Today was my first full day off. What did I get scratched off that list? Something I’d forgotten even to add to the list in the first place. It’s something I started last summer. Or was it the summer before that? I could check, but what’s the point — the point is that it wasn’t completely finished, that French drain project. I’d intended to hook the whole system up to three of the five downspouts on the back of the house.

Since we’ve hired someone to enclose the area under our deck with lattice, and he was scheduled to start today, I knew I had to finish hooking everything up this morning.

While I worked, I conducted informal research on a project I’ve had lingering in the back of my mind for years now, something I’ve wanted to write but just never had the distance required to write about it. Now that both my parents have passed, I’ve started drafting ideas for an extended piece on my religious upbringing. A memoir? Who knows what it will be. But I’ve started exploring that world again, downloading old sermons from the 70s and 80s from an internet archive of impressive scope, a site that has made available all the literature (books, “booklets,” magazines, sermons, television broadcasts) of the Worldwide Church of God, the organization in which I grew up.

I grew up having expectations for my teen years and early adulthood that were so different that my peers’ expectations that they’re almost laughable now.

I’ve written about similar matters here, but mainly I’ve explored the groups that exist that profess, to varying degrees, the same theology of the WCG. Now, I’ll write about my own experiences growing up in such an environment.