FUMING GEYSERS AND GUARDIAN ANGELS

My little big sister, Judy (right) Thanksgiving 2010

That night, Mother and Daddy did have a loud fuss. (Julie and I never called them ”fights” because most of the time, except for that one plate and the kitchen chair, they didn’t throw anything at each other except words.) But these words were horrible, sharp-pointed weapons that boiled up and spewed out of their mouths like the fuming geysers at Yellowstone Park that I had seen on the newsreels at the Rio. Sometimes in the middle of the night if Julie and I went in to try to help negotiate in some infantile way or maybe just showed up by surprise and shame them by letting them know we had heard them, I would look at their mouths and be surprised that their lips and tongues weren’t singed or blistered by the white-hot eruptions that had issued forth from them. Surprisingly, they were always still all in one piece with never any blood or even blisters. Later I learned that there really was all kinds of damage — hemorrhaging, blistering, and scarring — but that it was all inside, mainly inside my mother.

It didn’t look like religion was doing much for them either, at least not late at night when Julie and I needed to sleep and they needed to explode. In the daytime, to look at them both, you would have sworn that everything Reverend Holder was saying behind the pulpit at First Methodist was soaking in. My mother was a pretty and upstanding person who spent her days either fashioning impressively detailed dresses for her two daughters with her Singer sewing machine or working in her high-heeled shoes at “Pep’s Finance Company,” and Daddy dealt with an adoring public, treated his staff and their families with kindness and generosity, and went regularly to Lion’s Club on Thursdays at the BK Café. They had plenty of friends and were patriotic, all of which seemed like God and Jesus, His Son, would have been proud of, but it didn’t seem like Jesus was much a part of anything that went on in their bedroom late most nights.

So that night when I woke up to the geysers spouting off, I just got up and went to Julie’s room, even though I had the privilege of having a room of my very own. She let me crawl into her bed under the afghans and snuggle up under her wing where the pointy words couldn’t penetrate, at least until we had to come out to get some air. It kinda seemed like, freshman or not, that she was glad I was back, and most nights from there on out, I would sleep with her and not the clowns in my room. It’s a good thing, too, because she went back to reading the Bible to me every night and saying my prayers with me.

From fifth-grade on, I began to get a little of what was going on in the Bible stories she would read to me, and some nights I would stay awake for the whole story. People like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Abraham and Isaac, and Peter began to seem like real folks with real problems that could have sat and visited together on one of the twirling stools at the soda fountain of Green’s Drugstore or come walking out of the dime store with a sack of roasted peanuts as I passed by on the sidewalk. When she would read to me right there lying under the covers, two feet away in her fourteen-year-old voice, all of those “thee’s” and “thou’s” and holy words seemed to carry more meaning than when Reverend Holder would say them forty feet away down front wearing his long black robe and standing behind the pulpit in front of the choir on Sunday mornings.

Yessir, even though she was just a kid, I think in the long run you’d have to give Julie most of the credit for keeping me out of the Shelby County jailhouse.

BRINGING IN THE CLOWNS

By early October, knowing I had to get up and spend five days a week with Mrs. Gravitts had worn my childlike joyfulness thin, and at ten, I was already acting like a grouchy grown-up. Everybody in my family, even Julie, thought it was funny to call me "Sunshine." Rather than the desired effect of making me see the error of my ways, hearing "Sunshine" just made the dark cloud that brewed over my head grow angrier and blacker. It seems like for a while there I was pretty much a constant brewing storm and threatening tempest.

It was bad enough that my own family members called me names, but one night at the supper table the funnel cloud touched ground and nearly made goulash out of Mother's nicely laid-out rump roast, jacket potatoes, turnip greens, and fried green tomatoes. Julie had invited her boyfriend, Travis Wayne Harvey, over for supper. As he approached the table where I was already sitting, he opened his mouth and said, "Hey, there, Sunshine!"

Well, that was it. The combination of somebody who was not even a member of my family calling me "Sunshine" and Mrs. Gravitts' clanking teeth and murderous paddle frenzies was enough to push me over the edge.

