2009-05-13 - 12:43 p.m.
Well, I’ve gotten through my first day as Father Reynard. It went well, over all. I headed out to the park at about eight thirty- well before Morning Prayer was due to start, but better early than late. It was a good thing that I did, since I spent half an hour getting things sorted out with Carrie the friendly cashier. No, they weren’t trying to charge me to get to work, but she is turning out to be a really good resource person. She pointed me to the people who could do those helpful things like get me a mailbox at work, and assign me a parking spot. Once all that was sorted out, I headed over to the church. First order of business was of course to get the cassock on. I was wearing a clergy shirt out there, and when not in the park, I had the collar open, with the white plastic tab pushed back into the collar so that it wouldn’t fall out. However, when it was time to get the tab into place, it wouldn’t come out. It was completely stuck. After several increasingly desperate moments trying to wrench it out, all the while watching the clock tick closer to nine thirty, I finally gave up. Not wearing a collar is not an option, since the real Father Reynard would never go out without one, but luckily there were some spare collars in the wardrobe. I shoved one of those into place, silently cursing the stuck tab. It looked ok, and you couldn’t tell that I had an extra tab hidden in the collar.
I managed to start the service on time, although the congregation was limited to me. Yes, three services yesterday, and no one came. Still, it gave me a chance to get used to the space, and I’m sure that more people will come as the summer goes on.
The other adventure of the day was the wood stove. The park has just refurbished the original wood stove at the church, which is awesome. It looks really good, just like new. I lit a fire in the morning without much trouble, but then I found out mid morning that they still had more work to do on the stove. They had to install the heat exchanger, which sounded like a good idea to me. Anyway, the long shot was that the stove people asked me to let the fire go out, and they would be back in the afternoon. Now, this wouldn’t have been a problem, but it was COLD yesterday! I’ve mentioned all the snow that it still around, so you can get an idea of the ambient temperature around here. Add to that the fact that it was raining on and off all day, so it was damp too, and that the church is quite big, with high ceilings and not much insulation, and you can get an idea of how cold it was in there. There is electric heat, which they added in the thirties. That helped, but only a little. I spent a lot of the afternoon standing over a vent. I think I know why clergy wear cassocks- it got quite toasty in there!
Twenty visitors stopped by. Most of them seemed to be from Canada, although none stayed to talk for long. Still, apparently twenty is quite a good turn out for the first day. There was a long stretch in the afternoon between visitors, and that got boring quickly. Clearly if this keeps up I will have to find things to do in the church or in the town. I did some reading in the study- lots of old reports from summer students past, although the most recent is from 1995. The ones from the seventies were interesting. Lots of information about the church, and about the cemetery.
The other big event of the day was buying a hat. There were a couple out there, but as I expected, none of them fit my enormous melon. The general store in Barkerville (Mason & Daleys) has lots of hats, so I trotted down there between morning services and they found me a good one. Black, of course, with a black band and flat, wide brim. It looks quite clerical when paired with the cassock and collar!
I also met Bill Quackenbush, who is the curator of Barkerville. He seems really nice, and really smart. They have the Barkerville archives out there, and he showed me around. We are welcome to do a little research on our own time, and I think I might try and do that. Bill also loaned me the cemetery master plan. It’s still an open cemetery, so they have a plan on how it will be used and maintained. I haven’t read it yet, but it should be quite interesting.
All in all, it was a good day, if a bit boring at times. That’s something that I’m sure that I can deal with without too much trouble, so I’m officially looking forward to the rest of the summer now.
