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Hands Off My Seat

The Source

I’d taken my cast of Potluck, The Musical, to eat in a nearby town. The place had been highly recommended by one of the gals and we had an hour to kill before a show so I pulled in. As soon as we hit the door one of my group pointed to a table near the front window and said, “Don’t sit there.” There was no one at the table. “Why not?” I asked. “We can see out. “She said it again, “We can’t sit there.” The restaurant had an inviting fireplace at one end of the dining room so I guided our group toward a comfy round table, then asked, “Why couldn’t we sit by the door.” “My husband and I sat there once and we got in trouble,” she said. “Trouble?” Just then she pointed toward the door. “There they are!” An elderly couple entered the café and sat in the table I’d just been warned to avoid. “It’s their table,” said my actress friend. “We made the mistake of sitting there once and that couple just sat in their car and stared at us through the window until we left. It was really uncomfortable.” It was a small town and small towns come complete with their own set of unwritten rules. Pity the poor people who don’t know the pecking order. I once visited a church in a nearby village and stupidly walked right in and had a seat toward the front. It was less than a minute before I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up to see a red-haired usher leaning discretely over my shoulder. He said, “Are you a visitor here?” I told him that I was. He said, “You’ll need to sit back here,” and pointed to a seat toward the rear of the church. I didn’t make this same mistake again. I went to another church. Of course the idea of long held seating places is the joke in many churches. I think that most people simply feel uncomfortable sitting in church under any circumstances and they cling to anything familiar for safety. It’s funny. When they attend the movie theatre or most sporting events they aren’t so concerned with plopping their tails onto familiar hardwood, but there’s something about the house of God that makes us want to drift to the same corners every Sunday. They don’t seem to care much about which table they take in the restaurant and when they shop they don’t insist on using the same parking space. I’ve seen animals mark territory but the church seems to be the only place where the human animal is intent on putting down grubstakes. In general, the better folks know each other the less they stick to the same places. The church I now attend is relatively promiscuous in its seating. Many of our parishioners tend to “sit around,” so to speak. Sure, some folks can’t be blasted out of their rear pews, but we have a good many nomads who tend to drift from place to place just to get to know a bit of new territory. In some of the earlier churches, the congregants purchased pews as a way to pay for the construction of the church, and after the church was paid for this custom often continued. Some worshippers who owned their own family pew (and often deeded them down to the next generation) had “pew locks” installed to keep out the heathens who might try to sit in the family spot. The more your family paid, the better seating position you received. The best seats of course were those that allowed all the non-paying sitters to see you. . Lincoln had his own purchased pew in Springfield’s First Presbyterian. It cost him fifty dollars and he seldom used it. I don’t think that Abe locked his pew. I don’t mean to be cruel, but I’ll admit that one of the funniest sights in Christendom is to watch what happens when visitors enter a church and unknowingly plop themselves into a pew occupied since Moses by one particular family. Visitors often arrive early and thus have first dibs. To see the faces of the lifetime inhabitants of that pew is more hilarious than the day my father hid the collection plate as it was passed down the aisle during a new minister’s first service. The offended pew owners look as flummoxed as the new preacher did on the day of the great plate robbery. As I left the restaurant with my little band of actors my curiosity overcame me and I wandered over to take a closer look at the couple that owned the table by the window. As I approached their table they stared at me and I stopped in my tracks. I think they imagined I might be coming for their table.