Chapter Three

Where was I, then? Oh yes. Smoking and tattooed youth. And my church.

Within the village of Upper Sharon, where I do as little business as possible, I was across the creek to attend a meeting at the Community Church. We occupy one of an assortment of architectural gems built there in the burst of philanthropic exuberance brought to us by Miss Woodhull on her mother's behalf in the 1920s.

In the village, she erected a number of public structures in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. It's a bit of an acquired taste, but I must confess I have acquired it, and even find the somewhat dated peculiarities of the architecture comforting. It means home to me now.

Local legend has it that she went to her mother's birthplace, and offered to build them a library, and they turned her down flat. Indignant, she drove off and the next village she encountered she got out and asked "would you like a library here?" When the citizens of Upper Sharon said "why, yes," it was the beginning of a complicated but very fruitful relationship.

The library was built, then the Community Church to which I alluded earlier, and then a Memorial Hall for public meetings which went up right next to Carpenter's Hall, the Greek Revival era public building where the Masons and the Odd Fellows and all sorts of other groups had their meetings before the arrival of Woodhull money to the town.

Then came the brainstorm of St. Fiacre's Residential Library on the bluff opposite the village across Auter Creek, a vast pile of pseudo-Gothic echoing its Welsh inspiration at Hawarden, Gladstone's Library, and finally the purchase and elaboration of the then-near-ruinous Halcyon Academy building in between St. Fiacre's and the village. The Old Main of which in my opinion is still a ruin, who knows how many myriad dollars later spent to keep it erect.

And as we all must, Mrs. Woodhull Martin died, Miss Woodhull kept to her side of the Atlantic to wind down her mother's affairs, and we were left with memories and buildings and an endowment. Rather, the libraries, residential and community, were left with endowments. Cyrus College was left with buildings, old and new, and no endowment. Perhaps she meant to "get around to it," as they say. But she did not.

Upper Sharon Community Church did not have an endowment either, but we were blessed with an active membership and sufficient support through the years that we had no more and no less to worry about than any congregation with a large, old building and a dwindling, aging body of parishoners. To be fair, we had done better than most, but in this small town we were never going to be a large church, and God himself forbid we might ever insert screens and shows and drums and din into the worship space. We did have a discreetly placed speaker system, but that necessity comes from both the age of the ears in the pews and perhaps the fact that seminaries do not seem to teach their students anything about public speaking, let alone projection, before sending them off to be ordained.

The church building faced south, with the sanctuary inside facing just a little north of east, a Tiffany window catching the sunrise particularly well in the weeks around Easter. This meant the broad steps and porch took you into a vestibule which then had steps inside to either side, up to the sanctuary level (and an elevator installed thirty years ago to the west, a bleak protrusion off of the otherwise genteelly ornamented building).

It also meant that the wide staircase was a sunny and warm spot for people to sit and gather, which would seem charming were it not for . . . yes, you've anticipated me. Smoking tattooed youth. And skateboards.

We had put up signs and even called the local constabulary on more than one occasion, to the point where the "boarders" knew they could not ply their art on our steps, marking and marring the stone with their skids and hacks and chops or whatever they call their "moves." Still they would sit there, skateboards held across their laps, eyeing cooly anyone passing by not of their clan.

"Good afternoon," I said briskly passing through them on my way up the steps.

"Good afternoon, Chancellor" said one of them, looking vaguely familiar. Of course, most of them were our students. I should have been gratified that one of them recognized me at all. With a curt nod of my head in her direction, I went on in to my meeting.