Country Life

My mother had had it with the barrio.  She gave my father an ultimatum, and we moved to the 'burbs.

These were not the 'burbs of clean, cookie cutter houses, at least not completely.  Those are the planned development suburbs.  We moved to the exurbs, rightly speaking, what used to be rural.  Developers had built some subdivisions, but there were swaths of land with either nothing on them, or small, rural homes or mobiles.  We moved into a small house a man had built for himself and his family that had odd dimensions and crooked stuff, a house that was an admirable first effort at building a house by a person who never had and never would again.  I got the unfinished attic, with nothing between me and the ground but some boards so flimsily applied to the framing that I could have easily fallen out of the house.  My father had it jacked up three feet and had us shoveling dirt underneath for a quarter a load.  That's how my ambitious, athletic sister got her allowance.  I merely skipped lunch and used my lunch money for my own affairs.

I had reached puberty, the time when young people strive to do something.  As I mentioned before, my longings went in the direction of religion, and I began to look around for some kind of instruction.  This being the rural southeast, there was a church on about every other corner:  an Assembly of God, a Pentacostal church, several Baptist churches, a Methodist church.  The biggest, most luxurious church in our town was called the First Baptist Church, situated near the corner of a farm-to-market road and the highway, walking distance from Dairy Queen.  This was the first church I attended as a youth.

I had all but forgotten the bible school mandate to find a church.  What I found was that on Sunday morning, a church bus drove throughout out neighborhood picking up whatever kid wanted to get on it.  One day I got on the church bus and went to church.

It was a nice, big church, with nice pews and a lot of people.  There were a lot of lights and windows, so it was bright inside.  The preacher gave a noisy but kind-hearted sermon, at the conclusion of which he asked if anyone wanted to be saved.  I was the first one up.  I'm not sure I wanted to be saved so much as I wanted to belong to something in this new town, but saved I was.  They all welcomed me into the church and took my picture, which hung on the bulletin board for some weeks.  I was wearing a dark paisley dress with a large white pointy collar and had my long hair pulled back in a ponytail.  I looked not so much happy as eager.

I think I might have gone back twice.  Other than talking about Jesus, the church didn't seem to *do* anything.  Today I would say that it lacked a sense of cohesion.  In the 1970s, the culture wars had not heated up to the extent that the Baptist church was punching social issues--that has a lot of energy, and cohesion, though of a kind I am glad I got to avoid.  In the 1970s, the Southern Baptist Church was mostly a large, nice church of the Southern variety.  After church, we ate fried chicken after church, drank iced tea, and gossiped about the townspeople.  It was mostly just a Sunday go to meeting social event.

I was too Hispanic and too educated to feel that comfortable at the First Baptist Church.  My friends from school who were in this church were the pillars of society, the solid, reliable sorts, people who were acquaintances but with whom I did not have any real connection.

It just wasn't for me.