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Life, actually…

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FIDGETING AND SALVATION EVERY SUNDAY

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In memory fresh, I am fidgeting and squirming here on a varnished hardwood church pew in the Forest Lake neighborhood of Tuscaloosa.

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Time is leaping a seventy-year chasm and taking me back to Sunday morning sometime in the 1940s. You know—the ’40s, just yesterday to us long-timers who are still around to remember.

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I am trying to be patient this day. As the multi-tuned untrained-but-sincere voices of the congregation blend precariously with intonations from the burgundy-robed choir, I can only think of what is coming next.

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Thinking about what is coming next is what gets me through the holy services this humid morn.

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Fidget. Squirm. Scrawl with pocket knife-sharpened number two pencil in the margins of my parents’ pre-Thermo-Faxed paper program, printed especially for today’s services.

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Check the cracked face of a bandless wrist watch found just this week on the Northington Elementary School recess playground. The watch still works and I can keep up with time as the second hand spasms away the seconds.

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I feel the vibrations from overlapping singers and wavering organ notes as they wash over me and attempt to regain my wandering attention.

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The program scratchings completed, I now carefully examine backs of necks in forward pews. Some are freshly shaved, some are scraggly, others are pockmarked or wrinkled or graceful or baggy.

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May I can write a poem about backs of necks some day.

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Reverend Bronnie Nichols now bids the congregation to rise, an apparent effort to rouse dozers and alert offering-plate deacons.

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Everybody behaves during this hour of a Sunday morning, except for a baby or two. But isn’t that what babies do?

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Playmates are scrubbed and quiet, unlike their rowdy selves a few minutes from now when they are discharged into the wilds of childhood.

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I’m happy to stand up. It is something to do. And it means I, too, will be released into an extra-churchy world any moment now.

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But Brother Nichols is not done with me yet.

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Everybody sings verse after verse of an elongated hymn designed to press guilt upon unbaptized attendees who are supposed to rush to the front to be saved from perdition. Brother Nichols will not cut short the overtime singing until somebody responds to the pressure and reaches out for dispensed holiness.

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I am relieved when a teared-up churchgoer finally inches forward to please the preacher and the saints on high. This takes the pressure off of me. Maybe another Sunday will be my day to confess and repent and relent.

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Not today.

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We sheep are eventually released, but not until Bro’ Nichols has shaken every hand and patted every shoulder as we all pass through the front door.

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Now blessed and cleansed, I can stop fidgeting and start salivating. After all, the next thing up in my small life is fried chicken and apple pie and endless hours of playground hollering and jumping and laughing, and nursing the occasional boo-boo that will surely occur.

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But the boo-boo will heal quickly under the influence of a morning of overflowing righteousness.

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And in less than seven days I’ll be fidgeting and squirming all over again, just prior to salvation

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©  Jim Reed 2023 A.D.

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