The Ride - Nebraska, 1960

Don't Look Back

Columbus, Nebraska 1960

"Shirley, sweetheart, come help me with the dishes", my mother used to say after every meal.

"Shirley, my little girl, could you take the garbage out?", my father, every morning after breakfast.

I was born and raised in Columbus, Nebraska. A small, industrial and rural town of 20.000 people.

My father is the pastor of the local episcopal church, near the 17th str. Where I used to live. Nearby is the school, that I dropped out from, when I was seventeen.

My mother, like a good pastor's wife, does nothing in her life. She is a housewife, but doesn't that mean doing nothing? She used to occupy herself with charity funding, some time ago. For the poor, for the disabled, for the church and all that. She is – you know – that kind of woman that blames people for all evil in this world and praises the God for all good.

Towards me, they were consistent. I mean, they offered me everything I wanted or, better, everything that I needed. I always had my clothes, my food and all these that I guess someone needs to develop into a good part of the society.

Mentally though, things were a nightmare.

"You need to know, Shirley, that God is the only truth that you should follow in your whole life. Because only He will listen to you in your hard times. You have to respect Him and love Him more than anyone you know or will ever know".

"Do you love Him more than me, Dad?", I used to ask him.

"Imagine, how much I love Him, for He has given you to us", he was answering diplomatically.

"Can I ask you something else?".

"Sure".

"If I don't believe in Him, will you stop loving me or Him for sending me to you?".

"I'm pretty sure that such thing will never happen. You're a good girl, you know what's right".

My parents were always judging someone by their religious beliefs. I remember them stop talking to people they knew, because they declared to be atheist or even worse, ' I don't give a fuck about fucking God and His fucking universe', like old-Jimmy was grumbling everytime. Jimmy was a first world war veteran, who was cursing the existence all the time and was spitting on hin spittoon countless times everyday, while sitting on his porch from dawn 'till dusk. My father wouldn't even let him pass outside the church.

The fact that I was good at school didn't matter. Either way, it was like I was destined to doing charities, like my mother, and trying to gather as many five-dollar notes I could for the poor and the church and end up in my thirty five with a husband who would have the best references of the neighborhood and two children, boy and girl, who I would raise to follow the exact same route. I mean, this is what they wanted, and they made sure to show it to me in a 'cute' way, every single day.

"You should better read the bible little girl. What's so interesting, anyway, about these things? Most of them were created by people who were trying to disorientate", he was saying when he was catching me, reading something. Sometime, my books were going 'missing', all of a sudden.

My mother's opinion didn't matter at all. Basically, she didn't have an opinion about anything. She was just nodding positively, every time my father was present and when he wasn't.. Well she was telling me to "listen to your father". This was my mother's figure..