The Christian

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Coffee and doughnuts.  I remember the vast sanctuary with its naked wooden pews — maroon cushions, hard backs — lined on either side with stained glass windows — red, green, and yellow — and the vast cross taking up the wall behind the podium.  Rock wall, scraggly rock.  How you’d have to come out the door and go down a flight of stairs and along a wide, cold, marble-floored hallway to the men’s room through a door that seemed much too small, and how it was even colder in there, smelled like cotton candy from the puck-shaped pink deodorizers at the bottom of the urinals.  Everyone wore suits.  I even wore a suit, me and my brothers.  My older brother, Todd, seeming a thousand years older than me — an adult — my second older brother, Michael, only eighteen months older than me, my best pal.  

My Uncle Don always sat with us, sometimes between us to keep us from fighting.  This one time, I had a runny nose, and he gave me a hankie had some blood on it; and I was afraid of Uncle Don for some time after that, thinking, after I had seen it in a TV show, that he was a criminal, that he played back room poker, smoked a cigar, that he got involved in bank robberies.  Kids.  

But the prevailing memory, always, of church in my youth was the black and green tiled, big-windowed, high-ceilinged reception room where everyone congregated after the service and had coffee and doughnuts.  Coffee in great big stainless steel urns, doughnuts arranged neatly on trays.  Everything laid out on long card tables.  Long johns, chocolate cake, frosted, powdered sugar.  No one ever ate the old-fashioned ones, which looked like the deformed roots of trees.  My favorite was cinnamon and sugar coated.  I ate them in gobs.  Way too many, by my dentist’s estimation.

That church is a parking lot now.  An auxiliary parking lot for a hospital.  We go to a much larger church now.  Our congregation, a Presbyterian congregation, got folded in with another larger congregation whom we had always played baseball with in the church leagues.  Their reception room has a low ceiling and is beige, and they cater coffee and bagels from a local bakery.  The coffee comes in a cardboard carton like it was milk.  Whenever I’m in this room, I always think back to the other room, and inevitably to my youth, and how everyone seemed so pleasant then, smiling and laughing in their suits — the women in dresses — and I think that it must not have been that way, that I’m painting it that way out of nostalgia.  That there must have been secrets in that room behind those smiles, that there were rivalries, betrayals, affairs and abortions.  That there was disease, diabetes, cancer, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, retardation.  Anti-Semitism, racism, class-distinctions.  That there were funerals as well as weddings.  Tears of all kinds.  But that I didn’t see it.  All I saw were the good things.

That must have been because of my father.  And it was also because of my father that I started to see behind the smile, so to put it.  That I started to see everything else.

We grew up on a farm — my brothers and I.  Three of us in one bedroom, me and Michael in the same bed for a long time, then bunk beds when my father built them, then later, Todd and my father cleared all the junk out of the attic — scrapping some of the wood, but burning most of it in a big bonfire out back – and made that into his room, and we kept the bunk bed and had the rest of the room to play in.

My father was a strict man, so to speak.  He seemed very tall, although I know now he was no more than five feet ten, and he was built wide on the shoulders and thin at the waist, and had long, thick arms.  He could hardly keep his pants up, he was so thin at the waist, and his neck and face seemed withered and scrawny compared to his beefy chest.  He always had a beard.  Never a mustache, just the beard.  And he had a halo of hair, coarse and wiry, charcoal black, then charcoal grey as I got older.  The top of his head used to get sunburned because he’d start out the day with a hat, but then he’d get too sweaty and throw it off and forget about protecting himself, and my mother would ride him that why didn’t he put on sunscreen, and he’d wave her off and get a glass of cold milk out of the fridge.  

He never drank.  Never smoked.  He didn’t abide by it.  Those fellows that went out drinking, he’d leave the conversation if they talked about it.  He’d stand there if they were smoking, that didn’t bother him, but if somebody brought up roughhousing, he didn’t need to be a part of it.  He never commented on it, and I don’t think he looked down his nose at them or thought any less of them, but I think he just felt that he didn’t want to hear that because it wasn’t Christian, and they were in a house of the Lord, or at a meeting of the Lord’s children — a church function — and they had better talk on the level they would if they were waiting to go through the gates, if you know what I mean.

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