Page 40 - MLD Book

RONALD L. BAILEY (CHRISTMAS 1997)
2000
Of course, the big thing to remember about 2000 is that it was the year Ben left to go to Florida (August 27), where they bought a house in Punta Gorda. For me, it was the end of a great 19 years of working with somebody as a colleague who had brains and little ego, contrary to what was to follow! He even picked up on the nametag Lou Hemmers had given me of WBO (World’s Best Organist). I would like to reprint here the farewell letter I wrote to him, for it explains the time we worked together for the good of Calvary as best we could.
I emphasize TOGETHER instead of working FOR.
How do you describe 19 years of close association on one page? You don’t!! Together we have experienced so many things that it defies description to write them all down. To be sure, some should NOT be described, but some could be preserved for eternity.
Some of my memories of our work together have to do with the needy people who have passed through our doors: Frederick, with his lice and crabs, sitting in a chair as they crawled around; Leonard, who graced our Parish Hall so many times; the four men named LARRY, so different and so similar; Lil; June and the summer of 1995; Mr. Doyle, who can recite the alphabet backwards and knows all the states and their capitols; the Mason brothers and their pink slip scams; Ronald Bailey, the insightful poet; carrying in Kentucky Harvest boxes and having the bottoms fall out; Burrel lighting votive candles along the cement wall; delivering food to the blind and very nude John Scott and his seeing eye dog Puppet; Wilma Martin and her art work; the adoption of the Sherifi family; and the smiles of those who have so little to us who have so much.
Other moments include the wedding manageresses; the video man who put his camera on rollers behind the altar rail and loudly unwrapped his new tape; the dog who served as ring bearer; selling pieces of the new stove for $33 and keys for a new piano for $100 each; the jelly and bread sales that financed everything from a microwave to rugs; the fall of the cross while we ate lunch; the funeral where they stole the family jewels out of the trunk of their car parked in front of Calvary; Julian and the zucchini; burying the soup and killing the bush; knocking the macaroni and cheese on the floor right before a Lenten lunch; and your genius at fixing the Calvary toilets.
Then there were the worship experiences: wading through water with boots to fix frozen pipes on Christmas Eve; hearing Iris scream BEHOLD; the Donald Duck mike; The cross falling on Peggy Gaines head; and Melvin crawling into the organ chamber to fix a pedal cipher on Christmas Eve while you sang the Sursum Corda; the hundreds of service planning sessions looking for the PERFECT hymn to go with the PERFECT sermon, realizing that we are never PERFECT.
Also memorable were the strange gifts to the Food Closet: 24 cans of mock turtle soup; tofu from the Amazing Grace Health Foods; Chicken Tonight, that hatched the whole chicken project; swollen black olive and other cans mostly donated from a suburban church that should have known better; bugs in the rice; 50 pound bags of coffee; and gallon cans of hot peppers.
The parting shot: Please, God, make me the kind of person my dog thinks I am!