The World Cracks Wide Open

Skepticism’s foundations come from the child’s persistent questioning of the world, demanding answers that fit coherently together.
—Comment on Pharyngula

I grew up in the fifties, a third generation Mormon in Louisiana. Yes...a Mormon. Yes...Louisiana...Cajun Catholic Louisiana.

The Dunn Family on the Salt Lake City temple grounds the summer
after my high school graduation. I'm the tall one.

Like most Mormon girls, I was hyper-vigilant, obedient, a good student. My sister Donna recently told me she used to pray, but it always felt like showing off. I knew the feeling. Tribal loyalty and fear of planting doubt in my younger siblings kept rebellion in check throughout childhood and adolescence. When I was well into my twenties Donna announced, “Mama, Sharon and I aren’t going to church any more.” And that was that.

Donna, The Emancipator

I’ve softened since then. After forty plus years away, I’m living back in the house where I grew up, and I go to church from time to time. It’s the only place around here where I recognize anybody. Though Mormons don’t shun their lost sheep, I feel like an outsider. Since it’s how I feel everywhere, it doesn’t bother me so much any more. Nearly all my old friends and relatives are believing, practicing Mormons, and there are many intelligent and accomplished among them. Most are much better off financially than I am, and I take that as an appropriate Calvinist rebuke. That original congregation of sixty or so has grown to almost a thousand and has a respectable reputation I played no role in building. Like the Pentecostals Bill Clinton speaks of so highly, Mormons live their religion. I don’t believe in Mormonism any more, but I believe in Mormons.

Crack I

Ironically, the first big crack in my world view came in the ninth grade when I read the Book of Mormon. By then I was also reading the standard public high school literature: Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Dickens and Eliot. The BoM was indeed, as Mark Twain put it, chloroform in print. That wasn’t such a problem. When you’re a good Mormon, you put your shoulder to the wheel.

I wasn’t much of a literary critic, but I was a good English student. I couldn’t help but notice some really bad writing in the BoM. The best parts were almost word-for-word from the Bible. An unwelcome thought crept in: I wonder if Joseph Smith did what I do when I rearrange words from an encyclopedia for term papers. I felt like the only one who puzzled over why the BoM was written in archaic English. Wasn’t it supposed to be translated for the latter day saints? I’d been hearing the Bible quoted my whole life, but BoM passages sounded like a bad British accent to me. I felt queasy when I heard Mormons say the BoM was so deeply inspiring it could not have been written by the hand of man. Huh? A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court had moved me to tears. The BoM...not so much.

Crack II

In 1961 the poet Miller Williams (singer Lucinda Williams’ father, incidentally) did a stint as my tenth grade biology teacher at Gonzales High School. In Cajun Dogpatch, Mr. Williams was an exotic. With his gaunt, almost skeletal face, he both fascinated and scared the bejeezus out of all of us.

Back then, the first question...an awkward one for me...was, “What church do you go to?” It hit us like a thunderbolt when Mr. Williams answered evenly, “I don’t believe in God.” My best friend Jane, a Catholic with a flair for drama, burst into tears. “If I didn’t believe in God,” she sobbed, “I couldn’t live!” I sat there blinking, thinking, “No... If you didn’t believe in God, you just wouldn’t believe in God.” Somehow I knew that faith was not like vitamins and minerals.

I’d been liberally exposed to mockery of my testimony that I belonged to the only true church. To that point I’d had no existential thoughts about God. I accepted the fact of God. But...I’d also accepted Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. They gave me stuff. There was evidence. But God? Like Winnie the Pooh, I started to think, think, think.

Crack III

After my sophomore year at LSU, I went to see one of those shockumentaries of the Mondo Cane ilk popular in the 60s. In one scene an Indian woman in a sari squatted and quietly, using her long brown fingers, formed cow dung into patties.

While everyone around me was going eeeew, I was having an epiphany. No...I wasn’t stoned. “That could be me,” I thought. “Where does she end and I begin?” Then it hit me how improbable life is and the thing that connects all living things is life itself. The fact of life made the idea of God seem silly.

Crack IV

That fall I moved to Salt Lake City hoping to snag a returned missionary and put all this infernal thinking behind me.* My Aunt Nancy had done exactly that a generation earlier and I stayed with her and her family until I got my first job as a proofreader for the LDS Genealogical Library. The library was a sweatshop and another faith buster, but I digress. One day, as I was helping Aunt Nancy with dinner, she said, “You know I sometimes ask myself, ‘What if the church isn’t true?’ and I think, ‘Well what if it isn’t? It’s a good way to live.’ ” I was gobsmacked. How could the truth not matter?

