An old story, "Anna"

If my son, here referred to as three years old, is today well into his forties, the story I'm telling is now more than forty years old, originally published in a magazine that, by my direction, gave the author a made-up name. Why? Because, back then, I was afraid of how the individuals might react, given my going public with their lives. It's a difficult line writers walk when writing stories which "use" characters and situations others might recognize, and I was aware of that with "Anna," because here those characters attended the same church I did. So I hid, or tried to.

But here's the story.

*~*~*~*~*~*  

Anna is out of intensive care now, and I guess that's why I'm saying this. Because it strikes me-now that she has wrestled through a fight with her heart-it strikes me that we are far too good at eulogies. Nice things are always easy to say after the funeral. But today Anna came out of intensive care.

Anna is an organist in our church--self-taught for the most part--and a Sunday school teacher for three or four generations probably. When I was a boy, we feared Anna because her grim face wore no emotion; her lips were locked together in a twist that was neither smile nor frown. We read it as perpetual disgust.

Sunday school programs brought out the worst in her. A hundred kids with lit fuses would shoot around the church sanctuary during practice the night before. "You fourth graders, act your age!"

She would always snap at us. We were sure she had no loving voice in her. When she'd tum to the fifth graders, someone would mimic her for sure. Years later I discovered that Anna created those annual programs.

Anna never married. In a church of families, even kids don't quite know how to take women who don't marry. They're different, and a boy starts recognizing such things about the same time he starts reading the script writing carved into the Communion table at the front of the church he's attended for ten years. Suddenly, it's just there. Fourth-grade boys just figured a woman like

Anna--sour Anna--couldn't get a man. Meanwhile, another Christmas program would come and go.

Halfway through adolescent rebellion, I thought Anna was an icon of the staid, traditional, immovable church of my youth. Fashions arrived and left, but Anna's hair looked forever the same, as if she'd surrendered to being out of time. I swore that the older she grew the slower she played organ, until even the bouncy hymns poked along like the old psalms. And always you'd see the expressionless face up there, lighted by the soft glow of organ light. She chewed gum, not vigorously but quickly, nervously, when she played.

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More tomorrow