hello again
Friday, July 31st, 2009It was I guess around the spring time, I only know this because the whole situation was centered around “spring cleaning”.
The moms were involved with Sunday school and it was time to clean all the dried glue sticks and paper off the bottoms of the tables. And maybe throw out those economy size goldfish and juice boxes from 1983. As the sprays were firing and the wipes were gliding, the good faithful children ran quietly wild.
I insisted on pretending this giant church was a castle full of secrets.
We were supervised by the blossoming teenage cousins of my best friend Shelley. Of course they were more wild than we were. We followed eagerly with our hearts pounding, weaving in and out, bumping the hymnals tucked in their little pew cubbies.
We snuck in everywhere. We went inside the baptismal pool full of murky warm water. We snuck into the room the bride gets ready in. It was suppose to be fancy, but thinking back now, it was only filled with mauve carpet, an oval stand up mirror, and a couch next to a table full of tissue boxes. Next door to that was the handbell room.
I played handbells for a short time. I remember we preformed in front of the whole congregation and I accidently missed a finger hole in my glove and put two fingers in one. So the entire time I played it looked as if my pinky was saluting the audience. Those things seem to always happen to me.
Just writing that makes me think of all the crazy times I was in front of the whole church. Why did all the young girls have to dress up in fancy dresses and walk around in front of everyone? It was once a year. Seems like some debutante ritual. I always had the hand-me-down dresses too. They were always too big and never blended in with the rest of the dresses. “Which one of these doesn’t belong”, should have been the theme song of my childhood. And my poor hair, the dreaded bowl cut, until about forth grade. Thats when the perm kicked in.
“Poodle child scares classmates.”
I remember all the old ladies complimenting all my friends, especially Shelley. “You have such pretty curls Shelley”. “Doesn’t she, Ethel?” “Oh my, why yes, so cute”
It was like that duck, duck, goose game. I was the goose. At times I felt invisible.
so anyway, back to spring cleaning. We finally made it to the steeple room. It was always locked, but I guess it was being cleaned too. No one was there.
Looking straight up revealed a long narrowing interior with natural light beaming at the top. After climbing the ladder, the only way to get further up was to climb on the poles that looked like a Dr. Seuss jungle gym. We climbed as far as we could. I could have stayed there longer, but was interrupted by the scream of one on the teenage girls. A boy had put a dead bird/bat down her shirt. I can’t remember if it was a bird or a bat, I just remember having to leave.
Some days I wish that I could conjure up the way we see the world when we are children.
