Broken Eggs

The year was 1979, deep summer in Alabama.  It was lightening bug weather and the rolling lawns of the homes along Highland Avenue looked photo-shopped green. Ratchety sprinklers filled the air with their rat-a-tat-tat sounds. Mimosa trees opened their pink skirts and closed them again.  Magnolias left their lemon scent on your nose long after you moved in for a deep sniff.  I was wearing a nice pink suit with a striped silk blouse, dolman sleeves and tiny cuffs.  The skirt swept nearly to my ankles and the jacket was cut asymmetrically.

            The women of St. Mary’s on the Highland Episcopal Church had invited me to tea.  They wanted to take a look at me.  I was, after all, getting ready to enter the seminary and they were not at all sure about it.  So I was summoned.  I don’t mean to imply that it was a particularly hostile audience.  It wasn’t.  It was a curious one. 

            In the reception room large vases of flowers sat on the mantle and the serving table.  The silver service was polished and the cut glass punch bowl had an ice ring with raspberries and mint frozen in it.  Lemon squares and pecan tassies filled silver trays.  Cucumber, cream cheese and olive and pimiento cheese finger sandwiches lay under a damp towel that was whisked off only when the trays were passed.  The women all wore their Sunday dresses.  No hats or gloves that I recall, but you could tell that some of the women pondered that decision hard before they came….phone calls back and forth…”What about gloves?” “I don’t think so.  She’s so young she probably doesn’t even own a decent pair of gloves.” (I, by the way, did too own a decent pair of gloves back then.)

            The bishop was there and everyone deferred to him sweetly.  He greeted each woman with a warm two-handed clasp.  I paddled in his wake as he introduced me to first this one and then the next.  He prayed over our refreshments and for the next hour I mingled.  Mingling is one of the things at which I am totally inept; an occupational deficit to be sure.  But I girded up my loins and proceeded to be as charming and respectful as I could possibly be. I was both wildly uncomfortable and deliriously joyful.

            After the mingling time, the bishop asked me to say a few words about my sense of call and why I was pursuing the priesthood.  So I did.  It all started, I told them, with my very first memory.

            The memory goes back to my grandmother’s funeral.  In those days in south Alabama, people were often buried from the home.  Such was the case with my grandmother.  She and my grandfather bought the home on College Street when they were first married in 1903.  Built in 1855 it is a wonderful old home with high ceilings and heart pine floors.  It is the home in which my father was born and in which he died 88 years later.  But I get ahead of myself.

            Somehow the decision was made that I was too young to stay home for the funeral so I was taken across the street to my cousins’ house to play with their new electric train set. 

            Here is where my memory comes in.  Just after crossing the street, I turned to look back at the house.  I remember the mourners coming up the sidewalk and across the porch to the open front door.  Both the men and women wore black suits and hats.  A few had plates of tomatoes or deviled eggs.  I watched them for a moment as they entered the house.  Then suddenly I saw an indescribable bright golden aura around the house.   I knew instantly that it was God and my journey toward ministry began right then. 

            I went on to tell them other moments that had led me to be there in a pink suit sipping punch on a Tuesday afternoon.  They regarded me quizzically.  Asked only a few of the questions so obvious on their faces and then began to collect their handbags and cake plates to go on with their summer lives.

            As I stood at the door and thanked each woman for attending, one grabbed my hand and would not let it go.  She was small and wiry.  Her nubby suit smelled faintly of closet and her salt and pepper hair was wound in tight curls all over her head.  Her eyes were a nearly invisible blue.  They looked like fire in ice, like an opal in the right light.  “Eugenia,” she said.  “Don’t blow it.  All our eggs are in your basket.”  It took my breath away. I gasped, audibly I think, and took a frantic breath like the way it is when the door closes one of those machines for lung testing.  “I’ll do my best,” I said, thinly, afraid.

            For years I dreamed of her, felt the weight of those words, the weight of ‘firsts’.  I tried so hard to be the best at everything.  I wondered what it would take to ‘not blow it.’  I wondered what the ‘it’ was that I had been so prophetically ordered not to blow.  I got an ulcer.  I changed my hair. I hid.

            As it turned out, no matter how hard I tried to live up to a those hope-filled expectations of me, no matter how hard I tried to juggle that basket, I rather spectacularly broke all the eggs in it eventually.  A broken marriage, a feminist bent.  There were lots of reasons, but suffice it to say the Episcopal Church and I disappointed each other and moved on.   I found my happy tribe among the Presbyterians…a stalwart sticky fingered lot who for thirty years have sweetly picked out the broken eggshells of my life’s messes and made a yummy omelet of it all. 

            Theologians talk about the upward fall.  In short that seems to mean that it was a great and wonderful thing that Adam and Eve screwed up so badly because that meant we got Jesus.  I cling to that.  My life has been one wonderful and ragged upward fall, each crashing moment leading to an unexpected grace that could have arrived no other way.  Broken egg by broken egg.