“Oh, Dave, it was such serious stuff. It was so important. We planned such big things. We worried and we got upset with each other. We got mad at the church. And our parents got into it and they worried what would happen if their son wasn’t in the band, or what might happen if he was. And the church talked about the far-out worship ideas of the pastor what with ‘sweet potatoes in church’! And the Session agitated about it. The whole town got wrapped up in it. And then it all fell apart.”
It was about this “falling apart” that I wanted details. Angus knew what I had read and guessed at my curiosity. “Temptations were strong, and the boys yielded,” he quoted. Minnie set down her coffee cup and looked curious. “Nothing like you’re thinking, nothing so juicy,” he continued. “In the end it was just money. The G.A.R. paid us for doing the Annual Ball. Twenty dollars. We took the money and divided it up. It was our first and last paying gig. Word got out that the ocarina band from the Presbyterian Church were musicians for hire, which put us in company where some mothers didn’t want their boys. But it wasn’t just about the money. Everybody had gotten so serious about it. There were big debates about whether we should play only hymns or if we could play dance tunes. And there were those who said the uniforms were too proud. There was lots of talk and lots of meetings. It all started to pull at us, and after the G.A.R. Ball it just kinda came apart like things do.”
I guess I was disappointed that the story ground to such a less than sensational end. But that’s how it is, again and again. Human enterprises seem born with the seeds of their demise. Our most strenuous efforts so often seem to develop a centrifugal force bent on pulling them apart. Truth is, the line separating vision from vanity, purpose from ego, determination from stubbornness, is very fine.
As I walked home, I had no trouble imagining the plans and the passions that had animated the short life of the S.P.O.B. I knew that there were days in those years when some people in this town thought of little else. Sixteen-year-old boys spent all day Saturday with an ocarina at their mouth trying to get “Onward, Christian Soldiers!” just right. I had no trouble imagining the heated discussions about the admission of “young Methodists.” I could imagine the gravity of those Session meetings, the adamant opinions of parents and boys. I could imagine Angus a bit too proud. But I could also imagine the satisfaction so many had found in the airy, flute-like music of a couple dozen ocarinas playing sweet old hymns.
I could easily imagine all this because I know how matters as passing as ocarina bands occupy me and the people around me. Annie and I have been agonizing for three weeks over our Christopher’s Little League team assignment. My congregation is currently animated by the question of whether or not to sing “Amen” at the end of every hymn or only hymns that are, properly speaking, prayers. My next-door neighbor, Bernie, is in a state over the grubs that are ruining his front lawn. These things will pass, and in seventy years will loom no larger than the matter of the ocarina band does now.
But the ocarina band did matter. And Little League matters. Amens to end hymns matter. Even Bernie’s lawn matters. But how much? Most of us are tempted either to care far too much or to care hardly at all. Somewhere in between there lies the place of proper concern. In this place you are free to be passionate and engaged. But from this place you can see what it will all look like in seventy years.
– 5 –
The Affair
The Lyric Odeon Theatre and St. Peter’s Lutheran Church are the most notable architectural achievements in town. Both were designed to evoke some place other than southwestern Minnesota. In the case of St. Peter’s, which was built about the turn of the century, that some place else was southern Sweden, whence most of the church’s members had come not too many years before. In the case of the Lyric Odeon, built in the late twenties, the some place else was Venice, where nobody here had ever been, but which everybody understood to be a great capital of culture where all things were beautiful. The theater sits on Main Street, a jewel of what is now called “Italian Baroque Revival” sandwiched between two plain and dour red brick storefronts. Each year a handful of architectural aficionados journey to North Haven to view the Lyric Odeon and to say to us again, “Do you know what a treasure you have here?” It is a question that grates in its implication that people in a town like this could not possibly know.
The Lyric Odeon barely survived the advent of television in the fifties and is now just barely surviving the challenge of home videos. Truth is, by the time movies get to the Lyric Odeon, they are usually already out on video. But enough people seem willing to spend the extra couple of bucks to see a movie at the theater rather than at home. They justify the expense, they say, because “there’s nothing like the big screen.” This may be true, but there’s more to it. Watching a movie is an altogether different experience when you are doing it with a few dozen other people than at home with one or two, or none.
People also go to the movies instead of watching home videos because they just want to get out of the house—which is why Jimmy Wilcox went alone to see Lethal Weapon II in the middle of March at the Lyric Odeon. Ardis, his wife, had spent another dinner talking about how they “don’t communicate anymore.” When he asked her after dinner to go to the movies, Jimmy knew Ardis would say no. She hates violent movies and would never go to anything with a title like Lethal Weapon II. “You don’t mind if I go alone, do you?” he asked.
“Not in the least,” she replied, and tossed the wet sponge she had used to wipe up the table all the way across the kitchen into the sink. Ardis knew Jimmy knew that she would say no.
Jimmy sat halfway down and a few seats into the right side of the center section of the Lyric Odeon. For a time, he was the only person in his row. He didn’t notice Sharlette Wiggins and her sister, Ginny, when they sat down a few seats to his left; nor did he see the Lindsoes, who sat on the other end of the row.
