My religious upbringing was. . ..well, varied. My father was raised Southern Baptist but converted to Reform Judaism during his time as a MedEvac crew chief in Vietnam. He couldn't reconcile the horror he witnessed with the image of Christ he carried overseas and eventually took a laissez faire attitude toward God.

My mother grew up in the Methodist denomination but experienced a spiritual crisis of sorts after she and my father divorced. When two Mormon missionaries repeatedly knocked on our door for two weeks, she considered their persistance the answer to a prayer and has since remained in the Mormon church.

If you're looking to make your Sunday dinner rival the WWF, you need only sit a Mormon, a Methodist and a Baptist at the same table and let the games begin. I grew to despise Sunday dinners. Long before the pecan pie was sliced, the conversation disintegrated into shouting matches over who was going to hell and why. My brothers and I squirmed at the kid's table and pretended not to notice when Mom started crying or Grandpa pronounced our eternal doom. And to make matters worse, we depended upon my mother's parents for food and occassional shelter when my mother's paycheck was stretched to store-brand tissue paper flimsiness. We kids couldn't jump into the fray without, we thought, jeopardizing future meals. By the time I reached ten I'd had my fill of religion, and our babysitter's husband didn't help matters any.

But as distasteful as the issue of God had become, I couldn't shake the conviction that somewhere, a being higher than myself was watching. There was something mystical about the world, even the single-wide trailer we lived in. Magic was all around me, but I couldn't capture it. I could only catch whiffs every now and again, and dream of gobbling it up like a double chocolate banana split loaded with marinated cherries.