Billings

Sitting here in Billings, Montana sipping a glass of Markham cabernet, reading a few chapters in Sanford's Golden Prey, and thinking about my next novel featuring Gerald Hodges. It will take place in Vancouver. I'm sketching out the beginning and plot in my mind---also thinking of organizing my nonfiction-Growing Up Atheist book into time periods.  Ah...but back  to the wine. It's wonderful!

A beginning snippet

Growing Up Atheist

Well, where to begin? I am a sixty-six year old atheist, and was brought up that way. I suppose that I and my brothers and sister are fairly unique in America. My parents were atheists, and my father’s parents were atheists-don’t know about our background before that. My mother was brought up in the church and attended various services until she met my dad and married him at the age of nineteen. That’s when she got religion, or should I say not. All of her sisters and brothers stayed in the church, including the ones who upon marrying into another family discovered their new in-law’s Native American heritage. They embraced their new heritage wholeheartedly. My folks and I even went to one of their ceremonies—very interesting, but that is another story. Even with all the wild religionists in our extended family, none of them has ever held our atheism against us. We were as embraced as any other member of the family at large.

When I first mentioned to my mother that I was going to write a book about our family and atheism (she was 88 at the time-now going on 92) she said, “Wait until I’m dead. I really don’t want you to open up a can of worms.”

Well, she relented about a year ago. She seems more confident now that somehow it’s okay to lay it all out there. Kind of like a gay person having the confidence to finally come out of the closet and let the world know. It does seem liberating, because all of my life-mostly from the time I was of elementary school age, I was aware enough to know that our family was different than the vast majority of Americans.

So, again, where do I go from here? I’ve decided that I’m just going to ramble—it’s easier. I might go back and forth a little bit so it might get a little confusing. I apologize, but I will try to make everything clear!

I might talk to myself here a little, so please indulge me. I’m going to loosely construct the tale of my atheist family from childhood to the present, although, as I commented above, I might switch time frames just a little.