My boy Sam lasted two days in Vacation Bible School then told me he didn’t want to go back. I’m always encouraging my kids to get out of the house and get involved with life, but I didn’t try talking him out of it.
“I’m proud of you for giving it a try, son,” I said.
Sam was through with the “mean kids,” especially this boy – some future community corrections inmate who likes to throw rocks at other children at VBS.
While dropping Sam and his sister, Kenzie, off at the church Tuesday morning, I asked my son: “What are you gonna’ do if that kid throws rocks again?”
“Just ignore it,” he answered, telling me what he thought I wanted to hear.
“No son, if someone’s pullin’ that bullcrap – throwing rocks – you tell a grown-up right away. He could put somebody’s eye out, throwing rocks.”
“I’m with you,” a woman standing by us at the sign-up table said. She had a silver piercing in her nose and was holding the hand of a little girl who looked to be her daughter. That woman had to go to work, just as I did. Otherwise, I would’ve stuck around benevolently – a volunteer guarding the innocence of children as I busted the hellions and stone throwers like a hard-ass cop.
So I was cool with Sam not going. Kenzie could still go if she wanted to. Her experience had been better than Sam’s. Kenzie is 6 and she felt important, helping with the 3 and 4-year-old kids. Still, when Sam bailed out, she didn’t want to go either. She usually goes along with what her brother does.
Once I lived in a world like theirs. Many years and thousands of lost, pissed nights and bottles of booze ago, I attended vacation Bible school. We sang songs: “Have a little talk with Jesus, let us tell Him all our troubles” and played outside games like Simon Says and Red Rover.
I saw mean kids there, a few mean adults and some good people. While close in age to what my kids are now, I was neither the by-the-book rule follower my son is, nor the off-beat, (sometimes) quiet rebel my daughter is. There was an intermediate quietness about me that occasionally collapsed, such as when I had to say two nice things about a fellow Bible schooler’s elementary after I totally trash talked her school in a moment of grade school rivalry.
Neither I, nor any of the other kids, quite captured the level of depravity projected body and soul in this particular red-haired boy. Don’t remember his name and after two summers in VBS I never saw that kid again. He was all boy, a bred-in-the-bone mischief maker and terrorizer of little girls everywhere. A likeable little demon child who had to be pure hell for the ladies trying to run the whole show.
So we’d sing songs about how “if the devil doesn’t like it, he can sit on a tack.” Bible school got out, mothers approached in the parking lot and this kid bolted, singing in ignorant child-like blasphemously, “The devil made Jesus sit on a tack.”
Ouch!
Well, what do you expect? We saw WASPy images of a puny figure in a white gown. Not a man toughened by first century carpentry labor. This kid was unconsciously tapping into the J.C. and Satan caricatures that Trey Parker and Matt Stone would one day bring to comedy life on South Park.
Somewhere in the cracks of childhood, I think existed Jesus speaking Beatitudes to thirsting townspeople.
And a Satan more subtle than anything the superstition artists might have imagined.
I don’t remember any kids throwing rocks at VBS. Not saying it never happened, just that I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. One day while kids were at various play stations on the parking lot, my eyes grazed over a wiffle ball game, where to the side, a VBS helper was jerking the arm of this scrawny, awkward girl and giving her a tongue-lashing for not following directions or some stupid thing.
That woman’s son was in my class at school, said he got a spanking every day. He moved away after 4th grade. Never saw him again and somewhere around that age, after VBS at three or four churches, I didn’t go to Bible school anymore. Grew out of it, I guess.
Back in the 1950s, my mom was a Bible school kid. One day, she walked on to a bus, while wearing a lovely white dress. Too old to believe all that crap about Santa and the tooth fairy, she had the first of many monthly visits from the crimson fairy. Last time she ever wore that dress.
So many roads. When we’re walking and my boy reaches for my hand, I feel relieved. There’s still time.
A friend of Liana’s invited us to her church tomorrow. We’ll give it a go. We’ll get through life. I’m just a guy trying to save his kids from the sons of bitches in this world. I’ll pray that they can live in a world where people treat each other more kind.
And I’ll hope somewhere that red-haired kid is giving em’ hell.