"Don't you Sunshine me, you bigmouthed bully! Did you hear him, Mother? He is not even a member of this family!"

I let loose with a torrent of high-pitched scowls, and then, with a flourish of drama, turned over my chair and ran to my room. I was hungry; I loved fried green tomatoes, and we didn't have them everyday. I fully expected to be rescued and coaxed back to the supper table, but all that happened next was laughter. I could hear them in there laughing at me!


It's a terrible thing when growing up takes you to the place for the very first time where you aren't experienced enough to know what to do next: if you have a semi-civilized family like I did, you aren't street-smart enough to know how to cuss eloquently or get in the last shocking word, and you know that if you go off half-cocked and try to pay them back in some outlandishly violent way like busting out your sister's boyfriend's windshield with your pogo stick or busting out the kitchen window with your fist and scattering glass all over the table, when your daddy gets home, he will forget the civilized part of his nature and let him barbaric nature handle it with his belt. So I just sat there hungry and listened to Brenda Lee singing, "I'm Sorry," (which I wasn't) and Johnny Horton singing, "North to Alaska"( which is where I wished Travis Wayne Harvey would go).

If it hadn't been for me, he might never have made it to first base with my sister. He had been able to pull the wool over Mother's and Daddy's eyes about being an okay boyfriend to their firstborn daughter totally at my expense. It was last fall at one of the football games. Somebody had thrown a cigarette down from the bleachers, and since I was walking by and noticed that it was a perfectly good, unfinished cigarette, I just picked it up and took a couple of puffs. I should have taken time to look around a little bit first, though, because Travis Wayne happened to be leaving the concession stand and saw me. Before I got home, he had found a way to tell my parents the whole story. This made me so mad I couldn't see straight, but of course Julie was so cross-eyed in love with this jerk that she took up for him.

She came to me pleading his case: "Jen, Travis Wayne was just doing what was best for you. You should feel good that he wanted to take care of you! He was really only doing what your own big brother would have had one." This was a down time for Daddy, so she didn't think of him as a brother right then.

Just the thought of Travis Wayne Harvey as my brother made me want to throw up. Since he and Julie had just started going out, I guess he figured he could make a little headway with Mother and Daddy by blabbing, like some self-righteous big brother figure. I should have beat him to the punch right then in the name-calling department before he called me "Sunshine." I had a few good ones for him, "Eddie Haskell" being among the first.

No siree, he had blown it with me, and trying to join in now like he was family was enough to make me want to take a ballpoint pen and go out and let all the air out of his tires.

Our mother was an artistic genius. At the same rate Daddy took up new hobbies and cranked out pranks, Mother cranked out handiwork. Once she made Daddy this beautiful Mexican-style shirt with lace down the front beside the buttons, and after wearing it only one day to work, he came home with a list as long as your arm of women who wanted her to make one for their husbands. Girl Scout leaders were always inciting her to come teach the girls how to embroider or make pillows or candles. On this particular night after the "Sunshine" fiasco with Travis Wayne, Mother started making some mosaic tile pictures. They were a set of clowns, one with a happy face and the the other one with a sad face.

She said, "Jen, I am making these for your room. We'll put one over each of your beds, and every night when you go to bed, you can choose which clown's face reflects the way you are feeling since you seem to be having some bad days this year."

"Okay, I guess that's a good idea," I said. "But don't let that Travis Wayne call me names. He doesn't even belong here. Why does he have to come over here and spoil our meals? Let him find his own food. Doesn't he have a home and a supper table? Why does Julie have to like him? Why does she have to have a boyfriend at all?"

"Well, you should understand, Jen. After all, you have a boyfriend," she answered calmly without looking up from her Elmer's Glue and colored rocks.

"What do you mean, I have a boyfriend?" I asked innocently and I thought quite convincingly too.

"Now you know good and well that you like Johnny Paul Hightower, and he likes you too."

