“I remember swimming in the murky waters of Crystal Lake. And I suppose we ate, and played baseball, but I remember best Rev Grenz, a cousin to my father, asking me to get into his car. He wanted to “lead me to the Lord”. He read a Bible passage or two to me, then asked me to pray with him, repeating after him, “Dear Lord Jesus, please come into my heart.”

“That’s done, now they’ll let me be at peace,” may have been the hopeful thoughts simmering just under the surface of my tension. Not so – that very same night, I was invited again to come forward and confess before God and men – my newfound salvation. “You must do so or you remain lost,” was the exhortation. I did not walk forward that night either, but felt I’d be consigned to hell if I didn’t tell someone.

“My grandfather and his friend both speaking German had been sent to pick me up from the camp. Telling them was not feasible, so it seemed, they were too busy talking in a language I didn’t fully understand. “The longer you wait, the harder it will be, and then it will be impossible, and your soul will be lost.” I resolved to tell the next person I saw… it was grandmother. She had her own agenda, a soulful whine beyond my comprehension. “I must tell someone before nightfall,” I told myself, but all seemed beyond me. I’d found printed in my father’s old Bible many years later, the proof a last desperate attempt at saving my doomed soul, “I was saved!” I hoped that God would accept that as a confession, and pardon me for my silence.

“I was a mere 10 years old when the “unpardonable sin sermon” delivered by my sister’s future father-in-law set in motion distressing thought patterns that were to dominate my youthful years, and even many of my adult years. “If you have thought this sin, you have done it, and will suffer eternal damnation.” I really don’t know the exact wording he used, but I felt that I’d thought sinful thoughts, and so began a frantic attempt on my part to retrieve those thoughts and banish them to oblivion. I was living a life filled with demons and angels, and only feebly functioning in the real world. I was a “good boy”, did my chores, said my prayers, was baptized, practiced the piano, went to church twice on Sundays and once on Wednesday, and I did my homework.

“When your face first appeared over my crumpled life, at first I understood only the poverty of what I have, then its particular light on woods, rivers, the sea, became my beginning in the colored world in which I had not yet had my beginning.” That bit of poetry from Yevteshenko speaks, for me, not of a person, rather of life beyond the rituals that gripped my being. I saw beyond the “battle for my soul” into the fields. I smelled those wild pink roses. I hid from vigilant eyes that thought something was “wrong” with me, when I stopped “playing the game” and was alone with the rattle of leaves or the sparkling drip of water, or the sound of my own heart pounding.

“My childhood was by no means all misery though I do remember the distress so intense that I became physically ill and missed three days of school. “I did not commit the unpardonable sin! You did commit the unpardonable sin.” The thoughts repeated themselves for days at a time. I did fall asleep, but upon awakening always the memory of what I’d said, done, or thought wrong on the previous day flooded into my brain.

It was an idiot’s life. I was afraid of words that rhymed with “rape”, or “kill” and numbers of other words. After an encounter with one of those words, I’d have to do a certain unspecified amount of penance before I could continue reading. Imagine trying to read under those conditions. I was a slow reader and seldom finished a test. Still I managed to live a coherent life.

“Skip Eagle would jump off of the elevated flower bed and knock me to the ground. He was quite soft, and I easily reversed my fortunes. Others would wrestle me with as little success. My favorite wrestling match was with a girl, Carla… She was strong, but not overly so, still she had a distinctive advantage - she followed none of the rules that boys did. (Boys didn’t even know that there was a world beyond the rules.) Carla was quite familiar with that other world. She kicked, bit, scratched, spit, threw things… I did not pin her.

“We played kickball with all the block neighbors. I batted a tennis ball against a school wall, shot baskets, did chin-ups, and ran around a two-block area 4 times without stopping.

“True, kids in school called me an egghead, laughed at me, made dirty jokes about me; but the tangle of real events engaged me, and I survived. And I did catch glimpses of that colored world of which poets speak.

“I met amazingly varied people, and I married, had children, succeeded as a teacher, succeeded in building some furniture, wrote some stories and some letters to the editor, played some piano, planted some gardens, fought some verbal battles, learned to ski, and I even learned to type on a computer, splash words onto a page. I am not the king on the mountain, but I love being alive, and I have swum back and forth across the pool 8 times without coming up for water, and my sons and daughters are beautiful people who are learning, beyond where I’ve learned, to love living. I could write for years and never tell all that could be told.”