A scent of hot dust, and some recollections are triggered. A sense memory that I’ve been meaning to write up for a while.
When I lived with my grandparents in Piqua, Ohio, in the mid 1960s, the Piqua Baptist Church sat at the northwest corner of Broadway and Greene Street. Dark, deep maroon-colored brick. Side entrance on Greene, which is where I usually entered. A Congregationalist church catercorner (no one could explain what was different about their faith), and another church (Catholic? Methodist?) up the block.
My grandparents were members, and one of my grandfather’s stewardship roles was non-resident caretaker of the facility. I think he preferred the term “custodian,” but frankly a lot of the work was janitorial. He was notorious for making the building a priority over everything else in his life; we had a tiff at my college graduation because he was anxious to get back home to check on the church. My grandmother helped him in his caretaking duties, and while I lived with them, I did, too. It was a painless way to earn my allowance.
Mostly what I did was to empty wastebaskets once a week. So I would make a circuit through the building, stopping in all the Sunday school rooms, the minister’s office, all around. Trash containers rank with stale lilies, used tissues, hardened chewing gum. The classrooms were arranged in a gallery along three sides of the basement multi-purpose room, with a kitchen at the other end. Walls faced with painted board and batten paneling. For the brief period of time that I was in Boy Scouts, our troop meetings were here. Stairways up to the rest of the church, and at the far end, a short flight to the furnace room, a convenient short cut back to the rest of the building.
The building was heated with a coal-fired furnace (hence my grandfather’s frequent trips to check on things). The furnace room was dark, but neither frightening nor particularly cosy. Just black dusty. From time to time, we all have the dream of moving through a familiar building, passing through rooms we’ve never seen before; for me, that dream usually begins in the church furnace room, where back in a corner is a door I’ve never seen before, that leads to someplace behind the baptistry, and on.
Back upstairs, facing the altar from the sanctuary, the baptistry was at the right, the minister’s office off left. The choir stood behind the altar. I don’t remember an organ, but there must have been one. Behind, and on the second story, were two rooms open to the sanctuary. I believe these were rooms set aside for mothers with infants, so that they could participate as much as possible without neglecting their babies. In one of these upper rooms I once found a booklet of devotions. The authors/editors were apparently holdouts from the Chicago Tribune’s spelling modernization plan, because each passage ended with a thot to be pondered.
Once I was finished with my chores, I would sit in the office, at the minister’s desk, and read whatever was available. Generally the calendars and addresses preserved under the glass desktop. I would play solitaire—that is, until my grandmother got wind of this. She didn’t actually call it “the Devil’s picture book,” but she made her feelings clear. (My grandfather, who would sometimes take me to play pool at his lodge, didn’t seem to mind.)
Each week my grandparents would dust the pews with ratty gray rags and fragrant polish. Once, I helped with a special project. In this church, communion wine was taken in individual glasses, in the pews. There were racks for the used glasses in the pew backs, on either side of the hymnal racks. I seem to recall three holes per rack. It seems that the clatter of all those cordial glasses being racked at the same time got to bothering someone, so one week I helped put rubber gaskets in the racks. Much quieter.
The church has since moved to a new building. The Broadway and Greene site is a parking lot.
