Final Word by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

My son, Axel, loves chasing a soccer ball around the Hawthorne Elementary School field at night with his father until he is so wrecked he can barely walk home. My husband gapes at this behavior and claims to have spent most of his own early childhood imitating a motionless lump.

While I think that’s a bit dubious, our son may take after his mother in this regard. If I wasn’t tearing around, rolling on the ground and jumping off stairs or out of trees, I was recovering from doing so. My knees looked like mottled turnips, and my left ankle was often sprained.

When I was in grade school, my parents owned an eight-acre hobby farm, and the lawn was a sprawling race track, nearly flat. It doubled as a paddock for our cattle, so we dodged around fresh cow patties whenever Dad moved the electric fence. During one unforgettable “Chariots of Fire” moment, I was running full tilt along a grove of trees at the edge of the lawn when — zap! — my body jolted backward, and I landed spread eagle on my back.

In my rapture, I hadn’t noticed the wire on the electric fence looming in front of me. It wasn’t the finish-line ribbon I had been imagining, and I could hear its subtle clicks chastising me as I struggled to reinflate my lungs.

My greatest bliss, though, was running at church.

Before the ecstasy came the agony: Getting ready for church was a weekly discordant symphony concluding with resentful subordination. Mom domesticated my long, snarl-prone blond hair into French braids, partitioning the left side from the right side with a Maginot Line, which no hair could cross, exactly down the middle.

Though I always wanted to wear pants, my sisters and I had to wear dresses. The worst part of the ensembles was the tights. My mother weathered fits of crying nearly every Sunday when she forced me to wear them. During worship service, the seam of my tights wandered like Israelites in the wilderness, and the crotch sagged lower with each “Please stand,” and “You may be seated.”

After Sunday school, if adult forum was still in session, I would sneak into the sanctuary and check to make sure no mature figure, except for the image of Jesus, was watching. Then I would hitch up my tights and bolt up the center aisle, my braids flying behind me. I would bank right and shoot under the arches of the side aisle, run around to the other side aisle and sail through dust particles suspended in the reddish glow of the stained-glass windows. Sometimes other children with propriety fatigue would join me.

If the snow was melted, I would make a beeline out the narthex, zip down the wheelchair ramp and circle around the back of Grace Lutheran Church until I reached Vine Street — the thin, worn asphalt line between Grace and St. Mary’s Catholic Church representing the schism between the supposed Heretics and True Believers. I would slow a little to tag my church’s modest and reassuring Protestant buttresses, never mind that my fondest memory of my dad’s mother’s funeral had been the pink rosary beads laced around her knobby fingers.

Then I would pick up speed around the corner, cruise past the church’s front, and jump into the long well that ran along the basement windows. I would give my nearly-forgotten tights another upward yank in full view of the nursery window, skitter over the crushed rock in my Sesame Street saddle shoes and pull myself out at the other end of the well, careful to keep my dreadful tights from snagging at the knees. Dirt was a sin that could be washed away; rips and tears tempted perdition.

After two or three rounds of this, my parents herded me back into the car. On many rides home from church, I would mop my forehead and once again be fully aware of my awful tights, rendered even more torturous by the sweat with which they clung to my legs.

These memories flooded me while I was touring a large church in Faribault on a spring day a few years ago. Axel was with me and doing an admirable job of sticking quietly to my side. Then, as if channeling my inner wishes, the priest invited my son to run down the center aisle from the altar. Axel dashed all the way to the narthex doors on his short legs and galloped back.

As he returned to me, his cheeks were flushing and his expression was ecstatic. My heart felt free, too. Like mother, like son.

 

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson taught social studies in Albert Lea for more than six years before staying home to raise children. She lives with her husband, Jeshua, and their two young children, Trixie and Axel. She wrangles toddlers by day and writes by night.