Adventures from the Church Desk: Kwawffee and a Nice Pudding

“You always get the weird stuff,” is what the church staff tell me when I sit at the reception desk.

I can’t aver with all my conviction that the statement is true. After all, I’ve passed several very long mornings at the front desk during which the wildest thing to happen is a spirited debate about the merits of frozen yogurt versus ice cream, or when the high point was connecting seven cows in a rousing game of Puzzle Craft. There’ve been a few shifts during which the only sounds I’ve heard are the muffled ticking of the grandfather clock as it slowly scrapes away another second of the afternoon, and the occasional intrusion of my husband as he sticks his head in the door and wants to know why I’m not done stamping and hand-numbering that three-foot stack of music he dumped on me, oh, all of fifteen minutes before.

But yes. When I stride into the church and stick my nameplate into its slot, and when I take the phone off its voice mail, I always get a giddy sense that just about anything could happen. Very often it does.

Yesterday was a pretty typical Monday morning designed to keep me on my toes. It began with me assisting the two very frail and elderly women who apparently comprise the church’s quilting league. They’d already assembled their quilt and stretched it on a massive wooden frame. It was my job to navigate that frame onto the tops of four chairs they’d arranged into a square in the middle of the room—but more importantly, to stick around for a few minutes after and listen to them tell me about their love for the dying art of quilting. I’d helped a man find a specific plot in the cemetery. I’d had a nice long talk about the cemetery itself with a location scout for a David Duchovny movie, which the producers wanted to use for a funeral scene. That had led to a discussion about the differences between graveyards in Greenwich (pretty!) versus graveyards in his native Brooklyn (covered with graffiti!), how Tyler Perry used the church last year when he was shooting one of his movies in the area, and basically how traditionally churchy the church building looked.

I’d sent him off to take his photographs of the sanctuary and the cemetery when the phone rang. I answered it chirpily. “Yhello?” asked the woman at the end of the line. She sounded older, and had one of those Noo Yawk accents that New Yorkers don’t like to think they have, even though my brain has to go through all the exact same mental gymnastics it performs when trying to translate the consonants hitting my eardrums from the more colloquial accents found in a typical episode of Downton Abbey or EastEnders. “I understay-and there’s a funeral there on Saturday?”

“Mmmm,” was my reaction. I hoped it conveyed a balanced kind of sympathy—the sort of vague sorrow one experiences upon hearing of the death of a much older but no longer relevant Hollywood former star that one had already assumed was dead anyway, like Ernest Borgnine. I thought it sounded better than Could be. I’m here once a week, lady. It’s news to me.

“Well,” she said, and I could just hear her licking her lips at the other end as she prepared to launch into her speech. “I was wondering what the family is planning to do after.”

“After?” I asked.

“Yes. As in, were they planning to have just coffee, after the ceremony?” She pronounced it kwawffe, the way so many New Yorkers too. “Kwawfee and a few nibbles? Or were they planning to have more than just kwawffee?”

“Um,” I said.

“Maybe even instead of kwawffee and nibbles they’re having a nice buffet? With chicken and maybe a nice salad and a nice dessert or pudding?”

“Well—“

“Because I can’t imagine they’re just having kwawffee. Maybe kwawffee and a cheese plate. That would be nice. Or kwawffee and a nice cake.”

“I don’t—“

“I was really hoping that they were having a nice buffet after. You know. Chicken. And a nice salad. And maybe pudding. Or a nice cake or even a refreshing fruit salad. Though I’m not sure what’s in season. Blueberries? And maybe kwawffee afterwards. You know. Something nice.”

“Let me put you on hold for a moment,” I said smoothly, before she started mentally planning the apertifs.

I walked a couple of rooms over to the desk of the office manager. She looked at me with suspicion. “There’s a funeral on Saturday?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” she replied.

“There’s a woman on the phone who’s asking if the family’s planning on serving kwawffee and nibbles or whether they’re having a nice buffet with pudding. Do we know . . . ?”

She stared at me for a moment. “Are you serious?” I shrugged and winced. After a long, wearied sigh, she shook her head. “Oh good god.”

Back at my desk, I took the woman off hold and apologized for keeping her waiting. “Yeah,” I said, trying to sound as apologetic as possible. “It’s really up to the family to make those arrangements, and if they’ve made them somewhere else, we don’t always know their plans.”

“Oh really.” She sounded put out, and a bit curt. “So you can’t even tell me if it’s kwawffee and cake, or kwawffee or a nice cheese tray, or a buffet with a nice salad and—“

“And pudding, no.” I tried to ooze sympathy. “Noooo, they haven’t left us with a menu. I really can’t tell you.”

“Well!” she harrumphed. Then she paused. “Maybe you could tell me this: are the family planning to keep the flowers, after the funeral’s over? Or will they be giving away some of the nicer bouquets to people attending?”

A moment later, when I’d hung up and was trying to blink and recover some thoughts that weren’t of kwawffee and pudding, the office manager walked into the room. “Well?” she asked.

I told her about the conclusion of the call. “Man!” she said. Then she shook her head. “You always get all the weird stuff.”

This time I couldn’t deny it.