The cardboard boxes began appearing last week. The first one Thursday and more on Friday. While I worked on my sermon for Mary’s memorial, Carolyn began disassembling our life in the parsonage.

Monday. One day after my great triumph on the beach. Yea, that’s how I was thinking of it. I wish it wasn’t so. I admit it: I’m no better than any garden variety human. I have an ego and I like to feed it. So I woke up basking in the afterglow. But for Carolyn, Monday meant we had one week left to get out. So the boxes piled up.

We’d looked at a couple of houses but made no decisions. The kids wanted to move onto the beachside, as close to the beach as possible. But Carolyn put her foot down, saying no, we need to be frugal at a time like this and take the best place we can afford. Sagan and Scott responded by offering to share a room if need be and sailed off into a conversation about Sagan teaching Scott to surf.

Actually, I had heard from that banker Dad mentioned in his letter and the trust fund meant we wouldn’t face the wolf soon. “Still,” Carolyn said, “with no money coming in we need to watch our pennies.”

As a boy I bought into the myth of women being the romantic sex. But now I know the truth; it’s men. Carolyn had a bandana tied over her hair and the kids moving like Marine recruits in boot camp. I saw I needed to make myself useful and offered to make some calls on houses listed in the paper. The first one wasn’t for us. Four bedrooms but only one bathroom. I noticed ads for two other places on the same street, beachside. Three bedrooms, two baths. Recalling John-John’s advice to drive around in a neighborhood you like, I yelled to Carolyn that I was going out to look at a couple of possible rentals. Almost like she knew I only trying to escape the work detail, she caught me going out the front door.

“Where are they,” she asked, “and what did the people say about them?”

“I didn’t actually talk to anyone, but the addresses are listed and there’s two of them real close together.”

“I asked where they are.”

“On the beachside.”

“I thought we decided--”

“Does it hurt to look? The boys said they’d share a room. Do you have a problem with them sharing a room?”

“No, but if you didn’t talk to anyone how do you know you can get inside?”

“If I like the houses, either of them, I’ll call the number.”

“Yea, sure,” she said, shaking her head and turning on her heels.

I was crossing the high-rise bridge to the beachside when John-John called.

“Where you at padre?”

“I’m going over toward the north beach to look at some houses.”

“Gimme the address and I’ll meet you there,” he said. “I got some news to give you. Good news.”

I had no sooner parked in front of the first house -- a plain block ranch, vintage 1950s, when I saw John-John peddling toward me. The street ran parallel to the beach, about three blocks off and two blocks south of Flagler. John-John’s duplex was on the north side of Flagler, maybe a quarter-mile away at most. I was thinking the boys would love this location. So close to the ocean. And, especially in summer, Flagler Avenue with all its surf shops was jammed with kids just hanging out.

John-John’s bike was a second-hand beach cruiser with wide handle bars on which he’d mounted two brackets -- for his fishing poles I guessed, and a double set of wire baskets over the rear wheel fender. He hit the pedal brake and stopped right in front of me, wearing his usual summer outfit: worn khaki shorts, sandals and a happy grin. It took a lot to wipe that grin off his face. I imagined him grinning his way through his prison years.

“Pretty cool,” he said nodding down at the bike.

“Kind of a two-wheeled version of your wagon.”

“May it rest in peace, padre.”

“So, what’s the big news John-John?”

“Well, first of all, I gotta tell you Dietrich. Man, this town was buzzin’ about what happened down at the water yesterday. Nobody ever seen nothin’ like it. People who were there, people who weren’t there, wanting to say something’ to me about it. I’m telling’ ya, everywhere I went yesterday afternoon -- and evening -- just buzzin’ about it padre.”

“I guess that’s good,” I said.

“Good? Man, that’s great!”

“Is that the news?”

“Not exactly. So Jerry calls me this morning and asks me to stop by. Woke me up in fact. I go over there and he’s all worked up too. He’s tellin’ me about how everyone is talkin’ ’bout it in his club too all the regulars -- and he wants to do it again … make it a standard Sunday morning thing!”

“Really?”

“Really!”

“So he can sell more drinks?”

“I don’t think so padre. There was somethin’ about him padre. Like he was buzzin’ too -- inside. He wants you to go talk with him.”

“I guess there’s no harm in that,” I said.

“You’re lookin’ for a regular gig, aren’t you padre?”

“Well, like I said, there’s no harm in talking to him.”

“I don’t see no harm,” John-John said. He looked away, toward the house with its rental sign in the patchy front yard. “Oh, one other thing. When you talk to Jerry? He said he has a house up a ways on the beach you could use for awhile. People just moved out and he said he ain’t done nothin’ about renting it again.”

