Thursday, December 22
Post-midnight.
David’s sneakered footsteps echoed on the stone floor of the church narthex, beating the rhythm of an unfocused segue between his depressing recent past and an intriguing mysterious future. Was tonight’s cleansing lunar eclipse a symbol of fresher things to come? Or was it instead a harbinger of an emerging encompassing darkness? Was the music of his slow march toward the church’s nave that of an inauguration or a requiem? Closer, and farther, with each step.
Upon entering the main sanctuary itself, David noticed an unassuming arrangement of about fifteen rows of pews, a single center aisle separating them into pairs, and kneeling benches folded tightly beneath each set. Keep it humble, keep it real. But there’s no way I’m gonna kneel.
He quickly calculated the distance to Row 10, a nice even number, a favorite number, a safe number from front to rear. Nearly there, but also already gone. The entire space was empty of human presence, so his sense of safety was reinforced by his solitary status. He walked forward, turned left (another personal favorite behavior) and sat on the soft red ancient velvet cushions which spanned the length of the pew. He descended. He sighed. He relaxed his body, and the mind soon mimicked this activity.
Sanctuary. A place of rest. Escape. Release. Wholly holy.
As David continued to reside very quietly, attempting semi-successfully to still the many thoughts in his monkey mind, a custodian suddenly materialized at the altar, emerging, no doubt, from the sacristy. Since David was located near the back pews of the church, the fellow did not seem to notice him sitting there. Quite the contrary – the anonymous caretaker began instead to have a conversation, apparently with himself.
The man appeared to be in his mid 50’s, perhaps. For some reason, it was unusually difficult for David to discern his age, at any distance, in any light. The man wore a single garment, a workman’s set of bib overalls, dirty blue denim material, paint spots splattered about the material, a few torn holes scattered primarily about the legs. Underneath the bib section was – wait, was David seeing things? Yes, he recognized the prism and rainbow t-shirt design of the most famous rock album of all time.
“So,” David chuckled to himself, “the codger’s an old hippie!”
At that moment, the “old hippie” spoke on the front stage, at the altar table.
“Well, Franklin P. What’s new with thee?” The old man listened for a moment, glanced down toward the floor briefly, and then continued his one-sided dialogue. “Sorry about that, little fella. I can’t help it if this week’s congregation was not sloppy with the communal wafers. You may just have to survive on the bourgeois bread slices and stale cheese cubes that I bring you. Not every church sanctuary is blessed with such a personage of high nobility as yourself, your majesty.”
The custodian paused for a moment, reached into the top pocket of his coveralls, retracted a small parcel of something, and proceeded to place it on the floor, right behind the center table.
“Will that be all for now, your highness in lowly places? Good. Perhaps tomorrow night we shall both dine on delicacies from the exotic coasts of West Africa. Golden brown hushpuppies a la Long John’s Crab Shack, maybe.” Another quiet moment passed.
Then another response to no one. “Of course, I would love your company tonight. As soon as you have finished your fine repast, and I have cleaned away your plates, you might like to cleanse your palette with a club cracker or two? Then, if you would be so kind, we still have our regular work to do.”
The custodian then grabbed a red rag which had been hanging from a side waist pocket, and he began to polish the woodwork sections of the entire altar area, from the kneeling pews surrounding the chancel to the hand-carved rosewood cross nestled within the arms of the apse.
He worked slowly, methodically, never wasting a single movement. It was like an often-practiced ballet, or a yoga master in mid-sun-salutation. Each step deliberately taken. Each swipe repeated only a few times. And then a close-eye evaluation of the job performed. He was an actor on his stage, but his actions were not those of a false or over-rehearsed or mechanical nature. It was as if he was engaged in a conversation with the wood and the cloth and the space around him. Fluid energy, efficient and effective, and fully embraced. There was no sense of rush or frustration with these menial tasks. David observed a man meditating on the individual moments of his profession.
“Who wants to listen? Who is there to hear?” the man half hummed, half sang. He traversed the sanctuary stage as if it were a concert venue. Surprisingly, he even crossed over to the baby grand piano after a while, sitting down as if in wonder of the instrument and its functioning. In the next unexpected moment, he began to spontaneously improvise a harmonic structure that sounded like that extremely rare point in musical inspiration when perfect mathematics meets perfect aesthetics.
The chord structure followed no familiar pattern that David had yet encountered in his music theory classes. No typical fourths or fifths moving down to a minor second, and returning once again to the fifth in preparation for the final resolution. Rather, the musical movement struggled pleasantly through augmented and diminished patterns. David mentally challenged the maintenance man musician to make his way through a tonic-to-flatted-fifth arrangement, and, sure enough, the custodian of creative chordistry did so quite successfully, even adding an extra beat or two to the measure in the process. David was astounded at how sound waves of such alleged dissonance could form a relationship as close as the characters strolling side by side in a Georges-Pierre Seurat pointillist painting of some sunny park afternoon.
The man on the stage intrigued David as much as he scared him. Scared? Yes, that was one of David’s reactions to this simple sight. Scared of the unknown. It was suddenly time for him to vacate the premises, time to re-group and re-assess and de-brief this attack on his sensory input.
At a moment when he assured himself that the old man’s back was sufficiently turned away from him, David attempted to slide out noiselessly from his pew, leaving the “king of clean” alone to work in continued peace. But the custodian’s voice rang out like a baritone bell in a church steeple.
“Want to help me out up here, David?”
David was startled on so many levels. How long had the man known he was sitting there? Was he really talking to him? Or yet another invisible being? Was the man dangerous? Did he mean anything sordid by the phrasing of his question? And, last but hardly least, how did he know David’s name?
Without even providing a response to the sudden address, David traversed his own very un-fluid stumbling motion toward the outside door, opened it with a rusty squeal that he had not noticed upon entering this strange sanctuary, and practically single-step leapt down the front granite stairs to the street below. This time, the front door needed no magic spell to quickly shut behind him.
“Phew, that was close.” What was close? he thought to himself. Was I caught doing something improper? Was the old man even talking to me? Has my mind been more imaginative than usual lately?
David quickly but deceivingly convinced himself that he was now free to continue his former life, programmed and simple, and still sad, as he walked a bit too briskly along Springvale Street, back to his off-campus housing.
***