The bus rolled into the mall parking lot. I was horrified with the fact that the parking lot was filled with cars the day after Christmas. My horror was not at the defiling of the true meaning of Christmas, but more at the endurance of the mall goers. Lately, I've found Christmas to be exhausting with the re-learning of how to be part of a family now that I've moved away and the stress of trying to buy meaningful gifts. I've even grown uncomfortable receiving gifts and though I'm usually one of the first to jump into the car for a trip to the mall, I was glad to avoid them altogether this holiday season. These people seemed crazy. The night before, when my mom got sentimental and called all her siblings to wish them a merry Christmas, I talked to my cousin and she said she and her mom were making the two hour drive from their rural North Carolina home to the nearest mall in Norfolk, Virginia. "Err, that sounds fun," I told my cousin wondering what the hell she and my aunt were thinking. As the bus carefully crawled through the parking lot, I tried to imagine that the mall was the one from the zombie classic "Dawn of the Dead" and that inside the shoppers were meeting an onslaught of flesh eating undead. It wasn't so farfetched. After all, the mall where they shot that movie was in western Pennsylvania. I thought how funny it would be to see a stream of people burst from the mall doors, pounding on the bus windows seeking sanctuary. "How am I going to return this sweater now?" a woman would shriek, "there's brains all over it!"
I liked the idea of the town's bus stop being at the mall though. The bus stop in Carlisle had been at the mall when I was young. It was at the more abysmal of the two malls, where only the most delinquent of teenagers would even bother to hang out, and I always wondered what a town the size of Carlisle needed with two malls. It was right next to one of the only independent book shops in town. The rear entrance, facing the sidewalk and the bus stop, opened into the back of the store which was the children's section and I recall that it always seemed to be alive and vibrant in a hyper-real explosion of frogs and other cartoon animals. But it was nice to browse through the books and oftentimes my mom would buy me a skateboard magazine, or a bmx magazine or whatever my interest happened to be that week.
The bookstore was the first to go. Then the bus stop moved. Years later, while I was in college, the mall was demolished and replaced by a Wal-Mart. The bus stop in Carlisle now resides in a truck stop on the outskirts of town near the turnpike. I find that minutiae like this - the location of a bus stop, the demise of a bookstore, the phoenix-like emergence of a Wal-Mart from the ashes of a dying mall - serve as a better metric of time than years. It scares me though, because I think that time feels like it's moving faster and the changes to my old hometown seem more and more crazy. The places that mark events in my life are familiar, but they are no longer nostalgic and there is no comfort in their familiarity.
My mom and I walked past my old high school one afternoon while I was home. I broke off a clod of snow from the piles that had built up from where the parking lot had been plowed and kicked it in front of me. I kicked it hard and repeated this when I caught up to where my snow clod had come to rest. I finally goaded my mom into playing this game and we alternated kicks. As we walked past the school it felt like there was an invisible barrier around it and that if I crossed it, if I came too close to the school, if I thought too much about my time there, I would suddenly be acutely aware of how distant, how irrelevant that all seemed, of how much I had aged and how the place around which my entire life had once revolved now held nothing.
I had that feeling when I went to the school in Bloomington to learn how not to get HIV or hepatitis when a kid gets his hand cut off in school so that I could start substitute teaching in January. There's something about a school that makes the people who work around a school that seems to leave a permanent mark. As I inquired with the secretary, I couldn't help but feel like she was addressing me as some clueless high school freshman and when I spoke to another administrator she treated me with that pleasant maternity that is the mark of those who manage to find some shred of pleasure and dignity amidst what seems to me a pretty frustrating and shitty place. I had the same feeling of being uncomfortably reminded of the past, and my distance from it, when I was recognized by my 9th grade honors English teacher (who, though we were never close, was one of my favorite teachers). She patted me on the shoulder as she walked past my pew and I realized that it had been 9 years since I sat as a student in her classroom.
I'm not sure what is the worst part of being reminded of the passage of time. Is it the increasing awareness, with each passing year, with each fragmented reminder of the past, of ones disconnection from that past? Or, is it the realization that the reality of your life, the hours passed, the dedication, the frustration and the triumph of your current days will soon so pass?
posted by geoff on 12/27/2003 03:36:15 AM
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Could anything be more absurd? I, who haven't attended church regularly since I was sixteen or so and then only because it was really important to my mom and I, who, in the Sunday school classes, was always the most brazenly skeptical, and I, who somehow escaped the weekly duties of a church helper that my brother placidly performed as I mocked him from the pew, was sitting on the front pew of the brightly lit church, clothed in a white linen robe which, though according to the tag was an extra small size, constantly put me in grave danger of tripping and sprawling on the deep red carpet of the sanctuary. The photocopied sheet of paper accompanying the program of the worship service glared "Candle Bearers - Geoffrey Hing, Tim Hing". What the fuck was I doing?
