The Awakening 3

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12. I remember at some point of middle school thinking about how far away the end of high school was. Six years seemed like an eternity back then. As an adult, six years flies like water down a fall. Now as a parent, the years of my children's lives have flown like a brisk wind. They were little and now they are gone.

I don't have detailed memories of many classes in middle school. I remember Mr. Dallas, a kind old teacher who seemed to have trouble seeing. The students would have all sorts of fun with him. They would ask him if he was going to the Marlin Beach hotel that weekend, a hotel near the beach that I guess had a particular reputation. He didn't seem to know what they were insinuating. Some favored student they called, "Mr. Dallas' boy" (JV King?). Mr. Dallas didn't seem to know they were poking fun at him.

Sunrise Middle School was well integrated. I had a number of African-American teachers--Mr. Dallas for social studies, Mrs. Carter for pre-algebra, my Algebra I teacher also. I remember being especially bored and spending a lot of time drawing and flying spaceships during class.

13. Star Trek was a favorite show to watch in reruns. I would identify with Spock. It wasn't just his interest in science or my love of knowledge. He had trouble managing his emotions. He aimed not to let them control them. He aimed to be perfectly logical and objective.

As good Wesleyans, we did not go to movies. The only movie I went to from birth to seminary was Cinderella as  a fifth grade trip, and my mother went with me as a class sponsor, as I recall. When the 1979 Star Trek movie came out, I wasn't able to see it. In fact, I often didn't get to see those big event movies even when they came to TV, because we didn't watch television on Sunday.

Having a TV in the first place was a fairly big deal for my family. My dad's father had the old holiness position that Christians shouldn't have a "boob tube." My father long suspected that his dad didn't visit our home for a long time in Indianapolis because he thought we have a television hiding in my dad's huge stereo/record player. They did come to visit after I was born, I guess.

So we had a small black and white TV. There was a color TV that I ruined by sticking a huge magnet my dad had up to the screen. During high school they would let me watch MASH reruns from the dinner table after a certain point of the dinner.

There were strong anti-violence and language rules. My oldest sisters would turn the volume down if they sensed a gunfight coming on Bonanza or some such show. There's a story of my oldest sister running to stop my dad from turning off the TV when someone fired a gun. She was pleading--"It was in self-defense!" I guess that was a testimony to my father's mother's family, who were all quietists from the Old German Baptist Church. My uncle Eugene was a "man of peace" in WW2. He served in the military but was a conscientious objector to fighting.

But my father had a personal conviction against watching TV on Sunday. He believed he would spend all day watching television on Sunday, football and such. So to set the day aside for worship, we didn't watch TV on Sunday.

Not that there was the variety of options that we now have. There were only four or five channels. The down side was that the really big movies like Star Wars always debuted on a Sunday night. I didn't see Star Wars for many many years, probably into my married life, except perhaps in bits and pieces.

I didn't mind missing Star Wars so much. To me it was pure fantasy. Star Trek imagined a future that was actually possible through developments in science. When flip phones came out, it was not lost on me that this was an instance of life imitating art. Would we have had flip phones if there had not been communicators on Star Trek?

When the movie Star Trek came out, there was an elderly woman in our church who somehow recorded the movie on a cassette tape. I listened to that thing over and over again. I had a good deal of it memorized long before I ever saw it, some years later. "And I'll have you, doctor, as your continued predilection for irrelevancy demonstrates."

14. We did not buy or sell on Sunday. Occasionally my dad would have the opportunity to get extra money from working a disaster, such as one time when a hurricane hit New Orleans or when there would be a lot of hail damage somewhere. But he wouldn't work on Sunday.

He was an insurance adjuster in his early days in Florida and traveled all over south Florida with his Polaroid camera assessing car damage first for Motors Insurance Corporation (MIC) and then for GMAC. His office was initially on Federal Highway not far from the old Searstown and Port Everglades.

One time a man who was drunk walked into his office and asked for money. "What you need," my dad said, "was to stop drinking." The drunk man responded, "Thank you for those kind words." My dad immediately felt bad for the man, who clearly wasn't in control of his life. He took him to a diner nearby and bought him a meal.

We were allowed to stop at a restaurant if we found ourselves traveling to Indiana on a Sunday. I felt like my dad secretly enjoyed being able to eat out on Sunday. Early in my marriage, my wife and I always felt like my dad was disappointed when we actually cooked for him on Sunday. "If the ox is in the ditch" on the Sabbath the rule went, you could get him out. So my dad was not an absolutist on these old holiness rules. He made exceptions.

I also came to think the "free will offering" was funny at Frankfort Camp. They needed to provide meals on Sunday for the people, but they couldn't charge them because that would be selling food on Sunday. So they had a free-will offering. Sunday meals were free but there was a sign there with the cost so you could give a "donation." :-)