"Me and Johnny Paul and Bubba just play football, together every afternoon. I don't like Johnny Paul for a boyfriend anymore," I assured her. Johnny Paul, who was also in Mrs. Fletcherton's room in fourth grade and lived down the street, had come over and popped Black Cats with me on our front porch several nights in a row before Christmas and, after we ran out of firecrackers, had kissed me on the lips just like Frankie Avalon kissed Annette Funicello at the Rio Theater. We also went to the Methodist hayride and held hands, and so our mothers both went out and bought us Christmas presents to exchange: I got him a red sweater vest, and he got me a comb and brush set with a mother of pearl mirror. Right after Christmas we had broken up because it turns out that he was the kind of boy that only likes a girl when she doesn't like him back. This attitude was the most ignorant thing I had ever heard of, and it made me pretty mad, since I had given up a way of life to become his girlfriend. And besides that, I hated having my hair brushed with his or anybody else's brush, much less combed, which hurts even worse, which means I didn't have any reason to want to look in that dumb mirror he gave me either. So now, I had bounced right back into my tomboyism and didn't know where my mother had gotten such a crazy idea about me having him or anybody else for a boyfriend.

I didn't want to talk about it anymore, so I said, "Can I sleep with Julie tonight?" I had the feeling that Mother and Daddy were going to fight because she kept calling people trying to find him and couldn't. I didn't want to be in the room next to theirs and hear all that, even though I knew that my parents were trying to give my sister some grown-up freedom from her little sister sharing her room now that she was a freshman in high school and how they were going to do that was to tell me I was finally "getting to have" my very own room.

"Now, Jen, why would you want to do that after we've given you your very own room with two beds that will, as soon as I can finish them, have these really cute clowns over them?" Julie isn't getting any new pictures in her room. You just finished telling me you liked these clowns, and we made that plan about you climbing into the appropriate bed every night, remember?"

That was the thing about most adults. You give them an inch, and they take a mile. I mean, what could I do? When she asked me about those clowns, I couldn't just tell her that I was too big for something that she had just spent a bunch of money on trying to use as a psychological plot to make me fell important. So I had very non-noncommittally, mind you, agreed that this was an okay idea. And now, you'd have thought that I put my hand on a Bible and promised to love, honor, and obey these clowns all the days of my life.

But then again, maybe if I was afraid to sleep in my own room, I was not too big for circus clowns.

MY BIG BROTHER, DADDY

Although my sister Julie was pretty perfect, she wasn't really all that bad. She was four years older than me and had just entered into Azalea Heights High School. You might think the reason she was so motherly toward me was that she was so old now-- a freshman in high school-- but that wasn't it. She had claimed me as her baby from the day I came into this world three weeks late. I don't remember all this, of course, but everybody says she was just like another little mommy and that as I grew older and my badness couldn't keep being blamed on being a baby, she would look up at my real mother and ask with a sigh, "What are we going to do with Jen?" as though some of the responsibility for raising me and keeping me out of jail belonged to her. That's probably because she knew that everybody needs two parents, and technically, I only had one, our mother, Judy Crocker. Our daddy was more like a mischievous big brother than a daddy, so Mother was really trying to rear three kids all by herself. I guess Julie, being the firstborn and making it into the world on time instead of three weeks late, caught on fast, felt sorry for our mother, and decided to be her own second parent and help Mother raise us other two.

Our daddy, named Leon Perry Crocker, was nicknamed "Pep" when he was just a little boy, and that name had stuck throughout his life so far; even his car dealership and cafe were named "Pep's Pontiacs" and "Pep's Smokehouse," though you would think that a grown man would have better sense than to put a chopped-off name that wasn't even a real name up on a big neon sign and hope to attract mature customers looking for a trustworthy businessman to feed them a safe meal or sell them a reliable car.

