Smelling Your Age

In our church, you don't pick the congregation you worship with, you attend the congregation you are "assigned" by a geographic area, also called a ward. All leaders are lay clergy, meaning they don't get paid and they serve the congregation while also holding down full-time jobs and dedicating themselves to their families. Everyone pitches in to give the sermons on Sunday and to accomplish the other missions of the Church. So, my parents have the opportunity to be in a very unique ward, because of their geography.

They live in St. George, Utah which has it's fare share of retired folks. To make things even more interesting, they live in one of the several neighborhoods of "Senior Communities" that are reserved for residents aged 55 and over. At not even sixty, they are definitely the youngest people in their neighborhood, and thus, in their ward.

As we were lazing about yesterday, reading and staying out of the 103 degree heat, my parents were summoned to help one of their elderly ward members who had fallen while retrieving her mail across the street from my parents' home. They are the young ones, the ones that can help, and they do it willingly and without a second thought. I'm sure it's a comfort to the other members of their ward that there are a couple of "young ones" around to help out. Sleeping Beauty pointed out today as we sat in church, that Grandpa was the only one there with brown hair. All the other men had "silverish or whitish and maybe gray-black, but definitely no other brown." She's right, he was the only one not completely gray. (Don't tell my mom. She has beautiful silvery-gray hair, but is a bit bugged my dad hides his gray so well.)

Well, as a sufferer of migraines, who knows one of her triggers for worse migraines is perfume, I usually avoid the "old lady section" of church. I'm not sure why there is one in every congregation. Most people smell it before they see it, as those cute old ladies have a love for the olfactory pleasures of generous amounts of perfume. You've smelled the section in your church, and there is one at mine. It's inevitable. Part of the order of the universe, I think.

So, you can imagine my dilemma in going to my parents' ward: the place is full of "old lady sections" with the aroma all around. That's all their ward is made of. A migraine sufferers land mine. My girls were an average of seventy years younger than all other attendees today, which put me about fifty years younger than most, and definitely a lot less scented. A lot less. The cloud of perfume wafted down the halls as we approached the chapel. Luckily, it's one hundred degrees here today and the air conditioning was blowing at full power; enough air moving that I was able to get some fresh air occasionally. But not quite enough fresh air that my children were able to escape without losing some of their brain cells. At least, I think that's why they are reading a biography of Norman Rockwell at the moment, and singing, loud enough for the partially deaf neighbors to hear, "We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine...." Either it's that, or the neighbors are starting to rub off on us. I think it's time we head home.