When I was in college, I was a deacon in our church, the First Baptist Church of San Luis Obispo. Actually, I wasn't a real deacon. I was a junior deacon. I got to be involved with stuff, but couldn't vote. Kind of like Puerto Rico.
I'm not really sure what a junior deacon was supposed to do, but it should've involved a decoder ring. I really wanted a decoder ring.
One thing I did get to do as a junior deacon was help serve communion. Our church had communion on the first Sunday of each month. There's nothing biblical about having communion the first Sunday of the month; in fact the church we go to now has it on the last Sunday of the month. Jesus just said, "This do in remembrance of Me," so we apparently figured once a month was pretty good.
Serving communion was a big production number at our church. To tell you the truth, it wasn't all that complicated; it was just that any time old guys had to get up and move around during a church service, it involved more choreography than a Broadway musical.
Being a deacon meant that on Communion Sunday, you got to get up out of the pew a few minutes before the pastor finished his sermon and go back into the narthex to line up (the "few minutes" might be more than a few if the sermon wasn't all that great). Then, when the communion hymn was sung, we came down the left and right aisles and stood on either side of the two pastors at the front.
The pastors would take each tray with bread and pass them down until each deacon had one. Somehow there was always a matching number of trays and deacons. This was because the deaconesses were in charge of setting the whole thing up and they were much better at math than the deacons were. If the deacons had had to set up communion as well as serve it, we would've run out of stuff about two-thirds of the way through the congregation.
Then four deacons would start from the back with their trays, four deacons would start from the front and we'd meet in the middle. Nobody ever said anything about it, but it was very competitive as to which group would serve more people: the front deacons or the back deacons. Usually the front deacons did more because a lot more people would sit in the back than in the front. This is where the term "Back-Row Baptists" comes from. We'd serve the bread first, march back up, get the trays with the cups and do the same thing.
Now then: I say "bread" and "cup" because that's what they're referred to as in the Bible. In reality, the "bread" was kind of a small, very bland cracker and the "cup" was a little plastic cup filled in grape juice. The deaconesses had this nifty little squirter thingy to pour the grape juice into the cups.
People laugh at me sometimes when I talk about "deaconesses" at our church, and I agree, it does sound kind of weird. There aren't a lot of things that we put "-ess" on the end of anymore when referring to women. But that's what we called the female deacons -- deaconesses.
My mom was a deaconess for a while. The deaconesses did a lot of thankless work around the church: dinners, showers, other social gatherings. And of course, communion.
Well, I don't know whose idea it was -- whether it was a deacon's, or a deaconess's, or a pastor's -- but someone decided having crackers for communion instead of bread was weird (they never had such thoughts about having grape juice instead of wine; the line of reasoning stopped with the bread). So one month, the deaconesses baked some bread, cut it into little squares and divided them equally into the trays.
Real bread for communion! What a great idea!
So that Sunday, we all lined up as usual and the pastor started handing out the stacked trays, one by one, to the deacon standing next to him. That deacon passed it to the deacon next to him, and so on down the line until it got to the deacon on the end.
But what no one had thought of or discovered beforehand was that the bread cubes would stick to the bottom of the tray above them! We didn't realize it until they started falling to the floor, one by one, as the trays were being passed to the deacons.
I realized something had gone horribly wrong because my friends from the college group always sat in front, and I noticed how big their eyes suddenly got, and how they were all now trying not to laugh out loud during one of the most solemn times in any church service.
I quickly saw what the problem was, along with my fellow deacons, but none of us knew what to do! We couldn't bend down, scoop them up and put them back in the tray. They'd already been on the floor! Everybody'd seen it. Not even the Back-Row Baptists would want those.
So we just left them there and walked up the aisle with what we had, praying that Jesus would once again perform a miracle and multiply enough of this bread to feed our large crowd. We didn't even have any fish.
Somehow, it worked. We had just barely enough for everyone. When we returned to our lines, however, we noticed the bread wasn't on the floor anymore.
