Silver Belles

Welcome to Yellow Springs, a bucolic borough with characters caught in the crossroads of rural and suburban, somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow. For two decades, fictional Conestoga County has been a platform from which to evolve and share my thoughts about the ever-elusive, ‘true meaning of Christmas.’ My stories build on a recognizable, but not necessarily orthodox, Christian base, but I have always hoped to be suitably inclusive so that my friends with different views would also enjoy reading these tales. You can find yesteryear’s tales on Facebook; just search for “Yellow Springs Stories,” and then scroll down the page to see links to pdf copies of previous year’s stories that you can open to read or print. Here’s to a good Holiday season! -

Bill Kennedy([email protected]) ©2013 William D. Kennedy

As the calendar turned from Thanksgiving into Advent, Hayden Himmelglump heard the weather forecast call for a round of snowyicy-slush in Conestoga County. He announced that he was going outside to the car ready for winter. His wife, Hermione, cast him a dubious glance. “Every time you try to ‘work’ on the car, I end up having to call AAA.” “Nonsense,” Hayden sniffed indignantly. He went outside and packed the trunk with an emergency blanket, flares, spare gloves, a snow shovel, a water jug, and some granola bars. He checked the radiator, added air to the tires, replenished the washer fluid reservoir, and flipped up the spring-loaded windshield wiper arms to replace the worn rubber blades. He unlatched the old wipers from both the left and right wiper arms. He bent over to pick up the new wipers from the ground, but as he did so, Hayden’s hind side bumped against the car fender -- immediately after which he heard a hard thwack!

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Hayden looked up to see that the two, naked, spring-loaded windshield wiper arms had smacked back down against the glass. He stared in astonishment as two separate cracks emerged -- multiplying, crackling, and crawling to the furthest corners in a shattered mosaic. Hayden was afraid to move for fear that the slightest disturbance would break the invisible bonds that kept the glass fragments

suspended inside the car’s fragile, angled windshield frame. Without moving, Hayden called loudly to his wife inside the house, “HONEY?!?” Hermione shouted back, “I already called. Triple-A will be here in 10 minutes.” With his typical, self-deprecating humor, Hayden Himmelglump repeated the tale when he ran into his former pastor, Godfrey Swench, over at Flegelhoffer’s Fair Value hardware store. Hayden said he hadn’t ever realized that a windshield could crack into millions of pieces and yet remain intact enough so that the pieces didn’t fall to the inside of the car. “There’s a sermon in that story somewhere,” Godfrey remarked. “You still think that way, doncha?” Hayden asked. “Always looking at what happens around here and trying to weave it all into some kind of ‘message’, right?” Godfrey shrugged, “‘Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools do so because they have to say something,’” he quoted from Plato. “Looking back, I suspect I fell into the latter category much more often than the former.” For nearly three decades, Godfrey had spent the better part of each week trying to think up something worth saying from his Protestant pulpit. He always struggled to illustrate his theme by linking it to something that had happened in the village. Now that he wasn’t a preacher anymore, Godfrey found that he still saw potential sermon fodder all the time – such as in stories like Hayden’s windshield -only these days, didn’t have to interpret events in terms of some kind of profound truth; he could just enjoy each story for its intrinsic mirth or comfort. It was so much easier, he thought, to appreciate whimsical stories without always trying to derive some eternal, life-lesson. Godfrey had delivered over two thousand sermons, but looking back, he really couldn’t remember any of them very well. He thought that people commented on his sermons mostly when they agreed with

his message – like when his theme conformed to their side of the argument they had with their spouse or teenager earlier that Sunday morning, often an argument that wasn’t quite over when they arrived at church. “Do you miss it?” people often asked him in these past six months since he left his old life. “I miss the people,” he always answered, then sometimes added with a smile, “but not all the committee meetings.” Godfrey’s career evolution began a few years ago when he went on a leave of absence to take classes at Oxthorn University to make up for having not kept up with his continuing education requirements. After six months of college, he went back in his native church in Yellow Springs. Then 18 months ago, he was moved into an office job in the denomination’s regional headquarters. The Oxthorn U. experience led Godfrey to reconsider some longheld beliefs about which he had not been challenged before. He became increasingly uncomfortable with some of his denomination’s official positions on social issues. The denomination’s rulebook was rather black-and-white on some issues, but Godfrey saw a lot of gray – and not just that, but a whole rainbow of other colors and perspectives, too. He kept asking “why,” a question which was not always welcome around the denominational office. Then came last summer. In July, Godfrey and Gertrude’s son, Jacob, announced that he and Kirk wanted to tie the knot. The state across the border a few miles south of Yellow Springs had legalized such unions, and the couple was ready to take the next step. “We’d like you to officiate, Dad,” Jake invited. Godfrey immediately accepted -- knowing, of course, that it was against his church’s rules to do so. Godfrey went to see his boss the next day. Bishop Bourne Stern frowned over his glasses. “If you officiate their wedding, I’ll have no choice but to have to file professional charges. You’ll go through a ‘church trial.’ You could lose your credentials. And worse, your pension!”

