Wednesday
I’m introducing oatmeal back into my diet, after an absence of nearly 30 years. I use it for fruit cobblers and today I’m making a meatloaf with some oatmeal in it. I have been hesitant to use oatmeal because of the bad memories associated with it. I have to write them out here so maybe they’ll be expunged once and for all from my mind. I don’t want this past episode to stir me up to melancholy madness ever again.
I made a meatloaf years ago using oatmeal and no bread crumbs, which gave me the runs. Back then a lot of things gave me the runs -- especially Amy’s whole wheat pancakes. I had to stop eating them for breakfast, otherwise I would be late for work at the Utah State Tax Commission. Amy took offense at my body’s reaction to her cooking, cuz we ate a lot of whole wheat back then and the food budget, with 8 kids, was very tight. Amy probably thought I was just get snooty or picky or something unspiritual.
After the breakup, but before she filed for divorce, Amy and the kids went to live up in . . . geez, I can’t remember now! Was it Park City or Heber? Someplace up that way. One Sunday I drove up to see them at their church. It was Fast & Testimony Meeting. I bore my testimony -- stuck strictly to the gospel truths and made no mention of my troubles. After Sacrament I went into the Nursery to play with Ed. I had tried to say hello to Amy and her mother, but they both gave me the cold shoulder. So I went to visit Ed. I hadn’t seen any of the kids in weeks. My heart was being flayed. The bishop of the ward called me out of Nursery to talk to me. He was very serious. I still remember exactly one surreal snippet of our conversation:
Bishop: “Amy tells me you refused to eat her cooking anymore.”
Me: “Well, I can’t eat whole wheat bread or pancakes; they give me the runs.”
Bishop: “Amy feels very uncomfortable with you here, so I’m asking you to please leave.”
I didn’t put up an argument. I got up and left, driving away in the 1969 VW bus I had just bought for five hundred dollars. My hometeacher at the time, Scott Bernhisel, had sold it to me so I could get around, since Amy had taken the family van when she left with the kids. I started to cry on the way back down to Salt Lake. My eyes are starting to ache and moisten as the wound reopens.
Kicked out of church when all I wanted to do was see my kids. That was unfair and uncalled for. And petty and mean. And so very very sad. It’s the sadness that still haunts me today -- the anger and resentment have evaporated over the years.
But today I don’t want to be sad. And nobody WANTS me to be sad, do they? So I hereby banish this episode to Siberia, never to be mentioned or thought about again. So let it be written, so let it be done.
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Don’t be afraid to be indignant. Don’t be afraid to be indignant. Don’t be afraid to be indignant. When I write a poem. When I talk to superiors. When I am served bad food.
a clown as funny as Mel Brooks/never listened to the schnooks/when they said you can't do that/he squashed 'em like a tiny gnat/any clown as old as he/is cause for constant jubilee
An old friend sent me $4.20 by G Pay so I can buy more stamps for the month. That’s enough for postcard stamps, but my postcards to the president are too big and need regular stamps. Still, it was very thoughtful.
I need to record that when Bruce Young picked me up this morning for swimming I was in a black mood, because I couldn’t shake that early morning memory. But his cheery face and militant good humor, cracking ‘Joe Millers’ by the bushel, decided me, once again, that while memory is a pleasant companion it is a terrible master. Perhaps heaven is no more than eternal amnesia . . .
The maintenance crew came by late this afternoon to change the furnace/air conditioning filter.
It’s 545 and I’ve got a meatloaf in the oven and potatoes and cabbage stewing in V-8 juice on the stove. It’s going to be a lovely meal, and so I’ll end my daily diary right here and now. After all . . . what could possibly go wrong with the rest of this particular day? (I know that sounds like a set up line but really & truly I’m sure that nothing at all, good or bad, is fated to happen to me this evening while I continue to watch Deep Space Nine on Netflix.) I do wish the dermatologist office would call to schedule an appointment, though.
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