There's only one black family at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, and it's ours.
When we first joined the church, we got a lot of stares, but they're over it now. They know as well as I that the Lord doesn't care one whit about color except to paint our faces with it.
Some folks tend to overcompensate, trying to beat the others in sharing the peace with us during service, as if they had something to prove, but it's hardly hostile. Maybe it's even a little pathetic.
Of course, we're all pathetic in the sight of the Lord.
It's a beautiful church. The front end has a wonderful stained glass window depicting a cross surrounded by angels and figures with animal heads representing the various disciples, bunches of grapes, scales weighing the value of the cross more than pearls and gold coins...it's a very busy display. A lot going on in it. The motif is carried around the side walls in smaller windows set high above the pews. They have things on poles they use to pull the windows open when it gets too hot.
The interior is red brick, with a tall barn-like roof. The pews are varnished tan benches made from wood, with no cushioning. Up front, they have a pair of pulpits on a raised area, then an altar in a recess behind them, further elevated with differently colored tiling.
In the back, we have an upstairs loft that overlooks the congregation, with a huge pipe organ formed in the shape of the roof.
Since our building is right next door to a hospital, our congregation consists mostly of doctors.
Mr. Vegel is a radiologist and lay minister. His wife does something else at the hospital.
We got a guy in our choir that shows up in scrubs during Wednesday rehearsals, on account of coming over right after work.
Lee Weazell, who, I think, is a heart surgeon, has more money than he knows what to do with. His wife is in charge of just about everything in the church, and music above all else.
From time to time, we get foreign hospital interns.
Pastor Brewer's wife does pediatrics in the hospital across town.
My husband Mike is in Telemetry, and he's appeared in TV commercials.
As for me, well, let's just say it's a private practice.
I work for Dr. What's and Associates, and my clients are...of an unusual sort.
To give one example of how unusual, the other day I helped deliver a baby with six legs and a slug's face, then treated the mother's genital sores with a syringe full of Tidy Cat and glycerin solution.
Obviously, we're not in the phone book, or Google for that matter, so don't try to find us unless you have a serious case of Wabcalo lice, or your close encounter resulted in a nasty STD.
Or you've got an inflamed Qeejabi that needs to be taken out, or you've got an allergy to hydrogen solutions like water and have gone into anaphylactic shock.
If you need us, you generally find a way to find us, one way or another.
Who's Doctor What? Well, he's just an ordinary human with a muskrat face and wild eyes. Not as exciting as the other doctor, which I'll be telling you about later. He kind of takes the Band-Aid approach to medicine, but he's more affordable than Varzpegho, which is clear on the other side of the solar system.
With unusual jobs come unusual companions. Rubluca, for one, is my best friend, and she happens to be purple, with ears that kind of flop down around the sides of her face like a cocker spaniel, without all that hair.
Imagine my distress when pastor Brewer started pushing the "Bring Your Friends to Church" campaign.
When he first mentioned it, I pretended not to hear and went about my business.
But then the one to one interviews began.
As a rule, I do not divulge the secrets of Dr. What's office to anyone, so when we sat down in his little office and talked, I was cagey out of necessity.
Yes, I'm a doctor.
Yes, it's sort of like an OBGYN.
Since I couldn't explain what a Vuirixa Specialist is without sounding like a nut, I had to cave and say, yes. I was an OBGYN, not just like one.
Ha ha.
It was like I told a funny funny joke, except it wasn't a joke at all.
Then he starts in on how we're all on this campaign and we should be sharing Jesus and bringing in people and all.
I tried to explain that my clients, and coworkers were unusual, without giving any details, but he just laughed and launched into a story about how he suddenly discovered a whole row of goths sitting in the back the day after he tried the same thing at Holy Trinity in Seattle.
He had me so persuaded that the very next Sunday I was sitting with Rubluca in the back row, holding her trembling hand as her reptilian skin changed colors in self conscious embarrassment.
The pastor, who had been carrying a glass of water up to his podium at the time, was so taken aback that he promptly dropped it, and as he was picking up bits of broken glass while Mrs. Weazell blasted out the prelude on the giant pipe organ upstairs.
"It'll be okay," I kept telling her. "It was kind of like this when I first joined. God shows no partiality."
"Yes," she said. "But-"
I didn't let her finish the thought. I just hushed her, smiled, and rubbed her back. "It'll be okay."
We got a lot of stares and mutters. Rubluca was so embarrassed that everyone in the church probably thought that orange was her natural skin color.
I didn't let that bother me, though. I showed Rubluca how to read the hymnal, and though I didn't get her to sing, or pray, she had the eager nervousness of a novice swimmer contemplating a dive from the low board.
Sharing the peace was kind of awkward. People seemed to be making it a point to avoid her, so I made it my point to bring her to the people.
Once I had introduced her to a few charismatic individuals in the flock, particularly Mrs. Katie Hedgebaker (high school teacher), and Jack Strongheart (radiologist, I believe), the uncomfortable aloofness progressed into unnatural smiles and nervous handshakes.
When the pastor gave his sermon about Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones, she kept whispering questions, so I told her to write them down and we'd talk about them after service.
She had brought a memo pad with her, apparently for this purpose, which she had been jotting notes in all along. By the time the service ended, she practically had a textbook.
As we passed Pastor Brewer on the way out the door, he tried his best to be welcoming and friendly, but in between my friend's cryptic answers to conversational promptings, and the lame jokes, he kind of floundered. Especially the part about asking her what she thought about the new bible movie she'd never seen.
From then on, he was much more careful about Take Your Friend to Church Day.
Once we left the building, we sat for roughly an hour in the McDonald's across the street, just going over everything in Rubluca's notebook.
My husband was there the whole time, but he had this look like he wasn't quite comfortable being seen with her. We did get stared at a lot.
I can't pretend to know all there is to know about the Sacred Gaxea, Rubluca's holy text, but she claimed that the concepts of law and sin and atonement were nearly identical, minus the savior messiah, kind of like the bibles most Jewish people have.
She was really open to everything, despite, um, not exactly being from around here, and so we started praying together.
The next Sunday, she brought Krybus, her husband, who kind of looks like a smaller version of the Abominable Snowman.
To this day, I don't understand how that relationship worked itself out. I'm not really sure I want to know. I mean, he is ruggedly handsome, with a large dreamy bedroom eye, but the boy can't cook to save his life. Plus, those feet.
To my surprise, the friends the others brought with them last time came back for an encore. Unfortunately, it turned out they were mostly there to see a freak show. And now, with Mr. Krybus filling up enough space for two people in the back pew, they weren't disappointed.
Despite all this, Rubluca actually sang with me this time, and came up to communion.
We hadn't breathed a word about her being in space, or much of anything about her, so I guess Pastor just thought she was a weird looking person and gave her a wafer.
Now that I think of it, I wonder if he had done some serious praying about the situation or he might have acted differently. Especially if he understood that she'd never been baptized. I guess he just made the assumption because she said she belonged to a "different church".
Mr. Cyclops, though, he stayed in his pew. We tried to get him to share the peace, but even then he shrunk back in the wooden bench, snaggle teeth grinding in anxious fear.
Rubluca, being a good wife, eventually coaxed him out of his shell, but when he stomped up to Jack to shake his hand, the little man cowered in a row of pews he clearly hadn't been sitting in, stammering incoherently like the pig from Winnie the Pooh when we asked if he was all right.
He must have adjusted his flag tie about five times while Krybus stood there. I thought for sure he'd keel over from a heart attack.
The balding Dave Pettapet, however, being a full time fire fighter, showed a little more backbone.
It was a tough sell, but I guess you can say that at least a few people warmed up to him. Kind of.
The Sunday after that, Rubluca's whole clan was there, mainly to see her baptism.
Her children all looked like purple hunting dogs with mange. Floppy ears, zero to two eyes, grape colored skin with randomly scattered clumps of hair all over their bodies, with uneven coverage.
She had four of them, one as tall as her, a child sized one, and an infant with the lower body of a centipede.
The pastor seemed to take it in stride, giving a sermon oddly specific to the situation. A passage about not forbidding people to do miracles in Christ's name, the one about letting little children come to him, and how God shows no partiality.
Then Rubluca got baptized.
And that is how she became an official member of St. Paul's.
As the weeks progressed to months, her whole family got baptized, and most of everyone's opinions changed from "Hey look at that scary white thing and that purple lady" to "Rubluca, we're going to have a voter's meeting on August third and we'd like to know if you and your husband can help with table setting and cleanup."
She also joined our choir.
As it turns out, Rubluca is an alto, a rarity among the ladies, making her a valuable addition to the team when it came to those songs with high notes.
Now, Mrs. Bottomiller is our children's education head. Her last name is unfortunately accurate if you put a "big" before it. The woman loves food.
It was Mrs. Bottomiller's idea to do a potluck. I warned her it wasn't a good idea to ask my friends to bring their own specialty, but she was persistent.
The moment she saw what was squirming inside their Tupperware containers, she never asked again.
Of course, they did enjoy the chili.
The Doctor showed up a few weeks after the retirement of Mr. Brewer, our interim pastor, and the new guy took over.
Chuckles, I called him. He had the personality of Ned Flanders from the Simpsons. Gray haired man, roughly seventy years old, with horse teeth and a square jaw.
Chuckles always seemed to be doing sneaky things that went over the parishioners' heads.
His first major move as pastor was to remove the elderly, charming and thoroughly witty Professor Whigdon from head of the music program. The two met in secret, before the rest of us arrived to the choir loft for practice that night. They just sent us home.
In response to our complaints, we received a rather impersonal apology letter from the pastor, explaining that it basically wasn't our business why he was dismissed in the middle of the night without a single vote.
A week later, the pastor actually shows up and gives us this speech about how the other pastors always had a problem with him, though I'm not sure how much of that was true because I wasn't there behind the scenes when they were supposedly arguing.
Rubluca did, however, see the man somewhat forcefully hurling sheets of music over the piano on occasion.
Pastor didn't go into detail about the music director's removal. He just said he was "disharmonious."
Then came the two thousand dollar video wall, which is basically four plasma TV's stuck together.
I got upset when my husband bought us those three televisions, an entertainment center and home movie theater equipment for the living room when we'd just purchased a new refrigerator, so you can imagine what I thought about someone doing that kind of thing to my church.
Mr. Weazell had the money, but apparently he wasn't going to step up to the plate, so Chuckles brings it up as a new church budget item, despite there being a need for more important debts like the food bank, education and maintenance.
A couple weeks later, the TV's were on the wall. I guess it got more easy to set sail after dumping the professor of music overboard.
After this came the unnecessary hymnal replacements that lacked a number of songs I liked, and the addition of a brand new sound system whose control unit suddenly occupied a large portion of the choir loft, and couldn't be moved elsewhere due to the expense. They didn't ask us about that last one, either.
What, with all the visiting bands and the children's handbell choir around Christmas, that really got the choir, and even the replacement music director, in an uproar, but nothing could be done about it.
When the pastor installed the UNITY machine, that's when we called for the Doctor. The other one.