One Day Late

This morning I filled in for a friend who teaches a fourth grade Sunday school class. The whole experience is surreal. I don't let the kids call me Ms O---, although maybe they're supposed to. Titles make me feel weird. Kids always change Ms to Miss or, worse, Mrs. Mrs. O-- is, after all, my mother. She's very much a "Mrs. O--," the sort of schoolteacher that populates 1950s sit-coms. Vintage wardrobe notwithstanding, I am not. Plus, I hate the gender politics intertwined with name calling.

Once I had an upsetting dream about teaching in which my students were rebelling against my desire not to communicate marital status in my title. I was married in the dream and had cagily combined my last name with that of my spouse--without that dreadful hyphenation--and was using "Ms." If you're not bitter and single, they were shouting, why do you insist on "Ms?" They were all wearing berets and Colonel Sanders string ties. I have the strangest dreams sometimes.
No one much has ever asked me to work with kids in church. Or kids at all. I think I've babysat three times in my life. I may say "fuck" too much, but I haven't always said fuck this much, so that's probably not the whole reason. I don't come off as much of a nurturer maybe. But my friend asked me to cover his classes, so I did. I'm happy to do it, commitment to getting my ass out of bed on a Sunday morning notwithstanding. I like kids, believe it or not. Someone once told me that I talk to kids like I talk to other people, and I hope that's true. I remember liking to be addressed like an adult. In fact, I still enjoy it, so if you were considering calling me "honey," I'd really advise against it.

That's why I'm suspicious of Sunday School curriculum. I always hated Sunday School as a kid. I loved my teachers, but for the most part I just wasn't up for that flannel board shit or any of the saccharine language people teach small girls wearing lacy white socks.

When I was very young I called history, the past "back in horse and buggy days when Jesus and Indians were alive." I realized that these times were not concurrent, but I was trying to express some idea about the past I imagined, a sense of romance and of mystery and of longing for the things that somehow were lost to me before I was born. One Sunday my little sister piously reminded me that Jesus is alive--in our hearts. I wanted to punch in those tiny white teeth of hers. I know that.

Every Sunday morning we'd gather and sing while an old woman in a white-collared dress played an upright piano: Father Abraham had many sons. I am one of them, and so are you, so let's just praise the Lord. I may never march in the infantry, ride in the calvary, shoot the artillery. I may never soar o'er the enemy, but I'm in the Lord's Army! I'm inright outright upright downright happy all the time since Jesus Christ came in and cleansed my heart from sin, I'm inrightoutrightuprightdownright happy all the time!

All the pictures in the picture Bible were of kind faced people dressed for a production of Godspell. The pages were fingered and smudged by the children who'd sat in our small wooden chairs two decades before. Joshua and Moses and Sampson and Elisha and, even those pretty girls Esther and Ruth taught us little lessons about being kind to our brother and sisters and obeying our moms and dads and being a friend to the kids no one else would play with. The Littlelordjesusnocryinghemakes laid in that piled up hay and smiled out at me. His eyes were black as beads in his pink face. My tights were snagged and my hair was tousled. I crayoned "God is Love" in fat blue letters and signed my name below.

The other day I was listening to a mix tape or, rather, a mix cd someone made me. The next to the last song was a song called "One Day Late" sung by a woman who calls herself Sam Phillips. She started her career under a different name and on a Christian label, but her music quickly came into conflict with the ethos of her employers. She's something less than cheerful. Or something more, I suppose.

Help is coming one day late...

After you've given up and all seems gone,

help is coming one day late...

He'll be late.

You try to understand.

You try to fix your broken hands,

but remember there always has been good,

like stars you don't see in the day sky.

Wait for night.

Help is coming one day late--one day late.

I'm waiting for my bus and squinting under the sun and listening to this, wishing someone had played this for me while I was in womb. Someday, I told myself, I will play this in the nursery for my children. Then I laughed a little bit at myself: this is why you don't have children--you'd depress the hell out of them before they're old enough to walk. Toddlers dressed in black and full of ennui and Paxil.

