Marion did very much like Charles Darwin the famous scientist so hated by such Christians as our pastor at church Elder Babcock due to Evolution however. Marion Becker Chance has always been an extremely serious type woman, who for instants loves to go down to OMSI more than anyplace else on Earth as they call the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry for short, and lovely spots such as the beach find her buried in rocks at feet of cliffs with her back to the beautiful blue ocean, digging around for fossils and such.
Besides a Scientist Marion is also a Pacifist and an Atheist. This means she is basically against most things, such as War, Sports, and God. Don’t get me wrong here. She is a fine woman in her way. Just a bit too serious and sinnical, we feel. My brothers Everett and Peter (you remember Pete!) think this wierd outlook of Marions must of started up because her two brothers or maybe three were either all three or both killed during W.W.1, which Marion calls The Great War, inspite of W.W.2 being Greater. It also probably never helped when both her parents died shortly thereafter of a combination of broken hearts and the Spanish Inflewenza. Anyhow The Great War destroyed England forever, Marion claims, inspite of it still being there as I like to kid her, although kidding Marion is about like feeding the pearls before the swine in most cases, since pearls, swine and Marion all laugh about the same amount. Anyhow this destroyed condition of England was why Marion Becker Chance migrated to America, along with sorrow being the other chief reason. But then she turned around and never became a U.S. Citizen either, which later had very serious aftereffects for both her and my dad both, by whom I mean of course our hero, her son, Hugh. In 1928 however, Marion cleaned up her glum act long enough to snag a big southpaw math teacher at the Univercity there in Chicago, named Professor Everett Chance as mentioned. But we call him Everett Senior to fend off confusing him with our own Everett, who we call plain old Everett, for short.
Getting on with our story then, Everett Senior according to reports was about as All American of a guy and as great of a guy as a guy could get apparently, thereby proving what they say about opposites attract so far as him and long-faced English Marion was concerned. Unfortunately Everett Senior is also now dead at present, almost as if everything Marion touched turned into a corpse at some fairly quick point in time. In my heart I feel that this bad luck of hers is a big fat HINT, and that things would go much better for her if she would only except Christ as her personnel Lord and Savoir. But as our Everett says, it’ll be a snowy day in H-E-Blank-Blank before Marion Becker Chance does a thing like that. Meanwhile she continues to love Charles Darwin, hate God, Sports and War, and be known to us as Grandawma since that was how Everett said her name when he was a tyke and it stuck, and to this day her apartment resides less than a mile from our house here in town, unfortunately allowing no pets so that her skanky bulldog Gomorrah stinks it up here with us. But I like her. Grandawma I mean. Gomorrah too, as far as possible, I suppose.
Getting back to the son my father Hugh. After six years of life in Illinoiss he can’t remember all that well due to his smallness during this period of time, Hugh moved to Pullman Washington where he grew up due to his dad Everett Senior took a job there at the State College of Washington (GO COUGS!!) to teach mathamatics as usual, but also to coach Varsity Baseball as well. He didn’t tell Marion about the baseball part till after they were in Washington however, which turned out to have loud and violent aftereffects.
Getting back to the parents here a minute, Everett Senior felt it wasn’t any of his wife’s dang business, him deciding to coach baseball. Whether or not the man should wear the pants in the family, he should at least be allowed to wear his own pants, was how he felt about it. Marion however felt that the whole family was more or less jammed into one big pair of pants so that everything anybody else did could be bichbichbiched about by anybody else. Of course this goes against everything the Bible has to teach us about mankind, womankind, and the pants. But Marion hated the Bible, so what could you do? “NOBODY IS TELLING YOU TO COACH BASEBALL!” Hugh reports Everett Senior spouting at his firey wife when she kept having duck fits. Hugh gets quite the bang out of chucklingly recalling his folks’s loud and colorful debates of this period, both about baseball and other matters such as
ARE WOMEN TRULY SMARTER?
ARE ATHELETES ALL A BUNCH OF WAR-MONGERERS?
WHOSE TURN TO DO DISHES? and of course
GOD? since Everett Senior was a good Episcopalian as a kid and always believed on Him no matter what, right up until he died in Germany, same as me, except of course I’m Adventist not Episcopalian and have not died, as of yet.
