Murder as Religion
My earliest memory is a murder.
In was the death of my turtle.
He was purchased from the local Woolworth on the corner of Pacific Blvd. and Zoe Avenue in Huntington Park, CA a suburb of Los Angeles, where I grew up. Woolworth was the strange mix of urban bazaar and zoo. I can recall the smell of popcorn, vinyl and fish tanks all rolled up into one familiar scent.
Anyways, as I remember it, my mother ushered me into the kitchen in a solemn manner and took me to the tank where my turtle was and he was dead. He had a little hole punched through his shell. Then I noticed my brother who had a anxious look on his face. The murderer!
At that moment I knew one or two things could happen. I could make a scene and my brother would have been spanked for his crime, but this wouldn’t bring my turtle back to life. Or I could forgive him, bury the turtle and endure the loss. To this day, I’m not sure why I did the latter, but as I think back on that moment, it was my first step toward embracing an ancient faith where an innocent pays and the guilty go free.