Maybe you should be living in San Francisco, where a person with three heads would go unnoticed and unremarked, much less a more conventional middle-of-the-road nonconformist like you. Where do you find these fundamentalist screwballs?

I grew up in the Midwest, in little towns where the only non-white people anyone ever saw were on television, bottles of pancake syrup, or were foreign exchange students. And they weren't on television all that much either. The maids were white. The fast food workers were white. The garbagemen were white. The shoeshine guy was white. Okay, some of the field workers were Mexican, but they only came up for the season and we never ran into each other much.

Later on, as I got older of course, we got all sorts of people moving in as jobs diversified, farms got sold, and businesses came in from elsewhere. Pretty soon there were all kinds of races, religions, and cultures around. Now, you would think that the people who grew up in this white-bread environment would have made worlds of trouble. Wrong. I don't know why.

Although I was only a teenager at the time, I NEVER saw the kind of looneys you seem to have coming out of the woodwork where you live. People on the prowl for witches, satanists, Hindus, hippies, Hottentots, and any of "the wrong sort of people." All that seems to be missing is the pitchforks and torches. Geez. Anyone where I grew up, a rural Christian environment to the bone, would have thought that objecting to Halloween on religious grounds was a crackpot notion.

Is the loopiness you have to deal with a particularly East-coast type of thing? What's the deal? Where do people get this odd sort of Christian fundamentalist streak, which seems to look at the world in a different (more paranoid) way from the Midwestern, common-sense, pot-luck, Lake Wobegon kind of Christianity?

Beats me. What are your theories on this? Anyone else have a take on it?