Jeez. Sunday school.
There are branches of my family that don't like to move. They're as rooted as I'm disconnected. They're Ray Bradbury, Stephen King kind of small town. Suffice to say that in the northeastern part of this country, and some bits of southeastern Canada, there are towns I'm related to.
My mother had a second cousin who was the daughter of a matriarch of a town in Vermont. This older woman, she had her 90th birthday, and they made it a town holiday. Banks closed, everything closed, big parade, fairgrounds filled with chicken barbecue, like two thousand people showed up, which meant probably half the people who lived within fifty or sixty miles. Most of those people . . . were related to her. Know what I mean?
I missed that party, but my parents and younger brother went, and he videotaped a bunch of it for a sociology project he was doing. He never finished that project because he got kind of creeped out. But my mother recognized like a dozen people she hadn't seen since she was a kid (she grew up two states away, being connected to the German and Italian relatives and not quite as purely Canuck), and she decided we should start going to church there even though it was like forty minutes away.
Well, whatever. The church there was WEIRD for Roman Catholic, and not dull, not Lovecraft weird. More diluted-pocket-of-hippies weird. New England does both of those.
But the Sunday school, oy. Problem was, each little town had its own church, so only that town drew kids for Sunday school, and that town's high school had a graduating class of like 40 kids. They were eager for novelty. By which I mean that there were like six girls in my Sunday school class, and five of them flirted mightily at me.
One of the guys there was all
and said, "You should totally go for it, because you can just leave town and forget about it afterward!"
I said, "But . . . for one thing, they're all distant cousins of mine."
And he said, "Hell, they're all CLOSE cousins of mine. What do you think prom is like here?"
Oy.
