Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town Page 13

  * Fifteen years ago, the state issued 91,039 hunting licenses to residents; last year it issued 83,593.

  * The deer herd numbered roughly 110,000 in 1986; today it's closer to 145,000.

  * Number of Wal-Marts in Vermont in 1986: zero. Number today: four.

  * Fifteen years ago, there were a mere 1,267 Vermont-licensed attorneys in the state; today there are 2,688.

  * The state boasted 3,044 dairy farms in 1986; today there are 1,565.

  * Numbers are less exact for emu farms. In 1986 in Vermont there was either one emu farm or zero; today there are nine or ten.

  * Fifteen years ago, there were 8,267 serious crimes in Chittenden County; by last year the total had fallen to 6,630.

  * In 1986, Vermont Public Radio had two stations and 32,000 listeners; today there are five stations and 160,000 listeners.

  * If you wanted a cup of coffee in downtown Burlington in 1986, you were likely to drop into places like the Oasis, Henry's Diner, or the Woolworth on Church Street. Now you're likely to visit Muddy Waters, Uncommon Grounds, Starbucks, or Speeder & Earl's.

  * There were approximately 310 country stores in the Green Mountains in 1986; today there are 210. And while the number of grocery stores has decreased as well, falling from eighty to sixty, the newer ones are twice as large as the older ones.

  * Number of snowmobiles registered with the Department of Motor Vehicles in 1986: 29,705. Number today: 36,077.

  And, of course, the number of hours it has taken me to find my septic tank has plummeted from nine to a fraction of one. This, in my mind, is an incontrovertible sign of progress.

  *

  PART VI

  THE CHURCH WITH A

  WEATHERVANE

  ATOP THE STEEPLE

  Chapter 1.

  A FENDER BENDER WITH BABY JESUS?

  I HAVE MANY FEARS, some more rational than others, but one is about to go away for a little while because Christmas is coming.

  For the next few weeks, I will no longer fear running over the baby Jesus in his creche.

  This is actually one of my more rational fears.

  Specifically, I fear that some day between mid-January and mid-December, I might have to pull myself together after a tremendous calamity has occurred for which I am responsible, and struggle over to the United Church of Lincoln and explain to the congregation, "Ummm, there's no good way to say this, but I think I just ran over the baby Jesus. I'm really sorry, but I accidentally put the car into drive instead of reverse, and you know the incredible pickup those Plymouth Colts have."

  This could happen. This could happen because my church's almost life-size nativity scene is stored inside my barn after Christmas, and it is stored about a foot from the front bumper of my car after I've parked.

  Add to this the fact that I am an incredibly incompetent driver, and some days I am getting into my car at six in the morning--a time of day when I'm an even worse driver than usual, because I haven't yet hooked up the intravenous caffeine feed that keeps me awake--and we have a prescription for disaster.

  Ironically, it was my lamebrained idea to put the creche where it is in the first place. About five years ago, the stewards asked if the church could store the nativity scene in my barn instead of my neighbor's, where it had sat for years. I knew this nativity scene well, I knew the faces of the folks in the manger, and they seemed like nice enough people. So I said sure, they could summer in my barn.

  What I didn't know was that the nativity scene weighed a little more than a backhoe. This isn't one of those particleboard nativity scenes, this is no spit-and-polish plastic affair. This is a nativity scene with a five-foot-high manger, wooden adults who have eaten well for most of their wooden lives, and a floor with an aircraft carrier hidden inside it to keep the thing stable when the December winds blow hard off the mountain.

  It takes six strong men to carry it the fifty yards from the church to my barn.

  For four years we put the creche in the back of the barn, on the wooden floor far from the car. Over time, however, the flooring began to sink under its weight, and the wall beside it started to sag accordingly.

  So this past January, I suggested we put the manger on the edge of the cement pad in the front half of the barn, where I park. There is just enough room in this garage bay for the nativity scene, the car, and one thin person to stand.

  Consequently, when I drive into the barn at night, my headlights beam the creche. When I start the car in the morning, there are three shepherds, Mary and Joseph, and the baby Jesus staring back at me from the manger.

  This is a very weird sensation: bumper-to-bumper with the baby Jesus.

  It is also, however, an extremely moving one. In addition to the symbolic meaning of the creche to Christians worldwide, this particular creche has additional meaning to the members of one small church in Lincoln.

  No one knows who built it. It appeared, mysteriously, on Christmas Eve, 1981, on the lawn of the church the year the church had burned to the ground. When I see the creche, I am therefore reminded that while one old church may have disappeared in smoke and flame, in its ashes was faith, and from that faith a new church arose.

  So in three weeks, when it's time to move the creche back into the barn after Christmas, I probably won't find a new spot. But I will learn to drive with the parking brake on.

  Chapter 2.

  CLOUDS CAN'T HIDE THE SUN

  ON A SPIRITUALLY BRIGHT

  EASTER MORNING

  MOUNT ABRAHAM HAS no Himalayan aspirations, no delusions that it is part of a particularly grand massif. Just above four thousand feet, it is among the taller mountains in Vermont, but it is still less than one-seventh the height of Everest.

