towel, only she didn’t say Myrna, she said “Reta hand me that towel”. My mom looked at her funny and said “I am not Reta mom” My grandma looked at her and said “You are too Reta!” my mom looked at her quizzically and said “I am not Reta mom” Grandma looked at her puzzled and said “Well who are you then?” My mom again gave her an even stranger look and said “I am Myrna mom. What’s wrong with you?” My grandma looked at her for more than a minute with no recognition and then all of a sudden, she said “Well of course Myrna, I don’t know what I was thinking.” We all looked at each other with weird looks and went on about our business. It was like she had a bout with Alzheimer’s, but she was only 57, she was having more and more headaches too.