He liked to brag about some of the things he did as a kid in Tenaha: steal his own aunt's chickens to sell for money to go to the picture show, and use a bicycle tire pump to pump up his friend, Wiley Earl Skaggs, through his rear end because he couldn't swim, and he wanted to see if this would make him shoot across the pond like a motorboat. I'll bet if he'd dropped the "Pep" and started going by "Leon" when he got to be an adult, he would have turned over some kind of a new leaf that would have made him get this kind of behavior out of his system, but he didn't , and if you ask me, this is why he kept getting into things he shouldn't. Not like jail or anything like that. He was what was called a "white-collar worker" because he did things like be a bank vice-president once and own his own insurance and finance companies and later hospitals and nursing homes. So getting in jail was out of the question. He just acted like a kid once he got off work in the afternoons and took off his white shirt. Even though he never did get really drunk and stagger around, he'd drink beer and whiskey almost every night with his friends like it was something he was getting away with. He'd get on these jags just like a kid-- like suddenly taking up the guitar or the motor scooter or landing his airplane on Highway 287, or buying a fighting rooster he named "The Hawaiian Slasher," which if you didn't know, is against the law, even in Shelby County.

Not that the law ever made much difference to him. I don't remember him ever getting his car inspected, and once when his brakes went out in his old gray Packard, he just started using the emergency brake. He'd take me to school in the Packard, and when we were about to stop, he'd yell, "Hang onto your false teeth!" and then yank up the emergency brake. If I didn't have my feet firmly braced in front of me, I would have knocked all my teeth out on the dashboard. Finally, after a few months of this, the emergency brake went out, and he would slow way down about a block from the school, and I'd just open my door at a low speed and jump out.

Another thing he got a hankering to do that might have been a little bit illegal was to build a still in our utility room. He had this idea that he could make his own beer, so he brought home some I.V. tubes and bottles from the hospital and rigged up a still right there beside the deep freeze. This was an embarrassing thing to try to explain when friends came over after school and we'd go in there to get a Coke. It was even embarrassing when Faylene Holder, daughter of Reverend Leonard Holder, came over, and she was one of the wildest kids anybody knew of, besides Becky O'Hearn and a whole nest of seasoned hoodlums from five generations back named the Beckhams.

It wasn't that Faylene was a hoodlum so much as that she was sneaky and even more of a tomboy than I was. People thought that she was all good because her daddy was the preacher and her two older sisters were beautiful and smart and were named exotic, feminine names-- Sharlyne and Cheryl (both with "y's" where there should have been "e's") -- and never had acted like they were anything but thirty-five their whole lives. They probably would have thought Julie and her friends should have been sent to reform school for turning over Mrs. Gravitts' wastebasket.

But Faylene wasn't so perfect, if you want to know the truth. One day in fourth grade she came over and suggested that we use the doll bottles we were playing with to give ourselves enemas. Also she had a calf that lived in her own back yard there at the church parsonage right downtown. A dog wasn't good enough for Faylene; she wanted this calf, and when she got him, she named him "Junior Lee Holder" and fed him with a bottle with a great big nipple (much too big to be used to give yourself an enema.)

So with Daddy always being on one adolescent binge after another, you can see why Julie felt like Mother could use a little help. As it turned out, Julie was the one who ended up coming to my rescue and saving me from the terrors of sleeping in a room next to my parents' room all by myself.

(From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights by Jan Doke, © Jan Doke, 2009)

UNCIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

I had to be in the band room because I played a cornet in the band, and the band room that particular year was Mrs. Gravitts' room. I knew Mrs. Gravitts was a terror from way back because my saintly sister didn't even like her. In fact, she and her equally saintly friends got so mad at Mrs. Gravitts one day that they "broke into" the school late one Friday (which means that they went in the unlocked doors when the janitors were still there) and turned over her wastebaskets. Julie and her bunch weren't too bright in the field of vandalism and didn't have a shining future as aspiring hoodlums because they never once considered that because of the janitors who got to Mrs. Gravitts' room late in the day, Mrs. Gravitts would never even know of the offenses against her. All they knew was that they were mad at her for whipping one of the poor kids, so they cast all caution to the wind and let their ire have its way. It was their first and last strike as far as I know. It was hard for me to understand these girls: they had worked their worst upon an offending society, wreaked uncivil disobedience upon a public school teacher's classroom on a weekend, had never gotten caught, and yet unlike most red-blooded kids in their prime, they did not seem to find their success as outlaws even the least bit titillating so as to be lured stealthily but surely into bigger and better criminality. This had been enough for them, thank you very much.

