Building a mystery...

I've just spent the past half-hour Googling my high school classmates, and couldn't find a thing--not a tidbit on anyone. I know it's part and parcel of growing up in an itsy-bitsy small town, but c'mon--I'm starting to wonder about my own existence here! There's absolutely nothing, although I have a pretty rich memory of it all. Maybe it's a mythology I created in my own mind? Did I actually graduate from Cumberland Christian School, or is it all some nutball fantasy I've created for lack of anything better to do? (Trust me, there are times as a mom of very young children that making up fantasies of more interesting lives than one's own are all that get you through the day.)

I'm just feeling nostalgic tonight, but for what, and whom? Now I'm not so sure. In our info-saturated times it seems everything and everyone is on the Internet, but somehow Cumberland County, NJ is still off the grid. We always were about 15 years behind the times. But we had a great diner--the Presidential. It's gone now. It was one of those tired old diners with great breakfast specials available at midnight, with jukeboxes at every table, fluorescent lights making everyone and everything they shone on look slightly gray. Hot, salty, greasy scrambled eggs, chewy, gnarly bacon, endless cups of weak tea drowning in oily half and half...Heaven. I smoked back then. Badly. I was a terrible smoker, always smoked like a rookie and never actually enjoyed the experience enough to get addicted. I smoked really frou-frou girly cigarettes, too--Capris, I think they were called.

(Remind me to excise this bit of my history before my boys are old enough to read my blog. If they ever ask you about it, tell them their Mommy never smoked and it's a very nasty habit that will kill you. Thanks.)

Several years ago I wrote to the current pastor of the crazy church I grew up in. He was a new pastor, a couple pastors removed from the pastor who led the church while I was there--the one who wound up in prison. (Looooooooooooong story--look for the tell-all memoir I'll write somewhere between now and my grandchildren graduating college.) I was researching the whole scandal that erupted around that pastor (okay, brief synopsis: Crazy-evil fundamentalist loonies run a tiny independent church and school like a Jonesboro cult. Rampant child abuse of every imaginable description abounds. After oh, ten to twelve years of getting away with it and ruining a bunch of kids' lives, the pastor is finally busted and goes to a minimum-security prison for 6 months. His wifey, who at the least aided and abetted the whole nightmare, gets off scott-free. ) Anyways...

...researching the scandal. I sent the new pastor an email asking for info about the whole thing, because like so many parts of my history there were few primary resources to back me up--I was writing my history from the rather faulty resources of memory and emotion. He wrote me back a little note telling me God wanted me to just forget the whole thing.

mmmmhmmmm. sure. right. oooookaaaay....

So here I am, trying to find some information, some signposts that root me to the history that plays so often in my mind. And my history refuses to be Googled. If you don't exist on the Internet, do you exist in this day and age? Where I grew up, forgetfulness is somehow next to Godliness, and the past gets obliterated in the slow, plodding reality of the present.

So I blog tonight, in the absence of any other tangible signpost, to remind myself I was, once, a hick girl from NJ who grew up in the backwoods edging the Pine Barrens. Grew up in a crazy church, went to a crazy church school, had a half-assed education full of as much fire and brimstone as reading and writing, and went to sleep every night to the nightsounds of the pine trees and crickets, the moon shining like a neon sign through my bedroom window. Had up to 17 cats and dogs for pets, picked teacups full of wild strawberries and blackberries from my front yard, and graduated from the only Christian high school in the county in 1987. You won't find any documents to back up my story, but it's the only story I've got, so I keep writing it down, again and again, hoping someday my retelling of my memories of that history will be enough for me to believe it real.

I'm in a weird mood.

A poem from Denise Levertov that dropped into my mailbox earlier today, and had walked around the house with me ever since:

Talking to Grief

Ah, grief, I should not treat you

like a homeless dog

who comes to the back door

for a crust, for a meatless bone.

I should coax you

into the house and give you

your own corner,

a worn mat to lie on

your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living

under my porch.

You long for your real place to be readied

before winter comes. You need

your name,

your collar and tag. You need

the right to warn off intruders,

to consider

my house as your own

and me your person

and yourself

my own dog.

On a slightly happier note, my son has been talking to me a lot about God. Today he asked me if Jesus did magic. (Try answering that question in a theologically proper manner without confusing the heck out of your 4-year-old. Can't be done.) I think the final answer I came up with was "um, well...sorta..." and then tried to distract him with a chocolate chip cookie. In my fumbling for answers to his questions, I said:

"you sure are asking me a lot of questions about God today."

"yup," he said, "that's because God is my friend."

"Well great, hon," I enthused, "I'm so glad to hear that, because God is a good friend of mine, too."

Max just looked at me in a very superior way.

"Yes--well, he's a better friend to me".