Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [23]
One quiet afternoon near the end of the week, I came back from lunch to find a slight, sandy-haired man arranging flowers in the kitchen. They were mostly roses, but not the tight, scentless kind you buy at the grocery store. These had the ripe, opulent look of roses plucked from an English garden. Their scent drenched the air. Since the man was intent on what he was doing, I did not introduce myself right away. Instead I leaned against the counter and watched him work.
“You’re good at that,” I said after a couple of minutes. He picked up a dusky rose and considered where to put it. When he found the place, he took up a pair of clippers and snipped the stem to the right length, angling it at the end so that it would enter the green florist’s block like an arrow.
“Why don’t I like women priests?” he said, with his back still to me, as he jabbed the stem into place. I took a breath. En garde.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you?”
“I don’t know either,” he said, holding another rose the way a painter holds a paintbrush—straight out from his nose, sighting his next stroke. “I just don’t.”
“I’m Barbara,” I said.
“I know who you are, Mrs. Taylor,” he said. “My name is Bruce.” I cannot remember if he ever turned around, but I do remember taking an instant liking to him. He not only was a genius with flowers, he was also genuine with me. Even if his genuine disapproval was my first experience of this, I knew that I would not have to spend a lot of time trying to guess what Bruce thought about me or anything else. He was a straight shooter, with a quirky nineteenth-century kind of courtesy that made me think he might aim for my shoulder and not my heart.
As I would soon discover, he was among the people who missed Saint Julian most. Because I was so happy to be at Grace-Calvary, I often forgot how many in the congregation were still grieving his death. Instead of lessening their sense of loss, my arrival had deepened it, since the presence of a new rector was the surest reminder that the old rector was really gone. As I paid calls on parishioners those first few weeks, I watched their faces soften as they remembered the Friday nights when Julian would show up, unannounced, to invite himself to supper—and would fall asleep on the couch afterward so that they had to shake him awake when it was time for them to go to bed. I also heard stories about how pissy he could be, especially from the pulpit, where he found ways to work his grievances with various parishioners into his Sunday sermons. “He was the only man I knew who had permanent PMS,” one woman said with unmistakable affection.
Because Julian was a single man in a small town, some of his parishioners were also his best friends. One of them told me how he and Julian used to spend Julian’s day off paddling a canoe down the Chattahoochee River, working their way through a cold six-pack. Another told me how Julian had taken him into the rectory, offering him a free place to live while he pulled his life back together. While such stories gave me even more to admire about Julian, they also increased my dread of following him. I had come to Clarkesville with a husband I really liked, who was my first choice for roommate as well as for company on my nights and days off. I had also come with a resolution to lighten the load on my head by keeping as many birds in the air as I could.
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