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I've never been baptized. Never read the whole Bible for that matter, either through desire of faith or literary lust. The handful of times I went to church with my friends as a kid it was more about being given a reason to dress up in our teenage leisure suits and buy a pack of cigarettes to smoke on the walk home. So complete was my lack of religious knowledge as a kid that once, on one of those trips to Holy Family with my buddies, I actually went up and took Communion.
My parents broke away from the Catholic Church just before I was born. My mother found out she was pregnant with me and freaked. Scared and confused, she went to church.
The priest told her abortion was a sin. If she had one, he said, not only would she burn in Hell, but so would the baby. Distraught, feeling trapped, she went home and took a fistful of aspirin -- probably hoping to induce a miscarriage. When my father found out what she had done -- and why -- he went and raged at the priest. They never again went to church, and eventually, I was born.
I grew up thinking I was raised basically areligious. Nobody told me I had to go to church, but nobody told me I couldn't. It was neither a good nor a bad thing. Just something that was simply and apparently unnecessary for respiratory function in my world. The sun still rose, I still got to watch "Dragnet," and life as I knew it went on. I grew up with the attitude that I didn't need religion.
Probably now, in adult retrospect however, I see I grew up believing that at the moment when my mom was so desperate for comfort, a man of God had nothing but rebukes and threats for her. And for me, pronouncements of damnation for an act I had no control over.
I had enough judgment, anger and vengefulness from the people around me in the steel town of Pueblo, Colorado, where I was growing up. I didn't need more from my God.
My wife, Lesli Bangert, grew up in the United Church of Christ. For a time while we were in college she was a practicing Buddhist. Any religious training or knowledge I have comes from Lesli. I joke that "I married her for a social conscience," but I notice nobody ever laughs when I say it; leading me to think they believe it's probably true. Lesli is the first person I could ever discuss religion with. Or more likely, the first person I ever decided to listen to. I don't think I ever talked to God before I met her.
Probably out of respect to me, Lesli has never really pushed the issue of any sort of religious training for our daughters, Riley and Harper Lee. As they've grown, they've begun to poke and prod around the concept of belonging to a church themselves. Lesli -- and to my credit I believe I -- have supported but tried not to guide it. Faith is an intensely personal thing.
But this personal thing is a pronounced public part of a newspaper, especially in small town weeklies. The husband and wife who Lesli and I bought The Johnstown Breeze from are devout Christians. So devout, in fact, that they were able to look beyond my Black Madonna-less heart and see that even if I didn't love their God, I loved their paper. As a legacy nod toward their faith, both religious and in us, Lesli and I decided to continue to honor the half-price advertising deal they had with the local churches.
But along with money, when it comes to churches, there is also moral authority. In a small town, there's a certain religious cachet to being able to say you have the editor of the local paper in your congregation. Maybe not as much as the banker, but somewhere above the guy that runs the auto body shop. And yet, after nearly two decades in these communities, we as a family belong to no local church.
I've often imagined people might assume we're Christian Scientists, because we run national stories from The Christian Science Monitor to broaden our coverage as the population of the communities continues to grow and change, with more and more people moving here from larger cities. The reality is we subscribe to The Christian Science Monitor News Service because they have good and interesting reporting and writing, and more importantly, because it's cheaper than AP or Reuters.
In a weird way, an amicable common ground has been found between the religious community and the paper over the past decade we've owned and run the publication. A world somewhere between theirs and mine. We support them through a cut in the cost of ads, and coverage of their news, and they support us by advertising. I get the occasional e-mail or letter when I capitalize God, or don't capitalize it, but on most Sunday mornings, I'm reasonably sure no congregation in Johnstown or Milliken is praying for the destruction of The Breeze.
But that doesn't mean there haven't been moments when their perceptions and mine haven't collided.
When we moved to Johnstown in the early 1990s, the religious rulers of the roost were no doubt the Methodists. So intimidating and overwhelming was their righteousness that, in defense, I coined a term for them: the Methodist Mafia. I found out about their perceived power when, early-on in our ownership, I was informed by one of the church ladies that she had taken it upon herself to write a series of three articles promoting the annual pre-Thanksgiving Turkey Dinner, and wanted them run each of the weeks leading up to this year's event.
"I was thinking we'd do a story," I said, "but maybe not three. And were you planning on doing some advertising?" I asked.
