The Search

continued

thread through the miniscule hole in a needle, it frayed into a hydra-headed monster.

I don't remember how I answered the lady in the red hat. I do know I almost ran to the parking lot, away from the smiling people, away from the outstretched hand of fellowship. John kept up the church search for another month, but the impetus had gone out of it for both of us. Our Sundays reverted to yard work and the New York Times.

I believe, in fact, that writing for a religious publication made our spiritual journeys harder. Working with Christian subject matter acted as a kind of inoculation: exposure to a safe dose of the germ to prevent our coming down with the real thing.

Exposed we were, constantly. We knew secondhand about reaching the bottom of the pit and finding God there. About miraculous supply. About the inner voice that guides. We'd lived all these things vicariously as we helped people put their stories on paper.

And on paper, for us, they remained. The challenging sermons we'd heard during our six months of church hunting had lost the force of impact. We had been immunized.

The road to heaven, for both John and me, was a different one.

On the northbound side of the New York State Thruway in the Bronx is a gas station that I never pass without recalling a snowy January night in 1957. The station is closed now, its fieldstone walls disfigured with graffiti, but I still see it as it looked on the winter night we pulled in to use the telephone.

John and I and other Guideposts staffers had attended a Salvation Army fund-raiser where the speaker was the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Henry Knox Sherrill. After his talk we joined the long line waiting to shake his hand. John mentioned the coincidence of the name, and he and the bishop briefly compared family histories.

It was after 10:00 P.M. when we walked to the parking garage and got in our car. While we were at dinner it had begun to snow

"Could be bad up our way," said Norm Mullendore, Guideposts' art director, as he climbed into the backseat. Norm lived near us, forty miles north of the city.

It was bad even before we got out of Manhattan, snow mixing with sleet, traffic crawling. By the time we reached the Bronx, we knew we wouldn't make it home before midnight as we'd promised the sitter. "We've got to call Mrs. Coolidge," I said.

Norm thought there was a gas station not far ahead. "If it's open." At last through the sleet pelting the windshield we saw the welcome lights of the station. "Tell Mrs. Coolidge just to open the sofa and go to bed," I called as John got out of the car.

He was inside the station a long time.

"Maybe the phone lines are down," Norm said.

At last we saw John coming toward the car. Instead of getting in, however, he simply stood there in the storm. Norm rolled down the back window "Couldn't get through?"

"I got through. Mrs. Coolidge had a phone call from my mother. Dad died at 9:30 this evening."

For a while there was only the sound of ice crystals pinging against the roof of the car.

But . . . we'd been with Dad two days ago! Sixty-four years old, excited about the upcoming semester at Union, he and Mother had taken the train out to our house Sunday afternoon. As always, I'd served my one confident casserole: kidney beans, sliced potatoes, crumbled bacon, tomato soup. I could hear Dad's warm, deep voice, "I always look forward to this."

Dad couldn't be dead!