Religious Hour: The Backslider

For about 9 years of my childhood, from 1939 until 1948, I lived in Landover, Maryland. In those days, though just a few miles from D.C., that area was entirely rural, and our house was one of just a few that sat near the tiny station of that name, on the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks that ran between Washington and Baltimore and points beyond. Now only the name, Landover, remains, denoting part of an enormous sea of shopping malls and clover leaves.

I lived next door to a very down-to-earth minister who presided over one of the largest Baptist churches in D.C. He had a name that I liked, Tyler, because a movie cowboy had that same name. That was important. I think the actor was Tex Tyler, of whom I remember nothing, but his name was the main thing.

(I can only hope that, taking the easy way out and relying on euphonics, my memory has NOT appropriated part of the name of the much more famous Tex Ritter. Ritter was a singing cowboy, and I had absolutely no use for any cowboy who would break into song or brandish a guitar instead of a six-shooter.)

This church sported three large and ornate wooden chairs, set on small platforms high behind the pulpit, the middle one taller than the two on either side. They were too high for anyone to sit in and so no one ever did. I figured that they weren't for mere mortals anyway, though no one informed me what was going on with them.

I liked the majesty and the mystery of those chairs, and under the influence of this minister and his wife, I bought a Bible and read it copiously and got myself baptized at the age of 12. I didn't tell my mother that I would do it, but when she found out afterward she was pleased.

Four years later, I became what was called a "backslider." I stopped going to church, and I never went next door to visit that minister and his wife again. On my small, non-dynamic scale of things several earth-shaking, shattering things had happened.

I started playing chess instead.

My mother just shook her head.