"No, the articles are all the advertising we'll need," she said.
I chafed. I took the three articles and edited them into one that ran three weeks before the event. The next week, no mention at all. I soon heard from the church lady. Obviously, I had "forgotten" to print the next story. I hadn't forgotten, I replied. And I didn't intend to remember next week either.
The tit-for-tat touched off by that exchange reverberated through years of Turkey Dinners to come. The next year, I recall, they ran a small ad and we ran a small story. That obviously just made the situation worse, when the ad space they paid for didn't translate to enough space in the newshole in their opinion. For several years, they didn't tell us when the dinner was, and we didn't ask, nor did we print a mention. It wasn't until a new pastor came in, and a like-minded, more liberal granola-type named Jennifer, who was a friend of Lesli's and mine, moved into the community and joined the church and took over publicity, that the rift ever-so-slightly mended.
I think that situation, and others, stemmed from my problem with the concept that belief in one religious ideology or another was Right. And by extension, others were Wrong. Even as a child destined to burn in Hell, I remember being troubled at those services at Holy Family when they got around to the, "I will believe there is no other true word" part of the program.
Using religion as a moral cudgel, to make yourself more by making someone else less, always has bothered me and still does. Religious intolerance is the smuggest, the snobbiest, pinched-faced, most offensive kind.
"It's a cult," the former Wild Child, now Born Again Christian Woman, told me one day. We were talking about her concerns about the new Abundant Life Tabernacle church that had just started in Johnstown.
About a half-dozen families had, in fact, moved en masse from back east, following a young, good-looking, charismatic pastor, who bought some land on the edge of town and said he planned to build a home and eventually a church. This was the time of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians.
The buzz around both towns became such that I decided to attend one of the services and write a story. What I found was a group of people who said they fell in love with Colorado while once here on a church retreat. Mostly young families, they said they wanted out of the grime and crime of the cities. The fundamentalist evangelical message and service certainly weren't things that struck my heart, but the pastor and the church members I talked to seemed truly puzzled about what they needed to do to move from cult to congregation in the moral hierarchy of the communities.
Several years back, during the heat of the Federal Marriage Amendment debate, the United Church of Christ came out with a series of television ads under a campaign called "God is Still Speaking." One of those ads, which showed a male couple holding hands and being turned away from a church by "bouncers," was refused for broadcast by both NBC and CBS. I assigned a reporter to talk to the leaders of the local churches to get their response.
Most spoke freely and contributed to a good discussion on the issue. All said all were welcome in their church, but around the edges you got the whiff of a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. We even asked if they would perform same-sex ceremonies. All said no, a couple drawing a definite line of faith and religious philosophy, and several even willing to publicly say that according to church doctrine, homosexuality is wrong. I was proud after the story ran, that we had had the guts to take it on -- and that the local religious leaders had had the guts to talk with us and answer our questions.
Just last month, during the week of the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, we ran a Christian Science Monitor story about a mosque in a small town in Ohio that has been part of that community for 75 years. The story talked about how the mosque and the community dealt with tensions following 9/11, and gave a perspective on these -- many third generation -- American Muslims. Its headline: "A mosque made for America's heartland."
Thinking this was a perfect way to look differently at the 9/11 anniversary, and because the story had a striking accompanying photo of the mosque, we decided to run it on the front page alongside coverage of that Monday night's school board meeting.
We got several calls. Nobody challenged the story outright on religious grounds. Nobody said it was an insult at a time of remembrance of the terrorist attacks. But they wanted explanation why we had chosen to run a story about a mosque in Ohio, on the front page no less.
"These are good Muslims," I said to several, trying to lighten up the mood during our conversation. "I don't think until 9/11 most Americans had any concept of Islam beyond Aladdin or Lawrence of Arabia. We thought this was a good chance to show this group of Muslims that has been in this small Ohio town for nearly eight decades."
We've run other "national" Christian Science Monitor stories on the front page before. A couple of years back, we ran a front page feature with a large portrait of a Sandinista mural that accompanied a story by a reporter friend who had recently spent three months living in Nicaragua. In the midst of the war in Iraq, we had wanted to look at how Nicaragua was doing now that our militaristic attention had shifted elsewhere. We headlined the piece "Wars Come and Wars Go," and nobody said a word.
