Thom, long after you graduated again, Mom was dragging me down to open meetings every Friday night. Then there was the "volunteer" work making sandwiches in the kitchen at Plantation Elementary.
Every Sunday after Sunday school and church, we'd make the drive down to SR-84 and wait at the gate for a couple of Seedlings to come out w/ a couple of bread racks full of bread, mayonaise, mustard, PB&J and lunch meat and load them into the trunk of the car. Sometimes, there would be another "volunteer" parent waiting there too. Then we'd drive over to the elementary school and spend an hour or so assembling the sandwiches, load them back into the trunk and deliver them back to the Seedling at the gate. Then on to either Denny's or Skyline for a late lunch then back home.
I think she thought that a little Seed was a good prophylactic against adolescence and impending druggiedome. And she believed, and believes to this day, all the bullshit "signs of drug addiction", like a need for privacy, mood swings, changes in fashion and music and, above all, any attempt to make friends. GOD forbid I should let slip any desire to be a part of anything except for church and The Seed.
I'm still grateful to good old Don Taws. What a sweet old man he was. When Mom sent me into his office to get chastised for not formally joining the church, he told me it was alright; that he would never want anybody to swear an oath that they didn't believe and that he'd always be there if I wanted to talk. And I found out later that he'd been trying to explain to Mom for awhile that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to force me to attend services and open meetings if I didn't want to.
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
http://laissezfairebooks.com/product.cfm?op=view&pid=FF7485&aid=10247' target='_new'> Thomas Jefferson, 1787