While we were gone, the pastor had picked them up and put them in his coat pocket!
Being a junior deacon wasn't always this exciting, but it did have its moments.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Extended family
When I was a kid, my folks used to take me on long vacation car trips to see relatives. My mom was from Texas and my dad was from Mississippi, so it took forever to get there. This, of course, was before cars had much in the way of air conditioning (or at least before we had it) and these trips were almost always in the summer, so the vacation pretty much consisted of three people in a moving pressure cooker traveling across the country.
Looking back on these trips, it strikes me how much we did them on the cheap. We hardly ever stayed in a motel. Somewhat remarkably, we had enough relatives spaced just far enough apart to where we could freeload the whole way through.
Leaving from San Luis Obispo, we'd first stay with my grandparents in Los Angeles, then travel from L.A. to the Phoenix area where my mom had an aunt and uncle in the wonderfully named town of Apache Junction. From there we'd stop in Albuquerque at my aunt and uncle's house. After that there were more relatives in Texas and Louisiana before you'd finally get to Mississippi.
But when you'd hit Texas, Texas would hit back. You'd zoom across California, zoom across Arizona, zoom across New Mexico, but then you'd be in Texas. For days. And days. Texas was so big, and so flat, and so hot.
My mom grew up in Childress, which is in the southern part of the Texas panhandle, almost near Amarillo, but not near enough to where it would do any good. We stopped there one time when I was about 12 and met a bunch of cousins and such for the first (and in some cases only) time.
To say it was a culture shock is understating it. I almost wrote just now that the main drag of Childress probably wasn't all that much different from where I'd grown up. But it was. It really was. They did have stoplights, a few anyway. But only one per intersection. It was suspended from the very center of the intersection. On two sides, the red light was at the top and the green light was at the bottom, like I was used to. But on the other two sides, the green light was at the top and the red light was at the bottom, so that only three bulbs were actually needed to make it work. It makes sense, but to me just that, and the fact that the stoplights were painted yellow were enough to already make me feel like I was in a foreign country.
The stores along the main street were mostly mom-and-pop businesses, with a few bigger ones sprinkled here and there, like a J.C. Penney or a Woolworth, maybe a Sears Roebuck.
What really made my jaw drop, though, was when we actually got off the main drag and headed to my relatives' house. Very few of the residential streets in Childress were paved in those days. They were dirt roads, and it was a very, very red dirt that seemed to get everywhere. There were red ants crawling around too, something I'd never seen before. After getting the proper warning to stay away from them, I found myself looking at the ground everywhere I walked to make sure I wouldn't be attacked by a colony of red ants, which I was sure would completely envelop me and carry me off into their underground ant hill, where they would feast on my carcass for weeks.
It was hot and windy in Childress. I don't remember much about the inside of my relatives' house, other than it seemed rather dark inside. Most of the time we sat out on the wooden front porch with my cousins. Frankly, I don't recall too much about them, except for one female cousin (a second or third cousin), who was about my age and let's just say, way out of my league. I knew she was my cousin, but she was about the only thing worth looking at in Childress.
On the same trip, we visited a great aunt of mine in another Texas town. It was a pleasant enough visit. She had a very bright, air-conditioned house, a much better environment than Childress -- and while we were there, she had a baseball game showing on her TV!
For me this was great. Entertainment! Baseball! Something other than listening to family history! It was a Houston Astros game (later on this same trip, we would see a game in the Houston Astrodome, just to show you this trip wasn't all bad) and they were playing the Braves in Atlanta.
This gave me something to do while my parents and my aunt talked. I soon became quite absorbed in the game and was paying very little attention to the conversation.
However, during a lull in their talking, my aunt happened to look over toward the TV, just in time to see it showing Hank Aaron swinging a bat over his head in the on-deck circle to loosen up on a hot, sunny day in Georgia. He held the bat behind his shoulder blades to stretch his muscles.
My great aunt, who had no idea who Hank Aaron was, had no idea that he was one of the best ballplayers of all time, smirked at the picture.