The reality is, whether I believe in their God, or go to their church, and even whether the churches choose to support the newspaper through advertising dollars, religion is a part of the life that makes up a small town and the grist for the weekly paper's mill. Churches, in fact, pre-date the beginning of Johnstown and Milliken themselves in this area of northern Colorado.
'Two of God's loveliest creatures'
The story of Cora Dilley and June Grelle
"Matt, you've got to let me write about Rev. Cora Dilley," June Grelle said one day, most of the sentence delivered before the front door of the office closed behind her. If there were two things June Grelle loved, they were God and History, her favorite depending on the subject being discussed at that moment.
A twisting talking Texas tornado of energy that blew into town in 2001, June had spent the past 40 years teaching special education in a suburban metro-Denver community. Now in her 60s, widowed, she found the neighborhood she had raised her family in was deteriorating. Having grown up in the small town of Cee Vee, Texas, she sought to return to such a place.
Her mother, who lived nearby, had recently died. June was trying to sell her house and someone stole the For Sale sign from the yard. She got mad, got in her car, and started driving north on Interstate 25.
She had traveled nearly 50 miles before she saw the exit for a town called Johnstown. Recently, she recalled, she had read in the Denver Post a story about this small community. A farm town being swept up in the newest and latest crop craze … houses. She decided to check it out.
The featured person in the story had been a beautiful, blond, ebullient real estate agent, Sandie Slafter, who had moved to the community with her husband, Randy, so he could become pastor of a small and growing local church. Sandie was perfect for the real estate boom. Naturally friendly, she had made the vow upon moving to town that she would learn and remember the names of every one of the 2,000 or so residents. As the towns continued to grow, she stayed faithful to that promise and her yard signs dotted the new lawns like bright metal dandelions.
Upon entering the community, Grelle saw a sign for an open house. Following it, she drove up to a home being offered by the woman she had read about: Sandie Slafter. She bought the house.
"God led me to Johnstown," she would say. Now, apparently God and June wanted to write a story about Cora Dilley.
"More than a century ago, a bright shining star briefly zoomed across this southwest Weld County area and left a glow that remains to this day," the story June eventually wrote began. "A red-haired, striking beauty came from New York before the turn of the century, bringing her faith to congregations in this pioneer land by horse and buggy."
Born Aug. 20, 1867, in Newark Valley, N.Y., the oldest child of merchant Morris Elwell and his wife, Ella, Cora Dilley came to Colorado as a missionary in the United Brethren in Christ Church. After training in Denver, she was assigned to an area in the northern part of the state.
A "circuit riding preacher," Dilley traveled to the prairie churches that anchored the scattered farms and was regarded as a capable, spiritual, caring and hard-working woman minister, June wrote. In 1897, she led part of her congregation to build a church in the small town of Elwell (named after her parents) that they named Dilley Chapel in her honor. That same year, she married a young couple who had as their witnesses Harvey J. Parish and his wife, Mary, who five years later would lead the effort to create Johnstown just a few miles to the east.
And then she was dead. At age 30. Following "eight weeks of suffering" from what was termed "intestinal hemorrhaging." One shudders to think what that might actually have been, given the Victorian euphemisms of the time and the press. One wonders what Dilley was thinking during those two months. Had this been the path God had laid for her? To die an agonizing death on the frontier prairie with her family half a continent away?
The April 28, 1898, issue of the Greeley Tribune reported that, "Dilley Chapel was crowded almost to suffocation for the funeral … people came from 20 miles in all directions … to pay that last tribute to one of God's loveliest creatures. He giveth His beloved rest."
Dilley was buried under the south window of the church that bore her name. In 1904, it burnt to the ground and was rebuilt. She was later exhumed and moved to the Johnstown Cemetery, where she lies today. The building that housed her church was eventually sold to the Catholic Church and has moved several times around the community. Today, it sits across the street from the house of my mother, who moved up here following my dad's death.
We ran June's story on the front page, with a grainy, sepia-toned portrait of Cora Dilley, and a photo of her headstone at the cemetery, as the art. June smiled shyly on Thursday morning when she came in to get some copies after the paper hit the streets. Then immediately, she began telling me what we should write about next.
Two years ago this month, I came into work one morning to find out June Grelle was dead. Just the day before, she had been seen bustling around town doing last-minute things for the Johnstown Historical Society; a group she joined soon after coming to town and quickly became a foundation of its effort. She had stayed up till 3 in the morning sending e-mails about projects she was working on, before leaving early to drive back to Texas for the dedication of a historical marker at a church in Cee Vee. She died in a single car crash in southern Colorado. Investigators believe she may have fallen asleep at the wheel, or suffered a heart attack.
