The order of these events is a bit fuzzy. Granted, I'm trying to recall things that happened between the ages of four and five, but I should still be able to figure out more or less what happened when.

We moved into a new house (Dad, a very pregnant Mom, and I) shortly before Christmas 1983. My brother was born right after Christmas.

In February 1984, we went to my great-grandmother's funeral (See previous post).

In April, on my birthday (I found out much later), my dad told my mom he was leaving her for another woman. Divorce proceedings ensued, were finalized, Dad got remarried.

There are two things I still haven't forgiven my father for. One of them is that I didn't get to go to the wedding, and more to the point, that I found out about it after the fact. I was introduced to Jeanne after she was already my stepmother.

(We got off on the wrong foot almost immediately. While playing with one of those fifteen-foot retractable tape measures, I managed to break off the last foot or so, with the remainder whirring back into the housing. Jeanne guilt-tripped me, extensively, about it.)

Mom starts shopping around for churches to begin the religious education she felt I was wanting. The first church she selects is a United Methodist church in our hometown. It's the church that her college friends, Joy and Mark, attend. Joy, in particular, was a great friend to my mother during the divorce.

The original plan, she later told me, was to go to a different church every week for a while to get a flavor for the different possibilities out there. But Mom said she loved it right away, and kept coming back, despite her earlier plans.

Joy and Mark had been trying, unsuccessfully for some time, to have a baby. I don't think this is still the case, but apparently one of the major side effects of fertility treatments in that era was depression. Joy committed suicide in 1985. She sealed off the garage while Mark was at work and ran the engines of their cars.

I don't know how quickly the next bit happened, so I have no idea how scandalous it might have been. Mark started dating a woman and left the church, so the original reasons my mother had for picking that particular church were all gone. But we had been going for a year by this point, and my mother really seemed to love it.

At some point in 1985, Dad and Jeanne move north, to live in an old deer cabin on a largish chunk of woods about an hour north of town. Since Dad and Mom split weekends with us, my brother and I no longer went to church every week (before the move, Dad had passed us off to Mom on Sunday mornings on his watch so we could go to church).

I was a pretty aloof kid when it came to my peers, and now that I was attending only half the time at church meant that I never really made any strong connections to my peers until much, much later. The only thing that really got under my skin about the half-time arrangement was that the kid's choir director said that I couldn't be in choir if I could only make half the practices. Oh, good. One more thing to differentiate this nerd from the rest of the kids.

Starting in second grade, the UMC has kids sit in for the first part of the service - songs, announcements, choir performances, and then Moments with the Children (Moments with the Pastor from our perspective, I guess) before we were released to go to Sunday school (we got to skip out on the sermon, communion, and some of the really interminable stuff). Some weeks I'd be the only kid who went up for Moments with the Children who wasn't already at the front of the sanctuary for the kids' choir performance. I always felt like I was arriving late.

Other than an incident I'll recount later in more detail in which I embarrassed my mother, and getting in trouble once for stomping on an anthill during a Sunday School nature hike, the rest of elementary passed uneventfully. I'll pick this up later.