But getting back to the southpawed Hugh here, it is interesting to notice how inspite of her hate of sports Marion
Number 1, was lefthanded and
Number 2, loved to throw things!
Glasses, plates, and even objects, such as large lamps, got regularly smashed to smithereens in hers and her husband’s loud and colorful debates, Hugh reports. Gladly, neither opponent came to much harm, except how words will sometimes cut deep, between throws. There were close ones though. The most famous close one for instants was this fork Marion hurled clear across the kitchen only to stick deep in the oak table between two of Everett Senior’s helpless fingers. To Marion’s shocked dismay however this only overjoyed the stalwart husband, by proving that both sides of the family had tremendous arms, so surely young Hugh would have one also!
Getting off the subject here a minute, this same oak table resides in our kitchen to this day, causing my brothers and me while eating dinner, breakfast, lunch, between-meal-snacks or whatever to break out pondering those four deep forkholes. She is so skinny! we ponder. And only four foot eleven! we ponder. How the heck did she do it! So one day Pete and Everett decided to experiment, throwing forks at a similar type piece of wood at a similar type distance and angle till totally exhausted, and listen to this! THEY NEVER STUCK A ONE! This finding began to make what Marion did seem like a total Miracle, or as young Kincaid says, like a total waist of a Miracle. But at the Miracle Point here it is interesting to notice how the experiment hit each of us four brothers different, depending on the type of person we were. Everett for instance, a Doubting Thomas Type, decided Marion must be lying and actually just stabbed the fork into the table trying for Everett Senior’s hand. Peter on the otherhand, a Religious Type though a bit weird from such Christian standpoints as my own, felt that anger is so powerful of a force that a really powerful anger could convince a thrown fork to stick superhumanly even if we can’t stick one ourselves under more regular types of conditions. Meanwhile myself, a Faithful Adventist Type, agreed with Pete, as did young Kincaid, a Fairly Normal Type who by the way will be in your class the year after next and is one smart cookie Mr. Hergert! Anyhow, Papa finally got so sick of us pondering those four deep fork-holes that he filled them with puddy and painted the whole table dark green.
Getting back off the sidetracks then, Everett Senior instead of becoming a famous math genius or fossil expert such as Marion hoped in his spare time became Varsity Baseball Coach at Washington State College from 1936 up to 1942, which is a pretty famous thing to be itself if you ask me. You can still see his picture and read about him in old Cougar yearbooks, and you’ll find his name proudly listed under COACH on the trophy in that glass case at the football stadium there, for winning the League Crown once, in 1939. HOW MANY MATH AND FOSSIL EXPERTS’S NAMES DO YOU SEE LISTED ON THAT TROPHY? is what I sometimes want to ask Marion. I don’t do it however, as she is quite old and rickety enough as is.
Kincaid:
Sabbath School/Washougal, Washington/February/1963
Brother Beal has stuck me in The Corner again. What happens in The Corner is you sit facing the wall with a Bible in your lap till you’ve memorized this week’s Memory Verse. What Brother Beal hasn’t yet figured out is that I don’t learn my Memory Verses on purpose. I like it in The Corner.
There are six of us here this morning, which is about average unless it’s some verse such as Shew m
e a penny or Jesus wept. Beal’s helper, Sister Durrel, had to scour the whole basement to come up with enough Bibles for us. Then, when she was passing them out, she smiled and gave the only illustrated one to me. I about died! Sister Durrel is so beautiful compared to everything else at Sabbath School it’s like my eyeballs turn into compass needles, and she’s North. One time up in church I stared at her so long that Everett got embarrassed and gouged me in the ribs, telling me to knock it off, but I gouged him right back and said, “Why should I?” He gouged me again and whispered, “Because Sister Durrel is at least eight years older than you, and engaged to Brother Beal, and if she was your age she wouldn’t have breasts and her thick brown hair would be in scraggly pigtails and she’d be as knobbly-kneed and snot-nosed as every other girl you know!” I’ll admit I hadn’t thought of some of that. But I gouged him right back again and said that if she was my age I’d ask her to marry me anyhow: I’d just set the wedding date for the age she is now.
