“May I Have This Dance?”

When our children were little, three plastic grocery bags appeared for them each Sunday morning dangling from the doorknob of my office. Strips of masking tape designated to whom they belonged: WILL, BETSY, LAURA. Inside the bags, they discovered their weekly treasure. Their cache included everything from miniature dolls and trucks to jewelry, badges, stuffed animals, beads, and books. Each trinket was received with wide-eyed excitement as it was extracted from the bag.

“Look Daddy, a dump truck!” “Oooh! A purple bracelet!” “I got a baby doll!”

Week in and week out during our first years at First Christian Church in Wilmington, NC, the same ritual: the dash down the hall, the first sighting of the bags (“There they are!”), their distribution according to the masking tape markings (“This is yours! That one’s mine!”), then the opening of the treasures accompanied by “oohs” and “aahs.” For Will, Betsy, and Laura, every Sunday was Christmas morning. Those plastic bags were their stockings and my office door was the mantle.

Who was their Sunday morning Santa Claus? My kids dubbed her “The Beach Lady,” derived from their association of her with the A-frame she shared with Mr. Claus at the south pole of Wrightsville Beach. Adults knew her as Allene Boone. Her husband Milton was a retired former pastor of First Christian. The treasures that appeared in my kids’ door stockings were the fruits of Allene’s forays to yard sales. For a nickel here, a dime there, she’d pick up the Sunday morning treasures.     

When our kids were growing up, I prayed they wouldn’t reach adulthood, resent the church, and walk away from it. No one chooses to be a PK (preacher’s kid), consigned to life in a fishbowl, a source of illustrations in sermons, held to a higher standard, vying throughout your formative years for your parent’s attention and availability with several hundred others. Hence, Jennie (a PK) and I prayed that when our kids reached the age of accountability, they would choose to do what they never had a choice about growing up: be active members of a congregation. God save them from being burned out by church or irreparably soured by its members’ foibles to the point they write off the enterprise as adults.

There are all sorts of psychological profiles of PKs. Pieces I’ve read paint PKs with overly broad strokes as either goody two shoes or hellraisers. When they finally turn eighteen and fly the coop (or parsonage, as it were), the goodies trash their two shoes for the rebellion of barefoot freedom while the hellraisers keep on raising hell. There are few tales of PKs who turn out with any semblance of emotional and ecclesiastical equilibrium. Such is the myth.

I was all too aware of the PK in my family of origin. My paternal grandfather, Gabe Shirey, was a PK. His father, my great-grandfather, Wilbur Shirey, was a Disciples of Christ preacher in Daleville, Indiana, who was also Superintendent of the Daleville public schools. I don't know what happened to the rest of my grandfather’s eight siblings after they reached adulthood, but I do know my grandfather never set foot in a church as long as I knew him. I do not know why. I do know he was a rascal. He fought demons his whole life I’ll not name. I don’t know how much of his unrest was rooted in his PK beginnings, but I knew enough to want otherwise for my kids. Hence my prayers.

The folks at First Christian were answers to those prayers. They embraced our kids in arms of love and laughter, inoculating them in their formative years against a debilitating aversion to church. They gave church a good name as did Allene, who, raising a son of her own in the church, vowed to do what she could to be a force for good.    

One Sunday, there were no bags on the doorknob. Jennie explained to our kids that the Beach Lady was sick. Allene had a brain tumor that within a year would take her life. I visited her at their beach house throughout that awful year. She asked me about people at the church and how they were doing. She asked about my kids, apologizing that she couldn’t provide the treasure bags anymore. And she asked me about heaven.

Do you remember what it was that bothered Huckleberry Finn so much about Miss Watson’s depiction of Heaven? In Huck’s words, “She said all a body would have to do was go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever.” To which Huck said, “If that’s all it is, I don’t want to go there.”

“David,” Allene asked, “is heaven really a place of eternal rest?”

I put on my best stained glass pastoral assurance voice and said, “Oh yes, Allene. Absolutely.” 

Whereupon she frowned and said, “I hope not. I can’t bear the thought of lying around in a hammock forever twiddling my thumbs. I’ve been sick so long that I’m looking forward to being able to do things again. There are so many things I haven’t had a chance to try yet in this life. I don’t want eternal rest. I want eternal life!”

Not long after that, Milton told me, “Lately, Allene and I have felt the strong urge to dance on our grave.”

I said, “Milton, if Allene’s up for it, go for it!”      

They did. As I heard it told, with Allene secured in the passenger seat, Milton drove to Oleander Memorial Gardens, followed the winding road through the cemetery, and parked the car. He got out, grabbed a boom box from the back seat, walked over to the headstone engraved BOONE, and placed the boom box on it. He then returned to the car, opened the door, assisted his bride of fifty-plus years to her feet, and escorted to her to the dance floor. With Allene stable on her feet, Milton let go long enough to bend over and press PLAY. He then took Allene’s right hand in his left hand and placed his right hand on her waist. She placed her left hand on his shoulder and, with the music accompanying them, they danced together beneath the canopy of heaven on the grassy ballroom floor flanked by azaleas.

One Sunday shortly thereafter, as I went back to my office between the early service and the Sunday School hour, I was met with a familiar sight: three plastic shopping bags with masking tape markings hung from my doorknob.

Huh? How?

Five-year-old Elyse, Betsy’s best friend, knew about the Beach Lady and her bags of treasure. She had accompanied Betsy on several of the weekly scampers down the hallway and knew Mrs. Boone was sick. On that Sunday morning, Elyse woke up with an idea. If Mrs. Boone wasn’t going to be able to bring the surprise bags, then she wanted to fill in for her. So, Elyse said to her mother Kathy, “I want to be Mrs. Boone for Will, Betsy, and Laura.” With that, she retrieved plastic grocery bags from the kitchen, sought out the requisite pieces of masking tape, and had her mother print the names. Elyse then dropped into each bag a handful of candy.

The resurrected plastic bags appeared on my doorknob in the spring of the year, not long before Easter.

Cue the music on the boom box. Nothing mawkish or maudlin, mind you! Play something surging with life, something that in its joyous defiance of death sets the feet to tapping, the fingers to snapping, the head to bobbing in sync with the buoyant beat. 

Dance, Allene. Dance, Milton. Dance thirty-some-year-old Elyse, wherever you are!

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? (1 Corinthians 15:55)

Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed!