Purple Violets

An Excerpt

       The loud music coming from the softball field caught his attention. It was the intense rhythmic beat of Gospel music.  

 He entered a hot, dusty tent into an almost circus-like atmosphere, with multitudes of people singing euphoric music while a preacher dressed in black delivered a fiery message on stage.

 He shouted; 

“Can I get an amen?” 

They cried out,  

“Amen, praise God, Hallelujah!” followed with exuberant hand clapping, foot pounding, raucous hymns.

The vast sea of believers seemed agitated as if by a storm. Some were singing, others praying, some crying for mercy in the most piteous accents, while others shouted boisterously.  While witnessing these scenes, a peculiar, strange sensation, such as he had never felt before, came over him. His heart beat fiercely, his knees trembled, and he felt like he must fall to the ground. A strange supernatural power seemed to pervade the entire congregation of disciples. 

With each word of the message and beat of the music, he felt like he had come home. After being baptized, he left with a higher sense of connection to God, no longer feeling he belonged at the altar of the Catholic church. The road to the priesthood had taken a turn and headed him straight to the fellowship in the Baptist church. There was no need to share his epiphany with God; he already knew why he no longer wanted to be Catholic. He wasn’t abandoning God, he just took his worship to another place — a confession he no longer had to make to someone else — something he felt good about.                                                            

Then there were the good times—like waking up to the smell of Maxwell House coffee perking on the stove, lying in bed listening to the church bells ring and messing around on the way home to a hearty breakfast of home fries, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and toast—all while chugging down a quart of ice-cold milk.  

But the best breakfast of all was on Saturday mornings, watching Hoppalong Cassidy, Fury, and Sky King while downing copious glasses of freshly made orange juice along with all the “fried bread dough” he could eat.    

Midway down the street on Sundays, he’d follow the potent aroma of fried meatballs coming from his mother’s kitchen with the feeling that nothing else in the world mattered.

The rest of the day was spent just being lazy, walking with his mother, riding his bike all around town, and working in his uncle’s garden all afternoon; it gave him a chance to work on his sunburn.  Late in the afternoon the three of them would hop into their 49’ Ford convertible for a drive through the rolling hills surrounding the village. Along the way, he’d count the number of farms, cows, fence posts, telephone poles, trees, and out-of-state license plates on passing cars and trucks. He recited the words on every Burma-Shave sign while singing “On Top of Old Smokey” at least 100 times along the way. It was his way of returning to his father’s lack of empathy.  

He quieted down when they pulled into the parking lot of the town’s favorite drive-in, Green Acres, and then went home to lay on the couch and watch great family TV shows.

I wish that everyone could have been there. It was a slice of undeniable and everlasting contentment.

Blessings, dear friends,