I really didn't have much choice in the matter. I was relaxing the day after I took the Greyhound back to Pennsylvania for the holidays. I had been up all night on the bus, so I slept in until mid-afternoon. I was just starting to wake up and stumble around my old room when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver, and on the other end, it was the pastor of the church that my mom attends.
I've known the pastor for a long time, since pre-adolescence, but it doesn't seem that way. It seems like people in public positions, positions of authority, always seem the same, no matter how many years pass. I always liked her. She entertained my skepticism, my theological sparring more than other adults at the church and I thought it was cool as her arrival, being the congregation's first female minister, shook the aging congregation a bit and caused a few old bigots to shake their heads and attend Sunday morning services elsewhere. Moreover, she was at least twice the orator of the previous minister and while her sermons were admittedly formulaic she delivered them in a calm, warm, steady tone that, upon the conclusion of the sermon, if the content didn't make sense or sit quite right, at least her voice made it sound like it did.
When she called on that afternoon, I suspected it was for my mother, or less likely my father. "Geoff," she said sweetly, "how are you? You're just the person that I wanted to talk to." I knew I was in trouble. "How's the band? Where's my CD?" I always wondered, but deemed it impolite to ask, if in seminary they taught methods for remembering the details of people's lives. Her memory for such things seemed uncanny. "So, we need helpers for the Christmas eve service and you and your brothers names came up," she continued. "How was that?" I inquired. It's not often that I return home, and when I do, and go to church with my mom, I'm greeted more as a prodigal son by members of the congregation than as "church helper" material. "Well, we were short of people this year," replied the pastor, "and the Yeager girls suggested that I call the Hing boys." Damn the Yeager girls, I thought. Damn them.
What could I say? I was going to be going to the Christmas eve service. I knew that participating in a yearly Christmas tradition was a greater gift to my mother than anything that could be wrapped in gold foil paper and adorned with a red ribbon. What difference would it really make if I was bored sitting towards the rear of the church dressed in ill-fitting khaki slacks from when I was sixteen and a tie stolen from my father's own anachronistic collection or sitting at the front in a goofy white robe? I'm all for personal empowerment and I'm all for people not doing things that they don't want to do. And I definitely didn't want to be a helper at the service. Still, if there's one thing I dislike more than doing things I dislike, it's hearing myself make a lame-ass excuse.
"Ok," I conceded. "Good. I knew I could depend on you. I'll put you down as an acolyte then?" replied the pastor, her voice betraying only the faintest trace of haughtiness at her victory. "Umm, I'm not sure I should be trusted with that. Is there anything easier?" I asked. "How about candle bearer?" she responded. The word "bearer" didn't sound easier at all and it's formality made me think that I had made a great mistake in agreeing to help. In the back of my mind, I scrambled for some way out. "I guess that's okay," I murmured despondently. "Great. Now I need you and your brother to be at the church at 9:30. I'll send you your instructions (that's right, apparently the task of "candle bearer" required specific instructions) tomorrow."
My brother and I arrived at the church at the given time, a full hour before the service. We sat in awkward silence across from another set of siblings that had gotten suckered into servitude. I had always seen these siblings around the church but never really knew their names, or spoke to them. I remember them when they were younger and they had always seemed far younger, but now, both in stature and maturity they dwarfed my brother and me. They looked as if the moment they left the church they were going to embark on engagements, or child rearing, or maybe rush off to the dealership to put a down payment on a new car.
I always felt like my brother and I were oddities of sorts amongst the youth of the church. We weren't related to half of the other parishioners, we listened to strange music, we cracked jokes that no one got, we moved far away to go to school, we were more at ease with adults than our peers - but not these strange, anachronistic adults with their nebulous extended families, farms, and history. I never really had close friends at the church. There was one boy, Aaron, who was sort of a bad kid, his parents frustrated public school teachers, and who got away with quite a bit by virtue of his sister being even more of a fuck up. I remember one time, back when we had both been railroaded into attending the church youth group by our parents when we snuck away and walked to the Getty Mart (another favorite after-school loitering spot, that, though not quite as popular as the Uni Mart, attracted a considerable amount of the student population when there was a fight at the nearby "bubble"). He left to smoke and I left because I had nothing better to do. There were other quasi-friends too, a set of twin brothers, but our friendship was built more out of common experience - the soccer team and the tyranny of it's coach, the confirmation retreat where friends commented on the hotness of Winona Ryder and even the most unathletic was brought into the frequent games of "psycho fun ball", a football/soccer/rugby hybrid with an every changing ruleset born out of our weekend boredom. I regret, as I slip further into adulthood, that I have lost relationships based on this sort of common experience. When you're in school, you have these hours upon hours of inescapable boredom and frustration and that's the reality for most everyone you know. A situation like that is bound to breed intense allies, companions, enemies. Because the experience of being stuck somewhere be it in class, in church, or in a boring town is so ubiquitous you become defined by it and so do your peers and that, at least, is one thing you'll have in common. Now, the idea that any shared inescapable experience is who you are is, for better or for worse, lost and the time you spend in class with the people whose names you have forgotten, or at work with the people whose lives you absorb in a choppily abridged form isn't your life. Whatever "your life" is exists somewhere beyond the classroom or the timeclock and the lives of those people around you seem increasingly easy to ignore.
