The Transformation: Alternate Universe

My fall from life-everlasting on the Streets Paved With Gold to my present mindset of quip writer and beatnik poet was fairly precipitous, and a big part of the descent into perversion is due to science and science-fiction. Around 1955 when I was ten or eleven years old, my mom enlisted me into the Book of the Month Club, Wholesome Boyhood Division. One of my first books was about the hills of bonny Scotland where a boy and his border collie tended sheep on granddad's farm, and it was a pretty good read. A little later, I ordered and received a tome titled Danny Dunn and the Anti-gravity Paint, at least that is how I remember the name of the book. Anyway, it was about a boy and his pals who lived on Florida's Atlantic coast in an average American setting. Danny, while fooling with a hurricane or something, discovered a paint which nullified the effects of gravity. From there on, I ordered nothing but science fiction and hard science related books. My mom took notice of her budding Einstein (I thought more of myself as the handsome hero Buck Rogers type) and one day she bought me a sci-fi novel about a young man of the future who had just graduated from space academy on Luna. The cadet was assigned his first solo mission which was merely wrangling a huge thorium asteroid from beyond Mars to a Lunar orbit so the rock could be used to make nuclear devices to fight the powerful and evil empire of commies. Of course, the commies followed him there and there was much danger and brave deeds for our hero. Anyway, that space opera hooked me once and for all, but I cannot think of the name of the book. The main thing was that I was still going to church thrice weekly and living the good life of a semi-spoiled only-child (brat) in a pleasant country setting. In 1957, I journeyed into the seventh grade at a new school—Jonesboro High— which taught grades seven through twelve, and it had a great library where I read any kind of adventure story I could find including historical fiction and outdoor dramas. As I earlier wrote, at age 14 I became a card-carrying disciple of Jesus. If you were alive in the 50's decade, you well know the Big Event of the era was Sputnik; the commies had beaten the mighty U.S. of A. into space exploration and, of course, I wanted to become a spaceman defender of God, Country, and apple pie. About the same time I noticed a new novel on the library shelf titled Have Space Suit—Will Travel written by a man named Robert Heinlein. It and some woks by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke all got me to seeing the universe as it really was; extremely ancient and indescribably huge and not as one put together 6,000 years earlier by a supreme being as I was lead to believe for all my life. I got to thinking the big thought: Who is God and where did He come from? However, these new revelations in my receptive mind did not allay my mom's determination that I should and would go to church on a regular basis. Nay, my friends, her heart was hardened much like Pharaoh's and her retribution for non-compliance was swift and terrible.
To be continued: Punishment by Sachet!
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Happy Birthday, Colleen!
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May your day be filled with Saturflies, dear hearts.
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