I told this story a few years ago, but with Easter coming up, It's worth telling again. After your children are grown, when they get together, you find out all kinds of things that you never knew before.  I thought I had them under control when they were growing up. But obviously I didn't.

      We had moved to California for five months, waiting on Ken to retire.  We were living on base at El Toro in officer's housing.  Which wasn't much.  Two bedrooms, one bath.  Adequate, but nothing luxurious.  Pat was in the fifth grade.  Becky in the third.  Scott had just turned five years old.

     There was a big tree in our front yard and the street was pretty busy.  Easter was coming up.  So, Pat said she asked Scott, "Hey, you want to be Jesus?" Whatever Pat and Becky thought up, Scott did.   and unbeknownst to me, the girls got ropes and tied Scott to the tree with his arms out, fastened to a couple of branches like a cross.   "You're gonna be Jesus in our Easter pagent," they told him--and topped him off with a crown of thorns.  Probably from a rose bush.

But after a while,  the girls got tired, went in the house and left him there.   Naked as a blue jay except for a tea towel wrapped around him in an appropriate position. The only bad thing was, after awhile, he lost his loin cloth.  Their intentions were religious.  It just didn't turn out that way.  I don't know who cut him down.   You would have thought one of the neighbors would have told me.  I also don't know why I never heard about it until they were grown.

At least the girls knew the crucifixion story.  They didn't disobey.  I never told the girls not to crucify their brother.  If I had, I would have told them not to crucify him in the front yard on a main street.

     "We finally remembered that he was still hanging out there and cut him down and gave him his clothes," Pat said.

     "They crucified me!  Scott said,  There I was, my arms tied to a tree, and my...."  (Unprintable.  You can fill in the blanks.) " Pat said:  "He was no worse for wear, and nobody reported a naked kid tied to  a tree."   Becky said: "I had nothing to do with it."  Knowing Becky, she probably thought it up.