Jimmy is in his mid-thirties and has been putting on weight. Ever since his senior year in high school and until sometime this past year, his pant size had been a 32-inch waist, 30-inch inseam. It had been an unhappy day when he told Ardis that she’d better order the new slacks she was going to send for from Monkey Ward’s in a 34-inch waist. The three pairs that soon arrived were all Jimmy wore anymore, even though all the old pairs of 32’s were still in the closet. He kept them because, he said to himself, he would start to “watch it” (meaning what he ate) and maybe even jog in the mornings before he went into the store.
But the morning of the day Jimmy went to see Lethal Weapon II, all three pairs of 34’s were in the wash at the same time. He put on one of the more generously cut 32’s, sucked in his gut, snapped the snap, zipped up the fly, and said half aloud, “Not bad.”
“Not bad” until he sat down, that is. Jimmy spent most of the afternoon at his desk going over invoices. When he finally got sufficiently uncomfortable, he did what most of us over thirty have done at one time or another. He undid his belt, unbuttoned the button, and unzipped his fly half way.
When he sat down in the Lyric Odeon that evening, he was even more uncomfortable than he had been in the afternoon. At dinner he had wolfed down Ardis’s mashed potatoes with rutabaga and two large pieces of potato sausage. The size 32 slacks that had been “not bad” in the morning and a little too tight in the afternoon were now excruciatingly uncomfortable. Ten minutes into the movie, Jimmy figured everybody was watching Mel Gibson pretty closely and wouldn’t notice, so he did what he had done at the office that afternoon: he unbuckled, unbuttoned, unzipped, and sat back to watch the movie in comfort.
Nobody would have noticed, of course, except that about three-quarters of the way through the movie Sharlette decided that she really did want popcorn after all. She went to the right, as providence would have it, and said, “Excuse me, Jimmy,” when she was about two seats away. (They graduated from high school together.) Jimmy should have stayed in his seat and squeezed his legs to the side to let Sharlette by. This is what Jimmy said he should have done.
But now that it’s all over, I’m not so sure.
What Jimmy did was to stand up. Not until he began to stand did he remember that his pants were unbuckled, unbuttoned, and unzipped. Perhaps he should have just held them up as Sharlette passed by. This is what Jimmy told me he should have done. But again, I’m not so sure. What he did do was buckle, button, and zip as fast and discreetly as he could. Jimmy was almost quick enough. Sharlette noticed nothing until she felt the tug on her skirt where Jimmy’s zipper was stuck. “Just a minute, Sharlette!” Jimmy whispered as he furiously tugged at the zipper. She assumed that Jimmy, for some curious reason, was holding on to her skirt. “Jimmyyyy,” she giggled, “let go a’ me!”
In no time the folks in the rows behind were politely asking them if they could “please sit down so we can see the movie.” The zipper was intractable, Jimmy didn’t want to rip Sharlette’s dress, so he told her in a few whispered words what the problem was. This, however, only made her giggle more uncontrollably. They walked out of the Lyric Odeon in an odd and intimate tandem with Jimmy holding one hand around Sharlette to steady her while his other hand held up his pants. They whisked through the lobby, onto Main Street, and into the alley that separates the Piggly Wiggly from the dime store. There, after many apologies, Jimmy finally managed to extricate himself from Sharlette, who seemed to think it all riotously funny. As they came back into Main Street, the theater was just emptying out. Mel Gibson had foiled the South African drug smugglers, and everybody was going home.
Jimmy still speculates that it would have been nothing more than “one of life’s embarrassing moments” had not Sharlette acted the way she did. Sharlette and Ginny, he explained, are Friday night fixtures at the Blue Spruce Bar and Grille. Friday nights are given over to the “All U Can Eat Fish Fry” and the “All U Can Drink Special of the Night.” That night, Sharlette told Jimmy in the alley as explanation of her inability to maintain her composure, the Special of the Night had been Tequila Sunrises, which she especially liked. “I remember back in high school,” Jimmy would later tell me, “Sharlette Gunderson—that was her maiden name—just giggled when she drank. She used to giggle till she wet her pants.”
Jimmy guesses that at least two dozen people saw them leave the theater together. He says he caught Danny Olson’s wide eyes as he and Sharlette flew through the lobby and he also has a hunch that somebody may have seen them in the alley. “It was dark, but not that dark,” he said worriedly.
A few weeks after all this happened, Jimmy called the church office and asked for an appointment for the next day. He came in promptly at ten, sat down in the chair opposite the desk in my study, and said straight out, “Ardis suggested I come in and set you straight before you heard anything.”
“David,” he said while shaking his head incredulously, “you need to know that Sharlette Wiggins and I are not having an affair.” Annie had told me a few nights before that she had heard just that at a PTA meeting. Jimmy related the story of the zipper with all the attention to detail of a well-rehearsed defense witness. I could imagine him telling it to Ardis, as I am sure he has more than once. “The rumors have got Ardis and Mom all upset,” he said, “and we thought you needed to know the truth.”