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It occurred to Godfrey just then that most of the time when people say they’ll have ‘no choice but to’ do something, what they really mean is that they refuse to choose not to. Godfrey suggested, “Aren’t you concerned that our rules are a little out-of-touch with the very society that we’re supposed to minister to?” Well, it turned out that the Bishop Bourne Stern and a number of similarly situated church officials were not so concerned. And so if came to pass that one Saturday in July, Godfrey presided over his son’s wedding, then tendered his resignation the next day. Godfrey’s departure led to a kerfuffle over who owned the house in which he lived, the backyard of which abutted the parking lot behind the church where he used to work. The property had been the home of the church’s pastor since the 1920’s. When Godfrey was named to replace his late-uncle as the pastor decades ago, it seemed perfectly natural that he would move into his uncle’s former home. Likewise, when Godfrey moved on to the denominational office job18 months ago, the new minister, Stolucia Stolzfus, already had a home, so the congregation saw no need to reclaim the property. After Godfrey was no longer with the denomination, some of his former church members questioned the status of the Swench home. The church leadership thought the property was a parsonage – a manse or parish house that belonged to the church for the benefit of the incumbent cleric. Godfrey, on the other hand, said he inherited the home when his uncle died. The opposing sides appointed a panel of two equally respected Yellow Springers to study the issue and author reports. They chose elderly accountant, Matthew Taksis, who had actually known Godfrey’s grandfather, and a younger, amateur historian, Dr. Theophilus Luke. Matthew spent weeks pouring through the courthouse records, tracing the property title back to when William Penn’s sons first settled in the heart of Leni-Lenape territory over three centuries ago. Matthew’s report included quotations that he claimed to remember Godfrey’s grandfather as having uttered during a meeting held in the Millard Fillmore High School auditorium 50 years ago – a gathering that included some of the brightest scholars from eastern Conestoga

County. Matthew’s report spoke of the denomination’s deep traditions and customs. Matthew concluded that Godfrey’s grandfather never meant to surrender private ownership of the family property, but rather that he wanted his descendants to live there in perpetuity, serving the people of Yellow Springs (or at least the Protestant people). Oddly, Luke’s report had virtually nothing in common with Matthew’s. Luke boasted that he had painstakingly investigated everything, relying on eye-witnesses and other evidence. What Matthew called a ‘big, public meeting’ at the high school in the center of the village 50 years ago was, in Luke’s account, a small conclave 46 years ago in a small barn in the west side of town that was attended not by visiting sages, but rather by an ragtag band of insomniatic farmhands. Luke concluded that the Swench property was really meant for all Yellow Springers and that it was not meant to be kept just for the Swenches. The competing reports came out shortly before Christmas. Some church leaders chose to focus on one account more than the other version, and others tried to bend both stories so that they could be harmonized into one, unifying truth. Rev. Stolzfus was asked her views; with typical mysticism, the enigmatic cleric intoned, “Truth lies not so much in ancient stories, but in how we treat our fellow man and woman. Do we seek to expel or include? To divide or unite? To acquire and use power, or to show charity towards all?” “Well …” huffed most of her parishioners. What do you do when someone basically tells you that your question is shallow and that you’ve missed the point?? Once he was no longer formally associated with a particular denomination, Godfrey looked for new work. Oxthorn University offered him a part-time post as its non-sectarian Chaplain, and a few weeks later, the Fallow Farm retirement community made a similar offer. Neither job called for much public speaking, for which Godfrey was glad, but the two posts added up to full-time work in which he met one-on-one with a broad age-range of constituents, discussing, debating, and counselling about the great issues of life and death, hope

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and despair, love and heartbreak, war and peace. Godfrey had never been happier.

story, the mere fact that they share tale tales makes an entirely different point.

