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Today, I received a package for which I had been excitedly waiting---a used (like new, no damage, no markings) copy of the Scofield reference Bible.

In or about April 1976, I purchased---for a high school class (one I had been waiting for three years to attend) on the Bible as Literature---a new copy of the 1967 edition of the Scofield Bible, published by the Oxford University Press.  I had never seen, much less owned, a reference Bible before; and I was supremely fascinated by it, and by the annotations and chain references it presented.  (This particular edition omitted some of Scofield's more incendiary comments about Judaism, and also some of his amendments to the actual text of the King James translation; these amendments being noted in the margins, but not in the main text.  Scofield's antisemitic remarks, and his apparent contemept for the Hebrew and Galilean Christians who were the first members of the Church makes me, as a Christian, ashamed of him.  I did not, in 1976, know of these aspects; I found out about them years later.)

I used this Bible during the last term of my Senior year in high school; a year in which I had been given so many blessings that, in the six years prior, I would never have been able to be imagined.  I was no longer bullied; no longer treated as a social freak with the appearance and manners of a baboon.  Because I had completed most of the required credits for graduation by the end of my Junior year (lacking only the four credits for Senior Civics), I had several free periods in which I did not have to actually attend classes.  I used these to work in two different jobs that I absolutely loved---as helper to the Chairman of the English Department, the most powerful teacher in the entire district (and the first educator who encouraged and fostered my ambition to become a poet), and as a lab assistant in a remedial sophomore biology class.  (Halfway through my senior year, the chairman of the Biology department, who was also the ranking Football coach, asked me to serve has is lab assistant for the AP biology that I had taken, as a class, the previous year.  However, I had promised the instructor of the remedial course that I would work there, and I felt I could not insult him by accepting the better offer.)  

Those who have read my poems on this site, especially the Ad Astra series might remember that this year also brought me to one of the most important events of my life, on Saturday, July 10th, 1976, when my First Beloved, Cerulean (Cerulean of the kicked off shoes, the dark blue socks, and the unbuttoned shirt hanging open) helped me escape from the shadow of my parents, and from the bullying that had afflicted me between 1970 and 1974, by helping me to find the appellation that, in its early form, showed me who I could be.  (Waiting for Cerulean to walk the short distance of the five houses that separated our two homes on that dead end street, I was sitting on the back bumper of my 1975 Ford Pinto, just after dusk, watching the stars begin to appear in the Eastern sky.  The evening before we had purchased, and Cerulean's brother-in-law had installed in the Pinto, a Midland c.b.; but I had not been able to find a channel.  Cerulean walked over to my parents drive-way, and asked me, "Whatcha doin'?"  I replied, "Watching the stars, star watching."  We looked at each other with surprise.  I said, "That's it, isn't it . . . my handle," and Cerulean said, "Yes, I think so . . . Starwatcher."  It evolved, over time, to Starward, a word I first encountered in a sonnet entitled "Saint Benedict," by the Christian poet, Thomas S Jones Jr., 1882-1932; but that conversation with Cerulean was the foundation.  The sense of sudden independence, and the lifting of burdens, that I felt was almost tangible.  My mundane name became only a legal formality to be filled in on forms and official documents.  I was, then, Starwatcher; and I now, and will be forever, Starward.

Cerulean was a Baptist Christian, and would have appreciated the Scofield Bible's King James text; a text not favored by my parents' denomination, which I then attended.

On September 9th, 1976, my parents transported me to my college, which was almost an hour northeast of my home town by interstate highway.  I had dreaded the date since before my high school graduation, because I had fallen in love with Cerulean; and I had been accepted by the community on c.b. channel twenty-two, of which Cerulean was a part, and very active as well.  My parents were far more excited than I was:  they had been planning for this since they adopted me in November of 1958; and it also effectively separated me from Cerulean, a separation they had sought as they considered our friendship (and my feelings that even my father was able to recognize and acknowledge)  as inappropriate.  I had to leave behind Cerulean, my dog Monica, the channel 22 community, and my Midland radio.  But I took with me my new identity, my thin folder of poems I had written, and my Scofield Bible.

To have acquired this copy, at this late stage of my life and during a difficult medical condition which continues to afflict me and shows no sign of improvement, gives me yet another means to reconnect with that part of my past which is the most significant contributor to who and what I am.

Starward