Ruth,

I think he was happy as a Christian. He was a lay Congregational 
Methodist minister. But he had his other torments. The story I have is 
that for many years he worked nights at the Sinclair Oil refinery in 
Salamanca, NY watching gauges. He was there every night, all night, 
watching. It was hard work for the fact that there was nothing else to 
do. He was not even to have books, though he snuck in his pocket Bible. 
I talked to him one time about madness, his comment, "You got to keep 
that stuff away." He took sick one night and staid home in bed. That was 
the night that the refinery burnt down.

My understanding of his spending long nights watching gauges made it a 
bit easer for me to commute alone 5 hours a day for 12 years. That sort 
of driving you cannot get away from yourself.

As I knew him he was always prepared to stop whatever he was doing and 
preach. He got up early every morning and went to a corner dinner 
downtown in Ithaca and preached Jesus to whomever would listen. He also 
spent a whole lot of time visiting the terminally ill at the county 
hospital. His death. He and my grandmother lived in a house that had a 
driveway that went up hill from the road. He was out working on his car, 
while my Grandmother was inside listening to the Texaco opera on the 
radio I presume. The car rolled and pinned him to the ground. He was 
there for hours in the sun and died of a heart attack brought on by 
dehydration.

Least these are the stories that I have.

A good deal of the Christian story line, particularly in New England, 
has been designed to keep people in a constant state of fear and 
torment. You can check out either the text or an audio recording of 
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinners_in_the_Hands_of_an_Angry_God> from 
Jonathan Edwards, 1741. This is incredibly heavy material but if you 
want an idea where your grgrgrandmother's self-torment came from it is 
worth looking at. Lingering threads of these torments tend to pass along 
through the generations. When the protestants first got the idea that 
G-d speaks directly to each individual it was very powerful. But at the 
same time the ministerial class was still busy telling as many 
individuals as possible what G-d was saying to each one of them. It 
comes down to the art of the most powerful persuader.

Merry Christmas.

][<en

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