Boy Rev

The Reverend's history includes being struck by lightning when he was young, thirteen or so. He had climbed to the top of a large cottonwood to experience God's presence up close. It was the wind he was mad for. Up in the high canopy, the swaying of the treetop brought the wind home in the irregular back and forth motion much like he imagined the clipper ship he admired on the Cutty Sark bottle he found washed up among a heap of flotsam along the rugged slip worn banks of the Scioto he regularly claimed as another playfield. His Godship, he called it, the cottonwood, naively unaware of the double entendra he was invoking. As he sang the final verse of Rock of Ages, his favorite hymn from the UMC Book of Hymnals used at the lovely, if not rustic one room church up the road, the sky darkened and threatening clouds rolled in from the east, hiding the bright warm June sky. As his mother, having just heard desperate storm warnings on the somewhat local AM radio broadcast, emerged from the tiny, rundown abode they shared with at least a half dozen often times additional occupants consisting of rag-tag-along cousins and friends of his older siblings, along with at least a few coffee klatch neighbors, many of whom would later serve as godsworn witness to the spectacle, the scene was cracked by an immediate blast of thunder, an explosion of what seemed atomic proportions that broke the mighty tree in two and sent the Rev, never once letting lose the hold he held to his blessed branch, inevitably and vigerously groundward. As the startled crew of family and possibly friends ran to the spot of his remarkable landing, his mother screaming hysteically, smoke, steam, and the unmistakable though yet unidentified odor of ozone, mixed with that of burnt hair, rose in graceful wisps from his still form. His mother, sobbing mournfully, certain her favotite towhead boy was forever lost to this world, knelt beside him, and at just that moment, green eyes opened brightly. A pronounced blush spread across his cheeks and through his face. He turned selfconsciously away from his maternal influence, his young body still twitching slightly in spasms. He was still a good Methodist after all. But when temptation reared its head, he would return to this moment religiously in the near and distant future, eyes closed, worshiping the memory unmercifully.