October 27, 2017 (Friday)
The wedding at which I officiated last weekend was at a Houston downtown hotel in the block inside Main, Rusk, Travis and Walker streets.
When I stirred from my sleep Saturday morning I walked around the block. I passed a parking garage on Rusk that stands today where the old Majestic theater existed for, I’m guessing, almost 100 years. I worked there as an usher after school when in the ninth grade. Above the garage were many floors housing parts of the hotel and other things.
I rounded the corner and reached the corner of Travis and Walker where there is now a parking garage. Before the garage, there stood a half-block large Woolworth’s variety store that housed a great cafeteria in the basement, and before that the First Presbyterian Church was there, its lawn with a wrought iron fence facing Main Street. When the lawn was there, as an eleven-year-old I jumped the fence to cool my burning feet, because I had stepped on a live cigarette butt. While standing there enjoying the cool grass, a well-dressed young man came out of the church and asked me if I would like to earn 25c. “Doing what?” I asked. “All you have to do is stand in the doorway and announce the wedding couples as they come in.” I took a look at my bare feet, my ragged trousers, my soiled shirt, knowing that my hair was disheveled, and politely turned him down.* On that day, if I had looked up toward the building beside the lawn I could have seen the windows of what was then a bank but now is a hotel, and would not have known that in 75 years I would be standing inside near those windows as a minister of the gospel administering marriage vows to my grandson and his beautiful bride. Today the lawn location has buildings for lease and after passing them, I re-entered the hotel and went back to my room to meditate on the passing of time and the changes that time brings to our lives.
All my memories are of buildings no longer here and people long since gone. I was forcefully reminded that today is the only real day I have and I am taught in the Bible to make the most of it for the Lord.
Memories are precious; opportunities are golden. Jesus said the night is coming; therefore we are to serve the Lord while it is day.
*cf blog 2008/07/14