by Becky Rule

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I was invited to be the first speaker at the new Historical Society building in Stratford Hollow, on the corner of Hollow Road and Bog Road. It used to be a Methodist Church, but evidently they ran out of Methodists, so the building was kindly turned over to the historical society. The members were so excited they immediately started sprucing things up. For one thing, they sanded and varnished the pews. Unfortunately, they must have used the slow-drying varnish. This was fine with me because I was standing up front saying my piece. But, let’s just say the woman with the blue angora sweater in the third pew left a little something behind.

In the afternoon, I led a writing workshop. When I asked the assembled what the population was, they looked at each other, and one man piped up: All of us.

Which wasn’t precisely true. There at the back of the hall, hovering in the doorway was a thin man in overalls and a baseball cap. I looked at him. Those who’d assembled for the writing workshop turned and looked at him. A woman in the front pew motioned him forward: Come on in, she said. You’re not late. We’re just getting started.

He took a seat in the sticky front pew. We got started. We wrote. We discussed stories, and poems, and our lives. We wrote some more. We read aloud. We critiqued one another’s work. After about an hour, I called a halt. We’ll take a five minute break, I said. Go ahead and use the bathroom if you need to, but come right back. We’ve got another hour to go. And if you don’t come back my feelings will be hurt. I’m very sensitive.

The latecomer stood up right in front of me, and — being sensitive — I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was about to make a break for it.

I said, “You are coming back after the break, aren’t you?”

He looked at me. He said, “I ain’t a poet, nor a writer. I just stopped by to fix the furnace.”