Even though he is no longer in the Protestant pulpit, Godfrey continued his custom of periodically meeting his Catholic clerical colleague for a monthly breakfast before work or, sometimes, as they both preferred, for happy hour after work. In early December, Fr. Opus Magnus met Godfrey at the Lazy Watchman. Fr. Opus started out in a fake, Irish accent, “Did you hear about the priest driving on the turnpike? He got stopped for speeding. Trooper McDonald saw a wine bottle on the floor. ‘Have you been drinking tonight, Father?’ says the Trooper. ‘Only water,’ says the priest. ‘Then why is it, Father, that there’s wine on your breath?’ The priest looked at the bottle and cried, “Saints be praised, He’s done it again!!”

Godfrey is new to Fallow Farm, and this month has been an awkward time over there. The problem began back when the Board of Trustees decided that five of its thirteen members should be actual residents elected by their peers. It was a curious allocation of power to just one constituency; after all, the Board hadn’t assigned specific seats to any of its other constituencies, like its lenders, regulators, managers, employees, adult children of residents, or prospective residents, each of which had an interest in the long-term success of the village.

Godfrey tried to top him. “So the Protestant minister passed a bar and heard the raucous voices of his parishioners. The pastor barges inside, sees one of his congregants, grabs him by the collar, and demands, ‘Don’t you be wantin’ to go to Heaven?’, to which the feller answers, ‘Y-y-y-es, I do, Pastor.’ The minister says, ‘Go and stand by the door then, you reprobate!’ He sees another member and asks, “Do you want to go to heaven?” The feller says, “Sure, pastor,” and the minister shoves him towards the door. This goes on four more times, and soon there are 6 people in a line by the exit. Finally the minister reaches Stubborn McStubbins. ‘Don’t you be wantin’ to go to Heaven, McStubbins?’ ‘No, parson, I don’t.’ ‘What?!?’ the minister asked incredulously, ‘You mean that when you die, you don’t want to go to Heaven?!?’ ‘Oh,’ says McStubbins, ‘when I die, sure. But I thought you were gettin’ up a group to go there now!’” The two old friends laughed heartily, even though both of them already knew the punch-line of the other’s joke. Their rapport is a far cry from long ago (but still within both of their lifetimes) when Conestoga County Catholics and Protestants were mutually suspicious, but a generation later, here were Opus and Godfrey, swapping heresies with each other. There’s really no point to the stories that Godfrey and Opus tell each other; still, even when there’s no particular point to the

Given the Fallow Farm Board composition, it was not surprising that they couldn’t agree on a budget this year. Company President and CEO, Brock O’Bonner, wanted to add staff to improve dining and cleaning services, and to have money set aside to re-build some of the aging infrastructure of the campus. Some Board members agreed with President O’Bonner, but several others had won election on a “read my lips: no new fees” platform; they wanted to hold the line on increases, even though operating costs and capital needs were all going up. The conflict prevented a majority from emerging when the fiscal year came to an end. Twice, the Board passed a resolution to allow temporary operation, but at the end of the last extension, the opposing sides had hunkered down in stubborn insistence. Phrases like “line in the sand” and “doomsday option” were bandied about. Which is how it came to be that at midnight on November 30th, Fallow Farm officially shut down. Or, rather, it became “sequestered,” as the opposing sides called it. President O’Bonner announced that the Medical, Security, Dining, and Maintenance departments would be on half-staff; everyone else was furloughed. The effect on the campus was both immediate and extensive. The wide array of menu options was trimmed down to just pancakes, pasta, and peanut butter. Common areas were closed, and the line outside the medical clinic was as long as a Depression-era soup kitchen. All the while, Board members quarreled both among themselves and with

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President O’Bonner. Everyone said it was the other side’s fault, and residents just wanted to get the thing settled. With the “sequester” closing the gym, the YMCA offered to let Fallow Farm seniors work out in its facilities. Lyle Lurker found that working out in a Y was a lot different from working out at Fallow Farm. He was used to seeing people his own age – mostly men -gently lifting light weights, but over at the Y, there were svelte young women in compression shorts lifting, twisting, bending, jogging, biking, and otherwise keeping in great shape. Lyle’s eyes lingered on the back of just such an athletic gal on an elliptical machine in front of his jogging treadmill. The young lady finished, stepped off her machine, and turned to towel off her face. Lyle’s face flushed red as he realized the woman he had been watching so keenly was his granddaughter’s best friend, Kelly Kynder! “Oh, hi, Mr. Lurker. I didn’t know you worked out here,” she greeted him. Embarrassed, Lyle’s feet stopped moving. A moment later, he was thrust off the back of the moving treadmill, falling on his ample backside. Kelly ran over, asking if he needed any help. Redfaced, Lyle declined. Instead, he quickly got to his feet, gathered his coat, and drove straight over to St. Wenceslas’ where he demanded Fr. Opus open up the confessional for an unscheduled visit. The Fallow Farm shut-down cancelled most of the seasonal activities, but for the Fallow Farm women’s handbell ensemble, their annual Christmas concert was already in jeopardy. The “Silver Belles” had rung their tunes at every major holiday, but the day after Thanksgiving, the Belles lost Anna Asher, their low-F and -C ringer. The retired astrophysicist had been fading somewhat in recent years – she had trouble remembering things from one week to the next – but her downward spiral was augmented by her grandson’s efforts to bake a Thanksgiving turkey in the oven inside of a brown paper bag. Something in his recipe went awry, leaving Anna with E. coli bacteria that led to a rare case of meningo-encephalitis, and she went into a coma on December 1st.

