Finding My Religion

A recent 88 Rewound on WMBR featured a playlist from May, 1971. I hadn’t heard this song in many years.

Honestly, I’d forgotten how much of an effect the song had on me. Life was changing fast, and I felt extremely unsettled. Six months later, entirely on my own, I started attending a Lutheran church I passed on the way home from my after-school job.

church

So began my religious period. It lasted until I was in my senior year of college.

Some years ago I attended my nephew’s wedding in the Midwest. My sister mentioned to her mother-in-law that she never knew how she and her husband were given permission to marry in the Lutheran church near our parents’ house. They lived out of state, and their church was in a different Synod. My sister’s mother-in-law smirked and said, “I know how.” My sister seemed surprised that, after so many years, this was the first she’d heard of it. “You do? How?” Her mother-in-law looked at me and said, “You were dating the minister’s daughter.” My mother must have told her. The minister’s daughter was Lori, and she got her dad to perform the ceremony.

Lori

Genetic Disposition

This is my maternal grandfather. He was an English professor at a college in Illinois.

Eugene Waffle, 1903-1968

He went bald, then had a detached retina. If I had taken after him any more than I have, I would have dropped dead from a heart attack 18 months ago.

Speaking of Mom, she used to live the theater life in New York. If this wasn’t her favorite song, it was one of them, sung by a young Jerry Orbach long before Law & Order.

My favorite song expressing the same sentiment is this one. I posted it 18 months ago, after not dying from a heart attack.

(Haven’t) Been There, (Haven’t) Done That

I had a visa to install a medical laboratory system in Pakistan.

The night before my scheduled flight out of Boston, a bus was firebombed outside of the Karachi hospital where I was going to work. As I watched the event on the CBS Evening News, my boss called and asked, “You seeing this?” With no need to specify what “this” was, I said “Yep.” He had just gotten off the phone with the big boss, and I was told, “You’re not going.” I never did, due to ongoing political unrest in Pakistan, culminating that year in the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73.