Hysterical Journey to Historic Places

---

How I Fell From Grace With The Methodists



<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">J. D. Higgins turned up amongst us one day on the playground. It was almost like he materialized from thin air. He was kind of a girlish looking fellow, and he couldn’t play sports with a tinker’s damn, but he always wore clean clothes. his clothing was a bit shabby, but it was clean. J. D. would have looked a bit like a scarecrow, but a scarecrow looked smarter and was a better right fielder. His demeanor was quiet and sad. He was sad because his dad had been killed in the Korean War. Before long J. D. had also turned up at church and in Sunday school, at our cub scout den and at little league. He was like a plague of locusts. You couldn’t get away from him.



<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">One time we organized a snipe hunt and sure enough, J. D. Higgins had turned up there too. He came equipped with a broken jack knife, and a Monkey Wards flashlight with good batteries, but no bulb, and about ten feet of clothesline rope. All the stuff a kid might need except for a stick and a sack, which were the things we asked him to bring. Soon as we whittled him up a stick, and found an old burlap feed sack down in the barn for him to use we were ready to go. We set him up underneath an oak tree half a mile out in the woods, got his sack propped open with the stick, and taught him to make a snipe call, and then went back home for hot cocoa and TV. Just before bedtime we went out to get him, but he wasn’t there. For some reason J. D. decided he did not like the comfortable spot we had chosen for him and moved to a new location. We could faintly hear him still making the snipe call and finally found him in the middle of a poison oak thicket. We got him out of there and took him straight down to the irrigation ditch and used the trusty old Indian remedy of packing mud on the exposed skin to draw out the poison. It didn’t work. Next day J. D. Higgins had such a frightful rash his mom had to take him in for some doctoring that she simply could not afford. Since I was the one who took him home, I am the one who got blamed for it. Being a good Christian church woman his mom took the doctor bill down to the ladies aid society. I wish she would have taken us to court instead. In a court room you can defend yourself. Up against the church ladies you don’t have a prayer. By the time those old hens stopped their clucking me and my dad ended up re-shingling the parsonage.



<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">A few weeks after J. D. Higgins had recovered from his poison oak rash I somehow found myself in the summer bible school with him. I wasn’t enrolled in that class though. I showed up there unexpectedly and there was no chair for me to sit down in. I had to stand up in the class clear up until break time, then I had to sit down and fill out the enrollment papers. By the time I was finished with the paperwork all of the red Kool-Aid was gone and there was only one peanut butter cookie left, and it was burned on the bottom. J. D. was outside tossing a baseball up in the air by himself and trying catch it, so I went over and got into a game of catch with him. Pretty soon he tried to get fancy and threw the ball hard as he could. It went way over my head and busted out the bedroom window in the parsonage. I had turned to look at the broke window right when the parson’s wife stuck her head out the hole to see which of us miscreants was to blame. In the meantime that rascal J. D. Higgins had disappeared around the corner. Once again my goose was cooked by those good Christian church women. To top things off, the lady that drove us kids down to the bible class had forgotten I was with them. She drove off and left me there and I had to walk home. That evening me and my dad talked it over and we went down the next morning and fixed the damn window. I never set foot on that property ever again.

---