I’m finally back to the account of being a member of five denominations during my lifetime to this point.
I revealed that, after being a member of the Church of Christ for most of my childhood, I joined the Baptist Church for my teen years.
Then, I graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso.
I married my soul mate, Charles George, in 1971. Still married. Coming up on 53 years in January 2024. We were high school sweethearts.
We lived a few miles south of Rising Star, Texas across from two pecan orchards.
Aunt Pauline and Uncle Rex (mine) owned a pecan orchard called Lost Creek about four miles south of Rising Star (population about 800 in the 1970s).
They wanted us to settle nearby, so they deeded 1.7 acres next to the 25-acre orchard to us. We had a nice mobile home there.
We went to church with my aunt and uncle. First Methodist of Rising Star, Texas.
My aunt was a life-long Baptist. Uncle Rex, life-long Methodist. When they moved to the orchard, though, Uncle Rex insisted they go to one church. His.
So, we joined them. I joined the choir, sang specials frequently.
Our daughter, Christy, was born in 1978. She crawled from room to room of the house we were building in front of the mobile home, slapping her palms, and pulling up on whatever was possible, practicing standing.
Almost three years later, December 1980, our son, Alex joined the family. After the first week home, she told me, “Let’s send him back.”
Uncle Rex became ill with a pancreas the size of a football, weighing 16 pounds, when Christy was a toddler and Alex a newborn. I can’t remember the name of the disease he had, but it stopped all production of red blood cells.
No matter how much Uncle Rex wanted to live another 20 years, the disease refused to slow. He died in the Wadley Clinic in Dallas after a years-long battle.
The first Sunday after his funeral, Aunt Pauline took us to First Baptist in Rising Star. We would’ve preferred staying Methodists (Christy and Alex were christened Methodists) where we had dozens of wonderful friends.
Nope. Her agreement with Uncle Rex, that she would attend church with him, would end when he died. And, it did.
I wasn’t comfortable returning to the Baptist Church. That central Texas church was nothing like the Baptist Church in Seminole, Texas, where I loved everything about it.
I joined the choir, which was led by a church member who sang specials frequently, had no formal education dealing with singing or directing a choir.
When we were practicing a special for the following Sunday, everyone in the choir sang “in exsellsis day-0.”
By that time, I’d graduated from Seminole High School (we were high school sweethearts), and I’d sung in the HS choir for four years and made the All-State Choir of Texas in 1967 as a first soprano.
I winced at the wrong pronunciation. And made a big mistake.
“We’re pronouncing that phrase wrong. It’s een exchelcees deh-o.”
The director and every other person in the choir looked at me with astonished anger.
“That’s how we’ve always sung it,” the director told me. Instructed me, actually.
I didn’t say another word.
Then, came an event Chuck and I could not abide.
Alex, who was about three, had been going to the pre-school Sunday School Class. After that Sunday’s service, we went to get him.
He was crying, and it was obvious from his red face and swollen eyes, he’d been crying a long time.
“What happened?” I asked the teacher.
“Oh, it’s nothing. He’ll be fine.”
In the car on the way home, holding Alex, still crying, I asked him to tell us what happened to make him cry.
“She said I was being bad. Bad boys go to hell. I don’t want to go to hell!”
We never returned to that church.
In fact, we didn’t go to any church until Alex was a 5th grader and Christy was about to enter Early High School, the smaller city next to Brownwood.
Alex was a Boy Scout. Each year, the Scouts went to a chosen church. I don’t remember why.
This year, it was First Christian Church in Brownwood, TX, 22 miles south of Rising Star.
My husband loved the interim pastor!
I loved the choir, and the director was a music professor at Hardin-Simmons University in Brownwood!
He knew how to pronounce everything! I was in Heaven.
His wife had the most unusual name I’ve ever seen. Docagari. Pronounced doc-ah-gah-ree. Named for four aunts. Dorothy, Catherine, Gail, and Rita. Everyone called her Doc.
Christy wasn’t happy when we told her we were joining the church. We hadn’t asked her if SHE wanted to join the church.
Getting her to walk the aisle with us to the front, to make our request known, resulted in a huge argument on the way home.
“Why didn’t you ask me if I wanted to join that church?” Tears. “You could’ve asked me! I wouldn’t have gone with you!”
She was thirteen, I think. We apologized. We had no idea she’d formed such a strong opinion of religion.
We told her it would be her choice to attend with us, or not. She never went back. Later, she told us she knew, in a previous life, she’d been a Native American, and loved that form of religion.
We loved her, and learned to love what she told us about her life in the Pacific Northwest.
The rest of us loved First Christian Church. Alex had friends there, so he sat with his friends, with Dad nearby. I sat with the choir.
I sang my heart out there for several years.
Christy graduated from Early High School in 1996, Alex in 1999.
With both children in college, Chuck and I decided to run away.
We lived at Pine Ridge the summer of 2001, then bought a home on eight acres — four forest, four canyon floor — in Cox Canyon, a couple of miles from Cloudcroft NM.
A year later, our children graduated from college—Alex, Texas Tech; Christy Tarleton—then found us.
One more to come….
Linda