Life
is full of things we never get a chance to do. Some, like flying to the moon or
winning an Olympic gold medal, are just statistically unlikely to happen to any
one of us. And then there are the things we never scrape together the money or time to do,
like travel around the world or become a professional glassblower. But the other day, I got to thinking about the odd little things that, due to a bend in the road, we just never do,
and we don’t even realize that we didn’t do them until years later, when we
discover that everybody else has heard Frampton
Comes Alive! or eaten Tofurkey or whatever. These strange little turns of events came to mind one Sunday morning while I was driving past a local church. As I watched the well-dressed parishioners amble in through the church’s front doors, I found myself trying
to picture what they were going to do in there. But I couldn’t, because…
1) I’ve never gone to church.
I’ve
been in a few churches for weddings
and funerals, but I’ve never heard an actual church service of any kind, and
I’ve never been in a house of worship on a holiday, like Easter or Passover. My
four siblings, all older than me, had to go to church and sit through Sunday
school when they were little; my parents, though they weren’t religious, felt
that this was what civilized families did in the 1950s. But my dad, who could
fix or build anything, always got stuck with “volunteering” to wire the
church’s P.A. system or dig the trenches for its sprinklers. When my family
moved to Sunnyvale, California, just before I was born, my dad took one look at
the local church—a brand-new blank box with nothing but dirt around it—and
said, “We’re not going to church anymore.” That was the end of religion in my
family.
In
fact, I’ve only babysat an actual baby once, and that was only for about three
hours, during which he didn’t poop. As a youngster, I didn’t like babysitting
and avoided it at all cost. I had no interest in babies; I was the youngest in
my family, and also the youngest among my cousins, so I didn’t grow up around
babies; to me, they seemed like some sort of alien race, slow-witted and
uncoordinated. Baby dolls terrified me—the glass eyes always staring, the weird
little pouty mouths—so I gravitated toward stuffed animals and model horses. To
this day, my maternal instincts are still M.I.A.; I worked with kids for a while
in my 20s and liked it, but I never warmed to them enough to want kids of my
own. And as for babies, I’m still nervous around them; they feel like
overfilled water balloons about to pop. Plus, as Elaine said on Seinfeld, “No matter how clean they
look, they’re always sticky.”
I missed this part of elementary school, where you memorize how many pints are in a gallon and how many feet in a mile, because I skipped that year. My mother, a fantatic about accelerated learning, taught me to read before I started kindergarten. It gave me a tremendous head start—back then, most kids didn’t learn to read until the first grade—but it had an unintended consequence: I was bored at school, bored, bored, bored out of my mind. My mother had skipped a grade when she was little, so she thought it would be no big deal to have me do the same. But it wasn’t that easy; the school officials balked, and it took her a couple of years to persuade them. Finally, they caved and moved me from second grade to third, in the middle of the school year. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that this was why I knew absolutely nothing about quarts and acres, let alone furlongs and fathoms—they’d taught that segment early in third grade, the part that I missed. I ended up learning most of what I needed to know through grocery shopping. But I still don’t know how many feet are in a mile. And I’ve found it doesn’t matter.
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