“How much?”

“Sounded like he meant you could just stay there.”

John-John turned his bike around. “Let me know when you’ve talked with Jerry an’ I’ll get to work on things for Sunday.” Pedaling off, he called over his shoulder, “We should figure some way to take up a collection.”

Since I’m here, I thought, I might as well look at the house. The door bell was corroded and I couldn’t hear anything from inside when I pushed it. No one answered my knock either. I tried the door. Locked. I looked in the windows. It was empty. I could see the carpet. Kind of a rose colored and dingy. A pretty small living room and no family room, best I could tell. Carolyn won’t like it, I thought. No point in calling the number.

I returned to the car, thinking about what John-John said. Why should I be surprised? It had been a wild event. Nothing like it in my experience. More like days gone by -- I pictured a crowd shouting and carrying on, pouring out of some old time evangelist’s tent and into a nearby lake with the “hallelujahs” flying and people throwing their hands in the air as they were dipped under the water. Or a fiery John the Baptist preaching and baptizing along the Jordan, the flame of God’s spirit cranked up all the way. Knowing they wanted a repeat performance threw cold water on my triumphant glow. Did I have a tiger by the tail? Could I recreate that atmosphere? Would they be disappointed? Yes, John-John was right about me wanting a regular gig but until Sunday morning none of these people had dreamt of doing this every week. Could I count on them to show up? What if I let them down, and they walked away scratching their heads and wondering why the first time had seemed so wonderful.

I once had a seminary teacher who claimed Jesus told followers to keep what they’d seen secret because he sensed momentum building too quickly, control slipping from his fingers. And yet there he was, ignoring warnings from his disciples and pressing head-on toward Jerusalem. Jesus didn’t worry that he might not deliver. He delivered time after time. He worried he was delivering too much, racing too quickly toward the final curtain. Well, I had no illusions about a quick ending with a grand finale on a cross. Some people called me a martyr for “throwing my career away” over Sagan. But mostly I was just going on instinct, reading the cards and playing them as seemed right at the moment. With Sagan, with Mary, with what happened Sunday … hopefully, I was only following Wesley’s advice, trying to do as much good in as many ways as possible. I am sure I’m no martyr. I know how to make commitments and accept the consequences, but that’s different. I want to live a long and happy life.

I drove slowly past the second rental house from the newspaper. It was a cut above the first, but I didn’t stop. I continued on and parked in the lot across from Jerry’s bar. The lunch crowd was coming and going and I found him playing host, chatting with guests in the dining room. He asked if I had a minute to take a ride, and I followed him outside and across the street to his Jeep Wrangler.

The Jeep was open to the summer air and the breeze felt good on my face as we rolled down the ramp onto the beach and turned toward the inlet. Jerry was small talking about the day’s weather and the restaurant, but as we moved north he clammed up. His eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, but from the way his cheeks were bunched up, I could see something was eating at him.

“Something you want to get out Jerry?

“Nothing really pastor, just--”

“Call me Dietrich, Jerry.”

“Sure. It’s just … I …”

I tried to prime his pump. “John-John told me you wanted to talk to me. He said you seemed to have been … affected in some way by yesterday morning’s events.”

“Yea,” he said, “that’s a good way to put it. ‘Affected in some way.’ And I’m trying to understand what that way is.”

“What do you think it is? Or better yet, what does it feel like it is?”

I watched Jerry repeatedly clinch and release his thick fingers on the steering wheel, the muscles tensing in his Popeye forearms.

I laughed. “Just spit it out brother!”

“Like you say pas -- I mean Dietrich, it’s more of a feeling than anything -- not easy to put in words. A guy like me -- in this business -- you can get pretty jaded. You’re around people all the time who start drinking and then puffing themselves up, blowing their own horns real loud. Don’t get me wrong, you see good people too, maybe some of those same people on a better day. But all-in-all, it can make you see this world as pretty much dog-eat-dog, and if you’re smart you’re going to be the dog doing the eating. And it’s not just here. Guys I play golf with … it’s always ‘me, me, me,‘ like a freakin’ opera singer warming up. Yesterday, I realized I’m just like them.

“Yesterday, when I heard you preaching and saw all these people, a lot of them pretty hard characters, respond like they did to what you were saying, it triggered this feeling in me. It was a familiar kind of feeling and after I thought about it a good while, I recognized it as coming from when I was a kid and used to go to church with my parents and knew what it was to follow your better angels, so to speak, instead of taking the policy of ‘let the big dog eat.’ Made me feel calm and clean inside. And I liked that feeling. Liked it a lot. I guess I’m afraid if I don’t keep stoking it, it’ll turn out to be an illusion and I’ll slip back. Does that make sense?”