It was by accident that I discovered how much nicer it is getting sent to The Corner than it is sticking with the Sabbath School class. The main trouble with the class isn’t Brother Beal’s lectures, which are only boring. It’s these cockeyed study groups they break us up into. After a hard week of real school, the last thing a person needs first thing Saturday morning is some goody-goody mom or dad grilling them on this Sabbath’s lesson in Pathfinder Magazine or My Little Friend. The Corner is supposedly a punishment: you sit with your back to the class, and you can’t talk. But what good is freedom of speech if all you can use it for is answering goody-goody study group questions? To me it makes more sense to get thrown in The Corner, where the freedom of not-speaking allows you to sit back and rest. Resting is what Sabbath is all about anyway. It’s what God Himself does with His Saturdays. It’s right there in the Bible, Everett says: “Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work, but on the Seventh Day God rested, so human beings should do the same. And getting all gussied up and going to church is not resting.” All Mama ever says to that, though, is, “Pipe down and get your tie on.”
Everett and Peter are in an older class that hasn’t got a Corner, and the twins are in a kiddie class that’s actually just a bunch of brats fidgeting and crying. But Irwin is in my class, and I’ve tried to share the good news: I’ve told him how nice it is here in The Corner. But he refuses to take advantage of it due to this Memory Verse Streak he’s got going …
For 160-some Sabbaths in a row now Irwin has nailed his Memory Verse dead—and the way Brother Beal treats him, you’d think it was DiMaggio’s hitting streak. “Iron Man Irwin” he calls him. It’s kind of embarrassing. Still it’s a nice thing for Winnie, since he’s a bit of a dodo at real school. He feels he’s keeping the streak going for Jesus. He even told his study group how his memory didn’t work worth a hoot till he asked the Lord to come into his life and make some repairs on it. Of course Beal and the other Sabbath School teachers could eat that kind of crap for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but I think Irwin really meant it. He seems genuinely fond of Jesus. Peter does too, come to think of it, though he gives his Sabbath School teachers ulcers of the brain by being just as fond of Buddha and Krishna and Finn MacCool and Odin One-Eye and King Rama and I don’t remember who all, thanks to his ongoing adventures with heathen reading material. Everett on the other hand thinks of Jesus as just one more of these out-of-this-world Nice Guys who, as Leo Durocher predicted, finished dead last. It’s right there in the Bible, Everett says: “Christ admits it Himself. ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega. The First—and the Last.’”
It’s strange the way everybody has their own pet notion about Jesus, and nobody’s pet notion seems to agree with anybody else’s. Grandawma, for instance, says He’s “just a defunct social reformer.” Then there’s Papa, who once said He’s God’s Son all right, and that He survived the crucifixion just fine, but that the two-thousand-year-old funeral service His cockeyed followers call Christianity probably made Him sorry He did. Meanwhile there’s Freddy, who’s six now, and who told me she saw Christ hiding under her bed one night, but that all He’d say to her was “Pssst! Shhh! Pharisees!” And Bet, who spent a whole day making a Christmas card for Uncle Marv and Aunt Mary Jane last year, then got so proud of the card that she refused to mail it to anybody but herself. “That’s the Christmas spirit!” Everett told her. Then we looked to see what she was so proud of, and it turned out to be this whole army of crayon angels, in these gold sort of football helmets, charging into Bethlehem while in the sky above them huge red and green letters copied from a Christmas carol book Bet couldn’t yet read proclaimed:
JOY TO THE WORDL!
THE SAVIOR RESIGNS!
Personally I’m not sure just who or what Christ is. I still pray to Him in a pinch, but I talk to myself in a pinch too—and I’m getting less and less sure there’s a difference. I used to wish somebody would just tell me what to think about Him. Then along came Elder Babcock, telling and telling, acting like Christ was running for President of the World, and he was His campaign manager, and whoever didn’t get out and vote for the Lord at the polls we call churches by casting the votes we call tithes and offerings into the ballot boxes we call offering plates was a wretched turd of a sinner voting for Satan by default. Mama tries to clear up all the confusion by saying that Christ is exactly what the Bible says He is. But what does the Bible say He is? On one page He’s a Word, on the next a bridegroom, then He’s a boy, then a scapegoat, then a thief in the night; read on and He’s the messiah, then oops, He’s a rabbi, and then a fraction—a third of a Trinity—then a fisherman, then a broken loaf of bread. I guess even God, when He’s human, has trouble deciding just what He is.
