Cookies and Damnation at Grandma's

Grandma was determined to save my soul from eternal damnation, a fate she'd already resigned to my parents. I'd have a wonderful time visiting on the weekends as a child, with her Norwegian cookies and her home's quiet nature, free of the smoke and drama permeating my own homestead at the time.  Wonderful that is, except when she'd tuck me into the guest bedroom and tell me a bedtime story.  It was too often a tale of demons and brimstone, of pitchforks and blood curdling screams that go on forever.  Satan ruled over everyone here and my folks were pinned to the coals for infinity with Lucifer's forked toes firmly ensnared 'round their necks.  My primal lizard brain soaked this shit in like a sponge and try as I did over the years with booze and coke - Beelzebub knows I underwent this method of treatment with gusto - and of late with psychiatry, I haven't been able to ring it back out.

Now this particular piece of dysfunction is minuscule when compared to the heaping helping of shit ol' Mom and Dad ladled into my psyche.  And unlike some of the things the folks visited upon me, Grandma's tales from the crypt were told with the best intentions.  You see, she had retreated deep into fundamentalist Christianity toward the end of her life after having lost her husband and son in the space of a few years time.  Grandma was suddenly alone save for an aloof daughter (my Mom) and went looking for any raft she thought might save her from drowning in this strange sea that was America.  Oh sure, she had other relatives around - a sister even - but it wasn't the same.

Grandma never felt comfortable here in the US, out of place and phase with a culture both too diverse and too fast for her, despite having lived in the relatively slow-paced, white-bread world that was and is Everett, Washington since arriving on these shores from her native Norway in 1929 with her husband and son in tow and pregnant with my mother.  She was woman not yet 30 when she first gazed upon this land and yet already well set in her ways.  She'd always been a "traditional" Norwegian, meaning a staunch and very conservative Lutheran.  She'd been brought up on a farm and didn't comprehend or approve of the pop-obsessed culture that dominated this country and mesmerized her children, particularly her daughter.  Her fun-loving husband was, in his way, fascinated with this culture as well so there was no commiserating with him on the matter.  She'd spoiled my mother as a child to the point that there was no hope of reaching out to her and receiving actual understanding or emotional support when she found herself a widowed sixty-something at the dawn of the 1960s.  She then lost her son to a heart attack in 1965 and was "on her own" in a very real way.

Grandma eventually married again, a neighbor, more out of loneliness than anything else.  But she gave her all in those last years - her heart and, yes, her soul - to the Jehovah's Witnesses and with it accumulated the Armageddon-laden baggage that such a belief packs.  Thus came the images of my roasting parents and the possibility that my sister and I might join them on the rotisserie should I not stand straight and fly right.  As such, whenever somebody waves a Watchtower on my stoop, I never fail to answer such a greeting with a hearty "Hail Satan!" before slamming the door shut in their beaming faces.  Well, I don't because I'm a wimp.  In fact, I often pretend to listen to their rantings before begging off after some imagined task they're keeping me from.  But I'm thinking it the whole while!

My time with Grandma was brief - she died of bone cancer when I was not yet 9 - and as I mentioned, almost completely positive save for this one thing.  Still, even as a fervent non-believer in any accepted theism - I've been thus since I was old enough to form an opinion on such matters - it's there, festering.  Nightmares of demons and terror.  I can't even watch movies like The Exorcist or The Omen lest I cower in fear for the next several weeks afterward.

I believe that whatever the great truth about reality, the universe, the multiverse, etc., that it's something far beyond our current capacity to understand and the odds that any group of people have guessed it right is stupendously small, especially when almost all of them believe it relates somehow to kings and angels and devils, good, evil, punishment and rewards, and all the things that seem very specific to a time and place long ago on our little old planet.  But that's just me.

Sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite.