Dispatch #4
Thursday, August 22
Green Bay, Wisconsin

A day of no cycling. We had too far to go before meeting Green Bay bikers at 1 pm. But last night presented its own texts for lessons I have not yet fully comprehended.

Thunderstorms of some power struck Hartford just as our LV Rally was beginning in the Chandelier Ballroom. God uttered (or Thor, in these parts, uttered) comments throughout my lesser presentations. I myself took such interest in the people gathered, thanking and receiving thanks and telling stories, that I scarcely noticed heaven's activities. I should have. I should, in fact, have anticipated them and prepared, but did not, and therefore suffered one more "lesson" before I could rest last night.

But before the evening several windows into the human condition opened on their own to me.

The Chandelier Ballroom is an historic building. It was the "Schwartz" when first it was built between the World Wars. We were renting the space for the rally, setting up, therefore, our own lights and sound system at about 3 in the afternoon. "We," I say, though it was really one who worked for WTKM, the radio station which (with its owner's, Scott Lopas' marvelous partnership) broadcasts Lutheran Vespers in Hartford. "Me," I was pacing, preparing my mind, wrestling the tension inside??when three women entered the ballroom space and approached. Could they, they wondered, look around the place?

Did we have the authority to say yes?

Well two of the women might have been in their 50's, their early 60's; but the third was clearly an octogenarian at least, leaning upon the arms of the others. These two were her nieces. She was their aunt. And, it was told me softly: "She danced here when she was young. She would like to see it again."

"The star," this older woman said.

I asked her name.

"Florence," she said.

Florence wanted to see the star where once she danced as a fresh young thing. The room is a great octogon. The floor is pieced with narrow strips of hard wood. The chandeliers hanging everywhere cast a muted romantic glow. It is a building of old romance. How could I say no?

Authority or not, I said, "Why, of course you can walk the room again.

Florence has the wider hips of age and thinning hair, showing her scalp a delicate pink. Her shoulders, though, retain a slender quality, and her arms might be called regal in their length. Her face is long, her eyes expressive.

Around the walls of the room they moved together. Folding chairs filled the place for our event in the evening. They began, the three graces, to thread their way through the chairs in spirals to the center. And when they reached it, she laughed. She touched her toe to the floor, and they called to me, and I walked over, and there under her toe was, of fitted strips of a redder hard wood, the star.

"The two step," said Florence. "Waltzes. And Lawrence Welk played here. But I was here before that one."

It was when she was eighteen that she danced on the star. She cannot dance now. But I can see eighteen in the mind and the eye that remember such a sailing experience.

"You danced before you married," I said.

"Oh, yes."

"And did you dance after you married?"

"Honey, no."

I do not pretend to understand that answer. It could be that, having grown up in Hartford, marriage removed her from that place to another town too far away. It could be that the state of marriage asked other rhythms of the wife. But the memory of dancing was clearly a tonic and bright in an old woman's mind.

"No," said her nieces, "but we asked you here to take our picture." Ach, a foreigner after all. Or else the manager of the Ballroom, as they supposed. "Push this button." "This one?" "No, dear: this button. And get the star in, would you?"

These, let it be said, knew nothing of Lutheran Vespers. Nor did I enlighten them. It was enough to have met them and to have recognized in her nieces the faces of my own aunts, after all.

And my sister-in-law Fritzy was there last night with my brother-in-law Fred Eggold. And a friend of many years, Brenda Stallbaum. And I met brother pastors and I received the great and weighty thanksgivings of many white-headed fathers and mothers, whose thanks (you know) carry the richness of years. And I did truly enjoy the presentations while God muttered above.

Until, after shaking many hands and talking long into the night (as it seemed to me), I was driven back to my RV and found, when I went to retire there, that I had left the plastic dome directly over my bed wide open.

The bed was completely soaked.

What God muttered I could straightway interpret, but grimly: "Ha ha!" saith the Lord, Pantocrator! "Ha ha!" upon the heads of them that think they have authority, but do not shut their windows.

"Ha ha!" the heavens declared, while heaven's highest inhabitant danced on stars more brilliant that Florence's, on stars beyond my imagining.

And then "Ha ha" became: "Depend, and take pleasure in dependence, and I will send you help."

For it was Larry Westfield who had driven me back to my RV; and seeing how crestfallen I became at what a little dickens that God can be, in a trice stripped that soaking bed, removed the mattress, set fans to blowing on the mattress in his church, and drovemy linens and me to his house, their to dry out, to sleep in his and Liz's guest bed, and to know goodness again.

Florence has the dancing once she did. I myself am storing up memories of the dance of human kindness.

I shall revisit them one day. I shall read this note and remember: relatives, friends, the marvelous community of the faithful.

Walt