With purpose in mind

As I pulled into the library parking lot, I noticed that the door to the Tusten Theater was propped open. With checking the stage in preparation for a dance performance in October on my list of things to do, I headed into the darkened theater. There, I was greeted by a man in his 70s, rather formally dressed in a white shirt and black pants, struggling with a 20-foot wooden step ladder.

I told him that I was checking out the distance of the screen and the front of the stage and needed no help. He, on the other hand, had the ladder stuck between the seats and was in great need of assistance.

“Can I help you with that?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “You are a Godsend.”

As a seminary student, I am always pleased when I am perceived as an instrument of God’s plan. Together, we maneuvered the ladder into place. There wasn’t enough space in between the rows for the metal guides to snap all the way down on both sides, but the ladder was firmly wedged, relatively straight and didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

He asked me if I had time to hold the ladder as he climbed up to hang two microphones down to do a sound check on the opera rehearsal that he would videotape in a couple of weeks.

“I’m a lawyer,” he said, “and I am not exactly sure why I do this videotaping. But when you’re videotaping, you have to know what the sound and the light will do.”

With that, he was up the ladder and I hung on as if his life depended on it. The ladder creaked and swayed as he heaved himself up, rung by rung, into the ceiling. I did not have the nerve to look up and contented myself to put my whole body into the job of stilling the ladder and my breath.

After a bit of a struggle and having to go up one step higher “then maybe I should,” he was able to jerry-rig the support bar that would take the microphone onto the lighting track. He slowly made his way down again, and I breathed a sigh of relief. As he limped to the back of the theater, shirt totally drenched with sweat, I marveled at his sense of life and work that propelled him to accomplish that which was amazingly rigorous and a little bit dangerous for a man his age.

“I don’t know what made me think I could do this without help,” he called over his shoulder on his way up to the tech booth on the second floor. I listened to his uneven steps on the stairs.

When he came back and tucked the German state-of-the-art microphones into his shirt pocket, he told me that when approaching that which is difficult it is best to take things very slowly and keep one’s wits about you. "When you hurry," he said, "that's when you run into trouble."

He said that he was doing this particular taping because he thought that the lead soprano was going to launch her career, which would end up with the Metropolitan Opera Company, with the singing of the role of “Norma” in the Delaware Valley Opera’s summer production. He was going to be the one who would capture that beginning. “I’m going to make a DVD, if she lets me,” he said.

I left him to the rest of his preparations, and the thought that at 10:00 p.m., he would be up that ladder again to retrieve his precious equipment. I was sure that there would be someone else who would make sure that the ladder was firm, and that when he finally ended his day, he would dream good dreams of a life well lived.