Well, I say they didn't get caught because they didn't-- by the school, that is. The only one to catch them was me, who happened to be playing on the school grounds when I spotted them and jumped on my bike and peddled home as fast as my six-year-old legs would take me to tell Mother and Daddy. Already at six I was tired of having a corner on the market on spankings from our daddy's belt. When Julie stepped out into sin's arena, I took no chances that she would make it a habit and seized the opportunity to initiate her into the fellowship of suffering. My parents didn't do much, though, except send her back up to the school to clean up her mess. On the other hand, they both lit into me and at the same time started yammering some far-out nonsense about a black pot and kettle.

Julie and her friends were right about Mrs. G. I knew first rattle out of the box that this lady was going to make for an interminably long fifth-grade year. She clacked her false teeth to scare us, yelled at us when she was in a good mood, and beat everybody with her paddle, blackened from years of carnage, when she was in any other kind of mood. She'd take kids out in the hall, bend them over, rare back, and with a loud grunt, throw her full weight behind the force of that board and smile only when the offender on the other end of the paddle cried out or lost his or her footing and went sliding across the floor and banged into the wall. You learned right off the bat to do that quick so that she would sate her sadism after one or two whacks rather than keeping you out there all day till your clothes were beaten into tatters.

Most of the time the one getting snatched out for something was a kid named Jesse Pugh, who had no business being in Mrs. Gravitts' room because he was not in the band, and he didn't have any business being in the fifth grade because he was about twenty His little brother Arnie, who was in there, too, was also not in the band, but he was at least the right age. Jesse would make his hair greasy on purpose, punch holes in the pittypat balls with his knife, and spit over the retaining wall on the second graders. But probably the reason he had failed all those years was that he wouldn't come to school more than three or four days a month. I figured the principal had assigned him to Mrs. Gravitts because she was the only teacher mean enough to control him. But Jesse wasn't the only one Mrs. Gravitts enjoyed whipping.

The very month school started, I got stupid when I was getting my whipping. It was picture day, and Mother had made me wear a dress with five ruffledy petticoats, and when Mrs. Gravitts lit into me, I couldn't feel a thing. Shoot, I wouldn't have even known she had started in on me if I hadn't heard her back there grunting and chomping her false teeth. What I did next was dumber than even something a third grader would have done: I laughed. Well, I learned, and you should too, don't ever laugh in this situation with a person like this because that was her cue to crank it up into high gear and opt for the throwing-me-against-the-wall tactic. She knew I had on prissy girl shoes without a wide base, so she had the advantage here.

On that particular day, I was having all kinds of trouble with the tenth commandment. Tina Farnsworth had just gotten a brand new blue coat with a rabbit collar, which she wore to school on this rare cool snap in September. She was a girly-girl with big baby doll eyes, long eyelashes, and curly hair. I didn't care about all that; I was a dedicated tomboy who had to be threatened or bribed every day to let my mother comb the tangles out of my hair and had never even noticed that people had eyelashes before everybody started making such a big deal over Tina's. I had absolutely no desire to look girlish.

Connie LaFevre did though. She was so jealous of the way Tina looked and upset that she didn't look anything like that at all that her mother finally had to resort to casting false aspersions on Tina by telling Connie that Tina's eyes were too close together. This wasn't really the truth at all, but this was when the whole world was nuts over Jacqueline Kennedy whose eyes were about four feet apart, so folks kept falling prey to making unfair comparisons. Then Connie lost it one day with Tina for being the teacher's pet and told her what her mother had said. Then Tina went and told her mother what Connie's mother had said. In a town the size of Azalea Heights, the grown ups really needed to get along because they had to play bridge together and go to PTA. I guess the only thing that kept all of them from killing each other was that they could always blame us kids by saying that we misunderstood what they had said. This was a lot like the excuses we used just to go ahead and do something we knew we shouldn't. On the rare occasion that I would balk at doing something I shouldn't, my best friend, Carla Nations, would shrug her shoulders and pronounce, "We're young. We don't know any better."