Rumors, of course, are especially sharp swords in a small town. I ached for Jimmy. There are few things more infuriating than to be falsely accused. Every protestation of innocence sounds suspect. (Would an adulterer hesitate to lie?) So as we sat in my study I shared Jimmy’s indignation. We shook our heads and lamented “what gossip like this can do to folks.” Truth is, I think Sharlette had been quenching the fires of rumor by giggling out the zipper story over Tequila Sunrises at the Blue Spruce. When our conversation fell into a moment of silence, Jimmy suddenly slapped his knees and uttered one of those drawn-out “weeell’s” that mean, “I think I’m going to leave now—maybe.” But he didn’t get up to go.
“How’s Ardis doing with all of this,” I asked. “If she needs an ear, tell her to stop by.”
“Oh, Ardis,” Jimmy sighed. He hesitated for a moment, looked at the door, and then looked at me. “We should both probably come in to talk one of these days. We’ve been having some problems, I mean long before the Sharlette business.”
His tale was familiar enough. Marriage after sixteen years had gone stale. His work was a bore. Everything was suddenly old. Ardis was always harping about “communication” and reading him articles out of Redbook like “Refreshing Your Marriage” while he was trying to watch “The Terminator” on TV. “It was getting bad,” he confessed.
“And now?” I asked.
“Well, it’s funny,” he answered. “Since the Sharlette thing, we sort of turned a corner. When the rumors started to fly and Ardis heard them, she was ready to call the lawyer. She came to me in a fury and I told her the zipper story and she said, ‘Ya, right!’ and spent that night at her mother’s. I guess she spent the night thinking about us. Later she told me that she was ready to forgive me, but her mother said that before she did that she should call Sharlette and tell her off. Of course Sharlette told her the zipper story and giggled so much that Ardis figured it had to be true.
“When LaMont first told me that rumors were out about me having an affair, I was furious. Then a funny thing happened.” Jimmy lowered his head and voice to indicate that he was going to reveal an even greater confidence. “Then I started to think: ‘What would it be like to have an affair, not with Sharlette, of course, but maybe an affair in Minneapolis? What would it be like to be with somebody else all the time? What would it be like to get divorced from Ardis? And how about the kids?’ I swear, Pastor, I had never even thought about having an affair until I heard that I was already having one. When I thought about it, it scared me to death. The picture in my head of what it would be like if it were really true made me think a lot. I really do love Ardis.”
Which is why I say that it was maybe a good thing that Sharlette went to the right to get popcorn and that Jimmy stood up to let her by. Who knows how things would have gone for Jimmy and Ardis had not whispered rumor roused their marriage.
– 6 –
Motorcycle
My office window is wide open. The slight breeze is strangely warm for early March, and strangely silent too. The birds aren’t back yet. They could hardly know that it would be so warm so early. When I drove home from a pastoral visit yesterday afternoon, I saw that Oscar Cedergren was already out plowing one of his drier fields. He’s early, but then Oscar just can’t sit still for anything. He wouldn’t dare plant yet. There’s something intemperate and deceitful about 82 degrees on the eighth of March. It’s like a promise that you know won’t be kept or a gift that you know you’ll have to give back.
Yet that first warmth, the smell of thawed earth, the sense of your own perspiration come again without effort, quickens something stilled by winter’s necessary discipline. What quickened in me was memory of my 1961 Norton Single that rests in our garage underneath an old bedsheet. It was my only means of transportation for three years of college. Three springs I waited for the roads to clear and the weather to warm so that I could take the winter cover off. Not a spring has come since that the Norton has not crossed my mind.
It was hardly mere transportation, however. Riding a motorcycle had been for me a belated flirtation with adolescent recklessness and sensuousness. It was not just the speed that made the experience so alluring, but the directness with which the speed was experienced. The earth and the air flashed by at seventy miles an hour with nothing insulating me from concrete. The hot engine throbbed out power between my knees, the burst of thundering acceleration that came with a flick of the wrist. This motorcycle had also served as an eloquent statement of rebellion and independence from my parents, who had forbidden the purchase of a motorbike my junior year in high school.
It now lies surrounded by various paraphernalia of maturity: folded-up aluminum lawn chairs, a power mower, and Christopher’s old playpen. I haven’t ridden it in at least eight years. In
fact, it doesn’t run: the carburetor needs to be rebuilt, and both tires are shot. But I’ve never been able to let it go, even after it began to acquire antique value. Annie claims I hang on to it because it is emblematic of the youth I failed to misspend, but I have always—well, for eight years—planned to put it on the road again, which would probably make about the same statement to this little town that I was making to my mother twenty years ago. Actually, most everybody in town and certainly everybody at church knows about the Norton in the minister’s garage. But it’s one thing to own an old motorcycle that you used to ride when you were young; it’s quite another to actually ride one when you’re not quite so young and no longer indulged certain irresponsibilities.
Last fall, the motorcycle in my past led me to make an unusual pastoral visit. In November, I got a phone call at home from the front desk of Lutheran Hospital up in Mankato. The voice said that I had been asked for, by name, by one of the hospital’s patients, a young woman from North Haven. Her name was Carmen Krepke, and she had been in the hospital for over two months. There had been some sort of dreadful accident. I said I would stop in next week.
Good News from North Haven Page 4