Much in the way that Fallow Farm had shut down except for baseline necessities, so also had Anna Asher’s mind ceased almost all life-support functions. She lay in the Critical Care Center on various machines, but she showed no signs of independent life. As the first week turned to the second, her doctors were pessimistic. Even though Fallow Farm’s Chaplain’s office had been furloughed, Godfrey Swench kept coming around anyhow, sitting alongside Anna as family members fretted, worried, and prayed. Then, on the morning of December 15th, two serendipitous developments occurred. First, President O’Bonner announced that he and the Board had agreed on a budget deal. Some skeptics who thought all they were doing was deferring long-term problems for short-term benefit, but residents were happy to see their beloved Fallow Farm staff come streaming back into the facility. Soon, the building was abuzz with renewed activity. The second event, much to the amazement of everyone, including her doctors, was that Anna Asher’s brain re-started. Out of the blue, she blinked – once, then twice – then began to raise her arms as if trying to figure out why she was in bed and what were all these lines and tubes connected to her for? They took her off the ventilator, and by mid-day, Anna was sitting up, speaking and eating on her own. Incredibly, her faulty memory was fully restored; she was as sharp as a scalpel. Everyone was still stunned about Anna’s turn-around a few days later when she asked for the Chaplain. “I had a vision, Godfrey,” Anna confided. “The doctors tell me I had no brain activity these past two weeks, and yet I recall floating endlessly in a field of great, white light. There was an aura of music -- not as if it were being played, but complex and rich, as if the music were alive and responding to me! I met others -- they didn’t have any bodies, but I just knew …” she paused uncertainly, “I just knew that I was in their presence, and I could tell who they were,” she said simply. “Do you believe me?” Godfrey wasn’t sure what to believe. He had heard stories of this kind of thing, but he had never known anyone who claimed to have

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experienced it. “What you are describing is amazing, Anna. Tell me more.” Well, she did. In fact, Anna Asher kept talking about her neardeath experience, first to Godfrey and then to anyone who would stop to chat. She regaling her neighbors and Silver Belle colleagues with the memory of what she called her ‘time on the Other Side.” She told them, “We are loved by a complex creator whose greatest gift to us is the ability to think and love. Where I was, there was no sadness – no tears, no mourning or crying or pain; there was only light and rest and infinite peace.” Well … no one talks that way around Yellow Springs, not even the preachers. Anna’s family was concerned about her. Much to the chagrin of Fr. Opus and his predecessors, Anna had never been more than Christmas-and-Easter Catholic to begin with. And even in retirement, Anna Asher had never been any kind of poetic, spiritual, old-softie. She had been a brilliant Ph.D. who spent her career looking at the universe, augmenting the work of the great physicists like Einstein, Higgs, and Cooper. More than a few fellow Fallow Farmers thought Anna’s ‘vision’ was the result of all the medications she had been on. Others chalked it all up to the unknown complexities of the brain. But Anna said that what she had experienced was more real than anything she had endured in her prior 84 years on this mortal plane -- more real than her childhood, her seven year marriage, giving birth, and decades of widowhood. And so on the afternoon of Christmas Eve day, Anna Asher called on the Chaplain once more, asking him the same question as before: “Do you believe me?” Godfrey answered, “It’s not so much a question of whether I ‘believe’ as it is whether I ‘understand.’ I haven’t been through what you went through, so I can’t understand it. But it seems to me,” he continued thoughtfully, “that you experienced something wonderful, rich, and fulfilling, which sure sounds like Heaven to me.”

