An open letter · To our neighbors in Carson

We are finally going to say your name.

Dear neighbors — and we do mean neighbors, because Carson is a short and reasonable drive from North Hills, thirty-one miles to the gallon, we checked — for nineteen years we held your name back. Not out of pride. We told ourselves it was a discipline: that a fellowship should be known for who it sings to, not who it sings against, and that naming a rival is the first small loudness, and we are in the business of soft noises. So we called you the airship people, and the mercury-bass fellows, and we left it there, and we prayed for you the gentle anonymous way you pray for a stranger. Then, this year, you named us — from a stage, into a microphone, with the fog machine running so thick we are told the front rows could not see you say it. You named us first. And a thing you learn at potlucks is that when someone finally says your name across the parking lot, the kind reply is not silence; it is to walk over and say theirs back. So: LitBlimp. There. We have said it, in love, in daylight, with no fog at all. We pray for you by name now, which we are told unsettles you more than the old silence ever did, and we are sorry for that and not sorry enough to stop. There is an extra folding chair by the decaf with your name on it, and we will keep setting it out, and we will keep being good at this until the gas runs out — ours, not yours, because yours, frankly, will not get you as far.

• ✚One — We will not respond to Re-Inflated. We responded already, in 2024, with Renewed, and the response was simply to be quieter and better and on time. A reunion record is a fine thing; we are glad the two of you are speaking again.
• ✚Two — On the matter of your two lead singers and which is the real one: we have two drummers, Brother Jim and Brother J.C., and they have never once disputed which of them is the real drummer. We offer this not as a rebuke but as a working example, available for borrowing, no charge.
• ✚Three — We will keep noting your gas mileage in the weekly bulletin when there is room, which there usually is. We do this in fellowship. A tour bus parked in Carson burns fuel even idling, and we worry about that for you, genuinely, the way you worry about a neighbor who leaves the porch light on all day.
• ✚Four — We will pray the fog clears. Not the stage fog — that is yours to run and we respect it — but the other kind, the kind a person hides in. When it lifts, the chair is here. It has been here the whole time. We just had not said your name out loud to point at it before.
• ✚Five — We will wish you well, every Sunday, by name, until it stops feeling like a discipline and starts feeling like the truth, which we suspect is the same Sunday it stops unsettling you. We will both know it when it comes.

Read aloud once at the potluck, then set on the extra chair. Fellowship in song since 2007. Bring a folding chair — there is always one more.