Growing up in the Mormon hinterlands, Salt Lake City represented the pinnacle of civilization...Zion. What I found was a provincial place with nothing of the diverse culture I’d been exposed to in Louisiana living along the rural corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.** I was anything but worldly, but it rankled when my returned missionary boyfriend treated me like the child I was, saying things like, “Where’d a little girl from Looosiana learn a big word like that?” I returned to Louisiana a nascent Mormon atheist.

---

* For a fuller story of what prompted this abrupt interruption to my college education, read this: The Scream.
** Now called Cancer Alley.

Valentine Card

A little late, I know, but I want to share the Valentine poem my nephew, Job Dunn, sent me:

Looka there, you're still so fair
Even without no brows or hair.

Beautiful lips and button nose,
A face so pretty it actually glows.

Dark chocolate brown eyes expressing sweet intellect,
You're just as attractive as you are intelligent.

I'm no gambling man but willing to bet
I'd fall in love if we had ever met.

Excuse me Ms. No Brows or hair,
I thought I'd tell you why people stare.

 —Job

Aw shucks!

Patty and Sharon Get Their Mojo Working

I made this sketch of a model I'll call Turk in Patty Whitty's drawing class. I'd admired Patty's work for years before I met her when I signed up for her class in 1988. I was going through my Dark Age, demoralized, knocked flat. Patty had been there and done that. Plus, she was struggling against big odds getting her art school off the ground. With Patty's gentle guidance I learned both to draw and draw nourishment from life.

Our class of about fifteen was a diverse group...a Slidell High art teacher, a few high school and college age students, 40-somethings like Patty and me and lots of senior citizens. Patty sketched right along with the rest of us. During breaks, she'd walk around instructing each of us in her soft, musical voice. It was a new experience for me...far different from 60s LSU art classes where tenured hot house flowers were snide at best, openly contemptuous at worst. Unlike them, Patty got results. At first, I teased her that some of her students wouldn't live long enough to learn to draw, but she consistently turned out competent draftsmen as well as some real artists.

Young Turk was our favorite model...perfectly proportioned and reliable. He was comfortable and inventive posing and could hold a pose forever. Our classes met evenings 6 to 10 twice a week and had a monastic intensity. Between breaks, the only sound was the faint scratch of pencils on newsprint.

One evening, it was about 6:30 before Patty said, "I guess it's just you and me tonight, Sharon. Let's get started, Turk."

Turk struck a fine pose and Patty and I started drawing. Patty had a frontal view; I a profile. I was well along on my sketch, when I noticed movement from what had always been Turk's consummately professional manhood. No one changed expression. No one said a word. The only sound was scratch, scratch, scratch. I turned my eyes furtively looking for a signal from the maestra. She was perfectly stoic. This seemed to go on forever until Patty asked, "Well, for whose benefit is that?" Without moving, Turk reddened and mumbled something inaudible. "It's been a long time since I've seen anything like that," she said. Finally when a sparkling dewdrop appeared, Patty called a break.

Turk disappeared and Patty walked over to my easel. "You drew it!" she exclaimed.

"It was there!" I said.

Turk recovered his dignity and resumed the position. But after several minutes, his disobedient appendage returned to its insolent pose. Defeated, Patty ended the class. After Turk got dressed and left, Patty and I...craving conversation...made a beeline for the all night truck stop. Huh? What thought had popped into his head? We were twice his age. What would she do if it happened again? (It didn't.) Should she have canceled the class before it started? Was this a perfect setup for a porn scene or what? For days, we were giddy with delight. We were new women.

Doctor Bob

The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of youth...come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new object...
—Evelyn Waugh

I met Bob Shaffer in 1991 before he became known to New Orleans as Dr. Bob, the artist. I was living in Slidell with my two kids, was divorced and filled with fear and loathing. I thought I'd left the traditional attributes of youth behind forever.

My children's father Parker and I had had a marriage made in heaven in one sense. We were both do-it-yourself gadget freaks. When the first personal computers hit the market in the early 80s, we were hooked. I started Archives Fabled Labels in 1984 and spent the next ten years, with the aid of my PC, churning out the work of a full design and marketing staff. By 1990 I had assembled my own 386 system and become both a self-taught software developer and an unwitting Windows beta tester on the cusp of the desktop publishing revolution.

