Community Gathering

I was driving home early Saturday evening, having thoroughly enjoyed officiating at the wedding of a wonderful couple from church, when I noticed something odd at the corner of Union and Harrison, right near where I live. I slowed to pass a gathering of people from the neighborhood waiting for the arrival of emergency vehicles after a car crash. I threaded my way through, parked in my driveway, and walked back out to the corner. The people from the vehicles seemed not seriously hurt, though one of the cars was rather spectacularly smashed. It seemed that the other vehicle, a large pickup, had just driven out in front of her, and what could she do?


I stood with my neighbors, whom I mostly never get to see, conversing about the scene, then also catching up with each other. I met the grown daughter of my next-door neighbor, who is now living with Mom, only I didn't know. I feel like such a stranger sometimes! I've only lived here for six years, after all. It's too bad that it takes a crash like this (or a fire -- there was one of those a couple of years ago), to bring us all out of our houses to stand around. Crashes that happen at night or really early in the morning don't do it either, and not that many of us are around if one happens during a weekday. But there we were, and this was a community gathering, the only kind we have. Nice people, my neighbors. I wish there were moments to hang out without crunched cars and the distress that goes with them.

These little side streets, Harrison, Prospect, not so much Myrtle, though it does happen, Orange, Pearl, they seem to bring cars together when they meet with Pine, Union, and Maple. On Pine street, the most recent accident brought the news that people can't see around the cars parked along the side of the street to be able to cross safely. On Union Street, I think some people forget to look both ways, since the other nearby big streets are all one way. And of course, people get going too fast on those big streets, so even if somebody could see to pull out, they might not be able to see far enough. We had a fatal accident not long ago on Maple street when someone was going way too fast and another car pulled out of a little side street in all innocence. But the most popular seems to be just blowing through stop signs, as the girl in the pickup did on Saturday. There was one of those at the corner of Union and Prospect a while ago that happened just as I stepped out onto the porch to pick up the morning paper. I spoke with that driver. She was distracted, she said, because she was rushing to the hospital to see her mother, and she had just not looked to see the stop sign.

We never reach a conclusion about all this at our community gatherings. We wait for the ambulance and the fire truck to come; we notice who goes in the ambulance and who does not. We comment about how it happened and who should be more careful. Everyone should be more careful, and we have no idea how the way this whole thing works could be changed to make it less accident-prone. I confess, I am grateful to have an event that brings everyone out to the sidewalk to stand around. But there's got to be a better way to do it!

Two Weeks in September

The beginning of September is an intense time for those of us who work in churches. It's a time for finding out things that have happened in the families of the congregation since June, a time for getting things started in all kinds of church programs, and a time for special celebration. It's exciting and exhausting. This year we added to the madness by hiring a new Director of Religious Education at the very last minute, doing interviews on Labor Day weekend, getting an agreement by the end of that first week, and spending a whirlwind week getting the program started for real. I arrive at this moment like a person washed up on the shore after flailing downstream through white water rapids, grateful, a little surprised, and somewhat disoriented.



I missed out on an ordination I wanted to attend, partly because my car had a mystery with a dashboard light that might be telling me something is wrong. But actually, the car is just reflecting my body and spirit, flashing a warning light that something might be overheating. It was telling me that if I didn't drive far out of town, then if the overheating occurred, I'd be close enough to home to be towed. I felt that way personally, as well.

The mechanic found a simple solution to the flashing light on the car. In the meantime, I attended to my own personal flashing dashboard light, using the time I would have taken for my colleague's rite of passage to mark my own passage from the time of beginnings -- the first two weeks of September -- to the "regular" fall season.

On Labor Day weekend, a small group gathered on Sunday morning to mark the end of the summer season. Two full-sized services later, the shock of seeing "everybody" is wearing off. Two weeks ago the green of the trees was just thinning out toward yellow and red. Now we start seeing real color. The autumn equinox arrives this weekend. A touch of fall is in the air, mixed with the still-warm breath of summer. Time to be with the fading light, the rising colors, the falling temperatures, and the rhythm of daily living.