GOD’S NOT AN ASPIRIN

I’ve had my brushes with infinity too, but I’ve managed to escape surrendering myself to a superstitious belief in a personal deity except for a few weak moments. Like most people, I’ve had some tough times in my life. Back in my drinking days, I taught high school for one year in the late-Sixties before the principal decided that I should teach college rather than high school students. At least that’s what his evaluation of my performance concluded. One of several failures I was suffering during that period. Most of my own making, I should add.

I gave him so many reasons to reject me. For example, I enjoyed meeting on the weekends with students who I thought required some special treatment because of their dissatisfaction with school. I took them to plays and to foreign films in Yellow Springs, Ohio. We day hiked all over John Bryan State Park in Yellow Springs too and visited the Dayton Art Institute, and we gathered in coffee shops in Dayton to discuss what we’d seen and experienced during our trips. Some people thought that what I was doing was pretty suspicious. My goodness! A teacher who likes the rebels in his class and wants to increase their knowledge of the world. What will teaching come to next?

I don’t think our principal liked the way I allowed students to use my black boards as places to jot down their thoughts, beliefs and sayings which they liked, specially the way one guy managed to write “FUCK” on the board in a kind of Chinese-like characters that disguised what he was really saying. And I know he was threatened by my challenge to my students to bring in any piece of writing they admired for me to read aloud to the class. I know he heard about the book by Marquis de Sade which P. B. brought in and challenged me to read. Gallantly, I stood before the class and began, but after a line or two, I knew that P. B. had mastered me and brought my challenge to heel. I couldn’t do it. P. B. had taken me to a bridge too far, and I folded. Actually, few students responded to my challenge.

I’m also sure the principal didn’t like the eraser fights I participated in in class toward the end of some of our school days. Our kids we’re locked down in school all day long, and I noticed that by sixth and seventh period the young studs were getting pretty restless, so one day I began an eraser fight with them. It was me against them, and I put my chair on its side up on my desk for protection and we began chucking erasers. Wham, bap—the erasers would hit the black board and chair and me with loud whaps. After about 5 minutes, the steam would be let out of them, and we could get to work. Then, one day, the principal opened the door just as an eraser struck the board near the door. His finger crooked to beckon me to come out in the hall where he gave me a talking to. He couldn’t see the benefit of letting off steam that way.

But that’s enough of examples of why the principal didn’t want me to teach in his school the following year. I clinched his dis-ease with me when I gave all my students in all five sections I taught across the board B’s. What’s this got to do with god, you ask?

Well, that summer, for three months financed by the checks I received over a twelve month period, I lived in a remodeled chicken coop on an old estate on the edge of town. My goal was to get away from the wife and kids and to write for three months. Of course, I wrote little over the course of that summer, but I hiked quite a few miles every week to go visit the brand new campus of Wright State University. I did also do a good deal of reading. I read a couple of books by Bertrand Russell, including “Why I’m An Atheist”. He is delightful. I was an atheist, but not fully convinced at this time, and my path has been a rambling one, even to this day.

Anyhow. . . one by one, many of my students came out to visit me, and one night, Mike Day came out to visit me. He was a bright guy who was conservative and who liked to debate with me. He went on some of my student excursions too. I was not one to discriminate, besides, he seemed pretty lonely and isolated too since he didn’t have a lot of friends among the students. He definitely wasn’t one of the in crowd among the regulars or among the hippies who went on my excursions.

It was raining heavily that night, and I had a headache that was fierce. Fierce! Mike had been yammering at me for a long time, and he was making my headache worse. He was definitely a man to put authority over freedom, and I wasn’t enjoying our debate much that night. We were standing in a gazebo, talking, sitting on the picnic table. On the grounds of the estate, floodlights lit the night, and huge raindrops flashed through them. The soaked grass gleamed in the dark.

As I stood there, it came into my head, no doubt because Mike and I were talking about god and conscience, that I could get rid of my headache by just going out there to a floodlit spot of grass before me and dropping down on my knees and asking god to remove the headache. I knew it to a certainty that if I was willing to do that, the headache would go away. Then, I laughed at myself, and decided for agony rather than surrender. I thought, “If I did that, then god would be nothing more than an aspirin.” No, that didn’t fit my idea of what a higher power should be—just a pitiful little pain reliever.

No siree... no cheap, easy pain reliever for me!