Fellowship history · The tire store

The morning we played a grand reopening between the racks.

In the years before we had a room of our own, we had a rule instead, and the rule was: if a room will have you, go. We did not screen the rooms. We went to the ones that asked, and in those days the ones that asked were not, on the whole, churches. So it was that on a bright Saturday in the spring after our second album, Water2Fine played the grand reopening of Del's Tire & Alignment on Roscoe Boulevard, because the manager was a cousin of Brother Wesley's on his mother's side and had asked so kindly, over the phone, that Wesley said yes before he thought to ask the rest of us, which is the correct order in which to say yes to a cousin. There was no stage. There was a strip of pennant flags snapping over the lot, a card table of pink bakery boxes, a coffee urn borrowed from a Sunday school, and a concrete showroom that smelled of new rubber and floor wax, and in the middle of it a gap between two racks of tires just wide enough for four folding chairs if we angled them. That was the stage. We angled the chairs. We played there for two hours while people drifted in to see about a rotation and stayed for a hymn they had not come for, and we learned, all over again, the lesson we keep having to learn: that you do not get to choose the room, only whether you bring your whole heart into the one you are given, and a tire store on a Saturday will take a whole heart the same as a sanctuary will, if you offer it one.

• ✚Play the room you are given — We did not hold out for a better room, because in those years there was no better room, only the next room that asked. Del's asked. So we went, and we have gone to every Del's since — every lobby, every lot, every showroom with a gap between the racks — on the theory that a room that asks for a hymn is telling you something true about itself, and it would be unkind, and a little proud, to turn it down.
• ✚Softer than the paging bell — The showroom had a service bell that rang whenever a car was ready, and the manager, being kind, offered to shut it off for us. We asked him please to leave it on. A man who has waited all morning for his alignment should not miss the bell because a Christian rock band wanted the room. So we tuned down under it, the way we had tuned down under the hospital pages the winter before, and we stopped once, gladly, so a fellow named Ernie could go collect his truck.
• ✚The doughnuts were the ministry — Sister Petra maintains, to this day, that the truest thing we did at Del's was not any song but the twenty minutes before, when Brother Jim — this was before he joined the kit, he was just a man who came to help carry — went and stood by the coffee urn and refilled the little cups for strangers and asked each one how their morning was going. Half the people who stayed for the music stayed because of the coffee first. We have never been sure worship and hospitality are two different things, and we have stopped trying to sort them.
• ✚Leave the lot cleaner — When the pennants came down and the last rotation rolled out, we stacked the folding chairs, wiped the card table, and carried the borrowed urn back to its Sunday school, and we ran a broom over the little half of the showroom that had been ours. Del's cousin tried to pay us. We would not take it, and asked instead only that he keep the coffee going for whoever came in Monday, which he said he would, and which, cousins being cousins, we choose to believe he did.

One of the venue-less years' many rooms, told most springs at the potluck, usually by Brother Wesley, usually longer than this. Fellowship in song since 2007. If a room will have you, go — and bring a folding chair.