Man at the Desk

The shortest path between the old parsonage where we live and the parking lot where I keep my car is through the church building itself. On a cold or rainy day I appreciate those few seconds of warmth as I cruise past the main office and the copy room, past the auditorium, and out the opposite door. My own back door is just ten swift steps beyond, wedged between fairy-tale banks of boxwoods, tiger lilies, and giant rhododendrons.

There’s a tradeoff to the shortcut, though, and that is whenever I take it, everybody in the church all up in my bidness.

“Off to do some writing?”, one of the front desk volunteers will say as I stride through on the way to the parking lot.

“Sure,” I’ll say, hoping it sounds more plausible than if I admitted that I was really on my way to grab a frappuccino and spend the morning at the beach . . . again.

Or I’ll be walking into the building laden with big bags obviously bulging with groceries, all of them with STOP ’N’ SHOP emblazoned on the side, and one of the women in the office will poke her head out into the hallway. “What have you got there?” she’ll ask.

“Oh, you know. Just liquor and porn,” I’ll reply, in passing.

That’s been the kind of casual relationship I’ve had with the church office over the last year.

After I joined the church in the spring, however, I felt the urge to pitch in and become part of the community. I already play piano fairly regularly for the choirs, but I decided I’d also volunteer at that reception desk I’d walked past hundreds of times. So once a week, for a three-hour shift, I take my book, my knitting, or my iPad over to the office and substitute for one of the regular volunteers who’s out for the day. All the other front desk volunteers are female and almost are all of a certain age. (That age being roughly eighty.) So when people stop in surprise to see me there and ask, “Wow, are you really manning the front desk?” I compliment them on their appropriate choice of verb.

My first day there, I was a little apprehensive about the job because my orientation had consisted of a ten-minute rushed overview that in my memory consisted of two minutes of how to run the postage meter, some vague rushed instructions about doing something with baskets and flowers and church bulletins, some orders to change the sign out by the road that announces the upcoming services, and then an eight-minute detailed lecture on the importance of recycling rubber bands. I arrived to my first shift and learned that everybody—everybody—was heading to an all-day staff retreat, and that I and the rubber bands would be sitting in the church all by our lonesome.

I listened to the doors slam shut on their way out, contemplated the boxes of plastic letters with which I was supposed to construct that week’s roadside sign, and thought that they probably wouldn’t have left me with that kind of temptation if they’d known that at Craig’s last church I rearranged the letters of a Mr. Brian Wright’s door nameplate to read Mr. Writhing Bra. (He didn’t notice for a good four months.)

I resisted temptation. I wanted to be invited back.

My volunteer hours mostly have been spent reading, I have to admit. There are long, long stretches in which the church lives up to its quaint reputation as a three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old New England institution, when its office staff are working amiably and with barely a whisper, and when the only sounds are the quiet murmurs of Tai Chi in the memory garden and tentative bids of four-no-trump from the bridge club meeting in the auditorium. But then there are the times that I seem to have wandered into someone’s quirky sitcom of church office life, and frankly, I’m not getting enough residual checks for that crap.

Like the afternoon I was working and the phone rang. “First Congregational Church,” I said, mellifluously.

“How do you spell Gethsemane?” asked someone. It was a woman, I was guessing somewhere between thirty and fifty.

“G-E-T-H-S-E-M-A-N-E,” I suggested. Click. She hung up.

I went back to my book. The phone rang again. “First Congregational Church,” I said.

“How do you spell Jerusalem?” asked the same woman.

“J-E-R-U-S-A-L-E-M-say, do you have any other words you want me to spell while you’re still on the line? This is fun.”

Her response was both dignified and guilty, as if I’d made a stank-face, waved my hand around, and asked Hey, who cut the cheese? “I thought that a church might know the spelling best.”

“I can see the logic in that,” I conceded. “But I suspect a secular dictionary would do just as well, if I'm ever not here.”

“I think I’m done,” she said. “Yes. I’m done.”

“All righty,” I told her.

Scarcely had I hung up the phone than the frailest old woman came in from the outside, with a dry cleaning bag hanging over her forearm. She had to be at least ninety; her face resembled one of those dolls my sister used to make out of sticks, some corn husks, and a carved dried apple for a head. Her eyes were blue and sweet, though, and I smiled at her as she introduced herself. She’d driven down from Old Saybrook for a garden party in Greenwich that afternoon—I looked out the window and saw she’d parked a shiny Escalade in a space outside—and wondered if she might change into her party dress in the women’s room. You see, she was planning to wear a cocktail dress that was so delicate and light and airy that it would have been crumpled and ruined if she’d worn it for the drive down. Would I be so kind—?

I guided her to the women’s room. She returned in a floral dress that was somewhat gauzy and appropriate enough for a formal garden party with Queen Elizabeth. “You look lovely,” I told her.

“Oh thank you!” she cooed, in that charming way some little old ladies have. She then launched into another story about how hot the drive had been, and how her dress would’ve been ruined, and how kind I was to let her change. She added a chorus of grateful old lady thanks. Then, as she turned to go, she added over her shoulder, “Because if I’d shown up looking even a touch rumpled, I would’ve never heard the end of it from that bitch Mitzi Earnhardt.”

I was still gaping when the phone rang. “First Congregational Church,” I stammered.

“How do you spell crucifixion?” asked the woman at the other end.