Carpeted Walls and Hallowed Halls
By Tiffany Lewis

As a child, one of my greatest hopes and dreams was that my parents would inherit a million bucks and … buy our local church building.

To my view, I couldn’t think of a greater place to live than the ward meetinghouse.  It was expansive, with miles and miles of carpeted corridors.  I’d have my own personal stage to satisfy my theatrical muse, a huge gym to play basketball, spacious bathrooms and a million bedrooms to choose from.  My bedroom of choice was the Relief Society room, because it had pretty curtains.  And of course, the biggest bonus in owning the church: it boasted the largest bathtub in town.

Church felt like a second home.  We moved around a lot growing up, but those buildings were all the same.  Even today I can’t walk into an LDS church without feeling that sense of nostalgia.  There’s that churchy smell, the mottled carpet, and those signature scratchy walls that used to catch my hair as I scraped along them.

I remember a monstrous gym with yellow floors where we hid in excitement for my dad’s surprise 30^th birthday party.  He was bishop of our Orchard Park Ward in East Aurora, New York.  In that same ward there was a man who carried a bag of pink and white peppermints.  I’d tug on his pant leg each week, begging for a piece of candy.

Mom got her white coat stolen from the hallway of that same chapel.  She went into labor teaching the can-can to a group of Laurels.  My brother Matt won the Pinewood Derby in Missouri, in the same meetinghouse where a teenage boy got up in sacrament and told the congregation he didn’t believe the church was true.  I tried the best soup I’ve ever had at a Super Saturday in Oregon.

I got left at church, oh, a dozen times, making the giant hallway loop calling. “Mom, Dad, is anyone here?”  I had a crush on every deacon who ever passed the sacrament and every new missionary, especially the foreign ones.  We watched a cockroach run across the shoulder of a man who sang louder than the entire congregation each week.

I learned to perform on those church stages, first by watching my parents, who always did some skit about an old guy looking for his teeth.  Then it was me, doing the Penguin Cha-Cha in tap shoes or singing a duet of “On the Good Ship, Lollipop.”  I learned to speak behind those microphones, first in those nerve-wracking Primary talks, then in the big leagues of sacrament meeting.

There were those hours of roadshow practice on the stage in Utah, where we wore yellow vests and sang “What’s the Matter with Kids These Days?”  Afterward we reverently ran through the halls, or played with the stage lights, flickering them on and off, green-red-yellow.  We could always count on Mom to do some serious socializing.  This meant more time to explore the obscure corners.

The church was full of mysterious places: Locked rooms, especially the library, seemed to call to me.  The yawning cavity under the stage where the chairs and tables were stored made for a great hiding place, but there was always that fear of getting locked away after a ward party.  Permanent ladders on the stage led to heavily bolted doors containing who knows what.  The ledges and overhangs in the chapel occupied my thoughts during many a sacrament meeting.  Rumor had it that the janitor had access to the catwalk above the chapel.  We had to cover the tracks of one daring deacon who stole his way up there on mutual night.

There were mysteries and there were fascinations, like the enclave behind the stand where the priesthood prepared the sacrament.  I always tried to sneak my tiny sacrament cup home to use in playing tea party with my dolls.  I loved the stacks of numbers used to display the hymns and the tiny microphone attached to the sacrament table.  I remember the day in 1985, when the new hymnbooks arrived.  I ran my fingers over the gold-embossed Tabernacle organ on the front.  To my six-year-old mind, there had never been anything so beautiful.

Church was a constant — Mom leading the Primary or directing the roadshow, Dad as perpetual bishop, and us six kids in various stages of childhood and adolescence awkwardness, but always there, involved, evolving in a static environment.

And so as we go each week, on weeknights, on Saturday mornings and on Sundays to our lemon-colored ward building here in Miami, I hope that my kids feels some of what I did as a child.  My oldest son just graduated from nursery and entered the Primary as an all-important Sunbeam.  He gave his first prayer in closing exercises, starting with “Dear Heavenly Father” and speeding right to the “Amen.”  The nursery leaders pulled me aside to tell me that my middle child, the lone boy in the class, has taken to tormenting the girls and pulling their hair.  He’s going to be a thrilling deacon.

As I lead the Primary and Daddy works on the computer, as the boys reverently run down the halls and use the doorstops as makeshift power shovels and watch baptisms and eat Latin salads and get snagged on those same scratchy walls and hear that unforgettable Primary music, I hope that they can look past some of my inconsistencies as a parent and remember that we were there every week, laying our meager offerings before the Lord, communing with the Saints, our brothers and sisters, in our spiritual home.