The Key The Pastor Handed Me

The retirement dinner

This September the church announced that Pastor Harmon was retiring. Eighty years old. His wife had passed two years back, and he said it was time to let a younger man carry it.

They planned a dinner in the fellowship hall, a Saturday evening in early October, forty years almost to the week from that first night I let myself in with my bucket, though I did not think of that at the time.

A woman from the women’s circle called me and asked, a little oddly, if I would be sure to come, and to wear something nice, and to let them seat me where they wanted. I thought maybe they wanted me to help serve, the way I always had.

So I put on my good blue dress, the one I had bought for my granddaughter’s graduation, and I drove the two miles I have driven ten thousand times.

The hall was full. Folding chairs down both sides, the long tables I had wiped down a thousand times set with the good tablecloths. Ham and scalloped potatoes and green beans and more pie than a church that size has any business owning.

A woman at the door took my arm and walked me, to my surprise, straight up to the head table, and sat me one chair down from Pastor Harmon himself.

I said, “There has been some mistake, honey, I am not family.” And Pastor Harmon, who heard me, leaned over and said, “There is no mistake, Edith. You sit right there. I have been saving that chair for forty years.”

I did not know what on earth he meant. I thought it was just a kind thing an old man says.

I ate my supper and I visited and I watched person after person stand up and tell a story about what Carl Harmon had meant to them. A baptism. A hospital visit at three in the morning. A marriage he had talked back from the edge.

Then he stood up himself, with a little cedar box in his two hands, and the room went quiet, and he said he had one last story to tell, and that it was one almost no one in the room had ever heard.