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I told him everything – and I do mean everything.  Well, perhaps not.  One time we were driving to our summer house, Dad and I, and he started telling me all the places I got high, some of the wilder things I had done, things I couldn’t imagine telling him.  However, the ever faithful parish members would fill him in.  To his credit, he never let on, and never punished me.  He knew this was privileged information other parents weren’t likely to know yet he did because it was expected that I conform to the standard.  I was conforming – everyone knows minister’s kids are screwy.

To his credit, he never pushed religion down our throats – our mother did but not him. 
I was Daddy’s little girl.  I guess this much is obvious from the writing.  When I was little I wanted to be a minister just like him.  At thirteen I leaned more toward being a missionary.  Fourteen hit with boys and booze and religious ambitions went out the window.  I’ve always been strongly spiritual by nature, but the direction it was focused changed again and again in adulthood.  My family just shook their heads.  I was the weird one.  It was okay.  I was comfortable being the black sheep.

My father’s chief failing as a minister was that he was not business minded.  In today’s church, it is imperative.  Bringing in enough capital falls heavily on the minister, he needs to fill those coffers one way or the other.  Luckily, my mother was savvy in this realm.  She would start thrift shops, coordinate fund raisers, etc.  She was good at it.  The thrift shops she started in some churches thirty years ago are still going.  One generates 30% of the church’s income.

Over the years, the demands of the church and its members started having its toll on my dad.  The stress started leaking out.  My mother and father were having frequent arguments, great rushes of rage following by a passion of renewal.  My mother, who had trouble channeling her anger, sometimes used her fists.  One time she broke his nose.  Another time they had a huge fight up at our summer cabin which went on and on.  Finally I yelled at them to stop, took the dogs, and headed up the mountain for the next few hours.  It made them get it together then.  For years I became the referee.  Even when I left home, they would call and get on each extension and argue their positions.  While some piece of me felt powerful, but mostly I felt overwhelmed and burdened.

When I was fourteen, my father’s father died.  My Dad never forgave himself for not being at his side the very moment of his death, even though he had been there just a few minutes previous.  That night, my Dad started daily drinking.  All at once he became an alcoholic, much like I did years later.  A parishioner came to the door and Dad greeted her with only his underwear on.  Luckily she understood but it was the beginning of the end.  Every night Dad would sit in his chair, often in his briefs, in the darkness, watching T.V.  Most nights I would go down and talk to him for hours.  My mother didn’t take kindly to it – sometimes it seemed like jealousy.  It could well have been.  Dad and I were of one mind, she of another.  We could no more understand or walk in each other’s shoes, than we could climb Mount Rushmore.  My way of appeasing my mother was to occasionally massage her feet after she came home from work.  I hated doing it but it was all I had.

My mother had her fill of being a minister’s wife as I was graduating high school.  They gave me the constancy of one high school but two weeks after graduation, hit the road.  She opened a home for the elderly in upstate New York while my father took a parish an hour away.  He commuted between the two. 

The parsonage was atrocious.  In front of the toilet, there was a hole where you could see into the kitchen below.  The whole house was like that.  Mom wouldn’t go near it or let any of the kids go.  This gave my father ample time to pursue