Let Goods and Kindred Go
When Puck was handed another shopping bag of confiscated baseballs, golf balls, and tiny wiffle balls from Mr. Knotts at church before the service, his eyes brightened.
“Go thank him during the greeting time,” I whispered to him. “Do you see him sitting over there?”
Puck craned his neck…
“Yes. Yes!” he whispered loudly. Too loudly… “See him, Mom? It’s the bald head with no hair on top!”
“Well, I was going to say he was wearing a purple shirt, but…”
My son…
Maybe some people think it’s a little strange that we spend so much time celebrating that one cold Bavarian day 495 years ago when a German monk nailed a parchment to the church doors in Wittenberg. But we kind of like our traditions around here. And we’re not even Lutheran. But Presbyterian is a close second.
Tradition One – Hallowe’en party.
Well, sort of. This time we got a chili lunch and costumed game and crafts all rolled into one. Even a hayride I managed to come through in my traditional all-black garb – which I wore 90% for tradition and 10% for the Cardinals losing the NLCS. Scandalous.
So after Puck joined Mr. Knotts with some coloring sheets and crayons over bowls of taco soup and cornbread [Puck only experimented on the cornbread], he donned his Minecraft creeper box – which no one had any idea at all what that was – and socialized with every kid and his grandfather telling them fondly…
“I’m a creeper! I blow up!”
[Thanks, OLeif…]
Tradition Two – Sausage supper.
I figured The Bear would be an inch away from exhausted when he drove the last of three mini vans into the church parking lot after a full weekend of youthful activities and a good lecturer from the seminary. And, indeed. Headache, backache, nausea, the works. We lured him back to the house for an abbreviated nap and sausages to go before 2:45. Because at 2:45 he was already ten minutes late from another Reformation Day rehearsal down by Forest Park. He did seem to leave in better spirits than how he originally came, armed with a Coke and a coffee.
And after Mom left Linnea behind at church on accident – despite coming from a family of six kids, that was still always a rarity, if it ever happened at all… – everyone chowed down on boxes packed with sausages, roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, sauerkraut, and pies.
Tradition Three – Reformation service.
At my sisters’ church their music director somehow has always believed that The Bear is this fantastic violist. I remember Judah and I laughed about that often because anyone who knows The Bear’s musical abilities knows that he pretty much just fakes it on the violin, let alone the viola. This doesn’t negate his talents; everyone knows he can fiddle faddle just as well as any other fiddler around these parts. But when it comes to sheet music – it’s like making a cat swim. He can do it, but it just doesn’t glue together well. He’ll make it sound great of course, but the notes he’s playing are probably nothing close to the manuscript.
Anyway, five o’clock came very quickly, and the faithful shoveled themselves out to the car after a few garment battles and various arguments to the old gothic church in the city.
And as traditional as it is for The Bear to play these kinds of services, so it is for the English family to participate on their various sheet-reading instruments as well. So The Bear and Bing found themselves side by side behind the communion table as the bagpipes droned beside the pulpit.
I might have said it before sometime somewhere, but the volume produced from four hundred or more congregants in an old gothic church during “A Mighty Fortress” – there’s something pretty powerful about that. Add in a sermon by an old acquaintance, the pastor at Central, and a good night.
Fortunately by that time in the evening, The Bear – looking handsomely old school Presbyterian seminarian in a black suit – no longer had a headache. And Puck got down to the Z’s somewhere before nine o’clock… I think.