My childhood: I discovered my ultra-conservative parents liked to rock out

I grew up in a very conservative and ultra-religious household. This is pretty common in the mid-west and all of my family were devout Catholics. They still are for the most part but my immediate family deviated from the pack as soon shortly after we moved away from that area. As a child, I lived a very sheltered life including attending a Catholic school, going to church several times a week, and even being an alter boy.

Before anyone goes down the road of something sexual involving priests I'll put this out there: Nothing even remotely like this ever happened to me or any of the other alter boys. I guess we got one of the good priests or all of us weren't good-looking enough to molest.

Anyway, I would discover years later that a lot of what my parents were presenting to us kids was a ruse and they weren't actually the people they were presenting to the world. This is a great example of how I think a lot of people are. I don't fault them for this because they were just looking out for their kids but one day after we had moved away from the mid-west, I discovered something in the attic that was pretty telling of my parents' true nature.

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We had a family record player in the living room that was the size of 2 coffins stacked up on top of them. This thing weighed as much as a Volkswagen and once it got sat somewhere, this is where it was going to stay until the end of time.

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_{Something like this, only much larger}

The record-player cabinet had the speakers and the record player contained inside and then as an added bonus on the other side there was a liquor cabinet complete with waterproof ice cube storage. What a bizarre but totally cool combination.

The records that were contained in our public display included mostly religious indoctrination collections of songs for kids, a TON of Elvis records that spanned the gospel years of his career, Sonny and Cher, some John Denver and Dolly Parton, and other rather docile features. One of our prized records was a collector's edition of E.T. read by Michael Jackson.

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Basically, there was nothing even remotely risqué in there and this was by design. What us kids didn't realize was that my parents had a history of being fans of certain music that they had acquired before having kids that didn't fall into their new, religious persona. This music was all hidden away in boxes in the attic. When I discovered them as a teenager, I was a bit blown away.

They had Sabbath, Led Zepplin, The Beatles, and other such things that no good Christian would ever play in their homes. I ended up having a wonderful conversation with my parents about all the records and they had a bunch of great stories and memories involving each of the albums and how they got some of them while my mom still lived with her parents and she had to keep them hidden or she would have gotten into trouble with her also very religious parents. I loved the fact that my Dad, who had told me his whole life about the virtues of certain music, had great stories and remembered most of the lyrics to songs by Black Sabbath even after not listening to it at all for decades.

All of their children were in college or were in high school at this point and we were no longer even attending church service so there was no reason to lie anymore. One extra bonus was that they let me take all the records I wanted back with me to my college city with me. It is very unfortunate that just like any irresponsible college student, I mistreated them and they eventually were all destroyed and thrown out after a flood hit our city. I feel terrible about that because some of those were collector's items and even if they weren't, they had nostalgic value to my parents. I'm pretty sure they have forgiven me for this, and the many other missteps I made in my late teenage years and early 20's.

I was kind of delighted to find out that my rigid and strict in appearance only parents actually had a "cool" side to them as well. They did a very good job of hiding this from us and everyone else because no one had any idea that my parents used to rock out just like all other teenagers did at the time. I would later find out some other insider information about my parents and their rebellious streaks as teenagers and young adults.

I'll get into that in a later episode.