Erin Fleming (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} fine_mingler) wrote,@ 2006-03-23 07:45:00 |
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Forbidden fruit causes lots of jams
I live next door to the apartment that my family lived in during the seventies. In 1981, I went to high school, my brother went to college, my mom started a new job outside the home, and we moved five blocks away, in an L path - like a chess horse - one block over and four blocks down. That's where my parents' house is; the one that we are cleaning.
Across the street from where I live now is Dormont Methodist Church, a modest white-bricked, red-doored building which played a recurring featured role in my childhood. My brother and I went to Scout meetings there. Somewhere, in its recesses of carpeted meeting rooms and linoleum hallways, I told my Brownie troop leaders that I could play the guitar (It was a plastic mickey mouse guitar with three strings) and that my parents spoke fluent spanish (well, they had lived in Panama for two years - I thought they could.) I used to hit tennis balls against the back wall for hours and hours. I watched the sunset from the church steps. People would park there during the High School football games, and once a big black man in a trench coat and a cowboy hat got out of his cadillac and handed me and my friend Tony a dollar to "keep an eye on his car." The neighborhood kids used to play in the parking lot and one day, when my mom was trying to teach me how to ride a bicycle, she was distracted and I lost control of the bike and rolled over the four foot wall, landing on the sidewalk with a bloody lip. My mom had turned around to see me heading over the wall and ran after me, leaping into the air, and landing 20 feet away in the middle of street, with a crushed knee that put her in the hospital for months. My brother and I spent that summer with various relatives in a series of blurry arrangements that ranged from mildly embarrassing to outright abusive. I can't think about that time without the phrase "we're on our own...cousin" from Tommy playing in my head.
Good times.
The church used to have a massive bronze and copper marquee on its front lawn, which informed the neighborhood of the service times and things like that. It was stolen a few years ago. I was happy that it was stolen, or rather, I was happy that the church had been vandalized, because I harbored a vague sense of resentment toward the building and its elusive inhabitants. I say elusive because for all the meetings I attended there and the hours I spent on its grounds, I can't recall a single time that I met with, talked with, or was introduced to the minister or the secretary or anyone officially connected to the church. That's the problem with protestants - no uniforms. They look like everyone else. A few times some nondescript adult would come out the back door and yell at me for hitting the tennis ball too hard against the wall. It irked me that they knew my first name. But I can barely remember their gender, let alone be able to pick them out of a line-up. You know if it had been a nun, I would have remembered. And I would have known her name. Yes Sister Agatha. Sorry Sister Agatha. I won't lie about knowing how to play the guitar, Sister Agatha.
My resentment came out of a fuzzy understanding of the events following my accident in the parking lot. I was seven, so a lot of what happened was unclear, but I know that the church acted in a way that disappointed my parents, so much so that there was a trial in a courtroom and I was put on the stand. It was all very exciting and confusing, and I know it was during those months that my blatant mistrust of authority was born. Churchpeople: no good. Judges, lawyers & "the system": no good. Relatives: no good.
But there was another incident that had informed my resentment of Dormont Methodist Church. Years later from all that, on a summer afternoon when I was ten or eleven, I was walking our dog Rags in the alley near the parking lot when a brown truck turned down the street going the wrong way and parked right outside the church. There is something fundamentally unsettling about an official looking truck going the wrong way down a one way street. It smacks of rules being broken by men with "clearances" or espionage or some kind of covert operation. It was instantly disturbing to me as I stood there with my dog, looking to see if any of the adults who were out on the street were watching this. Then it got worse.
A man came out of the truck with a big ass rifle. Maybe it was a pellet gun. I don't know. But I saw a big ass rifle. No one came out from the church to meet him, he didn't acknowledge anyone else on the street - I was only a few yards away -- or make any announcement. He just lifted his rifle, took aim, and started picking off pigeons from the roof of the church.
Oh my fucking god - dead birds started falling everywhere. And the SOUND of that GUN. I was frozen with fear. Rags was upset by the noise. I saw Mothers running out of the other apartments down the street and gathering up toddlers. People started coming out to look. Finally I picked up Rags and ran inside to tell Mom.
