Blast from the past

As I was doing the music meme sent to me by the lovely Miss Becca the other night I remembered some stories from my college days. Here is one of the true stories from my college days:

I went to a small liberal arts college in east TN by the name of King College. It was then, as it is now, a conservative school with a decidedly Christian bent. In fact if you bend over, they shove their religion up there too. All students had to take four Bible and religion classes in order to graduate. We had to take one class called 'Old Testament Survey' and another called 'New Testament Survey.' One then got to choose the others from a pool of classes that included such scintillating choices as 'General Epistles,' 'Psalms,' and 'Comparative Religion or Yes, Everybody Who is not a Christian is Going to Hell, Even the Chosen People.'

My story took place one day in Old Testament Survey class.

I was sitting there half asleep listening to the professor drone on about animal sacrifices and Goliath or some nonsense like that when he called on this girl in my class to summarize the paper she had written for class about David slaying some Philistines.

The girl he called name was Ruth G. (I'll protect her some but people who went to King College in the early 1980's will know who I am talking about) and she was a pretty innocent God Squadder. For those of you who do not know, a God Squadder is a person who has their evangelical religion shoved so far up their ass it comes out of their mouth.

She got all bubbly and perky and she twiddled with her blonde hair as she spoke about her paper. She told everyone breathlessly what she had written about. She went on and on about how neat God was for giving David the strength to slay those Philistines. She worked herself up into a God Squad lather when she described what David did after slaying said Philistines. She said, "After he followed God's orders to kill all of them, he made a mound out of their foreskins."

She then ran her right index finger back and forth across her forehead as she said, "And I think this is the area of skin that is known as 'foreskin.' "

It took every ounce of self control not to say something smart assed to her. We all snapped our heads around to look at Ruth, most of us incredulous that a college age woman did not know what the hell a foreskin was. The professor, sensing that the polite chuckles were about to turn into loud guffaws, said, "Uhh, no Ruth, the foreskin is the excess skin around the end of a man's penis." As soon as the word 'penis' had left his mouth Ruth looked like someone had socked her in the stomach and she turned bright crimson. I looked away and bit my lip.

After class I ran out the door and rushed to tell this story to all my friends. And of course for the next few years when we saw Ruth mincing about on campus or holding forth on her love for Jesus we'd smile at her and tap our foreheads.

She went on to marry another KC God Squadder who she dated all through college. he became a minister and they went into the missionary field. The last thing I heard about them was that they were serving as missionaries in, I shit you not, France of all places. They had reproduced a couple of times and they lamented the fact that while they were so near the winter games in Albertville in 1992, they could not attend due to low funds.

I shudder to think of the damage she did to Franco American relations and sometimes I wonder if she and Pete had any male children. And if they did, were those boys running around without turtle necks?