Erroll Garner and Dinner at Church

'The next time you put on a dinner, don't just invite your friends and family and rich neighbors. The kind of people who will return the favor. Invite some people who never get invited out. The misfits from the wrong side of the tracks. You'll be---and experience'a blessing. They won't be able to return the favor, but the favor will be returned. Oh---how it will be returned!'

Luke 14:12
'The Message' Translation

The soft summer rain dinged the black plastic lids of the garbage bins in the alley out behind the church as the man with the shopping cart and the battered blue Cubs hat just picked out of the gutter whistled the first two bars of 'Misty' with a resonance that would have made Erroll Garner--who wrote and recorded the song the year that I was born --break into a big old smile.

Almost dinner time. A holy celebration coming.

Erroll Garner would have been 84 this week. Brought back by Clint Eastwood in the 1970's to play his tune in Eastwood's movie 'Play Misty for Me.' Today it's hard to separate Garner's masterpiece from the cheesy lyric added later by somebody else. ('Look at me. . . .I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree . . . .')

Hard to lift out and hear Garner's tune. Unless you are Clint Eastwood, you really know jazz and are world class good at what you do.

Either that . . . or you're in the alley out behind the church. Then the tune comes gentle as the rain and the holy meal just about to start.

In that alley right off a rush hour Damen Avenue, the man parks his shopping cart off the beaten path next to the chain link fence. Two black labs just bursting with life in the yard on the other side of that fence bound up to investigate; barking and sniffing.

Chuck, who is explaining the job to me in the natural rhythm of one born to be a leader, says 'Now it's OK if folks leave their shopping cart here. That cart's their home. Gotta make sure it's safe.'

Chuck and I circle though the alley, back on to Grace, right on Damen, ending up at the front of the church. 'So that's it,' he says. 'Making sure we're a good neighbor.' Back in front of the Damen Avenue door, which leads down to the Open Pantry and the hall where the meal is just about to start, we see the two men waiting, sitting in the stoop of the house next door.

Stepping north across the alley, the golden tones of 'Misty' still reverberating out for all who care to listen, Chuck and I get to do something subversive and radical. We get to say and then motion with our arms 'Hey, come on over here!'

'Hey, come on over here!' A message that run in direct and total opposition to the divisive cry of 'Hey! Move along! The call of 'You are on your own!' that permeates the very fabric of our world.

'Hey, come on over here!' Like an alien shriek, or maybe something soft as the man whistling 'Misty.' A phrase as bizarre as church itself.

Five words to describe what evangelism really means, 'Hey, come on over here.'

Looking straight at one man and then the other, I say, with a smile in the words:
'I'm in charge of standing around. It's my specialty. You guy's want to help''
The two men guffaw. Chuck silently pronounces me trained for the task. He turns and goes back inside to finish preparing the meal.

Chuck had supplied me with a trash bag. So I say to my two fellow sentries, 'Guys, I forgot to tell you that sometimes I just suck at standing around. Don't do it well at all. So I'm gonna walk around and pick up trash. If you see anybody in the alley, or a neighbor's front steps or yard---will you tell them, 'Hey, c'mon over here' You know, make sure they know they're with us''

'You a crazy man!' one of the men smiles.

'Sometimes I am good at standing around. Sometimes I just can't!' I wave, walking away, bending down to pluck an empty potato chip wrapper out from under the rose bushes and stuff it in my litter bag.

The rain picks up just a little. Still light. It sweeps that soft melody of 'Misty' out from the mouth of the alley on to Damen Avenue, and it covers the full east side of the church like a musical offering to all the hymns inside. Then the blended rain and the melody sweeps right back out to the car clogged city street again.

Floating down the parkway on Damen, somehow still fluttering despite the rain and the music --- a napkin---never used. A foot from the ground. I grab it just before it lights on to the wet grass.

And in grabbing the napkin, in the rain, hearing 'Misty'---I am back at my first holy meal.

It's at a Burger King.

Mr. Punnett was presiding. And we were all carefully spreading napkins on the orange and tan plastic seats bolted to the floor. My sister and I, Mrs. Punnett, Spencer Punnett, who was around ten just like me. His brothers Ian and Eric. In later years, I would be proud to be called 'the other Punnett brother.' We had just left the Christian Science Church. There was something that carried on from Church to this meal. Like Sunday school and the meal in the Burger King were all the same thing.

Now back up on Damen in the rain. I pick up the last of the litter; ask my two new friends if they are going to help other folks stand around. They say they will work on it. And I go down into Fellowship Hall to see if there's anything I can do to help before I make my next set of rounds.

Inside, the meal s just about to begin---so I go up and motion my two fellow sentries inside.

Walking through the door and into Fellowship Hall. There is a purpose in this room. The quiet, Lutheran dignity of the work,--- the service--- as Trudi and the others who form the living historical bedrock of this one street corner church in Chicago. That dignity and order washes over one just by walking through the door. I whisper a mispronounced high school German phrase to myself. 'Arbeit macht des lebens suiss.' (I think I remember it meaning, 'Work makes life sweet.') If you asked anybody who was serving here, what they were doing or why they were here, they'd tell you they were serving dinner. That's it. Why even bother with such a question''

To the observer though: 'These people are making history'

And in seeing the order imposed so gently on the room, one senses how that order soothes the troubled souls gathered here for the meal.

Order. Rules. They are not always fun. And they are rarely as gentle as they are in this room with the rain whistling Erroll Garner's 'Misty' outside the windows.

Mr. Punnett had rules. Back during one of the times I lived in the Punnett basement, kept company and kept warm in the most brutal Chicago snows by a friendly throbbing, ancient boiler; I was truly surprised and schooled by one of the rules. It arose in preparing for a visit from Laura.

Laura, a long, pressed blond hair, blue eyed daughter of a Rhode Island expert on arcane forms of venereal disease, was a 'friend.' What that meant, back as the closing days of the 1960's stretched on to the early 1980's, was that you put the word 'friend' in quotes. And then you'd say, 'No, really. We are really just friends.'

I was totally infatuated with her in that way that often keeps young people at the 'friend' stage. Infatuated in that way that should somebody have told me she liked to put baby kittens in sacks and twirl them around her head (which looking back might not have been all that far from the truth) ; but if somebody had told me that, I would have made up a reason why that was OK. So a visit from Laura was a big deal.

And seeing that Punnett's house was small, I volunteered to sleep on the floor. Right next to my bed, which I of course would give to Laura.

That sleeping arrangement of course never happened. Thanks to Mr. Punnett. I remember his greeting Laura though as if she were absolute royalty. All through the visit he was as nice, Mrs. Punnett might say, 'he was 'as nice as pie.' No one could have been nicer. But of course there were rules.

In Fellowship Hall in the basement ......

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