It's one of those bizarre events that happens in slow motion when I recall it. The man was from Animal Control, and the Church had called him to attend to their "pigeon problem."
I'm not a big fan of pigeons. They carry disease and all that, but OH MY GOD. Where does one start with what was wrong with that picture? I know I would not have articulated it exactly this way at the time, but right then and there I became aware of religious hypocrisy. I was no expert on Jesus, but I knew that he wouldn't have no part of some rogue Animal Control asshole whipping out a rifle in the middle of the day and shooting God's creatures off the roof. It just didn't jive. And to this day, people who call themselves Christians but who participate in the meat industry or who are disrespectful or cruel to animals in anyway really IRK me. What Would Jesus Eat? Not veal.
But honestly, I'm irked by so much of the behavior of folks who call themselves Christians these days that I really can't even begin to go into it.
Obviously I was reminded of this whole episode by the "sniper" who managed to shut down part of downtown yesterday, but who turned out to be some custodian picking pigeons off the roof of some building. And what is really disturbing is how everyone was sighing with relief that it was just some asswipe with a pellet gun shooting pigeons instead of oh, some terrorist.
And I'm like, you know what, people....potato - poTAHto.
But back to the stolen marquee. So the marquee was replaced by an incredibly ugly changeable sign, which now spouts cutesy messages like " When down in the mouth, remember Jonah. He came out all right." and "God answers knee-mail," and last week's "exposure to the SON is good for you."
Get it? It's a pun on sun. Jesus is the son. Get it? Gosh that's clever. That just makes me wanna go inside and pray. That makes me wanna sing a bunch of hymns and then go out and shoot me some dinner.
What WOULDN'T Jesus Do
a list
1. Shoot pigeons
2. Be mean to a woman with a smashed knee
3. Participate in today's flesh/petroleum trades resulting in destruction of the rainforests and exploitation of the third world
4. Believe a seven year old who claims to know how to play the guitar
5. Terrorize his cousin
6. Put up signs with bad puns
I live next door to the apartment that my family lived in during the seventies. In 1981, I went to high school, my brother went to college, my mom started a new job outside the home, and we moved five blocks away, in an L path - like a chess horse - one block over and four blocks down. That's where my parents' house is; the one that we are cleaning.
Across the street from where I live now is Dormont Methodist Church, a modest white-bricked, red-doored building which played a recurring featured role in my childhood. My brother and I went to Scout meetings there. Somewhere, in its recesses of carpeted meeting rooms and linoleum hallways, I told my Brownie troop leaders that I could play the guitar (It was a plastic mickey mouse guitar with three strings) and that my parents spoke fluent spanish (well, they had lived in Panama for two years - I thought they could.) I used to hit tennis balls against the back wall for hours and hours. I watched the sunset from the church steps. People would park there during the High School football games, and once a big black man in a trench coat and a cowboy hat got out of his cadillac and handed me and my friend Tony a dollar to "keep an eye on his car." The neighborhood kids used to play in the parking lot and one day, when my mom was trying to teach me how to ride a bicycle, she was distracted and I lost control of the bike and rolled over the four foot wall, landing on the sidewalk with a bloody lip. My mom had turned around to see me heading over the wall and ran after me, leaping into the air, and landing 20 feet away in the middle of street, with a crushed knee that put her in the hospital for months. My brother and I spent that summer with various relatives in a series of blurry arrangements that ranged from mildly embarrassing to outright abusive. I can't think about that time without the phrase "we're on our own...cousin" from Tommy playing in my head.
Good times.
