I’ve never known my directions like I knew them growing up in Indiana. I still have a pretty good sense of direction but by the time I was ten or so, I not only knew which way was east or west, but I knew what each direction represented.
My bedroom faced East after Dad built the second story on the house, but even before that I slept under the tiny airvent window on the east end of the attic. Not only did the sun rise in the East, but all of history was in the East. Washington DC, Valley Forge, Gettysburg, and beyond all that, Europe.
South was… well, the South. They were the rebels, the hillbillies and… Southerners. One of my earliest memories of a family vacation was a trip to the Ozarks in Missouri and my favorite comic strip was Li’l Abner. The fact that all three of my older sisters married Southerners cemented the idea in my mind.
Now we all know the West from Westerns, but I always wondered how near to Chicago the Lone Ranger lived. To me, the West was the City.West was the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum of Natural History, the International Farm and Livestock exhibition, and best of all, The Loop. Every Christmas the family went to Chicago and strolled down State Street to see what amazing mechanical Christmas exhibits would be in the windows of Marshall Fields. My Wild West was bounded by State and Michigan Streets and ran over the top of Wabash Avenue.
North. That is where dreaming comes in. I was a little more than 12 when I had the dream the first time, but it repeated periodically until I was well into my 30s and had finally written it down in one of my novels. I know I was more than 12 because I was confirmed at 12 and became a member of the Willow Creek Methodist Church, complete with my first Bible. There had always been Bibles in our house, and plenty of them. I’d memorized vast portions from the King James Version and had been given a little New Testament when I was “saved.” But this was my own Revised Standard Version of The Bible and I was intent on studying all of it.
On Wednesday evenings there was Bible Study at the church and I started attending regularly. And wouldn’t you know that the first full study that we did was of The Revelation of John. I was nothing if not impressionable and had already decided I would become a minister one day, so I was deep into the study.
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