Nights In Polyester Cranberry Satin

Nights in Polyester Cranberry Satin

I was, um, 13 or 14 and it was around 1971 or 72, Piscataway, NJ; that’s where I grew up.  But I was, or we were on our way to Westfield,NJ, thirty or forty minutes away; dad was driving me there.  Four or five years before, in fourth grade I’d started going to a different church from my family because I had joined a fastidiously trained men and boys choir at a high liturgical Episcopalian church across the river, in New Brunswick.  Soon I was confirmed into the Episcopal church and also active in the youth group.  Father John Wilson, our youth leader, had asked if any of us wanted to go on a weekend retreat at an Episcopal parish in Westfield.  I signed up but ended up being the only one from my church to go.  So now my dad was dropping me off in the early dark of an autumn Friday evening at an old church on a downtown city park square.

I let myself in a door on the education building attached to the church.  It was dark and quiet inside but followed my way towards some light and the sound of talking and met up with just two or three people sitting at a table half lit from florescent lights reaching from an open door of an adjacent room.  I was wearing a shiny, cranberry, polyester knit, pink pin-striped, golf style shirt and gray dress pants.  Where are the grown ups in charge?  I immediately sensed a situation I was not prepared for.  The folks around the table were very familiar with each other and gabbing profusely.  They were old, or older to me, older kids and acting like grown ups; they had cigarettes and were dressed in faded jeans and beads; and pretty fast I was a bit uncomfortable.  I knew I hadn’t been sure of what to expect, but still this was not what I had expected for a church retreat, and now I was stationed here alone for two nights and two days with these older, cool, people.  Back home in my bedroom I had the tattered painter jeans and faded shirts I needed to match the look, hippie attitude lingering from the 60’s.  Barely a teenager, I was just starting to experiment with such clothes and boy, I wished I’d dressed the part in my favorite and most comfortable clothes, clothes I had just hours before decided were the wrong choice to wear.  I felt so young, and so uncomfortable.

I sat like a shell desperate to enter the conversation but with little success.  Another person or two trickled in, and with every entrance there was a boisterous and what felt to me like an overplayed burst of joy and laughter, of friends smacking skin and affirming each other, their cigs in hand.  I had never seen cigarettes smoked in a church. 

I don’t think there were more than five or six of us that first night.  It was after dinner time and no meal served, so no breaking of bread and no snacks to help the strain, just cigarettes.  I don’t know if I can tell you what we ate at any of the meals that weekend; so much of it is a blank in my memory squelched by such nervous energy.  But that first night was the hollowing away as I painfully wandered here and there up the dimly lit hall, going into a room, and then the next, trying to fit into a conversation.  In this unending state of grasping, suddenly I heard music, music that transfixed my attention; what was that beautiful and eery music?  It was so tantalizing, alluring, mournful; and in this moment I found finally something I could attach to, some basis to find a common cause, something to talk about!  And I wanted to know what that music was!

I made my way into the room, one of the same three or four plain white classrooms I’d been hopelessly cycling in and out of, fretting and unnoticed, but now…this music might make all the difference and I hopefully ventured in to see what I’d find.  Across the room was a phonograph player with an album spinning and an older hippie boy leaning on a chair with one foot upon it, his jeans were very torn and faded with medium brown hair lapping over his shirt collar and a large waving shock sweeping across his forehead and eyes.  He had an electric guitar but no amp and he was vigorously air strumming on it, playing something else that didn’t go to the music.  He probably was still in high school, though at the time he seemed so old to me.  He was also alone which made it much easier for me to approach him.  With the first meaningful words I could find to utter all night, I asked him, what is this music?  He said ‘The Moody Blues’, ‘Nights in White Satin.’  Ummm…  Now looking back, ‘Nights In White Satin’ was first released in 1967 so at this time, in 1972, it was no new song when I was now first hearing it.  But in the early 70’s, F.M. radio was a new phenomenon and progressive rock was music older kids knew about.  My source of pop and rock was on the A.M. radio: Cousin Brucie and the count down hits.  I simply had never heard this music before.

