Wed, 27 Oct, 2021
Altar Guild Adventures
Chuck Silva, Senior Warden
So one of the absolute perkiest perks about being Senior Warden at this amazing place is getting to spend time with the folks who participate in the various ministries. As we were preparing for Homecoming Sunday last week, I was lucky enough to spend a good part of two days with Bertha Rocray and some of her colleagues on the Altar Guild.
Bertha had pressed me into service to help clean the sanctuary, and when I arrived there at 8:30 on Wednesday morning the place was already buzzing with activity. A quick look around gave me the impression that everyone else had been there since the night before, vacuuming, dusting and polishing continuously for hours. Bertha eyeballed me and my vacuum and, having thus formed an assessment of my cleaning competence, sent me up into the balcony to help Olin vacuum the ledge. Turns out, this was full of real pine needles that have probably been there since the Eisenhower administration. To vacuum this ledge, one must lean WAY over the edge of the balcony with the vacuum wand fully extended, which helps explain why pine needles could rest there undisturbed since the 1950s. So I start to vacuum, trying to remember what the Doctor had told me about the kinds of activity that could trigger a relapse of the crippling vertigo that had derailed my budding lumberjacking career and forced me into law school.
It was about this time that I was made aware that the our brand-new safe (the one holding the Queen’s silver that was gifted to the parish by Freddy Mercury when he passed) was refusing to open for Bertha, Jane, Elaine or any of the other Altar Guild folks. I did what every man does, which was to assume that they simply had forgotten the procedure and politely offered to try it myself. After numerous unsuccessful attempts, it was clear even to me that there was something wrong, and that someone, in a burst of muscular enthusiasm, had exerted more pressure on the spoke wheel than it was designed to withstand. The connection between the wheel and the spindle on which it sat was now broken, the spindle would not turn, hence the door would not open. It was around this time that the finger-pointing started in earnest. After interviewing all of the usual suspects, we considered whether we could somehow blame Rob. In spite of his relative lack of recent contact with the safe, the fact that he was not there to protest his innocence convinced us that he was almost certainly the culprit. Ultimately, we all agreed that pinning it on Rob was indeed the best course.
This important first step taken, we next focused on a bigger challenge, which was how to get the safe opened and repaired (or replaced) in time for the Queen’s silver to be used for Homecoming Sunday services. We knew that if we failed, Rob would probably be forced to use some ceramic chalices that he had made by hand in the seminary. While this would be liturgically sufficient, we agreed that it would be aesthetically unexciting.
After several calls with the safe company, during which we struggled to accurately describe the difficulties we were having, and numerous additional unfruitful attempts to open the safe while on the phone, the very helpful customer service representative informed us that she had concluded that the spoke wheel was, to use her technical phraseology, “. . . .not behaving properly.” This critical diagnosis having been made, it was mutually determined that the services of a locksmith would be required.
Thanks to Reggie’s contacts and influence, our good friends at Roche Locksmith, once made aware of the unwelcome consequences of failing to act quickly, made an adjustment to their busy schedule and sent someone over to assess our predicament. That someone quickly realized that they were no match for this particular problem, and that Peter Roche himself, the founder and eminence grise of Roche Locksmith, would need to be brought in the next morning.
We reconvened at the sanctuary the next morning, and were soon joined by Peter himself. The good news is that even this more experienced locksmith needed a couple of hours to get the safe to open (so it must be a pretty good safe). The even better news was that when he did finally succeed in doing so, he was able quickly to repair the spoke wheel, and also made some minor adjustments to the door mechanism that should reduce the likelihood of this problem recurring.
But the best news of all was that the Queen’s silver was intact, and there was still plenty of time to get it polished and buffed to a high shine so it could be used on Homecoming Sunday.
Which of course is exactly what happened.