The song used to go on to talk about how hot weather makes the back of your neck dirty and gritty. Not around St. John's. Summer in parish ministry is a time for planning for the next year, taking on administrative projects which otherwise we don't have time for, and above all—the building projects.

One year, we completely renovated the staircase and foyer in Wainwright House where I live. Another year, we did work in Wade House, one of the church's other properties. This year has been a funny year for projects. What little we will have done by the end of the summer will be done, pretty much in one apartment. My apartment.

Getting work done in the apartment is like a musical crescendo. It builds in volume with the passage of time. You do one room, and the next one looks tacky by comparison. And so another project gets added, the budget is examined for room to find a few more dollars, and the project goes on.

A moment like this causes one to examine one's possessions. I have to confess that I do not have much of a “nesting instinct.” When my partner was alive, he pretty much chose the stuff in the house—with the exception of the few basic things which I found for myself when I first graduated from seminary and began my first parish job.

When I moved back to California from Massachusetts, I have to confess, I was pretty much broke. And I had a sofa which my parents gave me and a black and white television (yes, indeed, it surely was) which was a birthday present that year. That was it. Really. And I got a huge surprise when I first went to some furniture stores. The first thing I discovered was that new furniture was beastly expensive. And that new furniture was also pretty much beastly . Joints made with staples, case goods made of particleboard covered with plastic laminate in what was hopefully described as “wood grain,” all in all it was pretty much, I thought, junk.

I began to think that I would sleep on the sofa and eat dinner off the black and white television.

Then, I met Joy, and Joy was one of those persons whose name matched her disposition. She was always eager and ready to help folks with any sort of project. She gave me a chair. With a matching ottoman. By way of introduction, she explained that the chair was not beautiful, but was a good piece of furniture, well made and sturdy. It was a wing chair, and she had me pictured in that chair reading a novel and drifting off to a nap. About the only way one could tolerate that chair was asleep, since it was covered in stained white naughahyde with lots of little gouged marks on the arms and back where, perhaps, a cat with good taste in furniture had offered her evaluation. “Now you save up your money,” said Joy, “and take it to Sloan's and get it reupholstered.”

And that is pretty much what I did.

Then, I discovered, one day, a small warehouse not far from the home of one of our elderly parishioners whom I visited from time to time. The door was open on that day and there was a faded, but professionally painted sign, announcing Second Hand Furniture. I walked in. It was stocked to the ceiling with precisely that. I began to look around, and I was astonished.

This place was a treasure trove. There were cubic feet after cubic feet of old mahogany and walnut furniture, most of it in used, but still useful condition. I particularly was drawn to a chest of drawers, in what I later learned was a reproduction of a Goddard foot, block front Chippendale design. I diffidently asked the price. “One hundred forty dollars,” said the big, burly shouldered sales agent/manager/delivery man. “For the set.” “The set?” I asked. “There is a mirror,” he added, pulling up a large rectangular mirror, which did, indeed, seem to match the chest, “and a table to go beside the bed.” What my mother used to call a nightstand.

“Sold,” I barely whispered, unable to believe my good luck. The next week, it was delivered.

In the coming weeks, I revisited that place, and several others in the area, and in under six months, I had furnished my apartment with second hand reproductions of all sorts of old designs: tables, chairs, desk, and even a couple of rugs. I dug around in the cellar and parish hall at church and found a small dining table and a large console table, and suggested that the rector consider giving them to me since they were not being used. He did.

And, so armed with furniture about three generations old, equipped with steel wool, lemon oil, a little wood paste and stain, and even some old-fashioned varnish, I entered the world of old furniture.

Of course, I said to myself that this stuff would do until I could get a better job and buy some nice new stuff. You can imagine what happened. That day of the new furniture never arrived. Part of it was my learning that old stuff was usually better made than the new, as Joy had taught me. Another was that by cleaning up all the stuff I could come up with a house that looked like it had some nice antiques in it—if you did not look too closely.

Years later, my friend Major said to me that he would like to learn a little about antiques and because I had a house full of them, he thought I could give him some pointers. “Not me,” I said, “what I have is not antiques, just a house full of old furniture, there is a difference.” We laughed together.

And much of the stuff remains. This summer, I had to move a lot of my stuff around from place to place as the painters and the floor repairers and the electricians came to work their crafts. And I looked at each scuffed piece, some of the stuff lovingly restored over the years, others of it a little battered. There was that first sofa my parents gave me, now wearing its fourth set of upholstery. There is the rust-colored wing chair, which was born in white naughahyde and reborn at Sloan's.

Some of the old stuff reminds me of the little collecting jags I enjoyed from time to time. One year, I was oddly attracted to old brass light fixtures and bought three of them at Salvation Army stores in Sacramento. I took them apart, polished them and then took them home. And this month, as one of them came down to go off for another polishing and cleaning, I remembered my father. And the day when he brought his tool kit over to San Francisco, I took a day off, and together we worked on rewiring that old fixture with all of its arms and globes and pillars. And then I stopped and made him some soup, which we ate together and then returned to the chandelier.

The huge Victorian fixture that now hangs in my living room is a silent reminder of the reason why it is not good to lie. That fixture had belonged to a man in my parish (in San Francisco) one of our first people with AIDS. I visited him for many months, until the disease killed him, and in the course of one visit, when I had sort of run out of things to say, I looked at the chandelier, and for some reason, admired it. “Why did I say that?” I thought to myself, “I actually hate Victoriana and this is Victorian with a capital V.” You can imagine what happened. A few weeks after the man's funeral, the doorbell rang and there on the porch was the man's partner with about eight cardboard boxes. You guessed it; he left me the wretched chandelier in his will.

The thing I learned this summer was how old furniture is bound up, in my life, with old friends and family members I loved and people I still treasure .

Joy made a wonderful set of red vestments for me when I was ordained to the priesthood; they are still my favorites. My mother was a strange and cold person in many ways, and yet, I think of her many kindnesses and her incarnate love for me when I remember her unwrapping the sofa in my living room that day, and unpacking the new television. (I also remember that along with those things, she gave me a new vacuum cleaner—in my family cleanliness was not only next to godliness, but sometimes edged out the Creator.) My father was the nearly perfect icon of paternal love, strong, wise—but not educated, and sensitive enough to step aside when I grew older and found my own course. Clark was a mad harridan who was given to wearing velveteen kaftans when I invited him and his somewhat unexpected wife for dinner, and yet, there is the nice old chair, with finish a little peeled from sitting too close to the air conditioning—a gift from this unlikely couple who helped me learn how to be a priest.

Let's face it. I am not going to get any new furniture. Now it is a badge of honor, a sort of inverse snobbery born of slightly tarnished brass, old mahogany ( I since learned that such goods are commonly called, with peculiar accuracy, “distressed”) and knowing where to find, in any town I have lived, an upholsterer who is willing to re-do old things. Memories are fragile enough as it is, let's not dispense with any of the landmarks that call them to mind and remind us of their power.

The Rev’d Lloyd Prator, Rector
Saint John’s in the Village Episcopal Church

New York City