I don't know that I was as covetous about Tina's new coat as I was just plain fed up with her being such a perfect little lady in practically every way, so I made a plan to take a little of the shine off her silvery world the next day. I went home that night and got one of the hypodermic needles my daddy had given me from his hospital so that I could practice being a doctor on an orange and took it to school where I filled it up with ink. Me and Dixie Ruth Foster, Mary Nell Bobbitt, and Prudence Mahoney proceeded to take turns going to sharpen our pencils, and while there we would shoot ink all over Tina's rabbit collar coat. This is why I was outside on picture day getting knocked against the wall in a dress with five petticoats.

It occurs to me that religion was not working with me at that point in my life. Sunday school and church were not taking. I was easily irritated into vengeance for little reason; I was totally untamed and rebellious toward the chief authority figure of my Monday-Friday, September-May ten-year-old world; and my mind was fearfully quick and acute at devising evil. It looked for all the world that I would have gotten just as much good out of crawfishing or climbing in under the cracked foundation of the old cotton gin and braving the drunken bums on Sunday mornings as I was getting sitting there all dressed up with the First Methodists. No sirree. The church was definitely not going to be enough to scare the devil out of this kid.

From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights, by Jan Doke, © Jan Doke, 2009)

DEMONS ON HERALD STREET

No one could make heads nor tails of what bred the demon that hatched out in me between fourth and fifth grades. The fourth grade was as fine as cat's hair. I was in Mrs. Betty Fletcherton's room, and since I was her cousin, she let me the classroom dentist and pull teeth, so I had a year in the limelight. (She never let me bring in a reclining chair or drill or put in fillings or attach braces, even though I could have handled the braces because once in church I had managed with two paperclips to build myself a whole set, and by the time Reverend Holder had finished his sermon, I had them fastened on so tight, we had to use a pair of pliers to get them off.)

But now just a few months later, it was like some invisible cowboy had pulled open a chute and turned this twisting, stomping, dirt-kicking she-devil loose on Azalea Heights. By then Daddy had lost his fervor for the movie camera, so we didn't have any spools of film that we could slow down or stop and rewind for another look to learn the answer from some telling darkening of my countenance. Later on people would speculate that I had just finally breathed my fill of the toxins that were being manufactured by my parents' escalating melee in vast quantities within the walls of 212 Herald Street.

This was their second round of matrimony to each other, and the sewn-up sheets seemed doomed to unravel once again. I guess their repentance wore off, and whatever dastardly behaviors both of them had agreed to wash down the drain weren't chased with a strong enough dose of healing waters, and so they came bubbling back up. Angry words of accusation spurred by long-simmering jealousies darted dangerously through the air late at night penetrating the walls of Julie's bedroom. There we huddled under a pile of quilts and afghans in search of warmth from the constant arctic blast being cranked out by her Curtis Mathis window unit. The fact that the air conditioner bellowed boisterously and the quilts stayed piled up twelve months out of the year tells you that the noise we manufactured and the quilts we used as bivouacs were defenses against more than the frigid air in our bedroom.

Occasionally more than words would fly. Once there was a plate, and another memorable morning we awoke to find one of the green padded aluminum dinette chairs poised precariously in the wall above the deep freeze with all four of its legs a foot deep into sheetrock. Mother refused to take it down because she wanted Daddy to see it when he got up and feel the foolishness of trying to explain it. Daddy, of course, wouldn't give her the satisfaction, so it just stayed there like some perverted art exhibit. Our friends who came over regularly finally just got so used to that green kitchen chair poking our of the yellow sheetrock, they'd just saunter on by it like it was as normal a sight as white clouds swimming through a blue sky.