Grelle passed away on Oct. 13, 2005, the same date on which in 1944 her little sister had died from a dose of incorrect medication at a Fort Worth hospital, according to family members. In 1946, her father was killed in a hunting accident on that same date as well.
For someone who had only lived in the community for four years, Grelle had become more part of the town -- and knew more about the history of the communities -- than some of the people who grew up here. Her death devastated the women of the historical society, deeply saddened many, and came as a brutal shock.
In the story I wrote about her death, I said news of it had struck people speechless. It was a sad, smiling nod I knew only those who knew her would get. June could and would -- how could you put it? -- tend to go on when you talked to her. I'd call her on deadline about something in a story and leave a message, and a bit later she'd walk in the door of the office. All I usually wanted was a piece of information. A date. Clarification of a statement. And she'd start talking about this, that and the other. I'd try to be nice, but facing deadline, I'd get her out the door as quickly as I could so I could get back to work.
Now, I wish I had been smart enough to just sit there and listen.
After deadline the week she died, I took the snapshot photo we scanned for her obituary and stuck it in the lower left corner of the front plate glass window that looks out onto downtown Johnstown. June sits there still today, a silent sentinel over the town she blazed across like Cora Dilley, before imbedding into our hearts like a human meteorite with a drawl.
The Albertson Boys
Witnesses with weed whackers
Among the many, including myself, who mourned June's death, it's likely the pain wasn't felt more keenly than among The Albertson Boys. Soon after June moved to the community, she hired them and they quickly became her good go-to guys for getting things fixed, and she became somewhat of a grandma to them.
Remember the old Newhart television show? The one where Bob ran an inn in Vermont? Think of The Albertson Boys as sort of like the brothers Larry, Darryl and Darryl that would do "anything for a buck." Except, while Larry and the Darryls did it all to serve themselves, Randy, his younger brother Tim, and their other brother, Jeff, do it all in the service of Jesus Christ.
Lawn need mowing? Call The Albertson Boys. Dog taken care of while you're on vacation? Fido's got a faithful friend. Christmas lights to hang? They'll hang them. So good and pure and Christian and dependable were these three brothers, that they quickly cornered the odd job and lawn care business in the communities. In 2003, still in their teens, they were honored among other young men and women in the state as entrepreneurs by the Young Americans Center for Financial Education.
The phrase "The Albertson Boys" came to be a shorthand measure of quality and dependability in Johnstown and Milliken. "Oh, they're no Albertson Boys," people would say of other similar services, "but they'll get the job done OK."
And then, in the summer of 2005, after more than a decade of building their business, they sold it. Randy and Tim said they had been called to go work for a youth ministry for the summer in Peoria, Ill. Randy, now a student at Faith Bible School in Mitchell, S.D., had met the pastor of the church that year at a conference, and they were going to help him in his ministry.
"It's not in the worst part of town," Randy said when I interviewed them just prior to their departure, "but it's pretty bad."
"Some crack addict is gonna shoot one of them right in the head," I told Lesli one night, lying in bed. I asked Randy, as the big brother, if he had any concerns for his and his brother's safety. He said few if any.
"If you're in the center of God's will," he said, "you're indispensable until He's done with you."
A couple of days after they took off, Tim called me from the road on their way to Illinois. "I guess I felt a little trepidation when we left," he said, "but not much. We're doing the right thing."
To sell their business was a decision based on faith for The Albertson Boys. What some might not understand, and I didn't understand until I got to know them, is that their faith isn't blind. It doesn't cloud, but clarifies. Robert Browning said in a poem, "You call for faith. I give you doubt, to prove that faith exists…the greater the doubt, the greater the faith if you have it."
Randy and Tim Albertson have their faith. Faith that God is with them and guiding them on this journey. "The easy thing to do would have been to stay in Johnstown forever," Randy said. "But you have to keep growing." Recently, he came up and shook my hand while I was sitting outside the office one afternoon. Now himself the pastor of a church in Missouri, he was in town for the Labor Day holiday visiting his parents, with his wife and their Albertson Boy, James Aquila.
