Warmth of a Saturday Night

Air crackled with cold sucking my warmth out through jaw-pounding shivering. Snow squeaking from boot scrunch. Cloud of frozen breath hovering beyond ice-stiffened scarf. All of that before crawling into the back seat of the old black-green '49 Chev. My place is behind my father who is driving, who keeps his window down so he can make the requisite hand signals in turning traffic. Doesn't matter if you are English or French, 40 below is 40 below either way, and wind chill from open window is the bite of the hawk.

It is Saturday night. A bitterly cold night in January of 1952. Darkness comes early at 51° N latitude, so the Sabbath ended early on that day. The marked time of sacredness flipped to its reciprocal time of secular at the precise moment of sunset. Tonight, a church social in the rented old Odd Fellows Hall located somewhere down in the Bridgeland environ on the eastern side of Calgary. An eclectic neighborhood, presumably named after the big truss bridge spanning the Bow River, of rows and rows of Chinese-run greenhouses and the little post-WWII bungalows occupied by newly immigrated Germans. The Bow River, in the eventual spring breakup, will jam with boulders of ice and then flood. Hell to freeze over this working stiff neighborhood.

The wind from my father's open car window whips my face. Eyelashes freezing. Pain flashes across my forehead. My cheeks become paralyzed. My breath short, the burning cold in my chest. Before leaving the house, my father had placed the battery back into the car. It had been taken out and kept inside the backdoor of the house to keep it from freezing solid. He unplugged the flimsy extension cord emanating from the front-door light that powered the block-heater that was supposed to keep the anti-freeze solution in the engine block and radiator in a liquid state to avoid an ice-busting breakdown. There was no hope on earth that the car heater would ever warm up enough to take the chill out of the interior of that old car. Even with the piece of cardboard wired to the front of the radiator to impede the flow of frozen air.

Arrival at the old run-down hall was a rush to warmth. From the outside it had the look of a place of the haunts. If one was inclined to care. So what. I jumped out the back door of the car, stumbled through piles of snow, made it through a frozen-stiff door to the inside, then to be slammed by a blast of hot air in my face. Ditching my coat, mitts, scarf and boots in the pile in the corner of the main room I survey the scene to see which of my friends are already here. The inside of the hall is enclosed with pasty chartreuse green walls and held up with square banged-up support columns. Tinged and cracked linoleum covered floor offset by a low-slung ceiling with stained fiber-board tiles. Even in its drabness it was a-buzz with social interaction. Tonight though, another highlight in a third-grade boy's sheltered existence and a scintillating experience of social development.

Tommy Mabley, Dalles Redgrove, Buddy Triebauser, Willy Siebal, Larry Fox, Freddy How, Bobby Miller, all boys from his world of church school and church were already making nuisances of themselves. We are accumulating in strength, yet all looking the part of orphans in our faded plaid flannel shirts and flannel-lined corduroy pants clinging to the long white underwear clinging to pale white skin beneath. We take off our shoes to better be able to run and slide. Linoleum floor tinges and cracks not impeding any coefficient of friction with hole-infused wool socks.

The fury of frenzy in the formation of festivities. The 'ladies' setting out the platters of sandwiches, dishes of olives, glazed crocks of macaroni and cheese, baskets of potato chips, bowls of macaroni salad, boxes of cookies, plates of pie, sheets of cake. A big bowl of punch. Piles of napkins. Little wooden flat forks and spoons. Plastic to show up a few years later.

Old men in drab shirts with pants held up by braces hovering in one corner, ruminating of the good old days. Young men decked out in a little splash of color hanging out together in another corner, yearning for better days to come. The old women sitting along the wall, covered mostly in plain black, or gray. The row of monotony broken by the two or three in tattered poke-a-doted dress . Each old soul encased within a tightly drawn shawl. Each sitting manly, with knees apart, hose rolled down to ankles, gout swollen joints forced into scruffed-up old granny shoes. The little girls. They simply didn't exist.

Some of us boys had heard a good one in church earlier in the day, and we were simply dying to try it out on one of the elders of the church. You know, those guys who were omniscient with all things Holy Book. Tommy Mabley's father was cornered and the inquisition begun.

"How come Moses didn't take any bees into the ark?" I excitedly challenged him. We had him circled, and we were all dancing back and forth from one foot to the other like we all had to pee or something.

"Well, I'm certain Moses did take bees into the ark," Tommy's father explained patiently to this obviously misguided bunch of prepubescents.

"No, no. He didn't. He really, really didn't," another piped in.

"Well, of course he did. We wouldn't have any bees today if he hadn't taken them into the ark to keep them from being destroyed in the flood." His patience was enduring. He had so much to teach. He had 5 kids.

The giggling. "No he didn't! It was Noah that took the bees into the ark." More giggling.

And Mr. Mabley, with his short hair and wire-rim glasses knew that he had just been had. And giggled too.

