The Golden State

I should look for a job in Turkey; I have no idea what is out there besides teaching English for which I have zero aptitude and hate doing and which does not pay well unless you do have aptitude, which is as it should be. I don’t want to float like an expat spouse, start some offensive blog, “My Life Among the Turks.” I want to make money, to have money. I don’t want to dig for bargain clothes in a seedy pasaj. And it makes me feel so mournful to think of Honey not speaking English at school, not to mention what they would teach her. Although why should I be suspicious of what she would learn in a Turkish school? God only knows what she would learn at school in Altavista. These are all problematic thoughts to parse at a later time.

We walk the roads off Main Street to get to the church and some of the houses look okay but some of them are obviously hoarder houses, faded curtains pulled up at a corner to show dusty knickknacks and piles of nothing. I wonder if this is some specifically American disease or whether other places have it too. I have never met a Turkish hoarder to my knowledge. As we turn onto Second Street I consider the wisdom of bringing a child Honey’s age to church. It has been probably fifteen years since I attended a church service, around the time of the Chios trip probably, and I strain to imagine what the experience is like vis-à-vis babies. I assume that St. Mark’s follows the liturgy of my youth, although I imagine it will be less well attended by an order of magnitude. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that Honey will be able to cope with the mandate of spending one hour in silence. On the other, who will care if we get up and go?

The church is significantly less prepossessing than I remembered, a small L-shaped ranch building built of cinder blocks like the Golden Spike. The yard is torn up, just cratered dirt with small piles of rubble here and there. It’s on one of the last blocks up against a dirt hill that crests up to a rocky outcrop looking out over the scattered houses of Indian Town. I’m sure it can’t be called that anymore. I wonder if the church is functional and this possibility opens a door to turning back and going home and I desperately want to slip through it. There is a sign on the actual door that I hope says Church Closed but really says Pardon Our Dust so I open the door and it looks as I distantly remember from many years ago. One side of the L formed by the building contains what I think is called the nave, rows of neat wooden pews, all of them empty, leading up to a very respectable little altar area with pulpit flags crosses etc. The sun shines brightly down the aisle through the modest stained glass. The other side of the L is a mingling slash rumpus area with a large table and chairs and an open kitchen toward the back. There are tidy bookshelves lining the room and a bulletin board and a low-lying gray wall-to-wall carpet covers the concrete slab which is perceptible in the balls of your feet. It’s all very nice-looking.

I know, although I don’t know how I know, that for years the priest has been itinerant between three towns in the county, since the number of Episcopalians these days is such that one rural congregation could never support his care and feeding. The Mormons seem busy according to their parking lot, and the evangelicals too, out there on the road between Altavista and a hamlet called, incredibly, Brother’s Keeper. There appears to be no one else in the building. I knew the number had dwindled but I had not considered the possibility that we would be the only people here.

I see a basket on a stand where you can write down people to pray for and I write my mom and my dad on one slip of paper feeling sentimental, and I put them in the basket, and then I write Ellery Simpson and family and Maryam Khoury on another slip and put that in the basket and I shake my head to disperse the stinging fog generated by this act and also feel guilty that I haven’t thought of Ellery and Maryam for a number of hours. I squat down unclick the Ergo and gently lower Honey to the floor and she takes a few investigative steps and then tears off down the aisle, tripping over her own feet and falling headlong onto the carpeted concrete. She wails and I rush to pick her up and as I’m patting soothing stroking squeezing the hot head and sticky hands I hear the sound of a toilet flushing and a door opening and from beside the kitchen a tall, rather stooped brown-haired man in his forties emerges and visibly starts.