Monday, August 30, 2010

When Does A Sense of Incompetence Really Begin?

Here we have the impressive Hawthorne LDS Church which is located at Roosevelt Avenue and 8th East in Salt Lake City Utah.

This would have been the building that my Grandmother and Grandfather Mary Salmon and Ira Bennion Cannon would have attended with my father, Bennion Rhead Cannon, and the building my other Grandparents, Nellie Bull and Edward Axel Peterson with their children, Welby, my mother, Helen Maurine and Patricia Joy would have attended had they been so inclined.

This also is the building, including the side shot of the very door (left side of shot) which my mother and grandmother would glide by and slow down enough to toss me out each Sunday morning to attend Sunday School as I lived at Grandma and Grandpa Peterson's.  The circumstances of living at Grandma's and the reasons I was to be eliminated from the household on Sundays are not clear.  I'm figuring I must have been about four.  All facts are vague except for the following.  It is just too traumatizing.

No one went in with me ever and I know this for a fact because no one at Sunday School ever knew my name.  I was asked, and I told them, every week.  But I must have been as unintelligible as Brad was at the same age because they never got it.

The same routine went on every week.  They would ask me my name, I would tell them, and they would ask me to have my mother come in the next week to talk to them to tell them my name.  I'd agree, time and again but would forget to comply.  That was just the beginning, I guess, of my letting God down.

But as I look back, I'm wondering, why didn't they just take a clue from the schools?  The old "pin a note to your shirt" trick wasn't all that secret.  But nevertheless, the mere sight of the old Hawthorne Ward House raises a greater sense of inadequacy in me than fear of wearing a shirt twice and smelling bad or using bad grammar in my blog.  I'm not kidding.

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