A Certain Encounter: The Man In The Front Pew

By Craig: One of the things that we all share as we pass along on life's short journey are interactions that we have with our fellow brother's and sisters. We start out as young babes under the loving care of a mother or father, or perhaps someone else...we all have different experiences. The world to a young tot is a compact thing. The child carefully observes his surroundings and learns from them. The people in the child's immediate circle are the ones that create the biggest influence. However, as the child enters school and meets new people he or she is confronted by new challenges. The path then leads to adulthood and finally old age. Along our wandering and weary path people come and go...some...never to return...They have a different path to follow than your path. That is the way of life.

     Every human on Earth is linked to everyone else through an intricate web of greetings, meetings and friendships which makes humankind a truly unique and compact body. In other words, I shook the hand of the hand of the hand that shook Napoleon Bonaparte's hand. However, before I digress into further absurdities I will get to the meat of this post and relate the history of the subject...The Man in the Front Pew. I will relate the details of this man's existence only as it relates to me, for I am wholly ignorant of any other aspects or knowledge of his life.

      When I was ten or eleven years old my twin brother and I became altar boys at our local church. It was a small parish with two resident priests. One of the priests (the head vicar) was an intelligent, kind man who would have given you the shirt off his back. The other priest was an elderly French-Canadian gentleman who interjected his sermons with humour and wit and was frequently somewhat drunk. When it was time to pour the wine and water I would pour every last drop of wine into the chalice. My brother, standing beside me would tilt the water and let a mere drop fall into the chalice before the old Frenchman would slap his hand lest the water dilute the effects of the wine! Perhaps he needed this boost to get him through the end of the Mass...I don't know....Anyway, my brother and I would spend a good portion of the Mass seated on cushioned chairs flanking the priest. Being twins, we were like a matching set of cards. I can remember going through the motions during the Mass. I suppose some naïve people in the church thought that we were two pious children. However,  I spent most of the Mass reflecting on all of the things that I would do outside afterwards! Sorry Jesus, but an 11 year olds mind is easily distracted, unless the 11 year old was a precocious one of pure genius and piety, the child has anything but pious thoughts running through the mind. I surely was no precocious genius! On the contrary, I was rebellious and rather hard headed. Anyway, as I would sit there next to the priest waiting for the Deacon to finish a reading I would scan the assembly and observe all of the pious and not so pious faces. Most of them were familiar to me, for I had been going to this church since I was five. There was the little old lady with the smoky colored veil who must have performed the sign of the cross a billion times during the Mass. There was the perfect couple Biff and Jane with their 8 kids who always sat next to the front so that everyone could see them. Biff, with his straight jet black hair and square jaw sitting bolt upright holding his wife's hand and seemingly engrossed in the sermon, but in reality was thinking about how he could get the big business deal done the next morning. These days he might be caught taking a peak at his I-Phone. Then...there was The Man in the Front Pew...He was an elderly gentleman, perhaps in his late 70s or early 80s, rather smallish with an olive complexion as if his antecedents might have come from the Mediterranean. Indeed, he himself might have hailed from that part of the world. I had no way of telling. I never once heard him speak. Was he mute? Probably not, but his speech is not what interested me. It was the regularity of his attendance. He always wore glasses with thick rims, and his eyes sat behind them like two giant ones that might have belonged to a bug...or better put, a fly. Indeed, I often had an absurd notion that he might sprout wings and fly up out of the pew where he would buzz around the church waking the lethargic ones out of their slumbering state.
"BZZZZ...Have some respect!" He would buzz in their ears.

     Bug man always wore a large wooden cross around his neck. I often wondered if he might have carved it himself. It was unusually large for an object to be worn in the manner that he was using it. It would have been about the size of one that you normally would have seen above somebody's bed. The little man was always alone, and seemed to attend every Mass whether it was the early one, the High Mass, or even the Vigil Mass the night before. He was ubiquitous, yet I never saw him at a function other than a Holy Mass...It was as if he somehow formed from the pew itself just before the Mass started and then after the Mass had ended would recede back into it until the next one. He always sat in the same place...front pew...port side of the altar. He would, therefore, be the first to receive holy communion.

     I served in the capacity of Altar boy for about 4 or 5 years. In all this time the man in the front pew never failed to show up. What was his history? Did he have a family? Had he ever been married? Did he have any kids? I never knew. I moved away from this area and it would be over a quarter of a century before I returned to this church, and it was quite by accident. A couple of years ago I made the trek north to visit my aunt. One day I decided that I would show my son where I grew up, so we drove the twenty or so miles and merely drove around as I pointed out the places that I had lived, and where I had gone to school. I decided to take a detour back and inevitably by some quirk ended up getting lost...Or was I lost? It had been years since I had been to this area and things had changed. I was suddenly able to orient myself when I came out on the road where the church was. It is still there, unchanged from the days when I attended Mass there. I thought about going in, but decided that we needed to get back as it was getting late in the day. A short time after we passed the church a large horse fly had somehow managed to find its way into the truck and was making a nuisance of itself......