1954

I was certain I would die on Saturday night.  It was not a maudlin thought, as I was only six years old.  Angels flapped their enormous wings, making great feathered shadows on luminous streets of gold, and I could almost hear them swooshing overhead as they heralded my entrance through the pearly gates and into heaven.  The walls of heaven are encrusted with shiny jewels and there is thundering and lightning and an emerald rainbow pouring from God's throne.  And, most importantly to me, a child newly aware of the death of Jesus for me, He is there.  Who would not want to die?  Growing up and getting old in order to experience death seemed, candidly, a waste to me.  Besides, I really thought I was not going to wake up on planet Earth on Sunday morning.  Just got that in my head.

This declaration to my parents on the Monday morning of my death week was cute.  Must've heard about heaven in Sunday school.  As I trotted off to first grade beside my big sister that day, I had no idea I had left behind the seed of a thought that would be my parents' anguish by Saturday morning.  Miss Shaddock was my first grade teacher and also attended the same Baptist church to which our family went every week.  Nice older lady. A rather looming figure to me at the time, she smelled of too much powder and her lipstick always ran in little rivers from her upper lip line toward her nostrils.

It was Christmas time and I still did not know my alphabet well enough to print all the letters, upper and lower case.  Hh always wandered away about the time I needed them; D and P were heading the wrong direction as were b and d. So, I had simply smiled my way through September, October and November.  As a result, it was Christmas before Miss Shaddock became concerned with the disappearing and nonconforming letters in my mind. 

"She does not know her alphabet," my report card blabbed for all to see.  If that were not exasperating enough, I was further castigated in the Comments section for  "sometimes turning letters around."  Well, duh!  I did not even know them, so, of course I turned them around!

Mother and Daddy were concerned. It was evident from the furrowed brows and serious tone with which they addressed my alphabetic ignorance.  I would, in the week of my impending death, spend thirty minutes a night writing the alphabet with extra focus on those tricky letters that spun around and the disappearing H's.  By Tuesday evening, I'll have to say heaven was looking pretty good!

Each night before heading to bed that week, in my kindliest, most compassionate tone, I would assure my parents I would most certainly be playing a harp on Sunday morning while all the other kids had to be quiet and sit still in Sunday school.  By Wednesday at bedtime, my prescient farewell was becoming at best annoying.  "Okay, Kay," Mommy said.  "Of course, you're not going to die Saturday.  I don't know what put that thought into your little head."  Then her eyes flickered a serious glint and she looked at me a half a second too long; Mommy was starting to believe me.  My mother would be fine.  I'd be gone. Neither one of us would have to worry about me and the old ABC's again!

Two weeks prior, I had been baptised on a Sunday evening in the big church sanctuary.  I had to don a pair of shorts and a summer top in the middle of winter!  Then we went up some steep stairs behind the pulpit to a deep square swimming pool, but we found out it was not a swimming pool at all.  Little white robes that we pulled on over our heads were distributed to each of us so we really looked quite angelic.  The pastor clomped in wearing a big long white robe and the most enormous, waist-high rubber boots I had ever seen.  It almost blew the moment for me!  I had seen baptisms while sitting with my  parents in the congregation, but I had no idea my pastor was in that get-up!

As the large church pipe organ began to somberly deliver the first few notes of "Amazing Grace," the pastor stepped into the deep water and extended his hand to me.  Standing on a high step in the baptismal, I folded my arms across my chest as I had been instructed.  I felt the warmth of my pastor's right hand in the arch of my little back; and, as he raised his left hand to God, he asked me, "Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that He died on the cross for your sins?"

Some children may not have been as keenly aware as I of their "sins."  His question made my heart pump faster and there was this queer catch in my throat.  Unexpected tears filled my eyes as I looked up into his solemn face.  "Yes," I whispered.

"According to your profession of faith in Him, I now baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen." In his raised left hand, Pastor had a white handkerchief that came racing pell-mell toward my face.  I had no time to think before my nose was covered in the hankie and my entire body was immersed in the warm, clear ablution of the baptismal waters.  Down then up.  Dripping, smiling, saved and clean!  I was definitely feeling it!  Like the way my stomach can't sit still when I get just what I want for Christmas! It was that very joy that hinted to me that heaven must be a riot!

On Thursday before my awaited demise, I was escorted to the cloakroom for misbehaving.  I really did not get it. All of us first graders were waiting patiently in our seats before the morning bell.  Miss Shaddock was not there, yet.  Through the door stepped the third grade teacher from across the hall.  She could not help that her face was permanently pinched into a frown which left an easily reconstructed road map on her skin when her face was in repose.  Her dry blond hair was styled in a most unattractive "Lord Fauntleroy" cut which accentuated the harshness of her demeanor.  Our entire class was perpetually terrified of her.  Even her smile looked like a sneer.  So, we folded our hands on our desks as she purposefully strode to the chalkboard, picked up a new piece of chalk, and wrote "something" in enormous cursive letters across the board. Like the buzzing of bees, each of us was asking the other, "What is she doing snooping around in here?"  Buzz. Buzz.  "What is she writing?"  We barely knew the alphabet - well, most of us -much less CURSIVE!

