Churchgoing

For a half-Jewish kid, I have spent a lot of time in churches.

One of my earliest memories is being in an old country church with my mother. It must have been hot - all the windows were open and everyone was fanning themselves with cardboard fans that had Biblical verses and pictures on them.

Some time later, my father asserted his prerogative as paterfamilias and I started going to Sunday School at the West End Synagogue. That went on for several years. When I was nine, I started going to Hebrew School there, two afternoons a week, after school. The purpose of this was to prepare me for Bar Mitzvah. The whole year before my thirteenth birthday I spent memorizing a long passage from the Torah in Hebrew. And I had to learn how to chant it, as well, in the same way that Cantor Glusman would sing it. So I had to memorize the chanting, too. I learned it by repeating the lines over and over again. Cantor Glusman taught me the chanting, one phrase at a time, until I could do the whole thing perfectly. I also had to memorize a speech, written for me by Rabbi Hertzberg.

At my Bar Mitzvah ceremony, I did the Hebrew chanting part fine, but I forgot the last line of the speech. I was mortified. I looked over at Rabbi Hertzberg, but he didn't know. Finally, I mumbled something under my breath and sat down.

Later at the reception, an old man took me aside and said, "Don't worry - last year, Rabbi Hertzberg, himself, forgot what he was going to say."

By tradition, everybody congratulated me for becoming a man. I've always respected my Jewish heritage, but, afterward, I decided that being a man meant making your own decisions. So I stopped going to Synagogue.

For a while, I went to the Woodmont Christian Church at Woodmont and Hillsboro Road, but I don't remember why. I liked the church and I liked the steeple, but I don't remember any of the people I met there. Across the street, the Woodmont Baptist Church was a complete mystery to me. I didn't know what went on in there.

Betty went to Second Presbyterian Church on Belmont. So, when we hooked up, I started going there with her. I went there for five years, until we got married and moved away.

I liked the church building at Second. It was small, but it looked just the way you'd want a church to look. I liked the people, too. Mr. Bittinger was the minister and Mary Bittinger was his wife. She had a Ph.D. in religious history, but, apparently, it was something you didn't talk about much in church. Mr. Bittinger had a more emotional approach to religion. He would stand in the pulpit and stare out into the air above the congregation until something welled up in him that he couldn't suppress. It was hard not to be affected by the full-of-grace look that would come over his face as the words rolled out, so fast, at times, that he seemed to be talking like a little child.

I liked Mr. Bittinger's sermons for the way they made me feel. I also enjoyed the choir, featuring the purest of Irish tenors, Ross Mandigo.

Among the congregation, first and foremost for their spiritual dedication, were Oscar and Henrietta Nelson, medical missionaries to Africa. I remember Mrs. Nelson for the loudness of her singing. Then there was, although I don't remember seeing him in church, Dr. Otis Graham, the head of the Monroe Harding Orphanage, and father of Otis, Jr., Fred and Hugh. All the Monroe Harding children, of course, went to Second Presbyterian.

And so many others - Finleys, Braceys, Geers, Stearns. Rick Drewry and Edward Lyman went to Second Presbyterian with their families.

But the real light of the congregation, the one person who seemed to represent bright hope to everyone, was Betty's mother. Ruth Harris had a light around her. She made everyone happy by just being there. Betty idolized her mother. And so did I.

Betty and I got married at Second Presbyterian and it was just the right size. We had a small wedding with just the families, but they filled the church. A couple of my father's sisters - my aunts - came, and I believe they had never been in a Christian church before. I remember that they seemed uneasy and nervous about being there, as though they expected Yahweh to strike them down at any second.

After the wedding, we drove off for California and never came back to live in Nashville again. A few years ago, Second Presbyterian Church burned beyond repair. We heard about it when it happened and then we heard that the church would be re-built.

A couple of years ago, we had occasion to visit Second Presbyterian again, where the new congregation had raised a fine, new building. We marveled at the sight of it, but realized that they had not re-built the church at all. They had built another church there, on the spot where the old one used to be. And it suited them just fine.

A Child's Christmas in Nashville

It's well regarded that Christmas, as we Americans practice it, is a special time for children. Children see the magical aspect of everything, but especially Christmas.

One of the things that I try to do, each year, is to recover the ways I felt as a child in Nashville, during the Christmas season. I know now that I imbued the things I saw with magical qualities back then, but at the time I thought that the magic was in the things.

The feeling of Christmas started for me early in the fall, when the weather became chilly and the winds blew the leaves off the trees. At school, we kept our minds off the darkening days outside by reading stories and drawing pictures about, first, Halloween, then Thanksgiving, and finally Christmas.

We got ideas by reading Play Mate magazine which was written, each month, by Esther Cooper and illustrated by Fern Bisel Peat. I was especially taken with "A Tale of Peter Pig", a story written in rhyme, each time, by Cooper about some pigly adventure, in keeping with the season. Every installment began in the same way: "Now, Peter Pig decided..." At Christmas, there were adventures with snow and sharing winter cheer and singing carols.

Nowadays, we hear Christmas carols sung constantly at Christmastime, but in school we sang them. The song that, for some reason, always takes me back to those times is this one:

Up on the rooftop,
Click, click, click!
Down through the chimney
With good Saint Nick!

I remember, once, during these early days, my father took me to a barber shop on West End Avenue on Christmas Eve. It was around 6 o'clock, but already dark outside, where wisps of snow were threatening to become something more.

I don't remember whether I got a haircut, or my father did, but there was a radio playing behind the barber, and at one point the program was interrupted by an announcement that Santa Claus had been sighted, making his way toward Nashville. Both the barber and my father made a big deal out of that with me. At the time, I was old enough to be skeptical about Santa Claus, but young enough to be impressed that the news was coming over the radio. When we left the shop, I thought that it was awfully cold out to be riding a sleigh through the air, but at Christmas, the idea was exciting.

Christmastime, then, was a time for going out, despite the cold. A special treat was going downtown to look in the windows of the department stores. We would always look in the window of the Krystal on Church Street to see the doughnuts coming out of the doughnut machine.

Sometimes, we would end up eating at the Krystal, but in those years when the Spirit of Christmas Present had smiled on our family, we would go around on Union to the B&W for a treat. We would walk down the cafeteria line, salivating like Cratchits, before the bounty of food that was laid out. There were several kinds of everything! I always got the fried haddock, which I covered with ketchup.

After such a fine repast, we would once again brave the chilly winds outside, but not without stopping at the window of the B.H. Stief Jewelry company. At Christmas, and at no other time, there were the most marvelous automatons on display in B.H. Stief's windows. Mechanical figures of firemen or farmers, or what not (there was a new display every year), driven by some invisible, but intelligent force to put out the fire or milk the cow, or what not.

In the eighth grade, we put on the Christmas Pageant and tried out, in our own declaiming, the great cadences of Luke:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night...

And Carolyn Suter played the Twelfth Street Rag on the piano.

And I have a memory of being on the fourth floor of Loveman's with my mother, near Christmas, when the elevator door opened and a band of carolers stepped out, singing "Adeste Fideles" for everyone there.

And on our televisions, we watched "Amahl and the Night Visitors."

And one night, we saw Buzz Evans sing "O Holy Night" on TV.

Christmas was everywhere celebrated and observed, then. Now, it isn't. It's getting hard, even, to find Scrooge during this season. We have, instead, "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" and "A Christmas Story", and we may think there's no magic in them. And we may feel sorry for our children. But our children continue to do what children always do. They put the magic in.