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Show Ida's Sabbath 92 Ida repinched the s l i t s of her eyes and wished that this prayer wasn't so long. She looked at Morris, the music graduate who had gone down to the University of Utah and come back trying to reform the way Ida had run the music for almost twenty years. "Stuffy Morris," she thought. "He might know music theory, but he doesn't know about the s p i r i t like I do. He detests 'The Holy City'-says i t ' s cornball. He t e l l s me not to use the vibrato so much-says i t sounds l i k e a funeral parlor. Oh Ida, listen to you being c r i t i c a l after what you've done." "And bless us that we may f i nd the means to repair our steeple, and for these blessings we ask," concluded Brother Parsons, "Amen." "The steeple! I t ' s all my f a u l t , " thought Ida. She adjusted her slippery glasses again with her right hand and pushed the diapason, dulciano, and 8' f l u t e stops with her l e f t . Then she relaxed her legs into her work-the sacrament hymn: "There Is a Green H i l l Far Away." Even though "Green H i l l " ranked as one of Ida's favorites, she couldn't wrest emotion out of the song, not even with her usual flourishes-scale passages, arpeggios, and a few chromatics. Today, on her 1,039th Sunday, she could think only of that skeleton steeple, i t s shingles scattered over the roof and the lawn by God's own l i g h t n i n g , i t s humiliation, and her own. She f e l t a t i c in her eye, nervous tension crowding her spinal column, and her vision started to wobble. She looked out at the congregation and was surprised at a sea of singing guppies. " I d a , get hold of yourself," she begged herself and looked to her friend M i l l y for some human contact. But M i l l y and her Lancome red cheeks seemed to be sinking in the middle of f i v e bouncing children. |
