It was a good year for suicide.

I won't say I liked Earl--he made himself impossible to like--but I could relate to him. He had a beady intensity that scared people. He spoke as though what he said were a matter of grave importance, but that party officials may be listening, so you had better listen well the first time. His nose looked as though it had been broken several times, and after he spoke he would tuck his lower lip in expectantly and not blink until he felt that you had grasped his gravity. He would then give a curt nod and a meaty slap on the shoulder as he hunched away like some cathartine Trotsky.

All of this meant that he was never taken seriously by the Elders, a fact of which he was seethingly resentful. He felt that he should be granted more priveleges in the congregation, and there he was right. There was no reason that he should not be in charge of some little task, like his blandly creepy son Harvey was. But the Elders had complete discretion when it came to the assignment of thankless tasks, and Earl didn't fit into their plan. He didn't fit into any plan; he looked ludicrously out of place at all times. Just like me.

So when he hanged himself, people simply didn't talk about it. It wasn't as though the facts were unknown. In a rage, he had put his wife in the hospital, and he kicked the chair because there are some things for which it is impossible to answer oneself. But in theory, God should have prevented this sort of thing. It was fitting that, like Earl, the circumstances surrounding his death didn't fit into most people's model of how things worked. And there was considerable relief when he was no longer there to injure everyone's paradigm.

But it was harder to understand when Marsha killed herself. Marsha wasn't like Earl. She was lovely, dignified and funny. There were things about her that, like Earl, did not fit the model, but they were ignorable, so everybody was thrilled when she married an Elder in the congregation and he lovingly took Marsha's teenage daughter in as well. Never mind that the daughter was visibly miserable, or that Marsha's giggles took on a forced quality. And, a year later, when Velvet walked in on her mother's body, never mind why. There are some things that we just don't talk about, not because they're unpleasant, but because we don't know how to. We just weep them under the rug.

I was such a good little Christian boy. In fact, i was more than a good little Christian boy. I was a good little Jehovah's Witness boy, which, as anyone will tell you, is harder. For instance, since every good Witness family arrives at the meetings at least fifteen minutes early, I had some time to kill. Now, some of the other youths in my congregation would waste this time talking about skateboards or television. The accepted term for this sort of conversation and the people who do it is "worldly", which is an ubiquitous term among Witnesses. Anything not directly related to preaching was "worldly", and therefore highly suspect. After school sports were worldly. Any movie rated worse than PG-13 was worldly, and according to some arbiters, including my Grandpa, even those deserved the W-word. Spending too much money on clothes, say more than ten dollars for a shirt? Worldly.

But I digress. As those W____ other kids were enjoying their lives, I decided that the most useful/unworldly thing I could do was to teach Bible verses to the younger kids. In time, I became quite an attraction. The little five and six year olds would come up to me (I was a mere nine or ten) and recite verses in exchange for approval. My biggest fans were Jared and Justin S., and my highlight of my career as an alternative to worldly was shortly before the meeting when their Father came to claim them. My natural charm was so addictive that the refused to go with him. Well, this called for a liberal dose of unworldly! "Justin," I reprimanded, "What does Ephesians 6:1 say?"
"Children, be obedient to your parents," he recited, "But . . ."
"Then don't you think you should go with your Dad?" I didn't even wait for him to finish. He relented and followed his Dad back to their seats. At the time, I thought of myself as a saint. Little did I know that a demagogue was born.