My interest sparked in the hippie boy some interest now towards me. No one had seemed the least bit aware that I was crawling with discomfort; not one of the kids that night had yet reached out to me in my young discomfort.  Hippie boy took me under his wing a little and bragged about the music for a moment, though we did not tarry on the subject.  Again missing my painters jeans, I was without the Schaeffer fountain pen I always kept in the side pocket on my thigh.  I burned the name of the band and song into my brain to remember for later.  Hippie boy lit up a pipe and asked if I wanted some.  What? What was this.  He was smoking a cone of purple incense!  Eww; I found this shocking.  How unhealthy could that be? I shared a toke with him, limiting myself to one taste. And though meager for long lasting help through my weekend of estrangement, this moment listening to ‘Nights in White Satin’ and smoking purple incense with the hippie boy was a savored suspension, a lurking turning point, an ingratiating moment of relief so needed.

I don’t think the grown ups ever arrived.  It seemed like we were there all on our own.  I don’t know where I slept that night, or the next.  Though I remember the other guys stayed in their blue jeans and I stayed in my gray wool dress pants and my shiny, cranberry, pink pin-striped golf shirt.  I seemed barely to ever find relief from this state of estrangement. There must have been some organized activity but I can not recount.  I think a eucharist service on Saturday and I know that at the end on Sunday morning we held a eucharistic service, but I think there was a lot of dead time leading up to the actual purposed engagements of the weekend retreat.  These services were moments of some respite from this just hanging out weekend.  I remember a priest or a friar in a robe moderating some of our time, and the communion services.  He struck me as being kind of like a long haired hippie himself.  I certainly do not remember any attempt of any of the adults that may have been there to reach out and bring me in.  Usually the adults were a harbor for me from social estrangement, but this time this didn’t seem to be the case.  Saturday night, I guess after the service, we were on our own again.  A girl and her boyfriend asked me to join them out for a meal.  I must have had a few dollars in my pocket.  We didn’t seem to have much time, or maybe we weren’t supposed to leave, because we quickly ran down the street to a small diner and had a meal in a bright all white painted front corner booth elevated over the street with big glass windows.  We also ran hurriedly back when we were finished.  It was cold and we didn’t have our jackets.  These were the only other moments of making any successful conversation with anyone: cool cigarette smoking chic and boyfriend with youngster in shiny polyester dress golf shirt.  Why I thought I’d be comfortable in this one shirt and one pair of pants for the whole weekend is good question anyway.

On Sunday morning we might have had pancakes but I may be making this up because I can’t picture this process at all.  I wanted to go home and get into my own faded painter’s jeans.  I wanted to go home and remember who I was.  After breakfast we had the closing worship service.  I wanted to know who I was, in Christ.  But this was a new experience for me, participating in a small and personal worship service with peers, or presumed peers, rather than as an institutionalized child member of the men and boys choir.  After I graduated from high school and dropped out of the choir I stopped going to church.  It was many years later, not until my early thirties, that I asked Jesus into my heart.  Maybe this hard weekend did more to soften my heart than at the time I realized.  I know those years as an episcopalian defector from my own family’s much more protestant style churches were formative years for me, week after week practicing for over four hours with the choir and singing through mass every week and taking the eucharist every other week, and sitting through Cannon Carthy’s formal and lofty sermons.

Ah! But how could I forget that final chapter of my weekend church retreat. The guys had an enduring shaving cream battle the whole weekend through.  By Sunday morning every dude there at some point had been cornered and covered with shaving cream; everyone except for me.  Mistakenly, I did not think for a moment in my polyester dress shirt that I was at hazard to be a victim, obviously not very comfortable joking around with the guys and hopeful that I was immune.  But surely this was the best way after my strained weekend for the guys to let me know that I was indeed included, such sweet reconciliation.  Out of place, I still loved my shiny, cranberry, pink pin-striped shirt, and how could anyone douse me with shaving cream in my gray dress slacks?  In the last moments, after the service I was finally marked for attack.  I ran in panic to protect my clothing but ended up on the floor of a small mens room while they shot me with the foam, giving me the initiation I deserved and needed.

Dad arrived just as I emerged from the bathroom.  He came into the church to find me.  I remember thinking he had his own estrangements, picking up his son at an uppity Westfield parish of the Episcopal church to which his son had solely defected.  It was all my parents could do to come once a year to see me singing in the choir while they confronted the kneeling and the juggling of the service program and the prayer book and the hymnal filled with hymns they never sang before.  I was really, really glad to see Dad, even though I felt inept at explaining my strange weekend to him.