Friday, January 12, 2007

Church and Church Key in Kellogg

While growing up in Kellogg, I had this idea that our town was divided between the churches and the taverns. I know it wasn't this simple, but I saw it all around me. I got the idea from this idea that church life was a teetotaling life and people who drank alcohol didn't go to church.

My family make-up reinforced this idea. My mother went to church sometimes, but was adamant about my sisters and me going to Sunday School and junior choir. My mom didn't drink.

My dad, on the other hand, rarely went to church and drank alcohol daily, except when he decided from time to time to go on the wagon. He called the opener he used to crack open bottles or pierce a can of beer a church key. Mom was of the church and he was of the church key.

I know that from outside Kellogg, it looked like our town was all about hard work and drinking, gambling, fights, and, until the new freeway construction razed the houses, prostitution (though there prostitutes who worked out of the McConnell Hotel), Kellogg also supported strong Lutheran, Baptist, Roman Catholic, United, Mormon, Assembly of God, Nazerine, and other non-denominational congregations.

I knew Kellogg's Catholics drank alcohol. Many of the Italians in town were Roman Catholic and many of them bellied up to the bar with my dad at Dick and Floyd's and I knew that some of the Italians made their own wine and I'd gone to the annual Italian picnic with my dad and the alcohol flowed freely.

I knew of Lutherans who drank. So I knew that there was crossover, but the prevailing idea in my head was that alcohol and serious church attendance didn't mix. Therefore, it didn't surprise me when one of my dad's friends, whose wife and kids were devoted to the United Church across the street from our house, came to the church to pick up the family, he didn't go in the church, but sat in his car, waiting, drinking a six-pack of beer in the church parking lot.

All through high school, I drank very little beer. Once I started college, this changed. I also sang in the choir at North Idaho College with Rick Frost, a wonderful choir director, and a very public Christian and a teetotaler. Being Christian, Rick attracted many Christians to the choir and I became friends with some of these choir members and I felt torn by the faith these friends professed and my drinking.

In other words, I internalized the conflict I perceived between church and drinking. Once I started drinking, I took on my father's attitude toward church: drinking made me unworthy of the church. I felt guilty when I saw church members and if I went to church I felt like a hypocrite. On the other hand, if I decided to go to church, I felt embarrassed with my friends who were drinkers and who didn't go to church.

This division continued after I graduated from North Idaho College. I transferred to Whitworth College. It's a Christian college. I think I felt like I could shelter myself in North Spokane away from alcohol and be a teetotaler in a Christian atmosphere. It didn't take me long, of course, to discover that many students at Whitworth drank alcohol. At first I was disillusioned. But as time went along, I began to think of myself as being sort of a hip Whitworthian because I began to believe I had integrated the worlds of the church and church key.

I drank alcohol at Whitworth and I worshipped. Upon graduation, in 1976, I got a job as a Chaplain's Assitant at Whitworth. I celebrated winning the job by having a nice dinner and wine with friends and then came back to my dorm and drank a couple of coffee mugs of Chevis Regal with Dave in my dorm and was so hungover the next day I could barely wiggle.

It wasn't the last time my chaplain's work and alcohol crossed paths.

This divide I perceived in Kellogg and felt within myself played itself out most clearly when my younger sister, Carol, got married in July, 1986. I had quit drinking the year before. I had come to the conclusion that I had a terrible drinking problem, and had been maintaining sobriety with the help of a couple of 12-step groups for about eighteen months by the time of the wedding.

Carol and her groom, Paul, were deeply committed to a non-denominational Christian church, the Christian Life Center. Paul's family had been pillars in this church for many years and it had taken hold in Kellogg very strongly.

When the wedding ended and the wedding reception started in Mom and Dad's back yard, across the street from the United Church, where the wedding took place, I was in charge of the bar. I could be trusted with pouring drinks and serving beer because I was sober.

As I started pouring some ditches and gin and tonics and screwdrivers and handing out some beers, I noted that our backyard had become a divided place. Members of the Christian Life Center occupied the west half of the back yard and the boisterous drinkers who were all family friends occupied the east half. As had been the case in my years growing up in Kellogg, the teetotalers and the drinkers were keeping their distance and didn't really know how to get on with each other.

I took a "what will be will be" attitude toward this division since there was not hostility, only awkwardness. But, after an hour or so, the groom, Paul and his brothers and his sister took out their guitars and a banjo and stood in the middle of the yard and began to play and sing.

Their wonderful playing and singing attracted immediate attention. My dad's friends inched toward the music. So did the church members. Pretty soon Dad's friends, a little lit up, but not sloppy, began to compliment the musicians to the church members, employing all their concentration not to say, "Son of bitch, these kids are goddamned good" and instead saying things, a bit artifically, like "These kids are great musicians. You must be very proud of them."
Joyful laughter accompanied these words of praise.

The music broke the division. The music seemed to cast a spell on those celebrating my sister's marriage to Paul that erased the self-consciousness of the polite church-goers unsure of how to mix with the more rough and tumble drinkers and of the drinkers acting sure that they were being held in judgment by the Christians.

Like most such magic moments, this one ended when the party dispersed. My dad's friends did not become members of the Christian Life Center and members of the church did not all grab a bottle of Oly and start telling stories spiced with profanity.

My period of sobriety lasted until fall, 1996. For mental and physical health reasons, I'm in another period of abstinence which I think will last a long time.

My struggle now is less with church and the church key as it is with refinement and vulgarity. Whether I'm drinking or not, I've been blessed by growing up in Kellogg with a profane mouth, a love of dirty jokes, vulgar phrases, giving and taking shit from people, and the kind of unrestrained humor that I learned in the Zinc Plant, from my high school friends, and at home. But, I work in higher education.

The classroom is not the right place for this love I have of profanity, irreverent comments, and picking on people. (Fortunately, I have several fellow teacher friends who don't mind too much if I lengthen the leash and some students with whom I can be myself away from the classroom.) But, in the public square, the prevailing tone and attitude is to be refined, not profane, and so I watch my tongue. Too many people take too much pride in how easily they can be offended.

I fight this all the time. How much, in the academic context, can I be my full self? How much should I hold back? How much can I let my personality rip? How about at home? In a way, my job has become what church used to be and watching my tongue as become the equivalent of not drinking.

I suppose it's why when I get excited about something around my family or enjoy a poem with my students or want to compliment a piece of student writing, I don't say, "It's like a wooden dick: you can't beat it."

I wait until I get back to Kellogg to speak such words that reflect my personality that honestly.

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