The Church Basement Where It All Began

One hundred and eighty-six dollars

Shirley and I did the shopping on the Thursday before, at the grocery store in the next town over, so nobody at ours would ask questions and spoil it.

“Twelve pounds of shaved ham,” she said. “No more. Lutherans eat one bun and say they’re full and then eat a second when nobody’s looking. Twelve covers it.”

The ham was on sale for $5.29 a pound at the deli counter. That came to $63.48.

We got eight dozen soft white buns, bakery day-olds marked down, for $24. Shirley said fresh buns tear when you butter them, and day-olds hold.

Two big jars of dill spears were $11.38. Three bags of pastel butter mints, the soft kind, were $13.47. Shirley checked that they were the soft kind twice.

For the punch, we got four half gallons of lime sherbet, three big bottles of ginger ale, two cans of pineapple juice and two cans of frozen lemonade. That came to $29.63.

For the cake, two boxes of white cake mix, eggs, four tubs of white frosting and a bag of powdered sugar for the frosting roses Bev insisted on making. $44.04.

When the girl at the register told me the total, Shirley wrote it on her pad and underlined it twice. $186.00. She looked at it a while.

“Your brother’s spending that on two plates and change,” she said. Then she patted my arm. “Don’t you say that to him. I’m just saying it to you.”

The guest book

On Friday, the night before, the church ladies and I took over the basement.

Bev and Shirley baked the cake in the church kitchen, two layers, the same as in the picture. Marge Haugen made the frosting roses with a pastry bag, slow, because her hands shake now. Every rose came out a little different. They were perfect.

Pete came straight from the parts counter still in his work shirt. He carried in the folding tables from the storage room and set them up in two long rows, the way they were in the old photos.

Then he climbed up on a folding chair with a roll of tape and a box of gold crepe paper, and he started twisting streamers across the ceiling.

He did not say much. He just held his hand down for the next strip, and I handed it up, and he twisted it and taped it, over and over, down the whole length of that basement.

Around eight o’clock, Arlene Brekke came down the stairs carrying something wrapped in a dish towel.

Arlene is eighty-four. She was the church secretary for twenty-nine years, and she still has a key to the little closet behind the office where the old records are kept.

“I went looking,” she said. “I knew it was in there somewhere.”

She unwrapped the towel. It was a guest book, white, with a little ribbon bookmark and gold edges worn down to the paper. On the front it said Gene and Marlene, October 9, 1976.

I had to sit down on a folding chair.

We opened it on the table under the light. Page after page of names in blue ballpoint and fountain pen. Some of them shaky, some of them in the round school handwriting of teenagers.

Grandma Jensen was on the first page. So was Grandpa. So was Uncle Dale, with a little drawing of a fish next to his name, because he was always fishing.

Bev found her own name halfway down the third page, in her big round eighteen-year-old letters, with a little heart drawn after it. She put her finger on it and did not say anything for a minute.

“I was so proud I got to carry the mints,” she said finally. “I thought I was the most important person at that wedding.”

Shirley found Clarence. Marge found her late husband, Walt, in his careful printing, and she touched the page the way you touch a sleeping baby’s head.

There were blank pages at the back. A lot of them. Arlene had brought a new blue pen and set it down next to the book.

“Fifty years later, same book,” she said. “Seemed a shame to waste the paper.”

Pete got down off his chair and came and looked over my shoulder at all those names. He did not say anything. He just put his big hand on the back of my neck for a second, warm, and then went back up the chair to finish the streamers.