As I considered which experiences to write for this post, I had to quash many familiar thoughts.

That’s boring.
That sounds like bragging.
That’s not exactly a WOW memory.
I’m not reliving that, thanks.

I imagine you had or will suffer those same plagues when you begin to write about your experiences. I can only offer you the same advice I give myself: Shut up and do it.

Whether this is your first draft or first time ever writing creatively, your early efforts don’t need to be good, they need to exist. You will make them better with revision. You will make yourself better with practice.

I considered and discarded a few thoughts for this post, such as writing about the experience of being unemployed and the difference between the several times I was unemployed in California and being unemployed in Florida. I could have also written about the difference between quitting and getting laid off and getting let go unexpectedly. I could have written about helping to care after my mom and dad in their later years, and watching their decline. I came close to writing about the two times I was a small press publisher of fiction and poetry.

I could have written about a lot of stuff. I wrote about this instead.

I Will Do My Best

When I turned eight, I was a Boy Scout, technically a Cub Scout, in an uncomfortably snug blue pseudo-military uniform, cap, and yellow kerchief. I don’t consider the Boy Scouts something I know a lot about, because despite 10 years of mandatory participation, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about scouting. If all troops were like ours, boys and their families would flee the BSA like snakes hightailing it out of Ireland.

But it was an experience, he said ruefully. In my case, scouting was sponsored through our church, which I have previously described as fringe. Ridiculously large families, siblings whose names all started with the same initial, matching homemade prairie dresses, lots of hymns about toil and pestilence. You get the idea.

Even among this then-minor sect, our congregation was itself an outlier, the fringiest of the fringe. I grew up near a military base, so most of our congregation were service members. Coming of age in the Reagan years among military members eager to fight the Evil Empire and in a religion that believes in the apocalypse, I was more fluent in paranoic conspiracy theories than scripture.

Also, the majority of our local members – including my family – were converts to the church. If you’ve ever met a group of new converts to any type of movement – cult, political party, veganism – you know what they were like. Ride-or-die believers, hungry for rules, desperate for direction, eager to report infringements, and ready to shun at a moment’s notice.

Militaristic, nihilistic, and rabid is quite the mix of personality traits.

Being military, families moved in and out at regular intervals, usually after three years, but sometimes less. Only a few of us called the area home, and whatever friends we made – at church or school – were lost to military transfer, often without even a chance to say goodbye. It is already difficult to grow up in a religion that encourages the avoidance of outsiders, but the itinerant nature of our congregation left me constantly unsettled, without a sense of history or permanence, wary of forming attachments.

Maybe this is why for most of my life, every three to four years, I felt the need to relocate. I got to be the one who leaves for a change.

This has nothing to do with Boy Scouts, but does set the stage for what’s coming. Outside a NAMBLA convention, I can’t think of a worse environment in which to foster a group of boys through childhood rites of passage into young manhood.

As was customary, church leaders assigned two moms of boys in the group to be den mothers. I don’t know what other dens were like, but I imagine the scouting experience is greatly improved when the adults want to be there.

I suppose it’s only fair that the adults came under duress, since I also was being forced to participate. I already hated going to church, so bonus church on Tuesday was not something I looked forward to. In the interest of time, I will only briefly mention we already had bonus church on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I spent more of my childhood in a church pew than I did outdoors.

The first lucky den mother was my mom. If you’ve read previous entries, you might have come to the conclusion that my family wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. You would be correct. And, as with corporate culture, the example was set at the top.

I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. My mom wasn’t a monster. My older siblings may beg to differ, but my upbringing wasn’t as bad as some.

But my mom was not fun. She didn’t like games. She was not playful, nor spontaneous. She was not approachable, nor good with children. She excelled at dirty looks. In another life, she would have been the nun at the Catholic elementary school who terrified all the children. It baffles me that anyone who knew my mom thought she would be a good candidate for wrangling a bunch of squirmy eight-year-old boys and teaching them about good sportsmanship, nature, problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership. Also I’m only guessing that the Boy Scouts teach those qualities, because we didn’t learn any of them.

Her assigned partner in leading the Cub Scouts was my friend Danny’s mom, the only person at our church, and perhaps within the county, less fit than my mom for this job. Earlier I said my upbringing wasn’t as bas as some. Allow me to introduce “some.”

How to describe Danny’s mom? When Dana Carvey introduced his Church Lady character on Saturday Night Live, I was convinced – not metaphorically but with absolute certainty – he had met Danny’s mom. It would not have surprised me if Carvey had claimed to be possessed. He had the performance down pat – the know-it-all attitude, dowdy yet comfortable wardrobe, short conservative hairdo gone prematurely grey. And the voice! The high-pitched, back of the throat squeal, the smug lecturing, the condescension…it was an uncanny impersonation, down to the cat’s-eye glasses.

This might give you an idea of my feelings for Danny’s mom.

As I said, she was even less fun than my mom. My mom was capable of reason, if not compromise, and the occasional twinge of conscience. She could be worn down, if I made myself sufficiently pitiable, but tears were lost on Danny’s mom. Tears didn’t mean you felt sorrow. Tears were a confession you’d sinned.

Danny’s mom – I’m trying to avoid naming names and I hope she appreciates it – was a prissy rules-follower and earnest scold and, as is the wont of such people, a massive phony. She beat her kids. She stole her daughter’s babysitting money. I didn’t know this first-hand, but my mom and older siblings did and they talked. (Our secrets were off-limits, but other family’s secrets were fair game.)

