"But theological change happens though selective quoting. Every religious person does it: You quote those verses that resonate with your own religious insights and ignore or reinterpret those that undermine your certainties. Selective quoting isn't just legitimate, but essential: Religions evolve through shifts in selective quoting."
Yossi Klein Halevi
When I was a kid, I went to church on Sundays. The church was six blocks away from home and mostly I walked. Once in awhile, I took the bus if I wanted to. When I got older tho, church got to be boring. So I would walk a couple of extra blocks to the Italian bakery and then if I felt like it kept walking west up Bloomfield Avenue. At least one time I made it to a long cement bench shaped at a 45 degree angle from itself which said in tiles, "Come ye apart, and rest awhile." That bench was real cool.
[My mother caught on that I wasn't going to church so I used to run in to get a Sunday bulletin to take home. I went to an episcopal church and a spanish-speaking church too at least once but I just didn't tell her. Once I got wheels, I was off and running. I got through my last three years of high school doing either Jesus or drugs but never both at the same time. My mother seemed to like me stoned better than on Jesus. She never went to any church but she wanted me to. And it had to be her church-- a roman catholic church. I paid for my choice to defect from the catholics later on with getting dragged across a rug on my knees, thrown down some steps, and a severe beating. That was how I got to move out to my dad's. Dad was mentally stable, non-alcoholic, non-abusive, and easier to live with.]
Bloomfield Center was a place sometimes friends and I would go on Saturdays tho to there we did take the bus. There was The Last Straw there [a head shop; not a gay juice bar like The Last Straw in Albany NY] and a Woolworth's where once I tried on a black hair wig and a movie theatre and a bank and some other stuff. My friend Joann F. in high school lived bout a mile down from Woolworths on top of the store her parents owned.
Further up Bloomfield Avenue and Bloomfield was Montclair where my mother and step-father and half-sister lived in an apartment building for a couple of years. The Unitarian Church was also there. I went there sometimes after moving to my dad's with the folks I kiddy-sat for. More stores too. The Montclair stores were classier and thus didn't hold the appeal that the ones in Bloomfield or downtown Newark did. Once tho, Joann F. and I bought a blouse for someone at the Bambergers in Montclair as a Christmas present.
Further West from Montclair was Caldwell with its' collection of small shops and West Caldwell where my dad worked. There was an office supply store in West Caldwell and I used to like to go there too. To this day, I love office supply shops. I worked in the office for my dad during the summer of 1973. My mother didn't know as she would have forbade me so I just didn't tell her. Working there gave me a paycheck and that helped very much.
South of Bloomfield and a tad west of where my mother lived in Newark was Orange. That was where my dad lived and where I wound up living with him. I also spent six months in a wild rooming house in South Orange with a bunch of young folk. In February of 1978, I moved to Baton Rouge Louisiana. Baton Rouge continued to be the one continuous high that South Orange had become. I moved Upstate New Yak to my grands farm in November of 78. Most all of 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, I was a full-blown partyhead and remained that way until September of 1980 when I sobered up and cleaned up.
sapphoq on life
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