Reflections on the State of Human Depravity
By Return-to-the-Old-Values? Doug
My mom used to tell me that it was wrong to kiss a girl before you married her. She also said that God watched what I did and saw that it was either good or bad. She told me on numerous occasions that she hoped I would obey Jesus and be a blessing to Him. Dad agreed with her on all these matters, as far as I could tell, though he spoke of them infrequently, instead simply putting on his reading glasses over porridge and toast and reading passages aloud from Our Daily Bread. Mom would interpret these pithy parabolisms and find in them matter for instruction to guide our day by day lives in rural Manitoba.
Now, we were raised well. We had food on the table, we had coffee, porridge and toast at breakfast, we had meat and potatoes for supper and we had clothing to wear to school. We never, in my memory, went hungry. We were as lucky as children can get. That was a great blessing, was our full stomachs. I remember coming home from school after 4 o’clock, with more than an adolescent boy’s ravenousness about me and mother trying to put a stop to my whining by telling me to go pick a few carrots In the garden. An hour later, however, she had potatoes and soup on the table for the six of us. Dad did not count in this number since he arrived home at nine or ten in the evening six days out of seven. Working.
On those occasions when mom would say that we deserved it, Dad had to spank us when he came home. He confided to me later when I was myself an adult that he deeply disliked that job. Mom got us to go weeding beets around Horndean, Plum Coulee, Gretna, Neubergthal and Rosenfeld. That’s Manitoba We weeded most of our two-month summer holidays away, did we five kids. Dad had me mow the lawn and clip the hedges. We had a large number of hedges on the yard and it was my job to be the grounds keeper. I also rototilled the gardens and later pruned the fruit trees. We had three gardens on our yard: vegetable garden, a fruit tree garden, and a flower garden. They covered 1/2 acre of our 2 acre yard in Old Altona.
Mom told me years later, when she was quite elderly, that she had despised grandfather Reimer for having made my older brother distribute evangelical tracts on various occasions, including on a holiday to British Columbia when he was only seven. He was required, grandpa said, to approach such people as garage mechanics, hand them a tract and also witness to them about Jesus.
My father reluctantly gave me a quarter each Saturday when I was sixteen and seventeen. I bought two cigars with it and smoked them that very evening. Mom made fruit preserves (crabapples, raspberries, strawberries and bing cherries). I purloined a few jars now and then to concoct my own wine. I did this from the age of 15 to the age of 18. When I was 19, my friend, a painter, convinced a 16 year old student of his he taught in a high school art course to let him body paint her. She wore undies and he painted all the rest of her. I didn’t see the process or finished product. He said he still got the goosebumps now, 40 years later, thinking about it. I think about the relative values our world places on activities. I never saw my father in anything less than longjohns and a shirt once, but found it exceedingly embarrassing. I never saw my mother sans habiliment. I did not want to. I never at all saw any of my siblings in such a state either. Unlike on acquaintance of mine who did.
My first thoughts about the adult body arrived—when I was 13–with my cousin who lived 30 miles away and whom we were visiting of a Sunday. We were swimming in the dugout on some farmer’s field, surrounded by cattails and willows, heated insects floating on the thick liquid and the smell of sun-baked mud. Of course, we swam naked. Boys then always did if no females were around (I remember getting the shock of my life at 8 watch a group of my uncles and their friends swimming in a dugout). The sun beat down on the raft we were sitting on. Somnambulant, Huckleberry-Finnish, we (for a few minutes till we tired of it) pulled our penises back between our legs to make them look like vaginas. We caught frogs and tadpoles on that same afternoon in the tepid water there.
Mom loved to garden. She planted dozens of varieties of flowers, and later in her 40s began a greenhouse business that she ran till she and father moved to British Columbia. Dad grew tired of being a rural travelling salesman after almost 20 years of doing that. He decided in the late 60s (he was 52) that he had had enough so they sold and moved west. There, in Abbotsford, he became a very successful real estate salesman and died at the young age of 72 of colon cancer.
My mom used to tell me that it was wrong to kiss a girl before you married her. She also said that God watched what I did and saw that it was either good or bad. She told me on numerous occasions that she hoped I would obey Jesus and be a blessing to Him. Dad agreed with her on all these matters, as far as I could tell, though he spoke of them infrequently, instead simply putting on his reading glasses over porridge and toast and reading passages aloud from Our Daily Bread. Mom would interpret these pithy parabolisms and find in them matter for instruction to guide our day by day lives in rural Manitoba.
