The Truth
Chapter 2

Copyright© 2015 by Old Man with a Pen

Between Mrs. Patterson, third and fourth grades, and Miss Paige, fifth and sixth grades ... and the ambushers, my optometrist managed to put his eldest daughter through six quarters of classes at Michigan State Agricultural College. I broke or had broken for me ... one pair of frames a week. Plus my vision deteriorated so rapidly that I managed bifocals before I passed the third grade.

“Move up, David ... I can see you squinting from here,” said Miss Paige.

I heard that once a month. New glasses and I could move back to the back row ... where I and others of my ilk sat. Then I would start my weekly meander to the front row. By the time I had commenced sixth grade ... my vision was 5:600 left and 5:650. Legally Blind.

What a normal sighted person could see at 600 feet, I had to be five feet away to see it.

Your normal Four Eyes wore his ... or her ... glasses to correct slight defects ... like 20:12 ... they could see well enough to avoid the bullies or fight back if need be. Without my glasses, I couldn’t see ... clearly ... my hand with my arm extended ... and what I could see out past that range might not actually be there.

“How many fingers, Dave?” asked my optometrist.

Since I saw six fingers and two thumbs I usually complained.

“You are using both hands and that’s not fair.” Then I chuckled.

“What’s s funny?”

“You have two left thumbs,” I said.

In my home town ... in the first half of the last half of the twentieth century ... if you didn’t go to church ... you couldn’t do business in town. It made no difference if you believed or not. So ... we went to the Congregational Church. It was close. The Methodists were closer and so were the Catholics but Mother decided on the CC. They were across the Courthouse lawn.

“Where’s your Dad,” I was often asked on a Sunday.

“He’s EUB,” I had been coached to reply.

Daddy was Evangelical United Brethren. They were the closest church to his home in the country. The church was long on preaching brimstone and short on heat, electricity and tolerance for ‘others’.

The church was way out there in the middle of a field of popcorn. Rather than obey the “Laws of Man” the EUB used what would normally be lawn to mow as a parking lot. The church made a very bleak appearance.

We went there three times a year and I never did understand ... anything ... I was a townie and all the kids smelled of cow shit and horses.

I spent a lot of time running around the outside of the building trying to get away from the girls. Those girls could throw a hundred pound bale of alfalfa hay into the hayloft ... one handed ... ambidextrously ... from the ground. I have a fair idea about how far they could throw me ... I got caught regularly.

We went to the EUB to buy popcorn in the winter, watermelon in the summer and pumpkins at halloween. The rest of the year daddy “churched” in his HamShack.

 
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