Today is my dear friend's birthday.
He is sixty-nine years old today. A mere number. A reminder that I lean against the Senior door, wedging myself so that when it opens I am forced to face whoever appears and whatever happens, because I will not be gracious about accepting qualities that enclose my curiosity or hinder my hopes. I watched parents give in to fear and passivity and willful ignorance. Not me. But what about my friend?
He and I grew up together in Amarillo, Albuquerque, and Clovis. Texas and New Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s were formative. That is, the small towns were booming with new life from immigration and ideas, arts and business. New people came in to these areas once beset by religious absolutists and upset familiarity, rounded out the corners, walked and paved strange roads, sang songs from Liverpool and Seattle and New Orleans, encroached on white middle-class neighborhoods. We were both and at the same time influenced by Baptist Bible Fellowship fundamentalism and West Coast free-for-all. Three television channels and Look magazines tuned us to the outside. So also did the (then) thriving diversity of Clovis, New Mexico. Young rock enthusiasts and garage bands, Black and brown students in our classrooms (though not in our neighborhood yet), Playboy magazines on the coffee tables of USAF pilots' homes where I babysat their children, my friend's access to books about sex and my access to the notes he took--we were given multiple and tantalizing opportunities to become curious and skeptical and open.
What happened in Clovis? By the early 1980s, Clovis was homogenizing itself. Whether because white city fathers planned the decay process or because outside influences gave up where they were not wanted remains a study worth pursuing. What causes a small town to reduce itself to the bland, unhappy, ignorant, stagnation it is today?
We, my friend and I, performed the proverbial flip from the frying pan into the fire. By 1975 we committed our minds and young adult lives to a religious cult. Although we did not see ourselves as cultists, I speak from having walked the road until it rutted, we were so invested financially and emotionally that our abilities to engage with curiosity and skepticism and open-mindedness were greatly hampered by the church's leaders. I left in 1982. My dear friend never left it. This is my heartache.
He is sixty-nine years old today and remains committed to the church leaders who we started together with in 1975. In all this time, my dear friend stood witness to many defections, some like my own were traumatic, to the molestation of children whose parents kept quiet, to the enormous debts that many like him willingly shouldered, to other abuses and scandals that regularly appeared in local newspapers. But because US media and legislators and journalists rarely want to expose, much less to prosecute, the corruption and crimes and abuses of power that exist among religious groups, most of the scandals were covered up. Including the ones that my dear friend observed? and ignored. Because "How can I admit after all these years that I was wrong?". "But you must be the hero in your own family! Please get out of there!" "I can't do it now." "When? When will you give to your children more than you've given to that deplorable church?"
I miss him. I miss our laughter that was stimulated by curiosity and open-mindedness. We were amazed by the SNL show on Saturday nights and laughed until our tears had to be brushed aside. We laughed at the Benny Hill Show and talked about our prospects for college. We wondered together how to make friends outside the church. We marveled at the architecture and cultures around us, in Wilmington and Philadelphia and Baltimore. We more than once expressed envy for others' abilities to come and go without the financial and emotional burdens that bound us to the church. I miss our laughter and conversations. I did not see until it was too late that we would be divided forever.
I sent a Happy Birthday! text this morning. I included a picture of us from our childhood. He responded in his usual sweet way, and I know that we love each other still.
I always pounce when a man or woman calls me Sweetie. The sweetest man I have ever known is too weak to stand up for himself but willingly defends the indefensible. Our mother taught us "to be sweet is to be good". Mom, I disagree.