Childhood
The Ellwoods are fourth-generation ranchers. Roger, Connie, four kids. On Sundays, we all drive to the church in town. That’s where I met them when the Outlaw Inn receptionist and her family took me along the first time.
I got a gig on the Ellwoods’ ranch now and rent a cabin for 50 bucks a month.
An intriguing li’l faith tribe these kindly folks are. When we take meals or chat on the porch or wherever we happen to have bunched, there’s typically a lot of laughter. A special kind of laughter, triggered not so much by looking at things in an off-the-wall way, but flowing out of steady gladness of being. One reason, I figure, is they don’t watch TV, don’t listen to the radio, don’t go to the movies, even the local paper they buy on the weekends only, and mainly for the local news. They even remove the radios and the antennas, and the ashtrays of course, from their cars.
“Gimmie the pliers,” I bid them, “I’ll do the same in my buggy!”
They laugh.
Well, if there's anything like God’s law, the spiritual dimension, the Rock, the Sense, then these organic – you may call them – Eurochristians are pretty much in synch with it.
Because what person can rinse clean their puny soul from all the world’s slag, the anxiety, the worry, which day after day, hour after hour, a trillion after a trillion bytes like bad manna fall upon us through ever cheaper, abler, more ubiquitous communication ducts? All that hail of “the news” from around the globe, the hourly drizzle of human shams, shakedowns, rip-offs and scams, the detailed minutes of disasters natural and mechanical, murders personal and international, gossip local and global – are we sure we have evolutionary means to digest it all emotionally, intellectually, morally, spiritually, just like our stomachs process white bread?
For most of our evolutionary history, the collective part of our psyche was being shaped toward operating within small bands. Such collective gizmos like "countries," "nations," even the despotically controlled looting hordes, have developed only in the last ten thousand years or so. In the previous 200 or 300 thousand years, or a million (depending on the current simian origins theory), humans lived and evolved in bands made up of a few hundred members, tops. That's 95-plus percent of our evolutionary time.