A strange lady at my school

Tuesday's post was a lot of fun. Just thought I'd flat out say something and see how many people were offended, but if anyone was, they didn't say so. And I had wanted to do something about being a Christian or being a Baptist before I got to the Gay Guy at Galaxy Fair post. So that worked out just fine, since I'll probably post about the gay guy tomorrow.

But I think I'll post a bit more about people making strange comments about God.

I went to a Christian school. It wasn't like what you see on TV sometimes. This was a really small school in a Baptist church, and we didn't even have uniforms or anything.

One of the teachers there was Mrs. H. I use the term teacher here because her actual title would mean nothing to my readers. The "teachers" at the school were mostly other people's moms. Most of the time, they didn't teach anything. Mrs. H was almost an exception, because she almost taught an oil painting class. But the class was cancelled after a bunch of high school kids gave her a hard time, and there weren't enough of the rest of us to have a class.

Anyway, Mrs. H was the mother of a girl a year or two younger than I was, Tammy. Older and wiser me now looks back and sees that Tammy had all kinds of problems, but at the time I just thought Tammy acted like Tammy because Tammy was a teenager. One of her problems was that she believed her step father didn't care about her that much, which may or may not have been true. What was true was that her little brother got more attention, but that was probably because he had learning problems and not because his parents loved him a lot more than Tammy.

Another of Tammy problems was that her mom was a bit of a ding-bat.

For the most part, I liked Mrs. H. I was into arts and crafts, and if we ever got to do any of that at school it was because of Mrs. H. But she didn't seem all that bright, and she was one of those people who thought ET was the anti-christ because he rose from the dead. She was clueless about most things, and she seemed to giggle a lot.

Mrs. H was always saying odd things like ET was evil and women shouldn't be allowed to wear pants. But I remember one conversation that seemed odd even for her.

At the time most of the girls younger than me were obsessed with putting stickers on everything. They put stickers on the outsides of their notebooks and on several pages inside their notebooks, and on their pencil holders and on their desks, and possibly even on their Bibles.

So one day most of the kids were out playing ball or something, and some of the girls who were not playing ball were just standing around doing nothing. And the girls have their notebooks out and are looking at all the stickers. And Mrs. H came by and looked at the stickers too.

So she was looking at some stickers that were pictures of flowers, and we she got to the roses she got very happy and started talking about roses. She said that she used to grow roses, and she pointed out some that looked like ones that she used to have. Her whole face lit up when she talked about the roses. We listend to her talk a bit.

And then she suddenly stopped smiling and got very serious. "Of course that was before I married Mr. H. I don't have any roses now. Now I'm doing what God wants me to do."

And then it got really quiet. No one knew what to say after that. I think that we all made excuses that we had to go to the bathroom or something.

She made it sound like Mr. H and/or God hated roses and didn't want her to have any.

Probably it all makes sense. Probably the roses were at a different house that she lived in before she married Mr. H, and now she doesn't have them anymore. Maybe they don't have room for roses, or maybe they don't grow well in that soil, or maybe they don't have enough light to grow roses. Or maybe Mr. H is allergic to roses.

And as for God not liking roses or not wanting Mrs. H to have any, that really sounded strange. But maybe Mrs. H was spending too much time gardening instead of doing church work or spending time with her family. Maybe she gave up gardening to have more time for doing what God wanted her to do.

But she didn't say anything like that. And the roses obviously made her happy, and not having them made her unhappy. And the way she was talking, it sounded like God didn't want her to be happy.

But maybe it was something altogether different that made sense only to Mrs. H. Maybe she gave up roses because ET the anti-christ liked flowers. I don't know.