All Hands Stand By to Repel Boarders. Cordell Strug

Factor in the multiple, crisscrossing family ties of a long-settled farming area and every relationship began with a shape well past changing.

      We lived right across the highway from one of our parishioners, a pleasant, elderly lady. After not too many years had passed, we did her funeral, and her house was bought by a young couple with one child who had moved into town. But Angie, the wife, was the daughter of another parish family. For her it was a matter of moving back to the town she grew up in. Soon she was one of our Sunday School teachers, eventually taking a turn as its leader.

      She might never have left. I was never sure I got the whole story of why her new family had returned to her hometown rather than somewhere else, but it was as though her interlude away had been erased. Even I thought of her as the daughter of Marie and Peter, an active volunteer in the church she had grown up in.

      She became my personal hair stylist. One Easter morning, she pointed out that she had a lot of opportunities to study the back of my head during the service, and she had decided she could do a better job cutting my hair. She would do it for free, as a gift to the pastor.

      She was actually an outstanding hair stylist, though glacial in her work tempo. I’d have to set aside at least an hour for a haircut, but I’ve never fought less with my hair than when Angie was cutting it. She was bright and fun to talk to. I got to know her well.

      I have three strong memories of Angie, two of them appropriately church-related.

      I could see her house from the church office. One day, soon after we had decided to accept a new call, I saw her walking over to the church and I thought I’d mention to her that we were going to move. So, when she came in the office, we had a little conversation about Sunday School and then I said, “Hey, I wanted to tell you: we got offered a call at another church, and we think we’re going to take it. We’ll probably be leaving in about two months.”

      Here’s what she did: she looked at me with that vacant look people get when they have been captured by some sudden worry, some distant thought; then she stood up without saying a word and walked out of the room. I watched her leave the church, cross the highway, and enter her house without ever looking back.

      She told me, days later, she just couldn’t process what I had told her at the time. But, once again, I wasn’t sure I was getting anything like the whole story or even if there was a clear story to be given. It was one of the many times I had to reflect on how little I understood about someone.

      Our leaving also provoked my second church-related memory of Angie. There’s a lot of handing over to be done when you leave a congregation, bridges started for the next pastorate, things to keep going. We must have been discussing Sunday School again and I must have thanked her for a job well done.

      She said, “I was always terrified that you’d think I was stupid, so I worked overtime getting ready. I know what you think about stupid people, and I didn’t want you to decide I was one of them.”

      I’m not sure how everyone would take that remark. I don’t think I tried to make people feel like that. But I have to admit I was pleased that someone did. So I remember it as a compliment, if an odd one.

      But the memory of Angie that comes to me most often doesn’t have to do with the church. In fact, it’s not one I’m involved in at all, except as an observer. It’s a memory that’s become for me a symbol of the life we all lived in that isolated little place.

      I was out in the yard alone late one night, in that star-filled darkness that came down so completely around us. I can’t remember if I was coming in from an errand or going out on one. It could have been a night I was out trying to pick out the constellations. I know it was winter because it was very dark very early and there was no one around. I happened to look across the street.

      There was Angie, looking out her living room window. The window was open a little. She was smoking, blowing the smoke outside. The room she was in was dark, but there was a light further back in the house.

      She was motionless, except for the hand holding the cigarette, but her head was turned slightly, looking down the highway. I watched her; she looked down the road. When I got cold and went in, she was still there, wrapped up in whatever her gaze was bringing her. After that first night, I saw her there often.

      The lonely pose of that figure in the dark window always comes to me when I think of the life we lived up near the border. I think of the yearning that can swallow you in all that isolation, yearning for something more or just something else, something unknown you can’t even picture in a wish or dream, yet you want it with all your heart. I think of people desperate to leave, people shipwrecked so they have to stay, people who came back stunned from finding nothing, people trapped by money, by love, by good nature, by bad choice. I see them all looking down the road, yearning.

      Those are my thoughts, of course. I was always going to leave and I’m never going back. But I was there long enough to know I’m not the only one who felt that way.

      Occupational Hazards (1)

      It’s sometimes hard to find things out in small towns because everybody assumes you know everything worth knowing already. Most directions you get are some variation of “Well, it’s just down the way,” spoken as impatiently as possible. More elaborate directions usually require you to recognize landmarks that have been obliterated for decades.

      People calling on the phone—not, to be fair, anyone’s favorite way to communicate locally—would never tell you who was calling. They would just begin talking, assuming you would recognize them and know what they were calling about as well. I could sometimes be wildly, hilariously wrong about this.

      But one night the phone rang when it was almost midnight. I would get an immediate rush of apprehension and alertness when this happened. I jumped up and grabbed the phone. “Hello—Strugs.”

      I heard a woman choking, wheezing. She managed to gulp out, in a high-pitched voice that was almost a shriek, “You’ve got to come over! I called the ambulance! He fell down and I can’t get him up!”

      This was one of the many times I felt the Holy Spirit must be guiding me because I could almost see her getting ready to slam down the phone and I shouted, “Don’t hang up! Tell me who you are!” It was an older couple I knew who lived only a block or so away. If I hadn’t known where they lived, I don’t think I could have gotten coherent directions from her.

      When I got there, the town’s first responder had already arrived and the EMTs and the ambulance weren’t long in coming. I knew the woman who had called as a very commanding, self-possessed person: it was one of the first times I saw how shockingly and quickly the fear of losing a spouse can make someone come apart. She rode in the ambulance; I followed to the hospital.

      This was one of my long hospital vigils, when I sat with two people, one struggling for life, one terrified, hour after hour, with not much to do beyond waiting to see if the next gasp for breath will come or not. That night, the breath came, then the breathing eased and, about five in the morning, we felt we could stand down and get some rest.

      But, if you serve in the same community long enough, you’ll watch all the old ones die, the strong elders who ran everything when you first arrived.