11 Dec #9 A Tepee in your backyard

My first Thanksgiving happened in Gillroye, California, with the family of my friend Anne Marie. Her father is from Illenois, her mother from Montreal. Interesting to observe the different backgrounds and ways they were behaving around each other.

The mother of Anne Marie was incredibly conservative. She was not very warm and welcoming to me; started to ask many questions about my background, parents, religious values, future plans. Personally I don’t believe that that is the way to get to know the other person, she was more interviewing me as if she wanted to check if I was a responsible friend for her daughter.

As the days that I spend there went by, there were more difficult conversations I had to follow with her. She asked me if I was practicing a religion, I told her my parents are catholic, they decided to baptise me but not to raise me catholically. In the town I was raised were not a lot of religious people and my parents didn’t value the catholic beliefs that much. Anne Marie’s mother instantly called my parents hypocrits: pick and chose religion is not the right way to belief; I would definitely end up in hell.

I am not a religious person so she did not really offend me by telling me that I am going to hell. I did sense the aggression in the conversation so I started to offend myself by telling her that my parents baptised me so that I had the opportunity still to believe whatever I would want to believe when I would be old enough to decide that for myself. When I asked her if she did mind it that we were not agreeing on this topic, she quickly changed topics by telling about the teepee in her backyard..

Excuse me, a teepee? A teepee made of cow leather, just like the Native American tradition?

Do I sense some pick and chose religion…?