But I don't know. If my hurtling into hoodlumism was some kind of a message I was sending, I sure didn't know it. I just thought I was having fun.


(From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights, by Jan Doke © Jan Doke, 2009)

OUT OF THE CHUTE IN AZALEA HEIGHTS

As soon as I finished writing and publishing Broken Jar, I discovered I was hankering to write something a little different. I had always feared jumping into fiction because I just couldn't come up with any new ideas for stories; I am much better at poetic-type composing, even it doesn't go down on paper in poetic form. Then one day it hit me that the truth of my fifth-grade year was possibly even more interesting than fiction, and since probably nobody would believe it was the truth, it technically could qualify as fiction. And by calling the truth "fiction," I could exaggerate and fabricate my head off without it ever truly being lying.

Three weeks later it was done, but a year-and-a-half later it is still unpublished. Maybe I'm not finished, maybe I'm hoping I can get a "real" publisher to pick it up, maybe I'm too broke to publish it myself, maybe I'm just procrastinating.

But blogging is publishing, so I decided that I'd try it out on you. My plan is to publish it here for you to peruse maybe a chapter at a time, at least for a while. We'll see if works out that way. But you need to promise me you will go into this with the proper mindset: you will be journeying into something akin--in pattern, if not in quality-- to To Kill A Mockingbird or Cold, Sassy Tree in that it is from the point of view of a kid, specifically a high-energy, fast-talking fifth grader enthusiastically dedicated to learning as little as possible within the confines of public education. This is not a daily devotional book, although hopefully when you finish, you will feel closer to the Great Listener, the One who deserves our dearest devotion. Prepare to enter the mind of a ten-year-old East Texas tomboy. The year is 1961.

CHAPTER ONE

WITH NO MALICE AFORETHOUGHT

There is a way of living that takes you meandering targetlessly until you show up somewhere. If you were older and wiser, you'd have enough sense to hope that God would be in the place you landed that day or month or year or childhood. If you were even older and even wiser, you'd arrest the development of such targetless meandering and find yourself a destination on some kind of a map before setting out on the road. But I wasn't old, and I wasn't wise. And though I went to Sunday school and church every Sunday, most other days I wasn't thinking much about who or where God was. What I was was young, wildly impulsive, and wholly sold out to goallessness.

I was Georgia Jen Crocker, fifth-grader at Azalea Heights Elementary School. The school was named after nothing and no one. It wasn't even really a name at all-- just a convenient descriptor for the people of our little East Texas town of Azalea Heights to know where to deposit their kids when it came time to start first grade. No one ever told me why we changed the name from"Azalea Heights Grammar School," but somebody did, and it seemed like most people felt kinda proud for giving up something old and traditional and latching onto something cutting edge. Other folks must have felt they had had some prophetic wisdom even in the backwoods of East Texas, though, because they never would acknowledge the school's new name anymore than they would acknowledge the existence of Daylights Savings Time. I didn't have enough sense then to admire their kind of tenacity to tradition or to roll my eyes at the weakness of jumping on every trendy bandwagon that rolled through town. I just swallowed-- hook, line, and sinker-- the new name, and let "Azalea Heights Elementary School" roll off my tongue as easy as too much spit.

As for my name, it was anything but a descriptor. I got my first name from my Aunt Georgia, who never lived anywhere near Georgia, and my second name from the "J" bank of my mother's imagination. It had to be a "J" name to sound good with my sister, Julie's, "J" name. I never could get a clear answer as to why it was just plain "Jen," which sounds more like an abbreviation than a real name, rather than "Jennifer" or "Virginia," which most people who end up with "Jen" start out with. I have often suspected that I got a chopped-off version of a name-- which by the way is the one they ended up calling me instead of my first one-- because I was almost three weeks late entering this word, and Mother thought starting me out with a quarter-note name would hinder any further inclination I might have toward dragging my feet and drawing things out unnecessarily.