  Nevertheless, it towers above the village of Lincoln, its summit just east of the town, and offers a remarkably different visage when scrutinized from different angles.

  Peter and Sue Brown, for example, who live to the southwest in a farmhouse Robert Frost once tried to buy, see what has always looked to me like a gargantuan toppled pear. John Nelson and Christine Fraioli, who live due west of the mountain, see instead a more gently sloping incline: A colossal bunny hill for a giant just learning to ski.

  It is not uncommon for there to be a layer of clouds just below the summit but nothing but clear sky above 3,500 feet. When this happens, the peak can look a bit like a boulder at the seashore at low tide: The clouds become sea foam and the mountaintop--white in the winter, brown in the spring, a deep green in the long days of summer--grows reminiscent of a stone in the breakers.

  When this occurs in the very early morning, before the sun has come fully over the top, the clouds become an almost nuclear shade of orangy red.

  One of the best views of the mountain is from Gove Hill, a gentle knoll south of the center of the village that is bordered by woods to the west. The hill is just steep enough that in the winter children can race down it on their snowboards and sleds.

  This morning, Easter, a good number of us from churches in Lincoln and Bristol will gather on that hill and watch the mountain to the east. We will arrive there before 6:00 A.M., and we will hope that today will be one of those sunrises in which we do indeed see the great star slowly emerge over Abraham. We do this every year, a ritual we share with congregations all over the world.

  One of the great idiosyncracies of the sunrise service on Gove Hill, however, is that we never know what to expect in terms of the weather. This is Vermont, after all, and Easter falls in that time of the year when the climate can only be called capricious. In recent years, the small congregation has gathered in the midst of howling snowstorms, and on balmy spring days when the daffodils and crocuses have already pushed through the boggy ground--kaleidoscopically beautiful signs of rebirth.

  There have been many Easters when the mountain has been completely obscured by fog and clouds, and the only evidence we've had that the sun is up is that the asphalt-gray sky has grown marginally lighter.

  At the same time, there have been
Easters when the clouds have been a pure white woolpack just below the summit, with the sky above them a cerulean blue. Those mornings we have sung a hymn, and the sun has appeared miraculously over the mountain--seemingly at the same height as our little perch on Gove Hill. Those moments are a particular blessing.

  But gather we do, regardless of whether we need to tromp up the hill in our mud boots and parkas or in light sweaters and sneakers. Sometimes there are fifty of us, sometimes there are a hundred. But the size of the congregation is less relevant, it seems, than the fact we are a part of a fellowship. We have been taught, after all, that it takes only a few of us to gather for there to be a church.

  Likewise, the unpredictability of the vista before us and the fact the sun and the mountain may be obscured are gentle reminders of just how little we know and how much we must take on faith. The sun will rise, we believe, regardless of whether we see it.

  Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Peace.

  Chapter 3.

  FAITH GIVES A CHILD SERENITY

  MY WIFE, my three-year-old daughter, and I are sitting around the kitchen counter where we have breakfast and lunch most weekends. It's just after noon on a Sunday.

  With the pensiveness that is peculiar to small children--my daughter's lips are drawn tight and her chin is tilted down toward her chest, but her eyes are looking up without a trace of a pout--she asks almost abruptly, "God's really strong, right?"

  "Certainly," I answer, and then quickly translate my response into one of the colloquialisms she hears around the house all the time: "Sure is."

  And although I'm not surprised that God is on her mind--she has, after all, just returned from Sunday school--I inquire as casually as I can, "So, why do you ask?"

  "Welllll," she says, drawing the word out the way she does whenever she's figuring something out. "Your mommy died. And mommy's daddy died. And God had to carry them both up to heaven."

  I nod, desperately in love with both her logic and her faith. (Meanwhile, the literalist inside me I've never liked much is thinking, "Well, they died four years apart, Grace, so God didn't have to carry them up to heaven at exactly the same time. There were probably two trips." Fortunately, I keep my mouth shut.)

  "Yeah, I thought so," she murmurs, and then contentedly takes another bite of her cheese sandwich, moving on blithely to the next question in her head: whether her mother and I will allow her to inebriate the cat with catnip that afternoon.

  I pray that my daughter never loses her faith. I pray that children of every faith retain their assurance that there's more in this world than they can see and comprehend, and that their confidence always remains a part of who they are.

  Some days, of course, that prayer seems more reasonable than others. I've certainly sat through funerals in which my own faith was challenged: the funerals of friends who in my mind died way too young. Sometimes I marvel that faith even survives in a world that in recent history has offered us ethnic cleansing in what was once Yugoslavia, mass slaughter in Rwanda, and people willing to blow up whole buildings in Oklahoma, Argentina, and Dhahran.