Somebody would be roped into being the master of ceremonies. The cold bitterness of January was rebuffed with the warmth of shared fellowship in a congregation of peculiar people. The self-made entertainment commenced. Action games. A blindfolded woman with a heavy stuffed pillow trying to knock off the man straddling the saw horse. Crowd yelling to her where and when to swing. Then the musical chairs with Tom Smith pounding out old melodies from "Everybody's Favorites" on the honky-tonk piano . The parlor game Jacob and Rachel where everybody but blindfolded "Jacob" and his object of desire "Rachel" form a circle, and poor Jacob repeatedly calls out "Rachel, where art thou?" and in ventriloquist disguise she answers back "Here I am Jacob" and he then gropes to find her. A few rounds of that is followed by the pseudo sinning. That being, of course, the marching. Lots and lots of marching. The lines and columns, the weaving back and forth, the arches, the uniformity interspersed with individuality. The singularity of form and pattern punctuated with the abrupt perpendicular. Dancing, even though done in the Bible, was but the vertical manifestation of horizontal evil and so was totally forbidden. Marching was the sanitized surrogate for sin. One wonders how any of us were conceived.

An interlude for eating. Someone pontificated with the blessing. Little boys scrambling to be first in line. A smorgasbord of foods he would never get at home. Foods from other little boy's mothers. Like Tommy Mabley and the simple awesomeness of his mother's salmon sandwiches. On white bread no less. I never would get white bread at home. Only brown bread, which years later he would discover was "wheat" bread as if white bread was made from methyl-cellulose or something . . . aka wood fiber, an additive to Wonderbread to boost its fiber content that simply swelled into a public relations nightmare for the baking company. And of course, that salmon being the only "flesh" there, a mother who dared to defy the hypocrisy of the vegetarian dogma of the church. Eating salmon meant that one had to die before Jesus would come. Only those who had never tasted flesh could be translated at the second coming. No one in that room that night was in any danger of being translated. Roasted flesh of turkey and vulcanized flesh of beef graced the tables of at least the ceremonial feasts of the annual cycle of seasons.

Potato salad, hot baked beans, cottage cheese, some of which was homemade and damn good, deviled eggs. Oh! The deviled eggs. And olives. Pitted olives. One for each digit of a little boy's hands. Cup cakes, apple cobbler, crumbly cookies. Punch with ice cream and gingerale. Hot chocolate made with real Fry's cocoa and sugar and canned milk and hot water. With luck, some little marshmallows, although it was firmly believed that they contained pig fat. Forbidden.

Chairs were now scooted out from the periphery and the focus now on the little stage. The regulars of local talent succumbing to the begging and pleading for their pitiful renditions. Buddy Triebauser and Willy Siebal with their trombone duet. A trumpet trio with Lloyd Fisher and his gang. Melvena Hill interrupting the festivities with her version of "Rock of Ages." then followed by, with horrors for everyone, my father, crooning , "The Strawberry Roan." Some old lady recited a reading about a soldier lost in love. Henry Welch, who was at least 7 feet tall, pantomimed a man with fleas at the bus stop. A half-dozen little boys sitting on the floor in front of the first row of chairs started to itch.

Jim Dalke always played his home-made Hawaiian electric guitar, the preacher's wife her marimba. Mr. Selslie his cello, Glenn Anderson the saw, to be joined by Harry Rembolt with his wash-tub bass to add a sense of rhythm.

When he had had enough, old Tom Smith, the head elder of the church and a lawyer of some dubious repute for an oil company, would mount the platform, swirl the seat of the piano stool that was supported by four greenish-glass eagle claws , so as to get the height just right. He perched himself on it, raised his arms, and then crashed into "God Save the King." Where upon we all rose to attention and rendered our loyalty to the head of our secular government, but not of our church. The evening was now officially over.

Tired little boys, stumbling through a pile of coats and hats and muffins and mittens and shoes and boots and scarves. Mothers bundling up babies. Old ladies struggling with tattered coats. Middle-aged ladies packing away the refuse from the victual table. Young men out in the parking lot trying to coax frozen batteries back into life and thereby infuse the inky frozen night with exhausted particles of frozen internal-combusted metabolic water.

I was back into the back seat of the car. Now, it was very late on a Saturday night. Streets nearly deserted. No need to keep the window down to allow for hand signals. Sitting there, staring through the little oval glued to the outside of the car window to supposedly keep Jack Frost from painting those gorgeous patterns across the entire window, my teeth chattering like a battery of compressed-air hammers.

The drive home was silent. Mother is mad about the Strawberry Roan. The outside was crisp and still. The sky punctuated as a pin cushion peeping into a brilliant vastness beyond the dome covering the earth. Some place up there beyond Orion, he would go to heaven. That is, if he had no sin. But he could hardly even find Orion, or the Big Dipper, or Cassiopeia, or the Pleiades, all things he learned about in 3rd grade science. Couldn't find them because they were hiding in plain sight. That was the problem. There was so many billions of other things strutting their brilliance out there that those ancient formations were simply obscured. Then to say nothing of the intermittent waves of green and purple and blue of the Northern Lights, dancing clear across the panorama of the northern sky ahead, as they headed northward back home.

The house was frigid. Even when the old gas-fired furnace worked, all of the heat vents were at ceiling height. The floor was glacial. My bed was frozen. Long-johns exchanged for flannel pajamas. No bed-time story tonight. I force myself to crack apart the flannel sheets. I know in time, I will produce a small pocket of heat. For now, my feet throb with cold. The warmth in my heart, eventually, will change that.

The Refectory Manager