Anna shook her head. “Sometimes, I wonder if maybe my skeptics are right – that it wasn’t real, but all ‘just a dream’. Think about it, Godfrey: seriously, what’s really the point of an octogenarian having a near-death experience?? It’s like watching the previews before a movie, but then having to leave when the main feature comes on! And around here,” Anna gestured to the Fallow Farm campus, “the Great Unspoken is we’re all more or less ‘near death’ every day!” Godfrey laughed. “We’re talking about things that people can’t really know about – things that probably can’t be known, despite what physicists and philosophers might think. But what’s it matter? All that counts is that you’re alive and with us today. Real or dream, the point is that you experienced something, you derived meaning from it, and you’re acting on it.” Anna wore a sly grin as she asked coyly, “You mean like Joseph in Matthew?” “Josephine Matthews…?” he asked, not placing the name. “No,” Anna chuckled, “I mean St. Matthew. Don’t I recall that in his account, St. Matthew wrote that Joseph was going to ‘put Mary away,’’ Anna made air quotation marks with her fingers, “until ‘the Lord appeared to him in a dream’?” “That’s right,” Godfrey remarked, surprised that Anna had referred to a Biblical story. “And wasn’t it another ‘dream’ in which the visiting Magi were warned not to report back to King Herod?” “Yes,” Godfrey nodded. “Matthew also wrote that Joseph was warned in a ‘dream’ about escaping to Egypt, and, years later, another dream told him it was safe to go back to Nazareth.” “But St. Luke didn’t have any dreams in his story, right?” “That’s right. Luke’s report is entirely different from Matthew’s.”

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Anna grinned at him, “I hear there’s a lot of that going around, what with all that squabbling about your house.” Godfrey wondered how the news of a Protestant squabble down in the village had reached an agnostic Catholic on the hills at Fallow Farm. “You’re right – the two reports about my house are entirely different. But, again, does it really matter? Regardless of which of these reports is accurate – which may be neither of them – the we’re going to put the property in a trust for the benefit of the congregation once I retire. The list of issues worth fighting should be very short, and the ownership of my home is not one of them!” Anna nodded firmly. “When I was on the Other Side, I was shown what is good – what was expected here below. We are supposed to be fair, merciful, and loving. We’re supposed to to walk humbly in the eye of our timeless creator.” With that, Anna Asher looked at her watch and cried, “Oh, speaking of ‘time,’ I’ve got to go! It’s almost time for the Silver Belles’ concert. Are you coming?” To the delight of the afternoon assembly, Anna Asher and the Silver Belles rang through a handful of seasonal favorites. They played an eclectic array of songs and carols, sacred and secular, in no particular order. “White Christmas” was followed by “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring”, and “Deck the Halls” preceded “O Come All Ye Faithful.” There really was no particular theme or message woven through the musical selections; instead, each one was to be appreciated on its own, for whatever value each piece may have had for each listener. And yet somehow, the eclectic selections made for a slightly merrier Christmas for everyone.

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Acknowledgements Everyone, of course, picked up the allusions in this tale to our federal leadership. My brother’s family may empathize with the Himmelglumps, and my retirement community friends will know this story is work of fiction (because our budget process is robust, fair, and timely). Some readers may recognize my tip-of-the-hat to “The Big Bang Theory, or to the near-death-experience bestseller, “Proof of Heaven” by Eben Alexander, M.D. Others may notice my wag-of-thefinger towards the recent defrocking of an area Methodist cleric who presided over his son’s wedding. Some work colleagues may recognize part of the treadmill story, but the remainder of that vignette is a function of my own dysfunctional imagination. As always, the differences between me and Godfrey are far greater than our similarities -- can you imagine me being happy to avoid public speaking?? Like Plato’s fool, I speak (and write) only because I have to ‘say something.’ In reviewing two decades’ worth of notes of fictional ideas, I came across this entirely factual event, with which, for whatever it’s worth, I will leave you: In the predawn darkness of Christmas morning, four year-old Abby raced down the staircase. “Yeeaaa!” she cried as she reached the bottom step and looked into the living room. Twinkling lights reflected onto a mountain of wrapped presents under the tree and throughout the room. Maggie, then only two years old, was descending the staircase as fast as she could, but it’s much slower when you have to back down, one step at a time. Maggie called ahead excitedly, “Did Santa come??” “Yes, Maggie! Quick, come see!” Reaching living room, Maggie’s eyes grew to the size of saucers as she gasped at the glorious sight. Turning to her sister with equal expectation, Maggie asked breathlessly, “Did Jesus come???” Abby put a consoling arm around her sister as she patiently explained, “Maggie, Jesus doesn’t come to houses. Jesus is in our hearts.”

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