"Look at that nigger, just stretching himself!" she said. "He just thinks he's sooooo great."
Now then. That word may not have been nearly as insensitive back then as it is now; it was used quite a bit in the South in those days, mostly as a denigration of the word "Negro," but it was still a racist thing to say and my aunt knew it.
Being 12 years old and meeting this woman for the first time, I didn't really know how to react. I'm sure my parents were both hoping I'd say nothing. And I didn't. But that moment has stayed with me to this day.
We don't get to choose who our relatives are. Some of them are treasures, some of them are not. Up until that moment, I had liked my great aunt and was enjoying our visit. Her remark, however, sort of knocked the wind out of me.
As I said, my dad was from Mississippi, born and raised in McComb. I remember another trip there, in my high school years, and seeing the black part of town. It was all so different from California, at least the part I'd grown up in.
I know I had a relative who was in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. I even have a badge from his regiment that was handed down to me. I used to think it was a bad thing, to be related to someone who fought for the wrong side in the Civil War. Having been to the Gettysburg battlefield a few years ago has made me realize that there were a lot of gallant men who fought for the South. But the idea that this relative, whoever he was, was in favor of slavery is still kind of hard for me to wrap my brain around.
No, we don't get to choose our relatives. People have asked me why I don't research my ancestry. Maybe it's because I'm scared of what I'd find.
Looking back on these trips, it strikes me how much we did them on the cheap. We hardly ever stayed in a motel. Somewhat remarkably, we had enough relatives spaced just far enough apart to where we could freeload the whole way through.
Leaving from San Luis Obispo, we'd first stay with my grandparents in Los Angeles, then travel from L.A. to the Phoenix area where my mom had an aunt and uncle in the wonderfully named town of Apache Junction. From there we'd stop in Albuquerque at my aunt and uncle's house. After that there were more relatives in Texas and Louisiana before you'd finally get to Mississippi.
But when you'd hit Texas, Texas would hit back. You'd zoom across California, zoom across Arizona, zoom across New Mexico, but then you'd be in Texas. For days. And days. Texas was so big, and so flat, and so hot.
My mom grew up in Childress, which is in the southern part of the Texas panhandle, almost near Amarillo, but not near enough to where it would do any good. We stopped there one time when I was about 12 and met a bunch of cousins and such for the first (and in some cases only) time.
To say it was a culture shock is understating it. I almost wrote just now that the main drag of Childress probably wasn't all that much different from where I'd grown up. But it was. It really was. They did have stoplights, a few anyway. But only one per intersection. It was suspended from the very center of the intersection. On two sides, the red light was at the top and the green light was at the bottom, like I was used to. But on the other two sides, the green light was at the top and the red light was at the bottom, so that only three bulbs were actually needed to make it work. It makes sense, but to me just that, and the fact that the stoplights were painted yellow were enough to already make me feel like I was in a foreign country.
The stores along the main street were mostly mom-and-pop businesses, with a few bigger ones sprinkled here and there, like a J.C. Penney or a Woolworth, maybe a Sears Roebuck.
What really made my jaw drop, though, was when we actually got off the main drag and headed to my relatives' house. Very few of the residential streets in Childress were paved in those days. They were dirt roads, and it was a very, very red dirt that seemed to get everywhere. There were red ants crawling around too, something I'd never seen before. After getting the proper warning to stay away from them, I found myself looking at the ground everywhere I walked to make sure I wouldn't be attacked by a colony of red ants, which I was sure would completely envelop me and carry me off into their underground ant hill, where they would feast on my carcass for weeks.
It was hot and windy in Childress. I don't remember much about the inside of my relatives' house, other than it seemed rather dark inside. Most of the time we sat out on the wooden front porch with my cousins. Frankly, I don't recall too much about them, except for one female cousin (a second or third cousin), who was about my age and let's just say, way out of my league. I knew she was my cousin, but she was about the only thing worth looking at in Childress.