Radio Waves to Heaven
Faith runs like a deep river through small towns and their souls, with all the individual dark eddies of sin and pools of salvation. About the best religion story I've ever heard doesn't even have to do with a church. It didn't take place in a pew, or come from a sanctuary. There is no stained glass involved. It happened in a farm field.
Don owns the local radio station and farms a small amount of land north of Johnstown. The story goes that years ago he was out working his land when a voice came to him. He needed to go into town, the voice said. He needed to go to the home of a local couple and talk to them about their marriage.
Now, living in a small town, Don knew of the couple, but little about their lives. Yet, something told him to stop work and drive into town.
As he was pulling up, the man was just leaving the house. His marriage was troubled. He and his wife had just had a terrible fight and he had stormed out the door, shouting that he never intended to return. As he was coming down the walk, Don was coming up.
"God sent me to come talk to you about your marriage," the story goes that Don said. The man, dumbfounded, sure this was a sign of some sort of divine intervention, calmed down and went inside with Don to talk with his wife.
Don's radio station has even gone through a salvation of sorts. When he started it in the mid-1990s in a news talk format, the burgeoning "Patriot Radio" genre was just getting its budding shoots of a start. The station wasn't and hasn't ever really been "local." Broadcasting by satellite, it reached and still reaches listeners scattered across the country. Several of his on-air hosts quickly fell into line with the Posse Comitatus, individual landowner rights, distrustful of government, conspiracy theory crowd.
Then, the Oklahoma City bombing happened, and suddenly folks weren't so willing to be accepting of divergent political viewpoints. The station, broadcasting from this small town in northern Colorado, became one of the examples of the "dangerous movement" that the state and national media began pointing to and at. Editors from the Denver dailies would send reporters to Johnstown, where they'd find Don's radio station on one block, and my hippie weekly newspaper down the street, and they'd call me for an interview.
Don was a good friend, I would tell them. He was always one of the first people buying a copy of my paper at the local hardware store when it came out on Thursday mornings, I'd say, and yes, I listened to the station on occasion. While I probably disagreed with 90 percent of what I heard, I'd tell the reporters, I still thought he was doing important work getting that perspective out to the listening public.
And then, on a cold November night in 1997, the beautiful two-story brick building at the main intersection in Johnstown, that Don owned and ran the station out of, caught fire. It burned through the night and to the ground. The story naturally caught the national media's attention, even meriting a report and photo in the New York Times. Rumors about what had caused the blaze swirled like ashes on the wind. The official determination, eventually, was that a man and wife who were on-air hosts, and who were living in the back of the station, had left a hot plate on and then gone out for the evening. To this day, however, some still doubt that.
But the fire was a cleansing of sorts for the station. Shortly after relocating to the old bank building across the street from the paper, and getting back on the air, Don began to shed himself of several of the more strident personalities he broadcast. Today, the station still proudly remains part of the patriot movement ("Truth, News, Health," it boldly claims on the sign on their door), but has mainstreamed itself, if that's possible. And Don, always devout, has continued broadcasting even more religious-toned offerings, including a daily program hosted by him. I love to listen to his show. Not so much for what Don is saying, but the soft rhythmic way in which he discusses this part of the Scripture, or that part of his faith. His voice soothes me, and I usually end up learning something as well.
"Unless God builds the house, those who labor build it in vain"
Psalm 127
If Don's story was one of faith carrying someone through his trials, the story of Randy Slafter is another. It was faith that brought him and his family to Johnstown 15 years ago. The wings of faith protected him from the dark angels of grief and tragedy in times so black that memory cannot even see them now. And it is with faith that he is now stepping into the next stage of his life.
A smiling modern-day Job, Slafter said he first realized his calling when, as a college student at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he preached for the first time in a small church and something resonated within his heart. He decided to go to Multnomah Bible College in Portland, Oregon, to study for the ministry. It was there one day he saw Sandie Reger, a beautiful co-ed from Southern California, with an inner light and spirit that shone like sunlight off her blond hair.
The two eventually began to date. Nine months later, they were engaged. On May 19, 1979, they were wed.
The young couple and their three kids moved to Johnstown when Randy was called to the new young church there. As he set about helping it to grow, growth of another kind came into the couple's lives. Johnstown and Milliken, long steady in population, were swept up in the development "Californication" of the northern Colorado Front Range. Sandie had sold real estate part-time in the small town in Nebraska where they had come from, and began steadily to build a real estate business here.