The class has split into study groups now. This is the part that makes The Corner truly worth being in. In Sister Durrel’s group they’ve started reading about the furnace Shadrach and his brothers got thrown into, but at least they’ve got Sister Durrel to stare at. Over in Brother Beal’s group they’re listening to a story out of Pathfinder Magazine called “Why Bobby Degan Told Satan No,” and all there is to look at is Beal himself and a clump of dead milkweed growing in a concrete window well behind him. In Brother Benke’s group, just behind me, this weird religious kid named Stanley Stubenfelker is telling how he wrote a special prayer for his grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary that made his whole dang family cry, so can he please recite it to the group? Brother Benke says, “Why, certainly, Stanley.” But on about word three of the prayer my best friend, Augie Mosk, starts crying his eyes out, and Irwin laughs so hard that Benke gets mad and sends Augie to the other Corner, where he’s resting now, like God and me. Way over in Sister Harg’s circle, which is all girls, they’re also trying to study the Fiery Furnace, but they’ve got the giggles. I thought they were giggling at Augie at first, but now I see that the problem is their stage props. They’ve got a big feltboard leaning on a chair, with a felt oven on it, and a felt Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego cooking in the oven. Jocie Best covered the brothers with red felt flames, and that was fine. Then Zulie Dawson added three big blond-haired Guardian Angels to protect them, and that worked too. But when Dollie Edgerton tried to stick the golden halos on the Angels the felt on the halo-backs was so worn out that they kept falling on the floor, and without halos the whole scene somehow lost its religious feeling and started looking like three Swedes and three beatniks in bathrobes committing suicide together in a sauna, so tee hee hee hee hee!
I take the Bible Sister Durrel gave me, flip it open at random, and look to see what God’s Good Book has to say to me today. My first flip is typical: “And Doeg the Edomite turned, and he fell upon the priests, and slew on that day fourscore and five persons … And Nob, the city of the priests, smote he with the edge of the sword, both men and women, children and sucklings, and oxen, and asses …”
Ugh. I try again: “And they made an end of all the men that had taken strange wives by the first day of the first month …”
Okay. That’s enough words.
Time for illustrations. I hunt down every color plate in my Bible one by one, bending each at the corner so I can find it again. Then I decide to conduct an award ceremony among them …
First category? How about Stupidest Picture?
Ah. Our first nominee is one of Jesus trying to drive a pack of money-lenders out of the temple with a whip about the size of a spaghetti noodle. And here’s another candidate: an idiotic-looking Peter staggering across the water, his mouth wide open, his arms splayed out like a toddler’s, while Christ just watches, grinning like a mean big brother, rowing backwards in the boat. But hey! The surprise winner, I see, has just got to be Noah’s Ark. It seems like the typical illustration at first—just a big wooden barge perched on a mountaintop, with the rainbow arching over it and a puddle-pocked landscape looking soggy but fairly inviting down below. But soon as I look more closely it hits me: when Noah and the animals get around to stepping out the Ark door, they’re all going to fall about four thousand feet straight down this humongous cliff and land splat in a pile of big sharp rocks.
Next category: Sexiest Picture. But in Bibles, this one’s always tough. My first nominee is Salome, standing in front of King Herod flashing a nice pair of dancer’s legs—but the head of John the Baptist bleeding all over the TV tray in her hands cancels the legs out fast. Here’s one of a Delilah, happily hacking Samson’s hair off, with a face a little like Sophia Loren’s—but it’s Samson who’s got by far the showier legs and breasts in the picture. That leaves just one other illustration with any amount of skin showing: the old standby, Eve and Adam in The Garden. They’re stark naked, which you’d think would help, but their backs are to the camera, and Adam’s lumpy body makes it darned easy to believe that God made him just the other morning out of a big wad of clay. On close inspection there does seem to be a sexy area on Eve at first—a nice little place where her naked waist curves in, then out again, as it works its way downward. But right where the crack in her bottom should start the trusty bushes rush up and wreck the view. It’s not the bushes that totally luke the thing for me, though. It’s Eve’s hair. Not only is it egg-yolk yellow, it’s all teased and ratted up, as if Uncle Marv had just been working her over at the Butee Bar up in Spokane …
The Brothers K Page 8