On the same trip, we visited a great aunt of mine in another Texas town. It was a pleasant enough visit. She had a very bright, air-conditioned house, a much better environment than Childress -- and while we were there, she had a baseball game showing on her TV!
For me this was great. Entertainment! Baseball! Something other than listening to family history! It was a Houston Astros game (later on this same trip, we would see a game in the Houston Astrodome, just to show you this trip wasn't all bad) and they were playing the Braves in Atlanta.
This gave me something to do while my parents and my aunt talked. I soon became quite absorbed in the game and was paying very little attention to the conversation.
However, during a lull in their talking, my aunt happened to look over toward the TV, just in time to see it showing Hank Aaron swinging a bat over his head in the on-deck circle to loosen up on a hot, sunny day in Georgia. He held the bat behind his shoulder blades to stretch his muscles.
My great aunt, who had no idea who Hank Aaron was, had no idea that he was one of the best ballplayers of all time, smirked at the picture.
"Look at that nigger, just stretching himself!" she said. "He just thinks he's sooooo great."
Now then. That word may not have been nearly as insensitive back then as it is now; it was used quite a bit in the South in those days, mostly as a denigration of the word "Negro," but it was still a racist thing to say and my aunt knew it.
Being 12 years old and meeting this woman for the first time, I didn't really know how to react. I'm sure my parents were both hoping I'd say nothing. And I didn't. But that moment has stayed with me to this day.
We don't get to choose who our relatives are. Some of them are treasures, some of them are not. Up until that moment, I had liked my great aunt and was enjoying our visit. Her remark, however, sort of knocked the wind out of me.
As I said, my dad was from Mississippi, born and raised in McComb. I remember another trip there, in my high school years, and seeing the black part of town. It was all so different from California, at least the part I'd grown up in.
I know I had a relative who was in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. I even have a badge from his regiment that was handed down to me. I used to think it was a bad thing, to be related to someone who fought for the wrong side in the Civil War. Having been to the Gettysburg battlefield a few years ago has made me realize that there were a lot of gallant men who fought for the South. But the idea that this relative, whoever he was, was in favor of slavery is still kind of hard for me to wrap my brain around.
No, we don't get to choose our relatives. People have asked me why I don't research my ancestry. Maybe it's because I'm scared of what I'd find.
Monday, August 10, 2009
A blooper -- or a Taco Bell menu item
At Cal Poly I was a broadcast journalism major. I had this idea that I could be a great broadcaster. But at Cal Poly, they had a "learn by doing" motto that did a pretty good job of preparing you for anything. So in addition to broadcasting, I did some newspaper writing too. Good thing, as it turned out.
I was on the news staff at KCPR-FM, Cal Poly's radio station, in the mid-'70s. The main purpose of the news staff was not so much to go out and report news as much as it was to get comfortable with reading news copy on the air. The news-gathering operation consisted primarily of the news director going over to KSBY-TV and gathering as much wire copy as KSBY could spare and bring it back to the station for people to read.
Every weeknight at 6 we would go on the air with the news. One person would read the world news, another the national news, still another the state news, sports, weather, and so on. We filled a half-hour with this stuff, along with a few local stories. People would shuffle in and out of the studio during the breaks.
One night I had the world news, which I was delivering in my best Walter Cronkite manner. One story was about the Glomar Explorer, a ship built by a Howard Hughes company, which was being used to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.
This had been an ongoing story and the gist of it this night was what the ship had recovered. The line I was supposed to read said the ship had "recovered two nuclear-tipped torpedoes."
What I said was the ship had "recovered two nuclear-tipped tortitos."
Now, I have no idea what a "tortito" is, but saying it caused me to crack up. I guess I had this picture of a gigantic, spicy Mexican dish at the bottom of the ocean in my head and I couldn't stop laughing about it. The two other people in the studio started laughing too and pretty soon it was a full-on disaster. The engineer cut the mikes and finally went to a break.
