stacks of a library, offers a pleasure not to be had from those pinpoint internet searches: stumbling across an utterly unrelated, but fascinating, entry. In the column across from “Beards, Clerical,” I saw an entry titled “Beating the Bounds,” so I read that instead.
Beating the bounds was an old early summer ceremony in medieval England, when prayers would be offered for the harvest. The annual procession would trace the boundaries of the parish, beating them with willow rods or—and this is the fun part—bumping the boys of the parish on the ground at the boundary. (The article says the boys were “also beaten.” Intriguingly, it ends by noting a modern—I have the 1978 edition—revival. I thought this was a typical religious blend of reasonable purpose and thinly disguised sadism, so familiar to me from my Roman Catholic youth.)
In our time and place, religious division and variety make the idea of firm parish boundaries impossible. The automobile has also done its part in scrambling them. Driving from one of the small churches we served to the other on Sunday morning, we would pass several other churches and many other drivers traveling past our churches to reach theirs.
Still, in a small town, it’s easy to think of that town as the rough, if porous, boundary of the parish. I reflected, after reading that article, that in any given week I did my own version of the ceremony.
Looking back on my service, I consider this one of the greatest pieces of luck I had: that I could do so much of what I had to do on foot, some of it on dirt roads leading to the grassy paths of small cottages hidden by trees. On quiet days, I could imagine I might bump into Thomas Hardy or Anthony Trollope. I had acquired, over the years, a collection of stout, gnarled walking sticks, which helped complete my fantasy.
I couldn’t exactly circumnavigate the towns we lived in, because they were bounded by rivers, planted fields, thick woods, and barbed wire. But, in both of them, I could walk out to the edge and back in every direction, all in an easy half-day.
Our first town was smaller and dropped off quickly into farms. The land was flat there and a lot of my walking was on gravel roads. Our second town was in a deep valley and you had to go up a fairly steep grade whichever side you walked out. It was also more built-up and had sidewalks as well as paved roads. To both the east and west, there were cemeteries. (In our first parish, the cemetery was across the street from the parsonage. It was the first thing I saw when I looked out the window in the morning.)
I would typically do my visiting in the afternoons. I loved walking along with my home communion kit and my Occasional Services book in my shoulder bag, whistling and twirling my walking stick. People would always ask me where I left my car. But once an old fellow I met said, “Doing your parish rounds, eh?” and I was ridiculously pleased to be able to say, “I am.”
But my most frequent walk was in the morning, to the post office to get the mail. There was a rural mail carrier for the farms, but most people in town rented a box. This was a great meeting place, somewhere to hear the news and take the measure of current opinion, find out why the sirens went off last night, and finally bump into someone you’d been trying to contact for days. Depending on the character of the postmaster, she (or, less often, he) could be very much the ringmaster of this arena, having final judgment on matters of fact and practicality. Depending, again, on the postmaster, I could sometimes spend an hour at the desk, catching up on current events or filling in the history of local feuds.
I tended not to vary my path, and I couldn’t have varied it much. So my walk there was almost an extension of my office hours: people knew when I’d be passing by, and it was a good way to contact me if you didn’t want people to wonder what you were doing at the church. It wasn’t odd for me to spend an hour on the half-mile walk.
I would pass the jumbled life of the old small towns: houses, welding shops that still rang with the blacksmith’s hammer, a grocery store, a body shop, a gas station. I could just glimpse the closest farms and watch the plowing or harvesting. In our second parish, if I walked far enough out of town, I could see the plowing being done with horses, since we had a growing Amish community around us.
My walk in our second parish took me past a small branch of the regional library system, housed in an old building with the town museum. (Where we first served, the nearest library was fifteen miles away, the nearest decent library was fifty miles away, and the bookmobile stopped every three weeks for about forty-five minutes.) I could continue up the hill out of town and drop in on the staff at the high school.
The big difference in my walks was that, in our first parish, the parsonage was next to the church, so my walk was to the post office and back, while, in our second parish, the parsonage was a half-mile from the church, so I continued on after my post-office visit to the church office. I had stops along the way in each town, about mid-journey, very important for my survival when the temperature was below zero and the wind was howling, always important for my spirit because I found the most pleasant people there and they always lifted my heart.
In our first parish, it was the gas station, run for a minimal profit by a couple named Danny and Patty. Stopping one day, I heard classical music on the radio behind the counter and I knew I’d found some friends. Danny could laugh and Patty could fume at almost anything. Knowing them was like watching a great comedy team. But they were both lively, funny, interested in music, books, and movies, and—I hope—as pleased as I was to find someone else who was.
When I lingered there, I would often bump into one of our substitute organists, Judy, the daughter of one of the matriarchs of the town (whom I thought of as the Queen of Hearts). Judy was a survivor of one of the more radical versions of the ’sixties and would drift into town and out of town on no one’s wavelength but her own. My service there overlapped with one of her longer stays. She was an excellent keyboard player and, oddly enough, loved the most elaborate liturgies we used, because they reminded her of Native American ceremonies she’d seen. She dabbled in natural medicine and was always trying to cure me of problems that usually sounded more like hers than mine. She had a deep, explosive, sexy laugh and, sometimes, I’d walk her home and we’d share stories about our youth. It was, I thought, like a dialogue between Passion and Sanity. Once I impressed her by adjusting the idle on her VW bus.
In our second parish, it was the bank, staffed by a group of women I thought of collectively as the Bank Babes. One of them, Mel, was a member of the church we served and the other two, Ginny and Faith, were members of the Methodist church just across the street with which we shared Lenten services. Not only were these women unfailingly pleasant, happily talkative, and very pretty, but all three were also dog- owners and -lovers. As our children were gone by this time, we often needed people to tend to our dog when we were at all-day meetings, two-day church conventions, or late events in the Twin Cities. This was another piece of good luck: finding people I could trust absolutely, without hesitation.
I was happy to leave our second parish: they made it easy to go. But I almost broke down, the day we left, when I went to say goodbye to the Bank Babes.
There were many people I encountered on these walks, regularly, through the years: the jolly woman who owned the grocery store, who would trade mystery novel recommendations with me; the ex-merchant marine seaman, who still swayed as he walked and ran a kind of men’s coffee hour that got out just about when I hit the post-office corner; the mercurial Roman Catholic woman who asked me to help her design a tattoo of the Holy Trinity to put on her left breast; my friend Rick, often congregational president, always a wise leader in church and community, who taught history in high school and could burn an hour or more with me dissecting the political scene.
It was always a good way to start the day.
About a year after we retired, we served as interim pastors in a new church built out in the country. We had to drive everywhere. There was nowhere to walk, no one to meet casually. During the week, I’d stare out the window at
