minivans full of young children, and one police cruiser.
After bombing several vehicles with my snowball mortars, I spotted my sixth grade history teacher, Mr. Austere, pulling out of the meetinghouse parking lot in his brand new truck. I drew pause upon seeing the shiny Ford, knowing full well who it belonged to, and briefly hesitated to launch any snowballs at it. Shaking off my fear, I intrepidly lurched forward from my concealed mound and covered the windshield of Mr. Austere’s new truck with a perfectly-planted snowball. Unlike the other drivers whom I had previously attacked, Mr. Austere stopped his vehicle, got out, and took pursuit of me on foot. Despite his best efforts, I escaped Mr. Austere’s clutches but was easily identified as the assailant due to my sexy red mop.
The next day at school, I had to face Mr. Austere while attending his history class. He called me out into the hallway before beginning his lecture. After I confidently strolled out into the corridor, Mr. Austere immediately backed me into the wall and stood two inches from my face. He looked at me hard and ground his teeth as he spoke. “You know how I feel about what you did to my truck yesterday?” he asked.
“No, not really,” I replied with an arrogant chuckle.
“You’re lucky I didn’t catch you.”
I took a deep breath and maintained my composure. “And what would happen if you did?” I flippantly asked.
Mr. Austere drew back his arm and released a strong punch toward my head. He struck the wall beside me, his fist landing an inch or so from my left ear. “Any further questions?” he asked.
I swiftly shook my head back and forth. Mr. Austere had made his point very clear. It was at that moment that I reconsidered my efforts in ditching Priesthood Quorum and Sunday School. I thought that perhaps my interaction with Mr. Austere was Joseph Smith’s way of letting me know that he was pissed at me for skipping out on his gospel tutelage. Upon further reflection of my actions, I realized that I just needed to devise a better way of not getting caught the next time.
CHAPTER 3
Therefore, strengthen your brethren in all your conversation, in all your prayers, in all your exhortations, and in all your doings. -Doctrine and Covenants 108: 7
Throughout my adolescent years, I used to fight constantly with my two older brothers, Stinky Steve and Bobby Boop. This fighting was not much different than the typical sibling conflict that takes place in every other household. The only extraordinary element about the warfare between my brothers and I was that it was actually encouraged by my father.
There were many evenings when my father would stoke up a large blaze in his fireplace, sit back in his easy chair, and supervise the wrestling wars between his three sons. Sometimes my father would enjoy a large bowl of homemade, buttery popcorn while observing these battles. Most of the time, however, he just nodded off to sleep under the cacophony of the squabbles that took place in front of him. When any of these wrestling matches got out of hand, my father would occasionally intervene with a verbal warning of redirection. On the whole, however, he let most of the physical combat slide unless blood was drawn from one of us three boys.
There was a brief reprieve from the incessant bickering between my siblings and I when my father would completely prohibit all fighting. During the several minutes of family prayer that took place before dinner each night, my father had zero tolerance for any sibling conflict. As every good Mormon family practices, mealtimes are designed to be activities of pleasant communication and family bonding. Dinner is supposed to be prepared at a structured interval every day, when all family members eat at once, seated around the table together. Just before the evening meal is served, a family prayer is typically offered. This traditional ceremony involves all family members who are positioned around the table to kneel down beside their chairs and engage in group prayer. The prayer itself is commonly lead by the priesthood leader of the household, which is generally the father of the family. But as the children get older the father may call upon anyone to offer the family prayer before dinner.
My father’s mealtime monologues to the heavens, which were complete with prolonged utterances of catch phrases and obsequious tripe toward Joseph Smith, seemed to go on forever. During these long stretches of litany, I often found myself impatiently waiting for the prayer to end, keeping my opened eyes fixated upon the oval-shaped, shag rug that my mother had spread out beneath the kitchen table. Amongst the yellow-colored fibers of the shag material, I usually discovered large swaths of crumbs and food debris that my mother had failed to collect with her vacuum. As she usually just vacuumed a wide path in the middle of the floor while cleaning, my mother would commonly leave the peripheral carpet edges and any areas around the furniture completely untouched for weeks. Thus, although the carpet looked superficially clean, it was actually quite filthy and littered with food particles.
I occasionally entertained myself during the many minutes of family intercession by organizing the food bits found on the shag rug into homogenous piles. Dried chunks of scrambled eggs would be cordoned off into one pile with Cheerios and bits of Wheaties into another. Bread crumbs would compose a separate order while miscellaneous detritus was gathered its own pile. When there was not a great deal of food pieces to be found, it usually meant that the shag rug had been scoured over by an invading ant colony before dinnertime. I would occasionally observe long trails of these minute, black creatures while kneeling around the kitchen table during family prayer. I marveled at the little insects as they carted off the spilled oatmeal or hauled away amorphous chunks of Malt-O-Meal that made its way to the floor after one of my mother’s “eat it or wear it” campaigns against my brothers. It was when the ant population began to swell that my mother actually took it upon herself to move the kitchen table and the chairs out of the way so that she could vacuum the yellow rug. Until then, the food crumbs were fodder to be flipped, flung, and launched at my siblings during prayer time.
While my two older brothers kneeled down in reverent prayer around the kitchen table, I would sometimes select hard pieces of the food particles from the shag rag and flick them at their faces. This action would evoke a look of scorn from my brothers, occasional cursing, and inevitable retaliation, as they would eventually respond by tossing crumbs back at me. The crumb exchange would involve a few volleys from either side until my father heard the commotion in between his prayerful words. He would then pause his humble prayer just long enough to knock one of his three boys upside the head while we were kneeling beside him, only to resume his homage to Joseph Smith once we were silenced.
Overall, I think that my father believed that he was doing a good thing by letting his children release their physical aggression upon each other rather than demonstrating it toward strangers. Maybe he figured that if he supervised the fighting at certain points and sanctioned it during inappropriate times, such as family prayer, it would teach us proper interpersonal boundaries. Perhaps this was an effective means to parent three unruly brothers. But what my father did not know was that the fighting between my brothers and I was not always for sport, and it did not always take place while he was supervising us. Some of the more serious altercations occurred when my father was away from the home at work or endeavoring upon some church business with his wife.
On the occasions when my father was not present to supervise the sibling battles, the fighting between my brothers and I often resulted in the incidental destruction of property inside our house. More than once, my mother’s knickknacks were broken during the course of a pillow fight gone wrong. Several vases were shattered over the years, in addition to a few large, ceramic animals that my mother had collected during the 1970’s. Miraculously, it was never discovered that any of these items had been broken. This was largely due to the various concealment tactics that my brothers and I used to cover up the crime scenes. With a few rearrangements of the knickknacks on the shelves, the missing, broken pieces could be obfuscated. Larger items were replaced with houseplants. And, on at least one instance, a wall-mounted fixture that had been
