The biblical story in Acts about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch is fantastically sci-fi and charged with spiritual energy. It’s an Easter story, acknowledging earthly life in full with heavenly life alongside. Philip runs into this eunuch, an Ethiopian court official in charge of the palace treasury no less, on the road. The eunuch by chance is reading a passage from the prophet Isaiah and doesn’t understand its meaning until Philip explains. The passage is fierce, all about sheep led to slaughter making no protest at all, humiliated and facing death soon. Such a God! Philip leaps in with the the Good News of Jesus Christ, and the ecstatic eunuch leaps into a quickie roadside baptism administered by Philip who then vanishes.
Instant Christian conversion has not been my experience, yet I can understand the sudden burst of energy that accompanies a brand new awareness—irresistible so you leap or plunge.
I can identify with this eunuch a bit. When I was a child I sought to flee too much positive attention, while the eunuch sought to flee too much negative attention. There is something shaming about too much attention period, unless that attention is unconditional love—Godlike.
I thought my spiritual story began at three under that dining room table, but in fact there’s a prequel. I’ve recently “unearthed” my baby book called “Tot to Teens,”written by my mother who, thrilled with my existence after several miscarriages, went overboard with her praise. I’m really not that great!
My mother recorded EVERYTHING!
-first words Mmmm, DaDa and Ba—presumably my bottle.
-seeing across the room at 3 1/2 months
-played with rattle at 4 months
-turned 1/2 way over at 4 1/2 months
-ate prunes and baked apple at 6 months, asparagus tips at 6 1/2 months
-first shot for whooping cough at 5 1/2 months
-used the “toidy” after her first time on it at 6 1/2 months
-crawled at 11 1/2 months
-walked alone at 13 1/2 months
By two and a half I could button my shoes. I was real “olympian”. Notable: my next “first” words were boy and car. No comment!
“Talks fluently (no exaggeration) and distinctly at 2 1/2 and can tell what is written in her book on any page from memory and is always right.” I am delighted to read this prophecy, because I grew up to read and write with great pleasure always.
Equally prescient and humorous is the description of the celebration of my first birthday: “We gave a cocktail party but no babies on Lyn’s 1st birthday.” There followed a complete list of guests and gifts, including a hot plate for my cereal, a monogrammed silver hairbrush, and a pearl necklace I still have.
My dental record included a diagram in which every tooth was labeled by number in order of appearance. No tooth fairy yet, but there was much concern about my thumb sucking and my front teeth—at 2 years and three months! “She looks like Eleanor Roosevelt.” If they’d only foreseen the orthodontist bills they’d later pay, not to mention my later becoming a Democrat!
As to pets and playthings I had numerous dolls and animals, including two elephants named Lodie and Lodelot. My favorite was a white cat I named Pussy P’Sandra. I still have her lookalike but I machine-washed her, poor thing, and all her long white “fur” shrunk.
My first birthday party at 3, “wearing a little white dimity dress with a pinafore with red rickrack and red slippers.” My mother thought I was “adorable”—which I might have been, save for photographic evidence to the contrary in black and white. But the shoes are on my home altar. High fashion, right?
As I write this I feel such sadness. I felt over-mothered and longed to wear dungarees and be free of incessant pinafores. I also knew I was loved, if a bit too attentively. One baby book entry brought tears. It was under the heading, Aptitudes. Mom, who loved to dance and was good at it, had missed her chance to follow her dream. She also wanted to be married with children. Back in the 1940s she couldn’t do both, so she wrote about teaching toddler me to dance: “I taught Lyn to “Truck” “Shag” and “Minuet”. She points her toes very gracefully and has a semblance of rhythm and timing. Is very graceful in nursery school and keeps excellent time to music. I was very proud of her skipping to music on a witches broom stick at the school Halloween party.”
Descriptions of my advancing years in parties, pinafores, and adulations continued till I weighed in at 33 pounds at 4. Then the notations stopped, although the book provided space through 9th grade. I’m sure Mom got too busy with two more daughters and life itself.
Today I can honestly say that I loved my mother, have forgiven our differences, have no pinafore regrets, and, as a mother myself, wish she were here to laugh and cry and dance.
