The Fish on the Watertower

The Miraculous Conversion of the Deacon, Christian Ryder

Deacon Christian Ryder, despite the implications of his sonorous appellation, was not particularly Christian until he was left a message just before his thirty-third birthday and on the eve of the birth of his twin girls. Left by natural forces at the command of a higher power, a fish appeared on his freshly painted watertower. Only he knows why he painted his water tower mud brindle brown, prolly got a signal from outer space, that being the origin of most important messages. He was supposed to paint the nursery, and not brown, but he decided it was a better idea to use up some old paint on the water tower. Now, it was hot and the paint was not inclined to form a permanent bond with the wood and that night a nasty little summer storm blew in and pelted the tower smartly. When all was blown and gone the watertower had a freshly inscribed fish. But it wasn't the stylized fish that school children stencil on catch basins to deter the pouring of used motor oil into the ocean or the bumpersticker fish identifying a certain type of zealot...it was a tropical fish, maybe an angel fish. Well Christian took this as a sign that he better get with the program on the brink of his wife delivering what they knew would be twins. So he looked in the phone book under "religious instruction", found the Holy Triangle Gospel Church and signed up for Wednesday night bible study classes. While not exactly mainstream, it seemed like a good fit and he was on his way to Deacon-hood.

Alrighty then, dial forward seventeen years, give or take. The Ryder twins, Debby and Dianne are in high school and are both gorgeous. I decide it might be a good idea to take a stab at asking Debby to a sockhop in the spring of '70. She says yes, but turns out "stab" was the operative word here. The Deacon decides to deliver his darlin' to the dance himself, what with him havin, a car and me not. So I hop on the' 65 Panhead (Harley) that my grandfather bought me on my sixteenth birthday and fixed up as a reward for me skipping grade ten. ('member him? Ironically he was another lay preacher...but I digress). I meet her at the door and we go in. I pay for the tickets and take her coat to hang in one of the cloak rooms. I put it on a wire hanger and the hanger slips out of my hand and stabs the back of her hand, producing quite a little geyser. Being a man of action (and scared &%$#less) I grabbed some masking tape from a sockhop sign and taped her up. I got her on the back of my bike, took her to emerge where she got three stitches, a tetanus shot, and later a scar. Her dad picked her up after I had beat it outa there. I steered clear of the whole gang for a while, but we all still live in a small town and Debbie never was mad that I could tell. Prudence kept me outa the reach of the Deacon as he was fairly sturdy and quite quick for an older guy.

This is how the spread looked in about 1980, long after the Ryders built a new shack...you could still see the "fish" and that brown paint stayed unfaded for years.