Matching Tracksuits

After lunch, the students at our new school have a short recess. The school is trying to get back to some more traditional ideas in school, and providing kids with a chance to get out and run about and be kids once in a while is an important element in the planning of the schedule. Right now since, we are just visitors in the building that houses are small school, we don’t have a lot of space for this recess. On days when the weather is fine, we simply go out to a grassy area in front of the school and let the kids have some free time. The boys throw a football, and the girls and a few boys for a circle and knock around the volleyball. everyone seems to enjoy it, so much, so this several of that we have mentioned it in the school journals, they are keeping in my class. Most days it has been intolerably hot for me during this break, so I have sought shelter under an awning in the front of the school. Today, however, the weather was simply perfect. It was sunny, but not hot. It invited rambunctious play but not sweat. it was a perfect Polish summer day in other words right here in South Carolina. Combined with the cool mornings we’ve had this week, this simply suggest that autumn is finally approaching.

This will be our first autumn without the Girl living in our house. And although she will not have much of an autumn in Florida, this will be the first autumn of her college days. Eventually, she might associate cooler days with the beginning of a school year, and cool mornings like we’ve had this week might bring back little floods of memories of her time in college.

For me, autumn brings back memories of my childhood growing up in a heterodox Christian that still insisted on observing the Jewish Old Testament festivals, although they gave them a unique and somewhat twisted spin. The highlight of all of this is always the Feast of Tabernacles, an eight day extravaganza Filled with activities, restaurants, and daily church services. The daily church service was really just the price we had to pay all the rest of the fund. At least that’s how we kids looked at it.

For kids, this weeklong convention was little more than a replacement for Christmas, which was forbidden in the church because of its pagan roots. My own parents would bribe me to behave well in the daily services by giving me a new Matchbox Car every day to play with. They would also buy one or two large gifts, toys that I had an eyeing for months on end at Sears or Kmart, toys that lured me like a sirens call every time we entered those stores, toys that I would play with his best I could through the packaging, which was Just cleverly enough open for little kids to get their fingers in and manipulate the toy, just enough to heighten the desire. One year I got a large diecast tractor with a working frontend loader and functional backhoe.

Another year, when I was in my full summer succession, they bought me Millennium Falcon. I thought I was in heaven.

Of course, once I got to be about Emil’s age, a teenager in other words, this eight-day festival really met one thing: a fling. In fact that’s just what we all called it. A feast fling. Teenagers would start to search for likely candidates from the very opening service, which was always an evening service before the first day proper, which always necessitated two church services. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. The day was just that special. Still, while these daily church services were simply the cost of the rest of the enjoyable week, that first day having double services was actually something of a blessing, for it was just before, and just after the services that the real hunting happened. Since we had so sequestered ourselves away from the rest of “the world,” that diabolical morass of the unchosen all out to steal our salvation, most members of the sect came well before weekly church services and stayed long after in order to fellowship. With that habit well established, it simply spilled over into these extraordinary days in the fall. Before and after services, clusters of teens would roam throughout the auditorium (or arena, depending on the popularity of a given location) rented for the week, all of the most one thing on their mind: to meet someone of the opposite sex.

Truthfully, it wasn’t just the teens who are doing this. Although they took a more nuance to approach, most single members of the site approach these festivals with a similar mindset. Because the group discouraged or even forbade members from marrying outside the sect, these weeklong gatherings offered everyone a chance to meet someone who was safe, who could be eventually married without the risk of losing one’s place in the church and therefore one's salvation and eternal life. I, too, participated in this gigantic mating dance, although it was somewhat half hearted, I believe. By that time, it was clear to me that I would not be staying in the church forever, and I would eventually drift out and leave my parents behind and their religion. Little did, I know that they too, due to the changes that have occurred, would eventually just return to plain Jane Christianity.

Still, after all these years (it’s been well over 30 since I last attended one of these gatherings), those yearly retreats remain to my mind one of the few benefits of growing up in what truthfully could be called a cult. Because of the double layered tithing system of the sect (and triple layered every third year), members entered these weeklong festivities with approximately 6 to 8% of their yearly earnings to blow in one week. That meant going to restaurants that we would never have gone to, visiting sites we would have never seen, staying in cities we would’ve never visited otherwise. This did come in a price, of course. When you’re taking off 20% of your salary every paycheck (and that was 20% of the gross not the net), even an engineer like my father made wages that could sometimes be stifling small. But in truth, that really just made the feast all the more special. It was a week of excess, a Bacchanalia as much as a conservative sect could allow itself to have.

So when the morning turn chilly, and the evenings finally become actually cold, my mind turns back to those magical weeks when just for a moment, just for the shortest of files, we lived like royalty.