I wonder if the people who write songs and stories and, dare I say, Sunday School curriculum remember being children. I do. I didn't enjoy it. My childhood wasn't particularly Oliver Twisty. My family loved me, and I had toys and friends and books and trees. But I remember being disappointed a thousand times. I remember wanting to strike my small fists against the things I didn't understand, the things that seemed so unfair about life. And there were so many of those things. I tried to be good and I was bad instead. I wanted to be a princess and a ballerina and a writer and an artist, but I had too many tangles in my hair and snot dried on my lip. My knees were scabby and my ankles were scratched. I had my picture taken with Santa one year and had to wear an ugly brown sweatshirt that had once belonged to a boy. In the picture my pink mouth is stuck out and my eyes are wet.

There were marvelous things about my childhood: dressing up in old window sheers and the wide green leaves of spring and space between the refrigerator and the wall and the way my dad tossed me in the air and caught me under my armpits.

But I was never in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time. Jesus didn't seem like he lived in my heart. He was on my shoulder, as persistant and sharp as an elbow, reminding me not to scratch bad words in the dirt under the swingset or plot to fill my sister's perfume bottles with wild onions or make my mother ask me nineteen times to come inside and unload the dishwasher.

I wish someone had played me a song then about help being far away, about feeling alone, about things only getting worse. I think I would've believed them.

In the mornings before Sunday School, the fourth graders and gather with the rest of the upper elementary classes to sing. There's no old woman and no upright piano. A middle-aged guy in a bolo tie plays the recorder, actually, and lets the kids pass around a tambourine. The kids can call out choices from a little bound book of songs, and they always want to sing spirituals or old hymns. At first I was surprised: this is a Bible church, the sort of place where people sing "Lord I Lift Your Name on High" or that dreadful song about walking around in a garden with Jesus. But I quickly realized it all makes perfect sense. Prone to wander, God I feel it, prone to leave the Lord I love. They sing in high voices. Someone of them don't yet realize they're far off key. In two or three years they'll duck their heads and mumble the words. Maybe these are the last months they'll sing so clearly or so unashamedly. There is a fountain filled with blood. The boys have their shirts hanging untucked in the back. The girls seem be glittering, as if the latest playground fashion is club kid circa 1995. What can take away my sin? They look serious, or at least the ones not kicking one another under the table do. The sins of children seem small, somehow, like we wish our own were.

Back in the classroom we sit at plastic tables and read about Joshua and Moses in order to learn about paying attention in Sunday School. I sit there and wonder what dumbass thought this was the point of the story. People are dying here, and I'm supposed to pass out the stickers next. They have cartoon of little altars on them. Moses is up on a hill, watching. Joshua is in a valley fighting the Amalekites with his bloodied fists and his ragged breaths. Moses is holding up his arms to the sky. His arms get tired. The kids in the class want to try it out, so I tell them to go ahead. Their arms get tired too.

I want to warn them that that's the least of their problems. I want to tell them about sin and doubt and failure and about having weird dreams about the ramifications of romantic love for their post-feminist worldviews. I want to warn them that someday they'll end up fighting somewhere in some red fury even though they thought all along they were too kind and too peaceful for that. I want to warn them that someday they'll hold up their arms to a sky that seems as empty as a bell and their arms will get tired and their feet will get tired and their hearts will get tired. But I think they already know all this. I think they've lived enough on the playgrounds and in the hallways and around the dinner tables of their worlds to have some idea.
I want to tell them help is coming. One day late. It's almost time to go, though, so I tell them it's time from prayer. I tell them they have to settle the heck down--I'm not thinking the word heck, but it's what I say--and close their eyes and their mouths and fold their sweaty little boy hands together to think about God. I pray that God will make us a little bit better people this week and that God will bless the people we love and the people we don't love. It's time to go, so I fold up the book and we go.

fall 2006