to save his work, he showed me the icon he clicked—“that little button,” he called it—to accomplish the same thing. We looked at the icon together for a second, and I said, “It’s actually an old floppy disc.” Gramps laughed. “That sounds like what I feel! An old, floppy, disc.” We cracked up, and as always, he gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek to see me out. “I think I’ll take that as my new nickname!” he declared. For the work I did for the ministry, for my aptitude in memorizing and defending church doctrines, and for my increasingly loud and zealous voice for Westboro in the media, I had my grandfather’s approval, and he liberally showed me his love and praise. “I just love all that good work you do, sug’. I love it, I love it, I love it! You learned how to put together a sentence like that from your ol’ Gramps, didn’tcha? Ha!” That little twinkle in his eye when he’d tease us, and then toss his head back and chuckle …
But growing up, I was also a bit afraid of him, of what would happen if I stepped out of line. The few times I gave him occasion to be dissatisfied with me—as when I failed to play a hymn at the correct tempo the single time I was accompanist at our Sunday church service—he berated me without pity, his harsh temper provoked at the slightest displeasure. The fear I had was also passed down by my parents’ generation, by the way they spoke of anything that might upset or disappoint my grandfather: in hushed tones with intense strategizing about the best way to reveal a problem to him. It was not uncommon to hear, “Stay clear, Daddy’s throwing one of his fits again!”
And then there was my mother. Sometimes she seemed exhausted just thinking about the years growing up with her father. The Phelps children spent long days at school, followed by hours of selling boxes of candy on the streets of Topeka, Kansas City, Wichita, to support the family and the church, followed by a daily ten-mile run. My grandfather had found the running program on the back of a Wheaties box and forced all his children to join him in following it—even the ones in elementary school. When he decided they would start training for marathons, their Saturday mileage increased to twenty-six. “His motto has always been, ‘If a little’s good, a lot’s better.’ No moderation, always to the extreme,” my mother told me more than once. When they ran the Heart of America marathon in Columbia, Missouri, my uncle Tim was the youngest to compete. He’d turned seven just a few weeks before the race. It took him seven hours to finish. Runner’s World thought it was a great story and published it in their November 1970 issue, which hung proudly on the wall of the church office next to the Time profile. “We were too young to be doin’ that—sellin’ candy and runnin’ like that,” my mom would say. “Too damn young. He shouldn’t have had us out there like that, and that’s all there is to it. Nothin’ to do about it now, though.”
It was in the past. Gramps didn’t do that anymore.
Such was the essence of the position my mother took when I came to her one day in tears of outrage and despair: my sleuthing on the message boards had led me to a book. It had been referenced a few dozen times before my curiosity got the better of me. I knew it was full of lies, per my parents. They explained that even the Capital Journal—certainly no friend of ours—had refused to print what they referred to as an “agenda-driven” manuscript. The ex-intern who’d authored the book had been fired by the newspaper “as a result of our inability to place any reliance on his judgment and his work product. His actions as an employee here were unprofessional and ethically questionable.” I clicked the link and began to read.
An hour later, wailing with an anguish the likes of which I’d never known, I stormed out of the living room and into my mother’s office. She jumped out of her chair and rushed over. “Is it true?!” I demanded, hardly able to force my mouth to form words around the sobs, doubling over as I folded myself into her arms. This was not a tone I ever took with my mother, but