For a number of years, we would pass this property while vacationing in northern Michigan. And each year, I would turn to Kristie and say, “I’m going to get some snapshots of this place while we are here this week, okay?”

And I never got those snapshots.

Until this week.

These are snapshots.

While this building has gone through a number of evolutions in the past few years, I can tell you what this place was thirty-six years ago.

The last time I would have walked in.

This was the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

This is a snapshot. Thirty-six years in the making.

And while a post like this one could take any number of turns, it might be noteworthy to share that I am given to absolute fits of nostalgia. . .if we truly know what nostalgia is and how it leaves the nostalgic feeling. . .after the feeling presents itself, settles into place and personhood, and then finally passes.

I revisit these places to put them to rest. Because they are as real as their timbers I can feel them in my own timbers. My green bones were forming under the frame of this place. I have as many memories of this place as I might a road, a meadow, a lake, a sunset, an attraction you can only get to by ferry.

This is a snapshot:

 

An entry point. Though I was reading before I entered into this building, most of my childhood reading would happen inside and outside of this building. The ability to quickly turn to a song number during a Sunday meeting. The accuracy of underlining an answer to a question following a passage of text for the Tuesday night meeting. Putting together an introduction and body for a “talk” I would give during the Theocratic Ministry School on a Thursday night.

This is a snapshot:

 

This is the back door to the place. This would actually open up to the stage area where I watched short skits given to serve as a “text” for how to meet the public during Field Service on Saturday mornings. When I met certain criteria from the Thursday training, I would give my own “talk” from this main stage. It was on this main stage that I gave a “talk” at age eight after having learned to incorporate hand gestures (or “gesticulation”) into my message.

My early leaps in literacy made it possible for me to follow and to internalize many stories, messages, and themes that helped me to follow conversations lost on many seeking a sense of connection to religion–much less theology–in their adult years. At age eight, I requested and read MY BOOK OF BIBLE STORIES on the way home from Holt, Michigan wherein a larger assembly of Jehovah’s Witnesses met (in fact, these are called “Assemblies”). It was a new publication coming out of the Watchtower Society and it was introduced at this assembly. Of course I wanted it and I wanted to be the first to have read it when we returned to Petoskey so that I could share the book with the other children.

Do we see it? This is a snapshot. Going to conferences with a keen interest.

In what I might see. Hear. Read. Bring back.

This is a snapshot:

 

This property has been burnt-out. Local accounts suggest it might have been a cigarette and the chemicals inside of the building as the last evolution of this building would have been a training facility for would-be cosmetologists. Perhaps the kind of cosmetologist that might have waved his or her hands while retelling the account of a previous customer with an odd habit or request.

This is a snapshot:

 

I wanted to get this shot. This is where the congregation would have sat to sing a song, listen to a talk, to raise their hands to respond to the questions from the Watchtower magazine article for that week (we also read Awake at home–a publication with topical articles designed to prompt thinking into the secular culture or “the world”).

This is where I learned to sit quietly. To listen. To keep my finger on the verse being referenced in the talk. To learn more about the person I would become if I followed this path. If I listened to “the Great Teacher.”

And. . .it’s where I learned that a momentary lapse of attention could garner a trip to either restroom for redirection. And as only a stone were holding the door closed to this place. . .

But I can not show you those snapshots. I could be suggesting that I walked inside of this place to get a snapshot of these restrooms. To walk about a space that has gone through many, many evolutions since it was the place I once knew. It wouldn’t be prudent to suggest to you that I might disturb the universe by trying to enter into some sort of portal to bring something of myself back.

I might be making this last part up in the interest of protecting myself from the idea that I might trespass upon a memory to see how it was made. . .was it really of this stuff. . .and was it really this tough?

But, I’ve been known to go Campbellian in my entrance into the bellies of whales to find something like a treasure.

This is nostalgia. She often presents herself in the portrait form. To make you believe you are seeing waterfall murals with the squeaking opening of a door that won’t lock. That you are seeing the giving box. That you are seeing the chairs in rows facing the front. That you don’t see one indication that you are behind a congregration seeking God.

There are no symbols here.

There are only snapshots.

There is no connection to teaching or reading here. I might have told you this in the beginning. To save you some time.

This is a snapshot.

And for what it is worth. . .it is also a text.