"Ask her, Kay!  You should ask her!"

All right.  "What are  you doing snooping around in here?"

Oops.  A less keen teacher would not have been able to zero in on just which snotty-nosed first grader smarty-pants asked such a precocious question.  But, let's face it, by now the entire class was looking straight at me, and I was the only one without the sense to cover my mouth in shame.  Like an armadillo in oncoming traffic, I just sat there smiling.  When all else fails, smile.

"Young lady, I am going to tell Miss Shaddock what you just said," she seethed, and she and her Lord Fauntleroy hair stomped out of the classroom.  Nervous, high-pitched laughter that only first graders are capable of producing slapped my face and head and heart and scared me to death!  Heaven was indeed looking like my only refuge!

It was clear from her gait and her countenance when she rushed into the room, that Miss Shaddock was really mad.  "I have just heard a bad report from Mrs. Crones.  Who was it who asked her what she was doing snooping around in here?"

Suddenly a million fingers shot like bullets from little fists all pointing in my direction.  My executioners were at the ready to back me up against the wall, and POW!, finger me to death.  Betrayed. Embarrassed. Ashamed.  I was only doing what my friends encouraged me to.  Mother had not yet had the opportunity to ask the age-old "if your friends jumped off a cliff would you just jump over too?" question.  Apparently, yes.

"Kay, I am ashamed of you. That is not very  nice behavior for a young lady who was just baptized recently.  Mrs. Crones wrote "MERRY CHRISTMAS" on the board!"  How were we supposed to know that?

Well, there it was. Sinning again already.  My baptism was not "taking" very well.  "Come with me."  An imperative from my kindly teacher.  I was trying to smile, but embarrassed tears were at the ready.  I followed her to the cloak room where all our coats and lunch boxes rested in their cubbies waiting for us to animate or eat them.  It was musty and overly warm in the lonely little room where she left me to "wait" with the inanimate while she went back to teach the dang old ABC's to the living, sniggering perpetrators of my confinement.

Fortunately, Miss Shaddock loved me; so, she did not leave me in my ignominy for very long.  Besides, I could not afford to miss much class.  It seems I needed social skills just as much as I needed to learn to read!  I could have just the let the whole thing go - let bygones be bygones.  C'est la vie!  But, Miss Shaddock felt it her civic duty to rat on me to my parents.  If I had not been so near death, they might have been harder on me.  They were, though, "very disappointed that I would say something so rude."  I saw my Daddy laughing about it with Mother later.  What a relief that was because I was beginning to think I was a hopeless sinner who would wind up falling off many treacherous cliffs behind every harebrained friend who beckoned me over the edge!

Friday evening bedtime was tough on my mother.  Still insistent that I was on the brink of eternity and one day away from singing alto in the heavenly choir, I had convinced my mother that maybe God had told me I was going "home."  She and Daddy  prayed over me and I went blissfully off to sleep.  No worries.

Mother did not sleep that night, and late Saturday evening there was a knock on the front door.  It was the  youth pastor from our church.  Carrying a Bible, smelling of hair oil, and gazing down on me from behind thick horn-rimmed glasses, this local theological seminarian gave me a half-smile as if to ask, "Are you the little specimen?"  Graciously he shook my parents' hands and spoke gravely with them for a moment in murmurings about which I was uninterested.  They all sat pensively around the formica table in the kitchen and Gene, the pastor, opened his Bible on the table before him.

"Should we take her seriously?" There is real fear in Mother's voice.

"She really thinks she will die tonight." My father does not know what to make of me.

"Mmmmm," said Gene profoundly.

All week, no one had discussed with me the "actuality" of my homegoing.  I had free rein in my imaginings to escape to floating clouds and pretty angels.  Immortality was my presumption, and I am quite sure I had not really entertained the thought that one does not segue between heaven and earth at will.  Death is final.  I thought it was a vacation.  As I climbed into bed that night all fresh from my evening bath, my parents knelt beside my bed and gave me back to God.  Tears filled their eyes and choked their words of sacrifice and love, spilling out of hearts ready to relinquish their middle child into the hands of a loving heavenly Father if that was what He wanted.  Then my father told me about death.  To the degree I could, I understood its finality, and I know it made him scared for me.  However, when the lights were out and I closed my eyes, in my heart of hearts, I knew I would never see them again on this earth.

So, imagine my surprise when I discovered that my bed in heaven looked much like the one I had left on earth.  My sister was asleep in her bed beside me, and for a minute I thought she had died, too.  The aroma of pancakes and bacon wafting into heaven from the kitchen and the vroom-vroom of the neighbor's lawn mower made me forget haloes and harps and run into my Daddy's waiting arms. He already knew I did not die!  That was why Mother made pancakes!