In the first week or so of attending Garfield Elementary School in Parsons, Kansas, I was given a test. Well, all the second-grade students were. It may have had more questions but the one I remember is the one that stumped me. There, in mimeographed blue letters on white paper, was:
“What is the Golden Rule?”
The other children seemed to know right away and just scribbled some words on the page. What could be so important that they knew it–and I didn’t have a clue?
I remembered admonitions and rules and the occasional scolding. It must be life-threatening, to be golden! Ah-ha!
“Look both ways before you cross the street.”
Turns out, as key as that advice is, it is not the Golden Rule.
Another child was called upon by the teacher. “Annie?”
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Oh. Who said that? As a 7-year-old, I had never heard it before. Now, some 60 years later, I start to type it and my computer fills in the rest of the phrase. Everyone knows it! Except me and, perhaps, a few other people who had never been to a Christian church.
Maybe it was that failing. Maybe it was time that I dropped my pencil in class and said, “Goddammit.” The little girl to my left said: “You shouldn’t say that.”
“Why not? My mom says it all the time?” I was not being a smart aleck; I was honestly confused. We had just moved from the University town of Manhattan, Kansas, for my mother’s first real job teaching high school English. Her school was a few blocks from Garfield but word must have skipped down those small-town streets pretty quickly.
Was it just the next Sunday that Mom put the three of us in the car and roared over to the First Presbyterian Church, dropping us at the door and telling us to find the church school? The ladies of the church tried to appear glad to see us while my older brother explained who we were.
Oh, those Goedecke kids whose mom was Mrs. Hornor, new to the high school…. Oh, they had heard something about them. So confusing. She had been divorced–gasp! Is that what made her a pagan or atheist? At any rate, we sat obediently in their church classrooms until Mother picked us up again.
Whether it was that day or another, she learned that she ought not drop off her kids if she would not be attending church . . ..
That’s the last we saw of First Presbyterian.
Allison Campbell Jensen 