As one decade faded into another life
was business as usual. Mid-South Wrestling was my go-to ritual on Saturday
afternoons. Long before it was the flashy, glitzy, money making behemoth it is
today, fans appealed to its novelty; an identifiable testosterone-filled,
cheap dramatic soap opera for men, scripted and contrived. I didn't mind the
phoniness.
Like clockwork, I committed to tuning in
to see all the stars: Junk Yard Dog, André the Giant, The Iron Sheik, Ted
DiBiase, Jake The Snake Roberts, The Rock-and-Roll Express, Kamala the Ugandian
Warrior, and The Great Kabuki. And I cannot forget my favorite: The two-by-four
toting, American flag-waving, charismatic, loud-mouthed, wild-eyed,
foot-stomping, thumbs-up giving, "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan.
I admired the variety of personalities.
Some you loved to love, and others you loved to hate.
Cousin Jimmy (only two years older than me and
comparable in size) and I had convinced ourselves we had perfected the art
of the moves. The only thing keeping us from fake drop-kicking and body
slamming each other was a lack of a springy surface surrounded by ropes.
If only we had a ring. As implied, summer in the city was business as
usual.
Once school started though, things
changed. My parents faced challenges in making sure my sister and I had adequate
care and attention while both parents worked. When they invited Mamaw to come
live with us mid-way through my third grade year, some of those challenges
disappeared.
With both parents laboring to provide, she
relieved a lot of the day to day mundane responsibilities by taking to
household chores as if it was her mission in life. She never
stopped cleaning. Whether she vacuumed, swept, did laundry or dishes; none
of it seemed to burden her in the slightest. She loved a clean house.
I found it frustrating to not be able to
play on my bed once it was made. My days of jumping up and down on it while
watching wrestling were over.
My parents did not attend to religion.
They are great people. But I don't think the modern institutional
worship model left a meaningful impression on them. They remain particular
about who knows their business and I can’t blame them. Traditional structures
have a way of being judgmental and harsh if their standards are not met to the
letter.
But every Sunday, whether Byram Baptist or
Fellowship Baptist Church, Mamaw and I would take full advantage of the bus
ministry. She loved church life. And because she loved it, I loved it. The
payoff reward was coming home afterward to the smell of cornbread and pot roast
lingering in the air with the sound of a Saints football game in the
background. These are some mighty fond memories.
Amidst all the nostalgia, I realized that
church life also introduced me to some darker concepts of existence and being
as preachers would consistently remind us of punishment and damnation for those
who should die unrepentant. Our final destination might be one of
grief, sorrow, pain, and eternal torment.
As a child, the decision to avoid such a fate
came easy. A sure way to avoid Hell? Sign me up. I became the good Christian
boy baptized into the church. We lived in the buckle of the Bible
belt, so it wasn’t a decision met with much conflict.
Yet there also existed a fear of a less
ambiguous nature; The last days. Armageddon. We can only theorize of
events yet to happen. But amongst many traditional congregationalists persists an unquestioning sense of loyalty to a particular school of thought that divides biblical history up along different ages or periods in which
God works and manifests. Beginning with Irish Bible scholar John Nelson Darby
and continuing in the American church with the teachings of C. I. Scofield in
the 1800s, and even novelized by Baptist preacher Clarence Larkin who later
added illustrated time lines, Dispensationalism in the south was just another
unquestioned tenet of faith.
This contrived pseudo-scientific method can be easily manipulated by clergy and layperson alike to convince others that the last of the last days are here. We have
been living in the final dispensation of time for at least hundred years now. For all we know, this could be very true. The end could be just around the corner. There are few things more terrifying than imagining the
church's faithful chosen raptured away before impending doom and misery
comes through a one-world government ruled by the anti-Christ. Perhaps not so to the ones who live in sanctified harmony with the redeemer of mankind. But for the ones still trying to muddle their way through life's meaning, the clock was ticking. They could be left
behind to face their last remaining moments on earth under the scourge of an evil global dictator just before being
damned to eternal punishment. All of this was sure to befall us.
It mattered little if you were
religious or not. The end of time has always been a matter of when, not if. Religious
leaders, scientists, and all-purpose nut bags alike work their respective
angle in providing proof of their researched prediction of when the world as we
know it will cease to exist.
Prognostications go back as far as 66AD when
Jews in Judea rose against the Romans marking the beginning of the end.
Italian mathematician Jacob Bernoulli predicted that a comet would destroy the
earth on April 5th, 1719. Even Christopher Columbus got in on the action by
declaring the last year of human existence as we know it to be 1658.
For whatever the motivation, others sought
attention by manufacturing elaborate hoaxes as did Mary Bateman in 1806 when a
certain hen of hers lay eggs with the phrase "Christ is coming"
written on them, only to be discovered later that she had written on the eggs
herself and had gone through the disgusting and (might I add) disturbing
process of then reinserting them into the hen's oviduct.
Others such as the 64-year-old
self-proclaimed prophetess Joanna Southcott made claims just as outrageous. She
believed she was pregnant with the Christ child due on October 24, 1814.
When she died in that same year, an autopsy revealed that she had not been
pregnant.
Similar events occurred over and over in
history. Harbingers of all walks of life believed, by whatever means of their
respective school of thought they used, they had an innate ability to forecast
the end of the world and they have always been wrong.
Such continued when astrophysicists John
Gribbin and Stephen Plaguemann predicted that a rare aligning of the planets
would have such an effect on the earth's gravitational pull, that it would set
off a chain reaction of natural disasters, most notable being that the San
Andreas fault across California would give way and the state would slide off
into the ocean. We expected it all to go down on March 10, 1982. They
called it The Jupiter Effect as explained in their best-selling
book of the same name released in 1972.
It was a highly publicized much talked about
occurrence, regarded as mere coffee talk to many. But to a nine-year-old, it
conjured terrifying imaginings.
My parents never bought into the quackery.
This helped me keep it together. They would prove their courage on the
morning of March 10, 1982 as we all woke up early to catch a very rare and
distant glimpse of the planets as they made their way into formation. We all
stood in our sleeping attire gazing towards the eastern sky
discerning what only looked like brighter than normal stars. I can still
remember the expression of awe and dread on my dad's face. Even as the
primary influence of stability and peace in my life, his expression
provided a clear sign that the cosmos and all it contained
proved much bigger, powerful, and more intimidating than any of us
imagined.
Yet world natural destruction did not happen. And that was perhaps the
first time I got a sour taste of cynicism.
The early part of the eighties became a
period of many growing pains steeped in manufactured fear.
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