It was really funny at the moment, but not so much afterward where I understandably got some criticism for the whole thing. One thing is clear: I certainly will never forget the Glomar Explorer.
Of course, that wasn't the only funny thing that happened at KCPR. One night one news reader set fire to the copy the other news reader was reading, causing the second news reader to start reading much faster before his "hot" story burned up.
During one summer, I was actually the news director. There was a girl at the station who had perhaps the worst broadcasting voice I've ever heard. It was extremely high-pitched, almost shrill. Not only that, but she had an awful habit of reading everything on the wire copy: the dateline, the "AP" designation, all the stuff that was in parentheses that you weren't supposed to read. I don't want to say she was ditzy or anything, but I guess I just did. I also won't tell you her name, primarily because I can't remember it.
I tried to coach her before one newscast to try to have better transitions between her stories. I told her to say things like "Turning to California news..." before she started the state news so people could tell she was going from the national news to the state. I could envision that taking her "under my wing" would help her tremendously.
So she started reading her national news in her shrill, monotone "style" and when she got to the end of it she said, "Turning to California..." and she literally turned her body in her chair a few degrees before reading the next story.
Many of the people at that station went on to brilliant careers. "Weird Al" Yankovic was one of the disc jockeys at KCPR. Others probably went on to careers where they were more likely to serve nuclear-tipped tortitos.
I was on the news staff at KCPR-FM, Cal Poly's radio station, in the mid-'70s. The main purpose of the news staff was not so much to go out and report news as much as it was to get comfortable with reading news copy on the air. The news-gathering operation consisted primarily of the news director going over to KSBY-TV and gathering as much wire copy as KSBY could spare and bring it back to the station for people to read.
Every weeknight at 6 we would go on the air with the news. One person would read the world news, another the national news, still another the state news, sports, weather, and so on. We filled a half-hour with this stuff, along with a few local stories. People would shuffle in and out of the studio during the breaks.
One night I had the world news, which I was delivering in my best Walter Cronkite manner. One story was about the Glomar Explorer, a ship built by a Howard Hughes company, which was being used to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.
This had been an ongoing story and the gist of it this night was what the ship had recovered. The line I was supposed to read said the ship had "recovered two nuclear-tipped torpedoes."
What I said was the ship had "recovered two nuclear-tipped tortitos."
Now, I have no idea what a "tortito" is, but saying it caused me to crack up. I guess I had this picture of a gigantic, spicy Mexican dish at the bottom of the ocean in my head and I couldn't stop laughing about it. The two other people in the studio started laughing too and pretty soon it was a full-on disaster. The engineer cut the mikes and finally went to a break.
It was really funny at the moment, but not so much afterward where I understandably got some criticism for the whole thing. One thing is clear: I certainly will never forget the Glomar Explorer.
Of course, that wasn't the only funny thing that happened at KCPR. One night one news reader set fire to the copy the other news reader was reading, causing the second news reader to start reading much faster before his "hot" story burned up.
During one summer, I was actually the news director. There was a girl at the station who had perhaps the worst broadcasting voice I've ever heard. It was extremely high-pitched, almost shrill. Not only that, but she had an awful habit of reading everything on the wire copy: the dateline, the "AP" designation, all the stuff that was in parentheses that you weren't supposed to read. I don't want to say she was ditzy or anything, but I guess I just did. I also won't tell you her name, primarily because I can't remember it.
I tried to coach her before one newscast to try to have better transitions between her stories. I told her to say things like "Turning to California news..." before she started the state news so people could tell she was going from the national news to the state. I could envision that taking her "under my wing" would help her tremendously.
So she started reading her national news in her shrill, monotone "style" and when she got to the end of it she said, "Turning to California..." and she literally turned her body in her chair a few degrees before reading the next story.
Many of the people at that station went on to brilliant careers. "Weird Al" Yankovic was one of the disc jockeys at KCPR. Others probably went on to careers where they were more likely to serve nuclear-tipped tortitos.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Dieting: Would you like guilt with that?