Eventually, facing burnout as a pastor, Randy chose to step down from the pulpit and joined his wife in the real estate office. Together they became "The Slafter Team." For a period of time, they were the real estate agents in Johnstown and Milliken. But if business success had followed the Slafters to Johnstown, more malignant forces did as well. Shortly after coming to the communities, Sandie, then 39, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Following treatment, however, it appeared as if the disease has been stopped. For the next 10 years, she regularly got a clean bill of health at her six-month check-ups. The kids continued to grow, the business flourished, and life was good.
Then, seven months after her last check-up, Sandie went to the doctor. "The cancer had come back with a rampage," Randy said.
Taking over more and more of the responsibility of running the business, Randy tried to keep things going while Sandie battled the cancer. One of their sons came to work with him. Randy said the last year of Sandie's life was the biggest ever for the business, but always, Sandie's illness hung over everything.
May 4, 2004, although the couple had done everything they could, including seeking alternative treatment in Mexico, Sandie died. Summer turned to fall, then to winter, as Randy tried to get the business back on track -- now without Sandie by his side. But the real estate market had been flooded with other agencies and agents attracted by the growth. Things just weren't the same. Bit by bit, Randy saw the business beginning to slip as he continued to grieve. We kept running his weekly ads, but payments became fewer and farther between. We tried to let the amount due ride, and even discussed a couple times just writing it off, but as a small business ourselves, we couldn't figure out how we could absorb the loss of revenue. Finally, the business went under. Randy, to his credit and our gratitude, came into the office and settled his bill in full -- on the way to file for bankruptcy, I believe.
Then, in April of 2006, we heard that Randy had been badly hurt in a motorcycle crash the night before. He said he doesn't remember deciding to go for a ride. The garage door at his house was left open, something he never did. His dog, which he always put in before he left, he said, was still outside.
"There was still food warm on the stove, so I must have intended to be right back," he said.
The Weld County Sheriff's deputy clocked him at nearly 120 miles an hour just a few miles south of the Wyoming border. He was traveling so fast that the deputy didn't even get a chance to initiate a pursuit. Within minutes, the Colorado State Patrol received a report of a crash. Randy had gone off the highway at a curve in the road.
Randy said he doesn't remember anything. The whole thing is still a complete blank. "I don't think I wanted to die," he said softly recently, sitting at a local coffee shop, his blue eyes looking off into space and trying to picture that black time. "But I know I didn't want to live." What he also knows, Slafter quickly adds, is the hand of God was on his shoulder that day. He suffered a closed head injury that he still feels the effects from, and a badly broken thumb that still gives him trouble, but his recovery has been nearly complete.
Late last month, Randy Slafter left Johnstown to go to Sierra Leone, Africa, where he will work with World In Need International, teaching other pastors. Given what he has gone through in the past 15 years since coming to Johnstown, and given what he is now embarking upon, the conversation quickly comes back to the nature of faith.
"Faith is nothing until is has been experienced," he said. "Sometimes, when you don't think God is speaking, that's when you have to listen."
I wasn't listening for God, but rather for footsteps, as I stood behind the screen of a large tree in the Johnstown Cemetery, trying to finish off a joint before the funeral procession appeared out on the highway. Part of the service had been the pastor reading the article I had written that week about Eloy's death. Following it, I bolted from the packed church and walked to the cemetery alone, needing to clear my mind and fill my lungs.
Eloy Mares was the owner of a tire and auto shop in Milliken. He had died suddenly of a heart attack. One of 10 brothers and sisters, he had grown up poor. In 1988, when he opened his tire shop, things weren't much better. He and his son, David, started in a shed along the main street not even as big as the average residential garage. In the winter, they used to have to build a fire in the morning just to thaw out the air wrench.
About that same time, Eloy was also elected to the town board. He served proudly in that position, maybe not always the most politically savvy or well-spoken member of the board, but certainly one of the most earnest. As his business grew, and he became more well-known in the community, he became the champion and voice for segments of the population that might not otherwise have had one. When Hispanic families moved to town, some coming newly from Mexico, the word was always the same: "Go to Eloy, he'll help you out," and he always did.
Whenever I was in Milliken, I'd stop and smoke a cigarette with him out in front of the service bays of his shop. Maybe go across the street to Rosa's Café and have a cup of coffee. There was always something to talk about, as Eloy, oftentimes impatiently, chided me about lack of coverage of this issue, or coverage of another.
