4th of July--Part One

Pastor Randall Nathan, (Retard), didn't get much sleep last night, or much peace this morning.

He walked over to The Methodist just before the sun went down, to prepare himself for preaching this morning, filling in for Pastor Patty while she is back in Nebraska at her 20-year high school class reunion. He doesn't prepare sermons; he prepares himself. He just sits in the pews, moving around from place to place in the sanctuary, getting a feel for what it will be like for the people sitting in those spots the next morning.

He sings as he sits, sings the hymns that the congregation will sing the next morning. As he completed "This Is My Father's World," the crow bats arrived. No one knows exactly what kind of bats they are, but they are as big as crows, so everyone calls them crow bats. They live in an abandoned electron mine. The assumption is that they were regular bats whose ions were reversed by exposure to electron dust. [The same thing happened to the fax machine at the Elaine Fowler Palencia Public Library when Olaf Rodriguez, the janitor, refused to use Dust-Be-Gone on his cloth, because he owns stock in Dust-No-More, and everyone knows DNM doesn't work on electrons the way DBG does.]

At least the crow bats used to live in the abandoned electron mine. Last night, though, they came down into the sanctuary from the belfry of The Methodist, and sat on the backs of the pews, and swayed in rhythm as Pastor Nathan sang the hymns. When he sang the last "Amen," the bats lifted up into the dark recesses above. Had they moved permanently to The Methodist? All night long, he had dreams of large bats grabbing him by the hair and dragging him out of the pulpit. He was delighted when he awoke and realized that couldn't happen, since he has no hair, but still, he did not sleep well.

Then this morning Randall's neighbor in the house across the alley started mowing his yard at 7:30. It didn't interrupt his sleep; Randall was up already. But it did interrupt his soul. He was sitting on his back deck, enjoying the quiet, getting his soul ready for preaching, and suddenly the raucous sound of a mower wreaked havoc on the only quiet morning of the week. By the time the worship service started, his soul was climbing a prickly tree.

There was no sign of the bats when he went early to the church building this morning, but when the worship service started, he went dumb as the congregation started into "This Is My Father's World." What if the bats came again? But they didn't. It occurred to him that perhaps it was not the singing but his particular voice that summoned the bats, so he kept quiet during the singing. He expected all batdom to break forth when he started preaching, but no bats appeared, and only an occasional yawn from the pews. So it wasn't his voice, either. Maybe they came out only after sun down.

Or maybe not... [To be Continued]