Excerpt from Tiny Cracker Zoo
As the congregation once again opened their sparse wallets for a special collection, I noticed that my manic Sunday school teacher Maude had bowed her head. Stationed as close as possible to the preacher without actually being in the pulpit, she softly prayed with her excessively virtuous nuclear family.
Maude was an unsettlingly pleasant yet suspicion-addled woman who believed that virtually every manufactured good held a sinister undertone if she scrutinized it long enough. Her ire routinely focused upon magazines, movies, popular music, television, and common consumer products containing overt references to Satan like Dirt Devil vacuums and Devil Dog snack cakes; she spared certain foods like deviled eggs and devil’s food cake by opting to replace the offending word with “angel.”
Every one of these items represented another brick in the wall, another menacing component of a much larger united front to corrupt the minds and morality of her family. Preserving the religious purity of her brood frequently pushed her into the hazy boundaries between anxiety and fanatical obsession.
To balance these dark forces, Maude developed an innocuous hobby of finding miracles in everyday life to assure herself that God was maintaining an active vigil over her. Because she never actually experienced a genuine miracle like lifting an overturned bus off an asthmatic quadriplegic boy, her pursuit of miracles was usually confined to the insignificant and sometimes ridiculous.
Every occasion that could easily be disregarded as a spot of good fortune, Maude desperately mistook as a personal miracle. Finding a misplaced stamp to mail out a late bill: a miracle. Dog peeing on the linoleum instead of the carpet: a miracle. Triple coupon days: a direct example of God’s intervention.
Of course, such routine occurrences weren’t miracles any more than seeing a vague face in a decade-old, half eaten grilled cheese sandwich. Nevertheless, such logic could not prevent her from warping them into a moral lesson every Sunday morning.
Maude took the position of teen Sunday school teacher to guarantee that her daughters were not exposed to any improper elements or ideas. Her two daughters were home schooled because Maude considered students in public school to be a bad influence even though Sheri and I both attended Middleburg Jr. High School. While we were learning the wicked ways of Evolution, her daughters were taught the unfailing foundation of Creationism and the virtues of maintaining a godly yet subservient life. Such ideology would be detrimental when gaining post high school employment at the local cabinet factory or as a perky Wal-Mart greeter.
In the week preceding Halloween, Maude repeatedly pleaded with every child in Sunday school to not dress up nor to go trick-or-treating because she believed it was the devil’s holiday. I laughed at her ridiculousness as I donned a blonde Dolly Parton wig and stuffed my neighbor Irma’s discarded bra with two pink balloons—the knots perfectly resembled erect nipples. Because I believed in the value of sharing, I secretly presented Maude’s daughters with some of my milk chocolate demon candy the following Sunday morning. They told me it was tasty.
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