Trips to San Francisco meant eating shrimp and visiting museums, and both were good for us

When I was a kid, I had a curiosity that could drive any grown-up nuts. One of my frequent third-degree victims was my 7th grade Sunday school teacher. He was a fellow who spent a lot of time in the public library and the Christian Science reading room in an attempt to learn spiritual facts that would assuage his deep concerns and everlasting curiosity over the future disposition of his soul and that of the students in his classes.

I couldn't understand his angst, he was the least sinful man in Lodi in my estimation, and after all, he was practically a professional Sunday school teacher, how could he even consider the possibility of fire and brimstone in his after life! At any rate, my problem in his class had to do with more mundane questions arising from certain stories in the Bible.

We had maps of the Middle East on the Sunday school wall and it was a plain fact that Israel is really small. You could look it up; it is just a speck on a world map. People compare it to the size of New Jersey. My problem was that even though Egypt was pretty close to Israel, it took Moses 40 years in the wilderness to travel from Point A to Point B, with the Promised Land less than a 20 minute flight away.

Moses had a wife named Zipporah, the daughter of Jethro. (It was a good thing the Beverly Hillbillies weren't around in those days; I coulda driven any Sunday school teacher insane with questions based on my knowledge of Max Baer and his son.) Anyway, Zipporah suffered the way modern day wives suffer when they're married to a guy who is either too tight to buy a map or too proud to stop and just ask directions.

You can also imagine the questions circulating among the children of Israel as they would look at one another and ask, "Didn't we tramp right past here the month before last? That 7 Eleven back there looked pretty familiar!"

Well, anyway, my Sunday school teacher had a ready answer to some of the more esoteric questions like, "If there were no restaurants out there, what did the people eat?" "Why did it take 40 years to go to a place that is no further away than Chico?" Or, "What really happens to our souls from the time we die until Jesus comes back?"

He would always say that is God's business and we are not supposed to ask. (Translation: "I have no idea.")

I didn't even have a chance to nail him on another point: Most of where they were lost was one big desert, so I wanted to know: What wilderness? Where?

As a kid, I saw wildernesses in my imagination the way Walt Disney's artists saw them: Trees had eyes that could see, branches that were like gnarly fingers that could grab and hurt little people, and when the wind came up, the branches would make distressing and spooky noises that would make little kids go to the bathroom right there in their theater seats.

I would think as our family would travel to San Francisco in the 1940s that, based on the fact it took Moses 40 years to go a couple hundred miles, how could I complain about taking a lousy two hour jaunt aboard a 1935 Ford with no air conditioning. Dad used to love two things in San Francisco: Freshly cooked prawns and museums, he said they were both good for us.

He was big on educational outings. By the time I was 15, I had been in all the museums in San Francisco, not to mention places that were closer, you know, like only 10 years away in "Moses' time."

(I ain't saying we three kids were a little feisty in the back seat of that '35 Ford but when dad sold it in 1941, the carpet in the back was not only completely destroyed, the metal drive shaft tunnel previously under said carpet was as shiny from wear as the car's chrome bumpers.)

I hope the library in heaven has a Lodi News Sentinel subscription and my teacher reads this; he'll find out he worried for nothing ... .

Bob Bader is a chiropractor who likes to write. His e-mail is bobbyo@softcom.net.