Good News

… and I have to say I’m shocked by this. My dad had been transferred from Eastern Iowa (we were halfway between KC and St. Joe, in a VERY rural bedroom community and Kansas was right next door), and when I hit the K-12 school (yikes!), was quickly dubbed “the witch from Ireland” because they thought I talked funny and I refused to join in their weird Baptist activities. They used to think it was great fun to go to the “big city” and wave a bible in peoples’ faces and “witness” to them as though calling people sinners would inspire them to toss everything and follow them to church.

Curiously, they also had an extremely high rate of teen pregnancies and shotgun weddings at 15 or 16. I still don’t get how that religion thing works out all those contradictions.

It was a miserable year. My school highlight was having to argue with the history teacher that Anwar Sadat was in fact the president of Egypt after he smirked at me for missing the “correct” answer of Nasser. I finally convinced him the latter had died quite some time earlier, which earned me an A for the semester, but hostility afterward for making him look stupid in front of the class (who seemed to barely notice).

But I digress. Have to give them credit for evolving enough to be so curious and welcoming to strangers because this wasn’t normal back in the mid ‘70s.