Maybe that doesn’t sound too bad. Maybe Danny’s mom looms larger in my memory because I was a child. Times were different then and maybe church leaders didn’t know everything that was going on at home.

But there’s one thing I am certain they knew. Everybody knew. It was pretty hard to miss.

Danny’s mom shot Danny’s dad.

This was a few years prior, about when Danny and I were kindergarten age. She didn’t kill him, thank goodness. She also did no jail time, I presume because Danny’s dad chose not to press charges, back in the days when spouses could shoot each other without repercussion, as long as one agreed to it. He did leave, however, and good for him. I don’t have a lot of strong memories of Danny’s dad, but I remember he was fun. He always took time to talk to me, and he liked to laugh. I liked him and I know my dad liked him, and we missed him when he was gone. Everyone else at church pretended this never happened. It was never spoken of afterwards, unless someone brought it up.

Guilty.

So, how was my scouting experience? My Cub Scout den mother shot her husband.

These are who my church thought best suited to den mother a small group of eight-year-old boys: My mom, whose parenting style veered from near total neglect to shrill, micro-managing rage, and Danny’s mom, of similar style but incorporating more frequent physical abuse, petty theft, and the occasional gunshot. And that’s not even the best part.

The best part?

They hated each other.

I was too young to remember at the time, but once they had been thick as thieves. Neither of our families were military so we were among only a handful at our church that did not live on base. My mom and Danny’s mom had a lot in common. They were not too far apart in age. Both were stay at home moms with fairly large families – five kids in ours, seven in theirs, generally in the same age range. And both women were zealous, diehard converts looking for direction and approval.

You might think it was the shooting that caused the rift, but no. That came later, so the breach was still relatively fresh when Danny and I were old enough to join Cub Scouts. I know the story, but I’ll save that for another time.

That they did not like each other was clear. Danny’s mom was stiff and formal around my mom, which is quite a feat for a woman who already had a broomstick crammed up her. She spoke condescendingly, in an icky sweet yet lecturing voice, as if my mom were stupid or a sinner. For her part, mom freely talked trash about Danny’s mom at any opportunity. I was no fan of our church or its people, even as a little boy, but I might not have taken such a dim view of Danny’s mom if my mom had been more careful with her talk.

Naturally, I absorbed all this, and I’m sure Danny did as well, which made friendship awkward. I don’t know what he knew, but he had to sense the tension. It felt disloyal, being friends while our moms nursed mutual animosity.

Once, I even told Danny I hated his mom. He said, “Me, too,” and if that wasn’t the saddest damn thing you’ve read today, I don’t know what is. I’m not proud of that, but in my defense, I was eight. Later, our acquaintance became a bit more antagonistic, though never physical or too loud. Like our moms, we treated each other with forced politeness and mutual disdain.

So with this background, what was actual scouting like? I mentioned what we didn’t learn at Scouts, i.e.: anything about scouting. We did recite scripture. We learned how to tie adult ties, since our clip-on days were numbered. We read the Boy Scout manual a lot, but never did any of the activities. We memorized the Scout Motto, Law, and Oath. I vaguely remember looking at pictures of nature, so we could avoid poison ivy, but I don’t remember ever going out in nature. We were too young for overnight camping, but I don’t recall any day trips or even walks in the woods. Maybe we collected leaves or something? It could have happened, I suppose. 

I was in Cub Scouts for at least 2 years, but have almost no memories of those afternoons. Other than Danny, I don’t remember any of the other boys, which is weird, because I have vivid memories of home and school from much earlier. I can remember the faces and names of kids in my kindergarten class who moved away before first grade, but I don’t remember more than a few scattered moments from two years of Tuesday afternoons.

I suspect I spent most of the hour thinking about the episode of Batman I was missing.

So that was the environment of our weekly Cub Scouts gathering: A Tuesday afternoon hour of what amounted to a second Sunday School, led by two strict rules-following women with unhappy homes of their own devise, who each resented the presence of the other and trickled this discomfort down onto their boys, at least one of whom was actively dissociating.

That’s a lot of material to put into context. Writing about Cub Scouts isn’t exactly my zone, but I could write about two women of similar backgrounds, who perhaps felt lost and overwhelmed by life, whose friendship is at first bonded by emotional need and their most unpleasant qualities, and later severed by the same characteristics.

I could write about generational grudges, passed down from mother to son, and how two women couldn’t put aside their personal issues to allow their kids to have a friendship. I might ponder my mom’s choice to isolate me from the one kid my age who lived nearby and wasn’t likely to move away, when I had no way to foster non-church friendships and the all other church kids vanished every 2 – 3 years. I could write about how awkwardness and tension decayed what should have been formative childhood experiences, and codes of loyalty and silence between parents and children.

Of course, I didn’t think of that as material for writing when I was a kid. All I knew is that I hated Scouts and I was missing a Batman rerun at 4:30. I would never have considered writing about this even as a college student or young writer. Cub Scouts? Danny’s mom? Are you kidding? As previously noted, I didn’t want to be there the first time.

It’s taken me years to realize that these experiences provide grist for our writing, even if we don’t know exactly how to use them or if we have to heavily disguise them before putting them to paper. I might never write about Boy Scouts, but I can write about my people and my experiences, and how they made me feel, and how I carried that into the future.

In just this short anecdote, I have material about broken friendships, isolation, multi-generational grudges, forced connections, loyalty tests, trauma, community silence, and someone even fired a gun.

And before I forget, let me remind you all of that happened when I was between 8 and 9 years old. Anyone who made it through childhood has their own version.

If Danny were alive, he’d have some story to tell.

• write with me