He was surely a larger than life character, with a voice that rose slightly above those of others. He loved singing hymns at full voice. I can still hear the booming tones of “There is power, power, power in the blood,” ringing out over the entire congregation, however energized they might have been from his sermon. His sermons could be a bit full of non sequiturs, jumping from giving treasures to dogs to building houses on rock to plucking things out of eyes to picking figs from thistles and so forth, but they made you feel that there was no act more rational than to immediately subscribe. In fact, feeling good pretty much defined what it was like to hang around him! If he smiled at you, you felt warm. If he talked with you, you felt important. If he acknowledged something good you did, you felt overjoyed to bursting.
Now, not everyone was pleased with him all the time. The family had been asked to leave their last apartment because of a disagreement over the volume of evening prayer meetings. Not everyone was in love with the boisterous singing. But the family was used to moving, had moved 16 times in the previous 19 years, surely a record. He didn’t actually help much in the actual moving. His job was to find new lodgings, purchase packing crates and rent a truck. When everything was packed by his hard working wife, he ceremonially nailed shut the crates, and directed their loading and unloading onto the truck. Wife and volunteers from his church did all the heavy lifting. His wife then used her vaunted skills to prepare enough to eat at a moment’s notice for however many guests he had invited to dine, an indeterminate number that could include as many as ten extra mouths for dinner. They all loved him. How could you not love a man who invited you home for dinner! And there they were, in their new apartment, all the hard-working movers tucking in to a good meal that would surely be followed by a rousing set of hymns.
The youngest daughter provided the piano accompaniment for all this in-house singing, as well as any singing that happened at the church. She had briefly been courted by a charming salesman who attended the church. During that time stars lit up her eyes and she walked on air. She was really quite fond of him and looked forward to establishing her own home in which she planned to live without moving for long periods of time. She imagined bringing her children home to her parent’s – for a meal, of course – and imagined how much fun the kids would have when they saw her sit at the piano to accompany singing sessions. “Mother!” they would cry, “we didn’t know you did that!” Then she would act as though it were perfectly natural. But when it came time for the salesman to ask for her hand, he never did, because her father had already told the suitor she could not marry as she was needed to provide the musical accompaniments for his ministry. She swallowed her disappointment and continued peeling potatoes with her mother for the crowds that continually arrived. Her older siblings had left the house young and lived in places far away around the globe. But it seemed that she was stuck.
He was getting older, was known now for walking about town in the evenings with a cane. The neighbors generally loved him. They knew that he would stop and visit their vegetables and their flowers. He would lean over and put his ear to the ground as though he were trying to hear them growing. They knew he would then tap, tap, tap and admire the petunias next door. If they ran into him, long conversations concerning gardens would ensue, followed inevitably by an invitation to dinner. It was extremely difficult to say no to these invitations, and most of the time, no one bothered. They just said yes and cleared their throats so they’d be in shape for the singing.
One day, quite suddenly, without having asked permission or having even whispered a word of her plans, the youngest daughter announced that she was moving out the next day. She had saved enough money from her free-lance clothes mending that she had rented an apartment and was going to support herself by mending. No one was more surprised than him, but you can’t really forbid a thirty-two year old woman from moving if she has a mind and means to move. Various people attempted to play the piano for the evening hymn singing sessions, but it just didn’t work out and their apartment fell silent in the evenings, somewhat to the relief of the neighbors whose feelings about the gatherings had been mixed. He still walked about town with his cane and communed with everyone’s garden flowers. If the night was quiet enough, you could hear him singing to the flowers, “There is power, power, power in the blood,” sotto voce. After he died quite suddenly of a stomach ailment, it was widely believed that no one’s flowers or lettuces ever grew as well as they had before.
I look forward to reading your narratives every day!