Swear to god, for all too long, I owed my philosophy of life to Rogers and Hammerstein, Victor Herbert, Mario Lanza, George Gershwin and—the Church of the Brethren.
In the beginning, of course, I attended Sunday morning and evening services and love feasts and communions and Vacation Bible School. I survived a face-forward dunking in the church’s baptistery in that clingy white choir robe. I believed that we had a story to tell to the nations and what a friend I had in Jesus! For sure, I absorbed years of guilt-laced rules for earnest young people: piety, modesty, frugality, virginity, studiousness, service—the very definitions of my goody two-shoe-ness. Oh yes, and a disturbing deference to authority. The outright stricture never to smoke or drink. The underlying whispers about what would happen in dark and smoky rooms. That fun based on pure abandonment would lead to trouble with a capital T.
But then the lines started blurring. Music Man’s Professor Harold Hill certainly warned River City’s parents about the dangers of pool halls and dissolution, “tryin’ out tailor-mades like cigarette fiends,” becoming libertine men and scarlet women , all on their way to de-grad-da-tion. But when Mrs. Kohler’s McPherson High School chorus presented “Music Man,” I cared not a whit about those evils (in no small measure because I knew I wasn’t going to commit them). I hung instead on the question of whether Marion, Madam Librarian, would succumb to Harold Hill’s persistent advances. And when she did, nothing scary happened. Just the two of them singing a duet on a bridge in the park clasping hands.
My love affair with musicals began in earnest in junior high when Pete Talbot played Curly in “Oklahoma.” To my naïve mind, the whole thing resonated. Kansas neighbored Oklahoma. I knew all about “waving wheat that sure smelled sweet when the wind comes right behind the rain.” We had cousins in Kansas City and that did seem pretty up-to-date compared to McPherson. And for goodness sakes, my parents talked about church box socials in their youth. So why wouldn’t I find the plot plausible. Handsomest boy Pete aka Curly smitten by loveliest girl, Laurey. Rough but kind-hearted Jed removed as a threat to Curly. Ado Annie, the slightly older, awkward, wayward spinster tempting the youngsters. (Truth of the matter is that I didn’t understand her winks and innuendos.) And finally, just as it all should unfold, a community of wholesome farm folk singing Curly and Laurey off into their lives together:
“Ev’ry night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk makin’ lazy circles in the sky.
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say, yeeow-a-yip-i-o-ee ay!
We’re only sayin’ You’re doin’ fine, Oklahoma! Oklahoma, okay.”
Who the hell wouldn’t want to grow up, find Curly, be his honey lamb, and be serenaded into marriage?
My mother used to say that there was a lid for every pot. I winced every time she said it—so practical and unflattering a promise. But in the land of musicals, I heard instead that there would be a prince charming waiting. That some enchanted evening I’d see him across a crowded room. That what followed would be sweet and exuberant, alive with the sound of music. And everyone would go to church on Sunday, quilt comforters for the needy on Wednesday morning, and practice choir on Thursday evenings.
I understood that such magic and calm might be shadowed by trouble—World War II battles approaching the islands; the Nazis invading the manor; a rough character or two lurking. Someone might come to church who smoked and drank, leaving us to debate whether they should be invited over for Sunday dinner. My grandparents had died and I was a bit unsure about that mansion in the sky with many rooms. Still the world would wish young lovers to “follow your star, be brave and faithful and true” or to “walk on, walk on with hope in your heart and you’ll never walk alone.”
I was happy as a clam when the curtain closed and the lights came up on a childhood of musicals as the bucolic sunset faded. I was nonchalant about whether I believed Brethrenisms or just knew the routine.
In short, for all too long, I layered a light shroud of Brethren beliefs over the plots of musicals and stitched the two together into a song-filled, fairy-tale, prudish future. And in that future, I anticipated no seriously dark times–just a life ordered by work and love and good deeds. I didn’t look ahead to children. No one would be bone tired. No one desperately ill or dying in desperation. No one starving. Because surely a loving God would see to peace and quiet. And because “a law was made a distant moon ago here July and August cannot be too hot. And there’s a legal limit to the snow here in Camelot.”
Preposterous as it now seems, I skated through the first thirty years of my life with that as the frame. Surely, goodness and mercy – and oh, by the way, a rising chorus and a deep embrace—would follow me all the days of my lives. Though missing Prince Charming, I managed to live an interesting, oddly innocent, unsophisticated life. It wasn’t a movie set of moon-swept beaches or wind-blown prairies. But it was damn easy and truly shallow.
Forty-five years later, I have no truck with the wicked pablum of organized religions, even one as innocuous as the Brethren Church thought itself to be. I quickly came to understand, also, that adulthood did not mean chaste kisses under a cloud-free sky. For a host of those years, living was too busy, too fraught, too committed to preservation causes and legislative deadlines and packed lunches and 4-H fairs. Too consumed by hurried flights home to Kansas and late night drives up the North Fork. Too shadowed or gilded by early alarms and crockpot management to wrestle down any coherent philosophy. It was about existence not existential tenets or even simple sophistry. And in the toughest, ugliest moments—and there were a respectable number– of those forty-five years, I found no direct utility for the hypocrisies of either faith or Broadway. I was significantly adrift—relying more on instinct than inspiration.
So it took losing Dave and the insidious tolls and available time of aging to rethink and re-feel the grounds on which I’d based so many years. I’ve come to look back on those church customs and those fifties musicals as curiously distant and complicated dogmas. For sure, they offered safer, more loving and forgiving foundations than so many people are ever given. They stood me on tricky but not empty footing—a world without violence or the sharp edges of cynicism. They both promised hope and possibility. And, even if they failed me in substance, they allowed me to live the crazy busyness of all those middle years–mostly steady. Mostly longer on light than darkness. I am grateful to those two beginnings–without ever wanting to pass them on to another generation whole.
Now, as I look all the way back and roll it all around in my mind, I see my great good fortune in those intervening years to know real despair and death and fear and weariness. And real joy and gratitude and distant lands, music and golden words that come from artists’ souls and most of all, friendship built on knowing. A magnificent universe–exquisite and ravishing just in the small sliver I’ve experienced. A world far far richer than either doctrine or drama offered. And at the same time, I’m never ever sure that I’ve reached the kismet of “Naughty Marietta’s,” theme song, “Ah Sweet Mystery of Life At Last I’ve Found Thee.” ©