  I have an older friend who attended divinity school with every intention of becoming a clergyman. But he found that in his case, the more he studied, the more his faith diminished. Eventually he dropped out and went on to a successful career in market research. In his life's work, the thorny issue of blind faith was made irrelevant by focusing instead on those questions and problems that lent themselves to statistical analysis and concrete projections.

  And there's no doubt in my mind that faith is capricious. My mother-in-law is an unwavering atheist, while her brother was for decades an Episcopal minister who works now for the Episcopal diocese in Chicago.

  But faith is also accessible. It's a gift given to the soul the moment we begin to sense the mysteries that surround us: an absolute intangible such as love. Those small and large acts of seemingly unreasonable selflessness that pepper our days and our nights. The astonishing goodness and beneficence that bob like buoys in the maelstrom that is this planet so much of the time.

  There's something miraculous in the very premise of spring.

  And faith is a boon that seems always there for the taking. Sometimes it demands a little work: a participation in the rituals the soul is craving. Acquiescing to the likelihood that we don't know quite as much as we thought. A willingness to bow before the notion that for once in our lives we have to swallow our pride and ask for something we need.

  But the gift has always struck me as enormous: a whole life lived with the peace of mind of a three-year-old.

  Chapter 4.

  MARRIAGE WEDS LOVE TO LAUGHTER

  I ALWAYS KNEW the pastor of our church had a pretty good arm from center field, but I'd never realized his biceps were so large until I saw them in a sleeveless white wedding gown.

  Likewise, I'd never imagined that construction manager Mike Stone could make a Barney-purple cocktail dress and high heels work so well with his mustache and goatee, or that Wendy Truax and Helen Turner could don men's suits and produce a fashion statement that was certainly bold . . . but at least not completely insane.

  And I'd certainly never realized accordion music needn't always be a crime: There is only magic in the way Libby Atkins plays her half-century-old Sereni, a joy in her "Blue Barrel Polka."

  Frankly, there may be no better way to savor those last warm Saturday afternoons in Vermont than to attend an outdoor wedding re-enactment, with the sun still high and hot at midday, the gathering at once ebullient and restrained, and the large bridal party completely in drag.

  Clearly, there are thousands of reasons why I cherish Vermont (and even more when I think specifically of Lincoln), but Mike's and Wendy's willingness to wear purple silk and gray flannel respectively to help four friends celebrate two wedding anniversaries must be among them.

  Twenty-five years ago, the twin Goodyear girls of Lincoln, Lorraine and Lenore, were married in one ceremony to Bob Patterson and Russ Gates. Their double marriage was recently re-enacted in Lincoln at a surprise silver anniversary party for the two couples, and well over 150 friends and family members descended upon the center of town to toast the Pattersons and the Gateses and witness the incredible simulation.

  The identical twin brides were played by identical twins David and Paul Wood, and the grooms were played by the Pattersons' and the Gateses' teenage daughters, Krista and Alison.

  Sociologists or psychologists or cultural historians could probably read into that mock wedding--and the rural tradition of which it's a part--whatever they wanted. There's a lot there, the ritual is layered with meanings: the roles of women and men, the power of costume and dress, the simple fact that the days get too short too fast in this part of the globe.

  Arguably, the greatest fashion no-no that occurred at the wedding--the most glaring violation of gender dress norms--probably hung from the shoulders of my friend Wendy Truax: You wouldn't see me wear a gray flannel suit when the temperature's still flirting with ninety degrees. You wouldn't see most people (guys or gals) do it.

  Yet Wendy did, and she did it for, well, love. Maybe laughs and love. Maybe laughs, love, and the chance to embarrass Lorraine and Lenore. But love was definitely in the equation.

  That's what I saw most in that mock ceremony in Lincoln. I saw the deep-rooted affection a great many people have for the Pattersons and the Gateses, and their profound awareness of the myriad ways the four lovers have brought joy to the lives that surround them. I've probably attended a half-dozen weddings in my life in which we were reminded of the apostle Paul's words to the Corinthians--love is patient and kind and endures all things--but it was only in that faux ceremony that I saw Sarah's testimony in Genesis that love is also about laughter.

  Today is my twelfth anniversary with my own inamorata: my enchantress, my bride, my wife. If, in thirteen years, we are surprised by a bridal party in drag (my teen daughter as me in a tux, my pastor in white as my wife), I will consider it evidence of a life lived
well, in a small world that understands the meaning of ritual, celebration . . . and a guy in chiffon.

  Chapter 5.

  THANK YOU, FRIEND, FOR GUIDING ME DEEPER INTO MY FAITH

  "I AM A Christian because of Owen Meany," the fictional John Wheelwright observes in the first sentence of John Irving's wondrous and complex novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. The book is a decade old now, but that sentence comes back to me often, especially when I contemplate the oddly comforting ruination of reason that is my faith.

  Most of the time I am not altogether sure why I am a Christian. I'm a confirmed Episcopalian, but much of my study involved listening to Jesus Christ Superstar in my older brother's bedroom while rifling through his drawers to see what he was hiding beneath his socks.