Читать книгу Safety Harbor - Chuck Cooper - Страница 8

Stewart Grenville went to Portland every Tuesday for therapy. It was an ultimatum by his wife, Katye, who had set it as one of the terms for the continuation of their marriage. As a priest in the Church of Anglican Piety, because of his recent choices, staying in the church as active clergy had not been an option.

“You are a good man, Stewart,” the Bishop had told him. “I hope, for your sake and others, that you get to the source of this disappointing behavior. You are grounded until all of this is sorted out.”

He had come to Safety Harbor with Katye when she had taken the job at the community college.

Stewart’s father had been a grocer in the small town of Smith Springs, Nebraska. His mother reared three children while her husband worked, day and night, to feed the family. It was an area deprived of culture and knowledge of the world beyond corn and bean prices and whether the Smith Springs Spartans were having a winning year.

As he grew older. he realized that their life at the Holy Spirit Baptized Church amounted to a good amount of incongruity and unintended outcomes. It was too hard to keep all the rules, riddled with pietistic hang-ups.

At the holy roller church, as people in town called it, you got married early. Normal dating wasn’t allowed because kids could get in trouble if they went to dances or football games or anything out of town. This meant that the church offspring often did get in trouble, as they put it then. After all, what they could do together on a date was so limited that it left them way too much time.

As a result, nature took its course and there were many young parents in the congregation. Fortunately, there was no infant baptism, so no one was faced with a public event featuring parents who had been married for fewer than nine months, presenting a child for baptism, a scandal in that time. A considerable number of babies seemed to come early! But, since marriage was always within the congregation, it was just one big family, literally. Church secrets were family secrets and vice versa.

The sting of parental disapproval over his not going on to the religious college of their choice was soon soothed by the wonderful new world of Saint Gustavus Adolphus College. There, he could think his own thoughts and meet people for whom conversation about ideas was stimulating. Often, their discussions were lubricated by a glass of wine or a mug of beer.

Still, he felt himself to be a bit of a slug and an anomaly. Others seemed to have a kind of understanding of the way the world is, as if they knew a secret about that life he did not know. It was as if someone had taken something out of him earlier that was precious, had not given it back, and he didn’t know where to find it.

As he reflected on those days, his older model Volvo made its way up over the Coast Range. Coming down out of the gentle mountains, the highway now widened into four lanes and the pent-up mountain traffic came spouting and rushing from behind as if a bottle of soda had been shaken and the cap removed.

He made his way through Newberg and the quaint little town of Dundee. He rounded the curve into Tigard where he took Highway 99 to I-5 North to Portland. Dr. Fred’s office was in the Pearl District, a renovated area of old warehouses and abandoned breweries that had been converted into upscale shops, restaurants, professional offices, and condominiums.

Today, as usual, they would discuss some nuance of how out of place he felt in the world and how he could ease that pain without hurting others as he had in the past.