| ||||||||
|
|
Salvation
Lake PAGE
TWO: It took three years for my piano teacher, who was also my church organist and about 113 years old, to understand why I always asked her to play each new piece before I attempted it. I was pounding out Tchaikovsky before my hands were big enough to play an octave. The day Ms. Stryker politely refused to play a piece I couldn't recognize by the title, my face turned to fire and I bit my lip so hard to keep from crying that it began to bleed. I was humiliated and ashamed, but mainly I was scared to death of disappointing grown-ups. I had been caught. I was a fraud. I could barely read music at all and had been faking it all along. The old woman placed the back of her hand on my cheek then quickly got up to pour me a glass of milk. Her gaudy gold rings felt cool on my face and her sleeve smelled of attics and Chanel. For the next few months we focused on theory, but as I learned to relate notes on a page to the sounds that they made, it somehow lost its magic. Or perhaps I lost mine. A prodigy I was not. I was just a kid with an incredible knack for memorizing useless things, which only put me at risk for believing anything I heard so long as it was repeated often enough. Somewhere in the Bible it reads: "You turned my wailing into dancing: you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy." I remember this verse and I don't know why. Perhaps it's because whatever a sackcloth is, I thought it probably shouldn't be removed. "Whoever
desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and then take up
his cross and follow me." It was the last day of camp. I did not know why we were doing it or where we were going. None of us did. All I knew was that my arms ached and I had blisters on my fingers. And that bitch in front of me who smelled like Listerine and mildew was slacking and clearly didn't love God. If I had known I would be trudging deep into the wilderness with an enormous splintering cross on my shoulders, I would have worn my Keds rather than my sister's fifty-cent flip-flops that were too big and had a hole in the heel. Through poison ivy patches and thick greenish mud, nearly two dozen of us were sent, aimless and confused, on a mission for Christ. This was all we were told. We were alone in a labyrinth of pine trees and gypsy moths. Thirty minutes passed, then another thirty. There were no adults in sight and my left shoulder was scraped raw. After what seemed like the better part of a day, we heard muffled and urgent-sounding shouts coming from what we hoped was our campsite. We hollered back as best we could between gasps of terror and pain, afraid, for some unknown reason, to let the monstrous and cumbersome cross touch the ground until we were certain we saw the lake and two of our counselors motioning desperately from the dock. I may or may not have been in tears. Maybe the walk symbolized our forthcoming commitment, or perhaps it was some kind of metaphor for the Christian life. More likely, though, there was a three-hour block in our schedule that was accidentally overlooked and the staff didn't know what else to do with all of us. The solution had been to find two massive dying trees, cut them down, tie them together with rope in order to form a makeshift cross, and have several kids haul it around until dinner. After
dinner that night, we were instructed to return to our cabins in
silence, single-file, preparing our hearts and minds to be filled
by the Holy Spirit. The path between the cafeteria and my cabin
was long, and swirled through the west woods. We crossed the rickety
wooden bridge, one by one, some of us wanting desperately to laugh
but afraid we might be sent directly to Hell, others gazing solemnly
at the ground, hands folded as though in prayer. We were laughing
at them on the inside. In a way church camp is like fat camp. In
theory, it is a place of unprecedented acceptance, where those on
the margins in regular, "secular" life will be embraced
for what they are on the inside, where books are not judged by their
cover, and where various other meaningful phrases are employed as
well. This is a common misconception though, and you mustn't be
fooled. There are hierarchies of dorkdom, just as there are varying
degrees of obesity.
|
Without
all the singing, I am certain that every camper would have been
all Jesus'd out before day two. We worshipped four times each day,
not including the mandatory Bible study that took place during the
hour and a half between arts and crafts and afternoon vespers. After
day three I already knew the lyrics to nearly every song in the
makeshift Xeroxed songbook. I was a little Christian prodigy, Reverend
Andy said after I recited all thirty-nine books of the Old Testament
in one breath. What he did not know, though, was that along with
the twenty-third Psalm and the Lord's Prayer, I could also recite
the entire Sally Struthers commercial ("Do you want to make
more money? Sure! We all do…") the quadratic formula (although
it would be years until I could make any sense of algebra,) and
complete songs in German that my father would make me sing in front
of various houseguests and, on occasion, complete strangers. I had
no clue what the words meant, I only understood the sounds that
they made. 
