My StoryChapter One - First Contact The day was a hot one, July or August of 1959 I think. The three of us were out popping tar-bubbles on the street next to our home. I was the gang leader, since I was the eldest, a full five years old as I recall. We looked up and saw a big black automobile in front of the house. We knew it didn’t belong, so we scurried to the house to see who was imposing on our home turf. As we approached the door it opened and out popped a middle-aged lady with a high pitched voice saying her goodbyes to Mom. In her car sat a middle-aged man behind the wheel and he made no effort to get out. This new person was talking to Mom about something that was unheard of in our house heretofore - religion and God. I was soon to find that this lady and her religion was to play a major part in my life for the next 45 years. As she stepped out the door she saw us standing there looking up and immediately offered us a piece of candy from her enormous purse. We liked her right away. Her name was Virginia, and her husband/driver was Robert. She said some final greetings to Mom and then made her way to the waiting car. Soon they were off, and my first memories of Jehovah’s witnesses and the religion they teach had been formed. It was a pleasant one, positive. How could a sweet older lady with gum and candy and nice friendliness leave any other impression on three little kids of five, four and three years old? She was like a grandma in our eyes. On later visits we sometimes heard her and Mom talk about the bible and God as they ’studied’ the Bible together. I remember thinking that this woman must know everything about God - she could flip through that Bible and find parts so quickly. Sometimes they were reading parts that I could not understand well, other times they were talking about living on earth forever, and at 5 years old I couldn’t understand where else we would live anyway. These little magazines started to appear in the house to about that time - Awake and The Watchtower. I soon began to think of them as sacred. The lady brought me a book called “Paradise lost to Paradise regained”. It was a big book and there were lot’s of drawings in there about Adam and Eve and Jesus and the New World as it would be when God got it all straightened out after the big war that was coming. The book was pink colored and attractive to children although I don’t really think it was for little children, since none of us could read it. But the pictures made a big impression on me. Some attitudes began to change around the house at that time. Something about the way things Mom was learning made me start to think the church down the street was not a good place anymore. That was further reinforced by the fact that we all thought the big vacant house next to the church was ’haunted’. All over town there were rumors as I grew up about how someone went inside once and saw things flying around the house without help, and we all avoided it after dark. I even heard Mom talking sometimes to her best friend about that kind of thing. Marylyn was a Catholic. She was the only ’religious’ person I knew as a little child. She had crosses and statues in the house that Mom said were ’demonized’. Her and Mom would sometimes have spirited conversations about religion as they sat about drinking coffee and smoking in Marylyn’s kitchen. I remember riding in the car with Marylyn and her children and wondering about the custom they had of making a cross sign when they passed her church just outside of town. I began to think that her religion might be of the devil, as Mom had indicated, due to these strange things they did. Also, they never went to church that I knew of, except on Easter and maybe Christmas. We stayed away from them around those times as Mom wanted us to have no part of hunting eggs or anything to do with Christmas. I saw a picture later in life of me sitting with my Dad under a Christmas tree, and one of me with a Birthday cake, but I have no memories of such things in our house. The funny thing is I also had few memories of ’going to the Kingdom Hall’. Mom talked a lot about that, but we never went very often. I remember thinking we ought to be going, and I started to want to go, but Mom rarely took us for some reason. Then a few months down the road I recall all of us being dressed up and in a big building, some sort of auditorium. Mom came out of some dressing room with a bathing suit on, said a few words to us kids, and marched down the aisle toward a pool there. She was getting baptized as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I recall that my aunt was there also, and a few minutes later she went down there too. I guessed we were becoming Jehovah’s witnesses today. Nothing much changed after Mom was baptized. We all knew we were Jehovah’s Witnesses now, but we rarely went to the meetings. When we did Mom would sometimes sit in the back of the hall with a lit cigarette as we studied the Watchtower magazine. Sometimes we would go over to Virginia and Robert’s house after the meeting and have lunch. Even Dad came once in a while to those lunches, but I don’t recall him coming to the meetings at the Kingdom Hall. Still we didn’t go that often, and I had the feeling that the brothers and sisters didn’t really love us that much. Once we went and I saw this other kid, a couple of years older than me, sitting across the aisle. I knew him! He was the play-yard bully at school. He used to beat up anyone in the yard that he thought he could whip. I didn’t like Don Coburn too much, and I wondered if he could possibly be a Jehovah’s witness too? School was at once, a place I loved and hated! As a witness youth I was not permitted to do anything the other kids did. Mind you I didn’t object, since I thought it would make Jehovah love me and save me when the world ended. But it was still embarrassing to me. I learned to stand during the pledge of allegiance and to put my hand just a fraction of an inch off my chest, not fully complying with the requirement to ’cover my heart’. I would not say the words unless someone seemed to be watching, then I would just mouth something to make it look like I was saying what they were. Birthday and holiday parties were always spent in the hallway or the principal’s office or the library. Valentines day was a sticky one for me - that was a week of dodging questions about who I was going to give a valentine to by putting it in their can. I didn’t have a can - we had to make one up and have our own artwork on it, and that time was spent in the hallway, so that raised additional questions from my classmates as to why I had no can. Still I got few valentines given me and I felt uneasy about that too. Maybe they contained demons. I would feel unclean for days after a party or holiday at school as if I had rubbed up against someone who was not in good position before God. I dreaded school around the time of the holidays for these reasons, but truly felt, even at my young age, that I was doing what God wanted me to do. First grade soon became second grade and the need to start the whole process over again. Mom came in to school and explained all the things I couldn’t do to the teacher. It was a whole class full of new kids again, as they did not keep all of the first grade together when we advanced, so I had to explain over again to a whole new group why we didn’t do the things they did. I was learning to feel sorry for them by now. We had the ’Truth’, they were caught in the Devil’s lies. I rarely felt any sense of envy for the gifts and holidays they celebrated, but I did feel a sense of not belonging. It was a mixture of pride and pain. Second grade soon became third and with that brought a move. Two moves really, the first was to give up the house we had sold, so we moved for a few months to a rental in a small town close to where we had lived. This brought a new set of classmates and teacher to which to explain things. Before we made the second move to California an earth-shattering event occurred. I was sitting in Mrs. Weaver’s third grade classroom when she came in crying. She announced to the class that a terrible thing had happened that day in Dallas, Texas. Our president, John Kennedy had been shot and killed. Confusion ran over me. Who was John Kennedy? I had never heard of him that I knew. Witnesses paid little attention to world events or politics, this I knew. Some of the kids seemed to know who he was and started to cry. I was ambivalent at that point. But like most everyone else who was alive at that time I can tell you where I was. At the time I didn’t see any significance to the matter. I remember walking home after school and looking at the fluffy white clouds in a beautiful Indiana sky of blue. When I got home my Mom was watching the news and constant talk about the death of the president. She watched it eagerly and anxiously, though I had the feeling that as witnesses we should not care that much about that. After all, wasn’t Jehovah going to destroy all these people soon anyway? I was developing a stoic view of the world due to the witness influence in my life. In all that time, in the first two full years of school and part of a third, I had never had a real friend. No classmates ever came to our home and I never went to any of theirs. At the time I never gave it a thought, but now I know why, it was because we were those weird people with that strange religion. We had become Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was starting to buy into the system of beliefs that would influence the rest of my life, I just didn’t know it yet.
This is very rough-draft and I doubt I have anything really special to relate. Maybe just for my own sake.
Critique?
Jeff