One’s point of view may change a lot between the ages of seven and sixty-seven. I take exception to Thomas Wolfe’s title, You Can’t Go Home Again. You certainly can, and it is not always a good idea. I returned to my birthplace and pre-wonder years after nearly sixty years. At that age, I would have learned that saying, “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” would be an excuse long rendered unnecessary.
When I lived in Findlay, the local newspaper was called The Findlay Courier, which should indicate the political climate. It wasn’t until the Nixon/Kennedy election that I realized that Democrats were living there. I left Findlay, not of my own accord. At the age of seven, going on eight—that’s another habit left over from youth. You will never hear me say sixty-eight going on sixty-nine—I didn’t have much say on matters such as the location of my father’s next job. I left the confines of Findlay to enter the even more confining environs of Auburn, Indiana. Looking back, I am reminded of the scene in National Lampoon’s Vacation where Cousin Eddie told Dale to show Rusty his worm farm. There was little or nothing for a child to do in Auburn.
Like most rural communities, the political atmosphere in Auburn was conservative. It was not right in the name of the local newspaper, The Evening Star. Since the road by the country club was called Morningstar Road, I can now only assume there was a cultish fixation on the planet Venus.
Auburn lacked at most minuscule two entertainment venues I had become accustomed to in Findlay: a movie theater and a public swimming pool. I was a small child for my age and the new kid. The checklist for some crummy few years was complete. When children are this bored, they look for anything to get into trouble, possibly as a revenge plot against parents for making them live in a shithole town or class C city, as the locals used to insist. Smoking and drinking early were entertainment vehicles, as was (further reminiscent of Dale and Rusty) perfecting masturbation techniques.
I stayed in Auburn and the surrounding area for the next sixteen years and graduated from DeKalb High School with a strong background in anxiety and loneliness. I do not have many fond memories of my time there other than meeting my lifetime best friend, my future wife, and the mother of my children. It was those two who kept me from becoming suicidal. I am sorry; this was supposed to be more lighthearted. Suffice it to say that my time there was never idyllic.
I blew a scholarship to attend any state university in Indiana because I was confused about what I wanted to do and not entirely well mentally. My modus operandi was to choose the path of least resistance. I mixed two years working for the USPS in Fort Wayne with a semester at Indiana University—my stint at the Bloomington campus lasted a month. The post office job was one of only two I acquired independently.
After getting married, I knew I had to get a good job to support the family I was planning. So naturally, when my father moved to Bowling Green, Ohio, with the same company that relocated him to Auburn, I went for a laboratory job there. I stayed there for about a year before moving to Texas to engage in only the second job I had gotten without assistance. At this job, I had the opportunity to educate myself in rubber chemistry. Since I was a child, I have been engaged in a quest for knowledge for its own sake. I took a read-and-experiment approach. I probably couldn’t pass an organic chemistry course, then or now, but I learned what ingredients did what in a rubber compound. I became good at it and chose it for my career path. I will not go into any detail on the how and what of rubber compounding because it would be excruciatingly boring to read.
There is an old saying was ‘rubber people bounce around.” I was no exception. My poor wife, taken from her friends and family at a young age and put into the alien environment of Houston, Texas, could never get wholly acclimated to anything and I “controlled’ my angst by drinking in those days—I even spending a night in jail in downtown Houston. All of this is to say that we moved a lot. I worked in Indiana, Texas, Alabama, Michigan, and Ohio. Our most extended stay was in Michigan, where we settled for twenty-three years before taking my final job in Bellefontaine, Ohio.
I recount this travelogue to provide a little background of my exposure to the political beliefs of colleagues and acquaintances. I made only a handful of friends, possibly due to the paranoia of my youth. I liked people well enough but was always disappointed when it came to getting better acquainted. Whether my expectations were too high, or my anxiety and suspicion drove people away, I don’t know.
Growing up in a town with a newspaper with the word ‘Republican’ right in the name and moving to a rural community in Indiana, I was exposed exclusively to conservative republican politics. I accepted this as a kid but began having the same nagging doubts I had when sent to Sunday school. The creationism story and the story of the great flood and Noah’s ark set off alarm bells in my young inquisitive mind. There were conflicting versions of what happened on which day in Genesis, and by being a member of the TV generation who read encyclopedias, I knew many animals and plants were out there. Some had to eat the others to survive.
The story of Noah did not hold muster. I figured out early on that if the Bible couldn’t possibly be the word of “God.” How could an omnipotent, omniscient, loving God be so full of shit? I went along with it and was even confirmed in the local Lutheran Church. I even attended a strict Church of Christ after I got married. But I never ultimately bought it, and I discovered that many Christians also happened to be assholes. After a while, the kid who used to read encyclopedias couldn’t even pretend to believe anymore.
Am I an agnostic or an atheist? An agnostic believes the existence of a divine entity is unknowable, and an atheist just flat-out says he doesn’t believe. Looking at it more closely, you can see no real difference except the concession to the believer that “I can’t disprove it either.” I can understand the reluctance to come out as an atheist. It is the equivalent of declaring one’s homosexuality in the 1950s or earlier. People don’t shriek and run away, but they still view it in a suspicious light, as if you declared yourself to be Satan.
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