Despite my primitive system and lack of formal credentials, my neighbor Bill Krieger, an orthopedic surgeon, volunteered my expertise to his wife Suzanne, who was running for state legislature. I ended up designing the graphics and writing nearly every word Suzie spoke or published during that campaign. It was a fight against a deeply entrenched incumbent, but Suzie's focused ferocity together with my quick PR response gave her the edge.

After the campaign, I got back to a stalled project of turning an old stable into an office. To thank me for my volunteer work, Bill paid Bob Shaffer to finish the job. Bob lived with Jan, one of Bill's surgery nurses. Bob was not only a jack of all trades but he told extravagant tales of various schemes and adventures...his Native American grandmother, his sister doing time in Oklahoma for manslaughter, his bar fights, his buddy who owned a tiger, an old lady who was going to leave him her 60s Mustang, his Dr. Bob act when he visited Jan at Slidell Memorial Hospital. It made little difference where reality began and ended with Bob's stories. What he gave me was the stimulus to recover the authentic impulse to action. Bob Shaffer was all action.

Though Parker and I had divorced in 1989, two years later we still didn't have a community property settlement. Parker had no financial incentive and I was paralyzed with dread. One day over lunch with Archives' accountant Fred (who would become my second ex-husband) and Bob, the conversation turned to the stalemate. I said I wished I could hold Parker's sailboat...still technically part of community property...for ransom to force him to deal fairly with me. On that, Bob and Fred snapped into full pirate mode.

"I'll go get it," said Bob. "Show me where it is."

"My brother lives on the Mississippi coast," said Fred. "We can hide it there."

The plot continued to thicken until I told one of my sensible girlfriends what we were up to. "If you think Parker's mean now," she said. "You ain't seen nothing yet."

Since the kids spent holidays with Parker, Christmas was hard. On Christmas Eve Jan was with her folks in Chicago and Bob proposed to cheer me up with a Redneck Tour of St. Tammany Parish. We set off for places that weren't on the rolls of any known taxing authority. We would step into a twenty foot square cinder block box at the end of a gravel road and order a drink from a man behind a four-foot wide plywood bar who poured from a pint of Wild Turkey he took from a shelf under fat, looping, multicolored Christmas lights. Bob introduced me around to everyone like they were all old friends. I figured Bob must know every eccentric in St. Tammany Parish.

Bob saved the best stop for last. As we walked into what was known back in the day as a dyke bar, we spotted two empty bar stools. I took one, Bob the other. As I scanned left to the stool beside me, I found myself staring into the eyes of an enormous she-beast. As we looked each other over, my eyes traveled to the words SEXUAL GIANT tattooed on her bulging forearm.

"Sexual Giant," I said. "What does that mean?"

"That's my name," she said.

I extended my hand primly. "Pleased to meet you, Miss Giant," I said.

Miss Giant did not see the humor and began to rise menacingly from her stool. Bob furiously apologized and dragged me out of the bar. By the time we got home, we were so giddy we put on some honkytonk music, kicked off our shoes and danced while we relived our harrowing escape. Just then a huge roach skittered across the floor. I gleefully stomped it. Bob fell against the wall laughing, tears rolling down his cheeks. "Damn!" he said. "What kind of woman am I mixed up with? First she nearly gets me killed in a dyke bar. Then she steps on a roach with her bare foot!"

I Have the Trashiest Friends

Guyton, Sherry and Romney on Fat Tuesday.

Some Lyrics Stuck in My Head

Every time that we go out
All you want to talk about
Things I did and things I do.
What you want poor little me to do?
—Professor Longhair

Knickety-knock the wig's off.
—Professor Longhair

I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes.
I have to turn my head until the darkness goes.
—The Rolling Stones

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”
—Bob Dylan

My man is little.
He shaped like a frog.
But when he start lovin',
Ooo hot dog!
—As far as I can tell, KoKo Taylor added this to Irma Thomas' You Can Have My Husband, But Please Don't Mess With My Man. This is what I remember from a Koko Taylor album I lost in Katrina.

When fish scent fill the air, snuff juice everywhere...
—Howlin' Wolf - Wang Dang Doodle