Now, we were raised well. We had food on the table, we had coffee, porridge and toast at breakfast, we had meat and potatoes for supper and we had clothing to wear to school. We never, in my memory, went hungry. We were as lucky as children can get. That was a great blessing, was our full stomachs. I remember coming home from school after 4 o’clock, with more than an adolescent boy’s ravenousness about me and mother trying to put a stop to my whining by telling me to go pick a few carrots In the garden. An hour later, however, she had potatoes and soup on the table for the six of us. Dad did not count in this number since he arrived home at nine or ten in the evening six days out of seven. Working.
On those occasions when mom would say that we deserved it, Dad had to spank us when he came home. He confided to me later when I was myself an adult that he deeply disliked that job. Mom got us to go weeding beets around Horndean, Plum Coulee, Gretna, Neubergthal and Rosenfeld. That’s Manitoba We weeded most of our two-month summer holidays away, did we five kids. Dad had me mow the lawn and clip the hedges. We had a large number of hedges on the yard and it was my job to be the grounds keeper. I also rototilled the gardens and later pruned the fruit trees. We had three gardens on our yard: vegetable garden, a fruit tree garden, and a flower garden. They covered 1/2 acre of our 2 acre yard in Old Altona.
Mom told me years later, when she was quite elderly, that she had despised grandfather Reimer for having made my older brother distribute evangelical tracts on various occasions, including on a holiday to British Columbia when he was only seven. He was required, grandpa said, to approach such people as garage mechanics, hand them a tract and also witness to them about Jesus.
My father reluctantly gave me a quarter each Saturday when I was sixteen and seventeen. I bought two cigars with it and smoked them that very evening. Mom made fruit preserves (crabapples, raspberries, strawberries and bing cherries). I purloined a few jars now and then to concoct my own wine. I did this from the age of 15 to the age of 18. When I was 19, my friend, a painter, convinced a 16 year old student of his he taught in a high school art course to let him body paint her. She wore undies and he painted all the rest of her. I didn’t see the process or finished product. He said he still got the goosebumps now, 40 years later, thinking about it. I think about the relative values our world places on activities. I never saw my father in anything less than longjohns and a shirt once, but found it exceedingly embarrassing. I never saw my mother sans habiliment. I did not want to. I never at all saw any of my siblings in such a state either. Unlike on acquaintance of mine who did.
My first thoughts about the adult body arrived—when I was 13–with my cousin who lived 30 miles away and whom we were visiting of a Sunday. We were swimming in the dugout on some farmer’s field, surrounded by cattails and willows, heated insects floating on the thick liquid and the smell of sun-baked mud. Of course, we swam naked. Boys then always did if no females were around (I remember getting the shock of my life at 8 watch a group of my uncles and their friends swimming in a dugout). The sun beat down on the raft we were sitting on. Somnambulant, Huckleberry-Finnish, we (for a few minutes till we tired of it) pulled our penises back between our legs to make them look like vaginas. We caught frogs and tadpoles on that same afternoon in the tepid water there.
Mom loved to garden. She planted dozens of varieties of flowers, and later in her 40s began a greenhouse business that she ran till she and father moved to British Columbia. Dad grew tired of being a rural travelling salesman after almost 20 years of doing that. He decided in the late 60s (he was 52) that he had had enough so they sold and moved west. There, in Abbotsford, he became a very successful real estate salesman and died at the young age of 72 of colon cancer.
My mother made and sold perogies in the first five years after their move because they had no money. They actually went hungry for three years not having enough to feed themselves or the endless succession of guests that came West to holiday and stayed a few nights with them. They sometimes resorted to borrowing money to put food on the table for these visitors who, many well off themselves, never seemed to feel it necessary to contribute to the cost of groceries. Or to pick up the tab when they had convinced my parents to have supper out with them, inevitably waiting for dad to do that.
Better off in later years, mother grew raspberries and father grew apples. By the time he died, he had created a fine yard, 2 acres in size, with many apple, pear, peach and cherry trees on it. And that is my reflection on the state of human depravity.
Better off in later years, mother grew raspberries and father grew apples. By the time he died, he had created a fine yard, 2 acres in size, with many apple, pear, peach and cherry trees on it. And that is my reflection on the state of human depravity.
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