The church used to have a massive bronze and copper marquee on its front lawn, which informed the neighborhood of the service times and things like that. It was stolen a few years ago. I was happy that it was stolen, or rather, I was happy that the church had been vandalized, because I harbored a vague sense of resentment toward the building and its elusive inhabitants. I say elusive because for all the meetings I attended there and the hours I spent on its grounds, I can't recall a single time that I met with, talked with, or was introduced to the minister or the secretary or anyone officially connected to the church. That's the problem with protestants - no uniforms. They look like everyone else. A few times some nondescript adult would come out the back door and yell at me for hitting the tennis ball too hard against the wall. It irked me that they knew my first name. But I can barely remember their gender, let alone be able to pick them out of a line-up. You know if it had been a nun, I would have remembered. And I would have known her name. Yes Sister Agatha. Sorry Sister Agatha. I won't lie about knowing how to play the guitar, Sister Agatha.
My resentment came out of a fuzzy understanding of the events following my accident in the parking lot. I was seven, so a lot of what happened was unclear, but I know that the church acted in a way that disappointed my parents, so much so that there was a trial in a courtroom and I was put on the stand. It was all very exciting and confusing, and I know it was during those months that my blatant mistrust of authority was born. Churchpeople: no good. Judges, lawyers & "the system": no good. Relatives: no good.
But there was another incident that had informed my resentment of Dormont Methodist Church. Years later from all that, on a summer afternoon when I was ten or eleven, I was walking our dog Rags in the alley near the parking lot when a brown truck turned down the street going the wrong way and parked right outside the church. There is something fundamentally unsettling about an official looking truck going the wrong way down a one way street. It smacks of rules being broken by men with "clearances" or espionage or some kind of covert operation. It was instantly disturbing to me as I stood there with my dog, looking to see if any of the adults who were out on the street were watching this. Then it got worse.
A man came out of the truck with a big ass rifle. Maybe it was a pellet gun. I don't know. But I saw a big ass rifle. No one came out from the church to meet him, he didn't acknowledge anyone else on the street - I was only a few yards away -- or make any announcement. He just lifted his rifle, took aim, and started picking off pigeons from the roof of the church.
Oh my fucking god - dead birds started falling everywhere. And the SOUND of that GUN. I was frozen with fear. Rags was upset by the noise. I saw Mothers running out of the other apartments down the street and gathering up toddlers. People started coming out to look. Finally I picked up Rags and ran inside to tell Mom.
It's one of those bizarre events that happens in slow motion when I recall it. The man was from Animal Control, and the Church had called him to attend to their "pigeon problem."
I'm not a big fan of pigeons. They carry disease and all that, but OH MY GOD. Where does one start with what was wrong with that picture? I know I would not have articulated it exactly this way at the time, but right then and there I became aware of religious hypocrisy. I was no expert on Jesus, but I knew that he wouldn't have no part of some rogue Animal Control asshole whipping out a rifle in the middle of the day and shooting God's creatures off the roof. It just didn't jive. And to this day, people who call themselves Christians but who participate in the meat industry or who are disrespectful or cruel to animals in anyway really IRK me. What Would Jesus Eat? Not veal.
But honestly, I'm irked by so much of the behavior of folks who call themselves Christians these days that I really can't even begin to go into it.
Obviously I was reminded of this whole episode by the "sniper" who managed to shut down part of downtown yesterday, but who turned out to be some custodian picking pigeons off the roof of some building. And what is really disturbing is how everyone was sighing with relief that it was just some asswipe with a pellet gun shooting pigeons instead of oh, some terrorist.
And I'm like, you know what, people....potato - poTAHto.
But back to the stolen marquee. So the marquee was replaced by an incredibly ugly changeable sign, which now spouts cutesy messages like " When down in the mouth, remember Jonah. He came out all right." and "God answers knee-mail," and last week's "exposure to the SON is good for you."
Get it? It's a pun on sun. Jesus is the son. Get it? Gosh that's clever. That just makes me wanna go inside and pray. That makes me wanna sing a bunch of hymns and then go out and shoot me some dinner.
What WOULDN'T Jesus Do
a list
1. Shoot pigeons
2. Be mean to a woman with a smashed knee
3. Participate in today's flesh/petroleum trades resulting in destruction of the rainforests and exploitation of the third world
4. Believe a seven year old who claims to know how to play the guitar
5. Terrorize his cousin
6. Put up signs with bad puns