I'm starting to think about dieting again. I've kind of gotten into this cycle of dieting a few months before my next doctor's visit. That way my extremely dour doctor (I call him Dr. Chuckles) won't be quite so dour. Then for the few month after my doctor's visit I can be a little freer about what I eat.
So far it hasn't worked out too badly. I've lost the weight I wanted to before the doctor trip and, since I wind up seeing my doctor in the months of November and May, I can eat what I want to eat during the Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays and during the summer.
But while I'm actually dieting and exercising in the months before the doctor visit, it's gotten kind of rough. I'm not nearly as pleasant to be around then (this is assuming there are other times when I am pleasant to be around).
Scientists have discovered that there is no longer anything that is good for you. Everything is bad. Especially when it comes to food. Apparently the only thing worse than starving to death is eating. So dieting in essence means taking all the things you really like to eat and banishing them out of your life completely. One of the reasons it takes me months to lose enough weight to make Dr. Chuckles happy is because I have to get my mind into the denial mode. It takes a while, a week or two, to get enough will power into my head to actually get going, to where I can get past the french fry withdrawals.
There is so much guilt associated with dieting. You feel guilty about being hungry. You feel guilty about eating. You feel guilty about what you're eating. On top of that, I'm diabetic, so I feel guilty about not eating.
I'll feel good one minute about having a salad instead of fries, but then I feel guilty for having the spicy chicken sandwich instead of the grilled chicken sandwich.
And yes, I know what I should be doing is eating healthy year-round. But I don't. And I feel guilty about that too.
Then there's the rationalization that goes on when you diet: trying to come up with reasons for why you're eating what you're eating. Well, I can eat this big dinner because I hardly had any lunch or breakfast at all. Well, I can have dessert because I was a good boy and ate only good things the rest of the day.
And I won't even get into the guilt I feel about exercising (well, I will, but not now).
The non-dieting times are not only more fun because I eat more the way I want to eat, but they're better mentally because I'm not dealing with so much guilt and rationalization! I have enough guilt going on in my life as it is without adding the stuff I'm putting into my mouth to the list.
Now I'm feeling guilty for saying that.
So far it hasn't worked out too badly. I've lost the weight I wanted to before the doctor trip and, since I wind up seeing my doctor in the months of November and May, I can eat what I want to eat during the Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays and during the summer.
But while I'm actually dieting and exercising in the months before the doctor visit, it's gotten kind of rough. I'm not nearly as pleasant to be around then (this is assuming there are other times when I am pleasant to be around).
Scientists have discovered that there is no longer anything that is good for you. Everything is bad. Especially when it comes to food. Apparently the only thing worse than starving to death is eating. So dieting in essence means taking all the things you really like to eat and banishing them out of your life completely. One of the reasons it takes me months to lose enough weight to make Dr. Chuckles happy is because I have to get my mind into the denial mode. It takes a while, a week or two, to get enough will power into my head to actually get going, to where I can get past the french fry withdrawals.
There is so much guilt associated with dieting. You feel guilty about being hungry. You feel guilty about eating. You feel guilty about what you're eating. On top of that, I'm diabetic, so I feel guilty about not eating.
I'll feel good one minute about having a salad instead of fries, but then I feel guilty for having the spicy chicken sandwich instead of the grilled chicken sandwich.
And yes, I know what I should be doing is eating healthy year-round. But I don't. And I feel guilty about that too.
Then there's the rationalization that goes on when you diet: trying to come up with reasons for why you're eating what you're eating. Well, I can eat this big dinner because I hardly had any lunch or breakfast at all. Well, I can have dessert because I was a good boy and ate only good things the rest of the day.
And I won't even get into the guilt I feel about exercising (well, I will, but not now).
The non-dieting times are not only more fun because I eat more the way I want to eat, but they're better mentally because I'm not dealing with so much guilt and rationalization! I have enough guilt going on in my life as it is without adding the stuff I'm putting into my mouth to the list.
Now I'm feeling guilty for saying that.
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