church mouse
{scintilla day 1}
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Tell a story set at your first job.
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My very first job was cleaning a church. Every Saturday, my whole family (my parents and four children) would spend the morning dusting and sweeping, washing and vacuuming, emptying trash and scouring sinks.
Okay, I admit, my parents did most of the work while the four of us ran around in what can only be called the coolest playground ever. We played endless games of hide and seek, as well as seeing who could make the other one jump the highest by sneaking up behind them and yelling, “Boo!” This is where I learned to internalize my scream, never wanting to give my brother the satisfaction of hysterics.
We each had a job or two, and mine was dusting. The smell of Lemon Pledge can take me back there, to my childhood, in an instant. My mom Pledged the crap out of every piece of furniture we owned, pretty much daily, and the church got a good weekly dose as well. We had to dust all the pews. There were a lot of pews, especially if you counted the main sanctuary plus the chapel, and then there were two large, formal sitting rooms filled with big antique furniture with lots of scrolls and nooks and crannies. A duster’s dream. Or nightmare, depending on how you look at it. It just so happens that I like to dust. (And you be quiet, Mr. Mediocrity.)
There was also a grand piano in one of those rooms, with a large photo of a couple hanging in an oval frame above it. I have no idea who the people in the photo were, but I do know for a fact that their eyes would follow you wherever you went. Sometimes we made a game out of that, moving to every possible location to see if they were still staring us down (they always were), but other times, when I was alone in the room, it would really creep me out.
There were a lot of creepy places in this labyrinth of a building, lots of hidden rooms and dark corridors. The organ pipe room was the stuff of Saturday afternoon horror shows, but the creepiest place of all was The Tunnels. Down in the basement, way in the back of the boiler room, was a door that was always locked. Behind that door was a series of tunnels leading I don’t know exactly where, lined with stone slabs. It looked more like catacombs than anything, the kind of place you would expect to find old skeletons. The story went that it had been part of the Underground Railroad, and the slabs were used for sleeping and hiding out. That always shut the four of us up for a little while.
And there was the bell tower. We didn’t go up there often, though I think my dad went every Sunday morning to ring the bell. But he took us up there sometimes on Saturdays if we pestered him enough, though none of us had enough weight to actually budge the thing. That bell was heavy. Still, we had fun trying.
Later, years later, my parents finally decided to retire from the church cleaning job, and my uncle took it over. And then he hired me to work with him for four hours every Saturday, for $60 a month. You can laugh, but back then that was pretty good pay for about 16 hours of work, especially for someone who wasn’t yet 16. By the time I did turn 16, it was time to find a “real” job to pay for the gas I needed to put into my 1967 Chevy Impala, a car big enough for eight people, a car I paid $200 for.
But I still look back on those church cleaning days with fondness. When you clean a place, care for it, it becomes yours, a little. And for a while, that church was ours.
I haven’t been back there in a very long time. But that’s okay, I visit in my memory, often.
And there is a story about a mouse, but it’s a sad one.
I’ll just leave it at that.
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this post is part of the scintilla project. see more here.
