Looking Back by Joyce Maynard

Author:Joyce Maynard [Maynard, Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-6128-6
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2012-05-25T12:00:00+00:00

I CAN UNDERSTAND THE Jesus freaks turning, dope-muddled, to a life of self-denial and asceticism. The excesses of eighth-grade psychedelia left me feeling the same way and I turned, in 1967, to God. To the church, at least, anxious to wash away the bad aftertaste of too many Cokes and too much eyeshadow. The church I chose, the only one conceivable for a confirmed atheist, wasn’t really a church at all, but a dark gray building that housed the Unitarian Fellowship. They were an earnest, liberal-minded, socially-conscious congregation of thirty-five or forty. If I had been looking for spirituality, I knocked at the wrong door; the Unitarians were rationalists—scientists, mostly, whose programs would be slide shows of plant life in North Africa or discussion of migratory labor problems. We believed in our fellow man.

We tried Bible reading in my Liberal Religious Youth group but in that mildewed attic room, sitting on orange crates in a circle of four, the Old Testament held no power. We gave up on Genesis and rapped, instead, with a casual college student who started class saying, “Man, do I have a hangover.” Sometimes we sang in a choir made up of one soprano, two tenors and a tone-deaf alto, draped in shabby black robes designed for taller worshipers. After one week of singing we switched, wisely, to what Unitarians do best, to the subjects suited to orange crates. We found a Cause.

We discovered the Welfare Mothers of America—one welfare mother in particular. She was an angry, militant mother of eight (no husband in the picture) who wanted to go to the national convention in Tennessee and needed someone to foot the bill. I don’t know who told us about Mrs. Mahoney, or her about us. In one excited Sunday meeting, anyway, the three of us voted to pay her way and, never having earned three dollars without spending it, never having met Peg Mahoney, we called the state office of the Unitarian Church and arranged for a two-hundred-dollar loan. Then we made lists, allocated jobs, formed committees (as well as committees can be formed, with an active membership of three, and a half dozen others who preferred to sleep in on Sundays). We would hold a spaghetti supper, all proceeds to go to the Mahoney fund.

We never heard what happened at the welfare conference—in fact, we never heard from our welfare mother again. She disappeared, with the red plaid suitcase I lent her for the journey and the new hat we saw her off in. Our two-hundred-dollar debt lingered on through not one but three spaghetti suppers, during which I discovered that there’s more to Italian-style fund-raising dinners than red and white checked tablecloths and Segovia records. Every supper began with five or six helpers; as more and more customers arrived, though, fewer and fewer LRYers stayed on to help. By ten o’clock, when the last walnut-sized meat ball had been cooked and the last pot of spaghetti drained, there would be two of us

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