Interlude 1

It was not long after the incident with the teacher regarding Noah that my attendance at church started to slack. My parents slowly stopped attending church. In part, it was because some weekends we were out of town at my great-grandparents house. Other weekends, I would be on the lake fishing, but also out of town. Maybe there were other reasons. Instead of going with my parents, my sister and I rode the church bus to church. This was awesome. The bus had doughnuts and actually stopped right in front of my house! (And it drove me to the church, which was right across the street from the school that I walked to everyday.) This was awesome. Of course the newness eventually wore off, and like all children do, I decided I didn't like riding the bus. And like my parents, I stopped going as regularly. Eventually, I stopped going myself.

Growing up in the South in the 70's and 80's, church was a fact of life. You assumed everyone went to church. But, at least where I was, I don't remember ever talking about it, unless we had a scheduling conflict. No one mentioned it, except at the beginning of the school year, when they were telling us that they had spent two weeks at church camp, or had fun in Mother's Day Out over the summer. We had way to many things to do: play football, baseball, or soccer, build sandcastles in the sandbox, ride bikes, boardgames, etc., etc. I was living life, and it was grand.