A Cross to Bear

Our son was barely three years old and had just begun to master the English language with complete sentences when we began taking him to rehearsals for a local production of the off-Broadway musical, Godspell.   Both his mom and I were involved; one on stage and the other directing the pit orchestra.  This arrangement seemed to go okay until we realized that this three year old, human sponge was actually memorizing the entire play. 

At first it seemed cute as he began parroting phrases from the play, "Pre pree pare ye the way of the Lawrd."  He had become a Godspell junkie, a connoisseur of St. Matthew, a musical, Biblical scholar. 

We completed the wildly successful run of the play, returned to normal life and the boy began his journey. 

Our next door neighbor was a Methodist minister.  Let it be known that, had I have been a man of the cloth, living beside a musician, with our cadre of artistic friends would have been somewhat challenging at best.  Once "Godspell" had been introduced to our three year old, however, the neighborly relationship turned to just plain frightening.

The boy's obsession with "Godspell" started with two Popsicle sticks and some Elmer's glue.  He began making crosses, lots and lots of crosses.  We couldn't keep the freezer filled with enough popsicles. We were under pressure to eat popsicles by the dozen.  It wasn't clear at first just what he was up to as his pile of crosses began to grow bigger and bigger.

Then, he vanished one day, and we began the frantic search to find him.  In our search for the cross maker, we went to the minister's house first, and the reverend's wife looked quizzically at us and said, "Nicky just sold us a cross for a nickel." 

This was not the first time the kid was hustling the neighborhood for money.  In fact, he had gone door to door that spring trying to sell our used magazines for two cents apiece.

We caught up with him three houses and 25 cents later, but the cross building addiction didn't end there.  It began to escalate as he discovered new building materials. The culmination of his efforts occurred one day when he crawled under the front porch, pulled out two, 12 foot long porch boards and tied them together with kite string.  In fact, he was dragging that 12 foot long cross up the preacher's driveway as the parsonage car was pulling in that afternoon.  I'm sure it made a life long impression on that unfortunate, holy man and his wife when they saw a two and a half foot high kid in shorts and a tee shirt dragging a 12 foot long cross up the concrete slabs.

The most memorable event, however, occurred late in August when the little guy was playing on the sun porch.  The good reverend was just edging his way into the driveway as I was trimming the bushes under the windows of that porch with our newly acquired electric hedge clippers. 

At the exact moment of Reverend Barker's arrival, the minister got out of his car just as the three year old began to yell in his deepest theatrical voice, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" 

The good reverend and his wife moved away a few months later and life went on at Orlando Street.   Amen.