YOUR LIFE HAS BEEN A BLESSING TO ME

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   YOUR LIFE HAS BEEN A BLESSING TO ME

  Overcome with the joy of the moment, Reverend Jim was suddenly seized of the notion that everyone in the congregation could be made to feel as touchy feely as he was at that moment. He stepped out from behind the pulpit; he clasped his hands together; he looked at us with an intensity and profound earnest and he said, “People, I want you to take the hand of the person sitting next to you. I want you to look them in the eye. I want you to speak their name and I want  you to say to them, “You’re life has been a blessing to me.” We were all so stunned by the prospect that there resulted a moment during which nothing happened except the soundless individual calculations of how easily one might make an exit while attention was diverted. Undeterred, Jim spun around, grabbed Louise’s hand in both of his and, with a depth we each felt ashamed not to emulate, he said, “Louise, your life has been a blessing to me,” to which Louise gulped the appropriate response. The motion required to pass this message among us the began. First, we all had to get to our feet which produced a comfortably distracting but short-lived noise. We’ve by now adopted a procedure for this awkward phase of the service which has, until this morning, only required us to exchange pleasantries. We stand and then we turn around to extend our hand and administer our blessings to the person seated behind us. This produces another momentary respite because, of course, that person (if there’s anyone there) has turned backwards to do the same thing. The result is that for a while everyone in the congregation is facing Linda who has remained seated in the last row back on my side of the aisle and her mother and brother who are across the aisle but standing.  The folks in the next to the last row back, the three or four that are within reach, extend their hands to Linda and say, “Linda, your life has been a blessing to me.” On the opposite side of the aisle the similarly situated parishioners extend hands to Carl and Annette and say the same thing. Then the folks who started it all off turn around to face the rest of us and extend their greetings to those seated in front of them and the ripple thus given birth wafts across the congregation like ‘the wave’ through the bleachers at Fenway Park. My time is quickly coming. I’m only a few pews from the back. In a moment I will be turning around to extend my hand to the people in front of me and “Oh, sweet Jesus, why couldn’t I have come in late?” I can’t ever remember who is sitting in front of me. I never noticed. The old woman seated behind me, having exchanged her blessings with the folks seated behind her, turns around and extends her tiny hand to me. She is seated with her daughter, a woman about twenty years older than me. Thankfully, they are both fond of me, I having befriended them once or twice. They say, “Phil, your life has been a blessing to me,” and I feel OK. They mean it. I say the same thing to them and in so doing I learn that if you both say it simultaneously there’s really no sure way of telling if the other person said exactly what was required.  I may have said, “your life has been a blessing to me,” and they might just as well have been saying, “You have a great piece of spinach hanging from your teeth and your fly is open.” I turn to face the people in the pew in front of me, no doubt waiting expectantly. As I turn, I encounter Elaine’s gaze, she turning with me, and I think why not just tell her that her life has been a blessing to me and let it go at that. I mean, it has certainly, been just that. I could say it to someone to whom I mean it. What a relief. But no, we continued to turn until we are face to face with two very somber looking ladies, each my mother’s age and her contemporaries.
     One fall day when I was around thirteen one of these ladies emerged from her snug house to collect an armful of fuel from the woodshed. Inside the woodshed, on a bench covered with blankets, lay her twelve-year-old daughter with her blouse unbuttoned. Her young breasts were undergoing a critical examination by myself. I had on a smock fashioned from an old sheet and was making liberal use of the stethoscope which had come with the doctor kit I’d gotten the Christmas before. The woman hasn’t spoken to me in the ensuing forty years. I take her hand in mine and I say, “Your life has been a blessing to me.” On a roll now, I turn to her companion.
     On December 24, 1965, I drove non-stop by myself from Orlando, Florida to Rockland, Maine. It took me thirty hours and all I had for nourishment was gin and No-Doze. I took the ferry out to Vinalhaven, arriving on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. The first person I saw on the island was this woman’s son. I picked him up and we drove around the island drinking and shooting the lights on people’s outdoor Christmas trees with a shotgun. Finally, having taken my hands off the wheel to take better aim, we crashed into a tree in the front yard of Kippy Greenlaw’s. The crash rendered us both unconscious and Kippy, having run out of the house to see what the noise was all about, took one look at my companion’s blood covered body and called his mother. It was Christmas eve around 9:00 p.m. Kippy said, “I’m afraid there’s been an accident. Phil Crossman was driving, and your son is dead.”
     He wasn’t. He was only banged up a little but it played hell with their Christmas that year. Neither she nor her family has ever forgiven me. I take her hand in mine and I say, “Your life has been a blessing to me.”
     That was several weeks ago. I’m going to church again next Sunday. If either of them is there it will be the first time since the day I shared that astonishing news with them.