If that was her thinking, it must have worked, for I was as slippery and hard to pin down as a tadpole in Tenaha Creek. I didn't set out to be wild, and the way I lived wasn't any kind of "acting out" or "desperate cry for attention" that I would hear about years later in the enlightened and sophisticated world outside the boundaries of Shelby County. I just got up every day of my life back then and took off living it with no spiteful scheming or malice aforethought whatsoever. But the way my days usually wound up in fifth grade, I couldn't have done a better job of wreaking hoodlum havoc if I had sat down and orchestrated some kind of a grand plan.

(from Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights by Jan Doke-copyright Jan Doke,2009)

OUGHTERS AND WANTERS

God's Word reminds us over and over that we should love God, not only with all of our mind and strength, but also with all of our heart. There is a reason for that. When our heart gets behind us in something, we are sure to be victorious.

We do lots of things in a perfunctory way--and granted, for survival's sake, some things pretty much have to be done that way. If we stopped to throw everything we are into brushing our teeth and tying our shoes we would be out of energy before we got to the things that deserved that kind of energy and focus. Yes, we must dress and drive and make appointments and change the sheets, and to do these mindlessly is probably not only permissible but appropriate; hopefully we can multitask at least well enough to do these kinds of things with just a smidgen of our brain and just enough heart to make the task palatable enough to continue to do it on a routine basis. (People who decide not to do these things because they don't enjoy them are the kinds of people most of us would label ''slobs".... So today I am not promoting full-scale heart-throwing after every menial task, and I hope you are not considering throwing scriptures back at me about "doing everything heartily as unto the Lord." Okay, maybe we should find pleasure in doing the menial somehow simply because we are given the blessing of breathing another day to do another menial task, but personally being able to do some tasks mindlessly allows me some much needed time to think more about the things that do really matter.

But what I want to talk about today has more to do with praying to live out our lives' calling with something more than a perfunctory attitude-- praying to love what we are given to do in a way that influences the part of our mind we call "the heart." I know the importance of a heart that knows what it means to be thrilled, a heart-consciousness that realizes right in the middle of doing a thing I need to do that lo! I am having something very closely akin to ...FUN! And rightly so. Having fun is for so much more than having fun. Choosing deliberately to clothe ourselves in all those Christian characteristics that we read about in Colossians is crucial if we are to waylay the gravity of sloth and worldliness. (Sloth because without heart for a job, it soon grows so wearisome that we are tempted to do it halfheartedly and then finally not at all. And worldliness because when our hearts are not engaged in anything holy, they get restless to be engaged in just about anything that will produce a thrill.) There is no denying that we were not put here primarily for fun, or Jesus would not have used the picture of heading off to die when He told us to "take up our crosses and follow Him."

But there are many Christian duties that, even though our sighs might indicate differently, we know good and well don't require anything CLOSE to dying. They are the woof and warp , the everyday staples of productive Christian living. We do them all right, but often we do them as Shakespeare described the young boy: "creeping like snail unwillingly to school." * What if we could somehow learn to think of these tasks as fun? What if we could learn to throw our hearts behind them and not just our wills? What if what we ought to do become the very things we want to do? It can happen. Our "oughters" can be one and the same with our "wanters." For a long time I watched it happen in others, and finally, after much praying about it, I am beginning to see it happening in me. Take Psalm 37:4 as God's literal promise to you.

What I am suggesting today is this: As you go down your prayer list, rather than just praying for their health and safety or wisdom in making decisions, pray that God will give to those you love a heart for the tasks He would have them do. Pray that they will learn to love what God calls them to do rather than tolerate it with a sigh. I'm going to be praying this for all of you. Would you please do the same for me?

"DELIGHT YOURSELF IN THE LORD, AND HE WILL GIVE YOU THE DESIRES OF YOUR HEART." PSALM 37:4

*William Shakespeare, As You Like It (Act II, Scene VII)