Communion

I want to tell you a story…

He was a preacher back then. He still is to this day. He is my father. I can remember him standing behind the table with the words etched across the front: in remembrance of me. He would say the words needed to bless symbols of stale saltines and microscopic tumblers of grace juice. But those memories are slight, fleeting. The memory that endures is his stance before another table, this one a polished veneer console. His voice was not required at this table, only his hands.

He would rise early of a morning before sun and sons and wife. His ritual was to stack the albums he loved and then let the needle slowly drop. The volume would be barely a whisper at the beginning; every five minutes or so he would stroll back by and increase the sound slightly, smoothly. While other houses were roused by alarm clocks of bells or beeps, our home gradually simmered each morning in the juice of music: Johnny Cash, Sons of the Pioneers, the gentleman Jim Reeves, Rod McKuen, Ray Conniff, there were others. As that cheap needle drew crackled sound from warm vinyl, so were my brother and I drawn from sleep to face the day. His morning ministrations were priestly; you cannot convince me otherwise. I was there. I am witness.

I had prodigal days of Cougar Mellencamp and Boston and Journey, there were others. I stepped away from his table of remembrance. But now, in my forties, probably the age he was in those days, I have found an AM station that plays Glen Campbell and Tom T. Hall and Andy Williams…and Cash, always Cash. I listen each morning on my commute and think of him, of my father’s body broken and blood spilled for me in ways a son will never know, so that I might live and grow and find wife and children of my own and sleep and dream. It is my daily communion. I take and eat and drink and do it in remembrance of him. He has not crossed over Jordan yet; he knows the joy of his children’s children. But I find it no sin to remember the living while the day is still called today. And so I do.

The crackers and grape juice of my youth were quarterly symbols; they never became the literal body and blood of our Lord. But my father’s music…