The church had been filled for Eloy's funeral, and now, the long line of cars appeared on the highway, turning off and slowly making their way toward the cemetery. I began walking toward the gravesite. As the family walked toward the chairs set up under the tent, I made brief eye contact with one of Eloy's brothers, whom I had met the other day for the first time when I was interviewing the family for the story. A blood red carnation was pinned to his black t-shirt. I doubt he even saw me, staring through the haze of his grief.
As the crowd assembled around the grave, one of Eloy's vato nephews, a huge hulking guy with a shaved head, stepped forward and began to sing "Amazing Grace." I remembered when one of my reporters had written in a story about cemetery expansion that they make sure all the headstones face east, so the cold granite symbols of death are warmed each morning by the rising sun. I remembered the time I called Eloy in a panic because I had to go to the airport the next morning to fly to California with my mom for several days, and the weatherman was saying there would be snow on the ground when I returned. The tires on my LandCruiser were balder than my dad, and I was worried about having to drive the hour back from the airport on race-slick rubber on icy roads. Eloy not only got the tires on for me that afternoon, but drove to Denver on his lunch hour to get them.
When we've been here ten thousand years...
bright shining as the sun.
We've no less days to sing God's praise...
then when we've first begun.
They say the hardest day isn't the funeral. The worst is the day after, when the sun comes up, and life now goes on without the person. I thought of eternity. Of the rays of sunlight each morning from now on that would hit the chiseled shadows of Eloy's gravestone. And I wondered whether he was gone, or had simply gone on. I wondered if it mattered. Either way, he wasn't here.
That night I was sitting on the bed, brooding about and mourning Eloy, when my oldest daughter, Riley, came home from a youth Bible study class and immediately went to her room. Like her mother, emotional by normal nature, if she was quiet that meant she was truly troubled by something.
Neither Lesli nor I had said much when Riley announced she was attending the classes. They were held at one of the more conservative and fundamentalist of the churches in town, but it was also the church of her neighbor and best friend. The pair had literally grown up together, but now, as adolescence was budding, they were starting to drift apart. Riley saw going to the class as a way she could share her friend's life and maybe reconnect. She wasn't coming home parroting any of the intolerant rhetoric we had sometimes heard coming from the church -- and she still proudly used phrases like "In Goth We Trust" -- so neither of us was really worried.
Around bedtime, I went downstairs and found her already in bed. I asked if everything was OK. She muttered things were fine. I knew that with her, as with her mother, the true emotion lay just below the skin and needed only be picked at slightly.
"How was Bible class tonight?" I asked.
"It kind of sucked," she said. "The people running it made me mad."
"What happened?"
"They were talking about Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses," she said. "They were basically saying they were wrong to believe the way they do. My friend Zach is a Mormon. Cousin Colin is a Mormon. And Aunt Shar and Uncle Dick and Kristi are Jehovah's Witnesses.
"And," Riley said, looking at me, "if I believe what they're telling me, you're going to Hell."
I winced.
"Riley, God and I don't have any problems," I told her. "The only way I'd be going to Hell is if I believed what they believe and didn't follow it. But I don't, so it doesn't matter.
"What I do know is this," I told her, trying to get her to settle in, and pulling the covers up. "I do know that the hand of God worked on the hearts of the people we bought the newspaper from. And for that, I owe Him, Her, or It a debt of gratitude. We've been given a really cool chance to do something for these communities. To be their voice. And part of that dialogue is religion. And part of any dialogue is that not everyone is going to agree."
"Do you ever pray?" she asked.
"Every morning and usually before I go to bed."
"What do you pray for?"
"That you guys are safe," I said. "That I'm thankful for another day. That I want to be a positive force in the universe, and that I'm seeking strength to be that."
"Who do you talk to?"
"God, I guess, Riley."
"So you believe in God?"
"Sure. Just not in religion. I believe there's something out there … a spirit …or something … a higher power. Your mother says we listen to it, we learn, and then we choose with our hearts."
I turned off Riley's light. Kissed her on the head and walked out, closing the door.
"And it struck me kind of funny, kind of funny sir indeed," I muttered to myself, singing the old Bruce Springsteen song, "how at the end of every hard working day people find some reason to believe."
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