The pastor arrived and it was good to see her because at least with her the conversation would be slightly less awkward than with the stoic Amazon children across from us. In her appearance, the pastor seemed the same as always, but she carried herself heavily. Her modest high heels that she always wore to services had been replaced by a pair of clunky snow boots that flopped, sloppily laced, about her feet. She seemed tired and the tone voice spoke of sadness or fatigue. I gathered that it was a hard season. The congregation, though always elderly (there was hardly a Sunday that went by without the announcement of some death or some terminal illness or unexpected hospitalization) seemed to be making the transition from aging to decrepit. I remembered, in the last few years that I was still young enough to be interested in the bounty of Christmas, squirming anxiously through the service, it being yet another obstacle to paper and ribbon filled glory of the next morning, that the church had been packed for the late night service. The ushers even had to bring the folding chairs from the basement and set them up in the back. Tonight the church was half empty. At the end of the service, one of the choir members had to be lead away in tears. She had just received word of death of her sister.
The service itself wasn't all that bad when it came down to it. Between daydreaming and my candle bearing duties, the service seemed to go by quickly. The point in my adolescence that church became tolerable was when I stopped dissecting the inconsistencies in the scripture, the hypocrisy of the congregation or the irrelevance of the sermon and just ignore all that altogether. I took the hour to just think about whatever I felt like thinking about and in the quiet of the church service or the background din of the choir, it was actually pretty nice. My mind wandered, I thought about some things, and the next thing I realized, the lights were off, people were holding lit candles and singing silent night, and then the service was over and the congregation poured out into the icy night.
At twelve, I had screaming arguments where I denounced any belief in Christianity or any other organized religion for that matter. I cited the crusades and other innumerable acts of genocide and intolerance as examples of why we'd be better off without organized religion. These arguments inevitably ended with the slamming of doors or my mom swearing and then crying and me glaring at her indignantly.
I came to terms with organized religion not through the religion, but through the organization. The idea of faith, or belief doesn't mean much to me, but the idea of community does and just as my mom doesn't understand what I see in groups of kids pressed against each other in sweaty basements or in midnight rides to crawl in dumpsters (which she is certain are all laced with poison that will kill me and all my friends), I can believe that she finds something in the dusty small town church that means a great deal to her but that isn't relevant to me. What I do know is that the people of the church supported her when she lost her father, and when she was diagnosed with cancer. I do know that people who consistently voted Republican and had the most antiquated and conservative views on social issues would smile and embrace homosexual members of the church. When an old man made a crack about having to wear a choir robe and suggested that he get his ears pierced and his nose pierced and go out to one of those "funny" bars, he was met with what seemed an embarrassed silence (a silence often sadly absent from the conversation of people of my generation).
I don't believe in the church, but I can support the things that matter to the people I care about. My mom knows I'm just going through the motions and she's fine with that, and that's fine with me.
posted by geoff on 12/27/2003 03:34:49 AM
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videos of my friend steve's band, derringer, playing at 4-corners fest are on the web at http://www.tomgilkproductions.cjb.net/. the show was fun in some ways (nostalgia, kids' excitement, something fun to do in a town where there's not a lot to do) and disappointing in others (total bro-down, violence, sexism, racism, homophobia), but in any case, i like steve, and i think his band sounds good.
posted by geoff on 12/25/2003 08:04:25 PM
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LA: The Smell http://www.thesmell.org/
LA (silverlake/echo park): Casa Del Puebla
http://casadelpueblocoop.org/eng/index.htm
Long Beach: Koo's Cafe http://www.koos.org/
San Diego: che cafe http://checafe.ucsd.edu/
posted by geoff on 12/23/2003 12:35:37 AM
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