Bats in the Belfry

There’s only one thing my wife hates more than mice. You guessed it. BATS! As Lisa would tell you, “A bat is nothing more than a flying mouse!”

To be able to regale you with a mouse story and a bat story in the span of a month is serendipitous! Personally, I don’t mind bats. They serve some purpose in the world of nature. For example, they eat annoying insects. Actually, that’s about it. They also leave bat droppings, spread rabies, scare children and, I’m not making this up, suck blood from the necks of cows in Argentina. Bram Stoker staked his fame and fortune on the human version of this creature of the night.

From the age of 11 until I graduated from high school, our family lived in a huge parsonage out in the country near the popular Wisconsin town of Utica, population 31. My father served a rural congregation there called Western Koshkonong Lutheran Church. (Try saying Koshkonong three times really fast.) I shared a bedroom with my brother. My sister had the room at the end of the upstairs hallway, right under the ladder that led to the attic. One afternoon during a Thanksgiving break I was in my bedroom listening to music. Suddenly I heard my sister scream. She burst through her bedroom door and came tearing down the hallway. “Dad! There’s a bat flying around in my room!”

My dad didn’t have a hunting or trapping gene in his body, but he answered the call. He came trudging up the stairs with a towel in one hand and a broom in the other. He walked down the hallway like a hunter with the scent of prey in his nostrils. He opened the door slowly, stepped inside and closed it again. What followed can only be described as mayhem. I could hear my father, the Lutheran minister, thumping and bumping around the room. I could only visualize him with the towel wrapped around his head as he brandished the broom stick trying to clobber the bat. Then I heard a loud crash. “Owwwww!” dad yelled. Then silence. A few seconds later the door opened and my father limped out of her bedroom with a dead bat in the towel, broom in hand. “I tripped over her fan,” he said. “I think I broke my toe!” It would not be the last time a bat invaded our home.

Last weekend, Lisa and I made the trip to her hometown of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. We met up with her brother and two sisters Saturday night and had dinner at a local restaurant in the thriving suburb of Milton. It was a classic Wisconsin supper club where you could get a brandy old-fashioned sweet, beer cheese soup, a queen’s cut of prime rib, potatoes au-gratin and a side salad with Thousand Island dressing. Hard to beat that!

We stayed overnight with her older sister, Cindy, and her husband. The next morning we attended the 9:00 o’clock service at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. It’s a beautiful old structure built back in 1863. Lisa was baptized and confirmed there, and the two of us were married there in 1981. Walking from the car to the church, we started running into people we knew. A guy that was a year ahead of us in high school as well as many other folks we hadn’t seen in decades. We exchanged some quick ‘hellos’ and ‘how are yous’ and then sat down. I turned to Lisa and said, “Man, these people are looking old.”

She said, “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re getting old. Did you forget we’re on Medicare?”

“Oh. Yeah. I guess you’re right. I keep forgetting.”

We sat through a wonderful Sunday-after-Christmas service. As we stood to sing the closing hymn, I glanced up and saw a bat flying around near the top of the ceiling. It was huge. Looked like a condor! “Joy to the world, the Lord is come,” rang out several hundred voices in unison. I could only pray, “Dear God, please don’t let Lisa look upward. Amen.”

I could tell that a few others had seen the bat and were getting jumpy. One woman put the hood of her parka up over her head. Still, Lisa was singing in ignorant bliss. “Re-pea-eat, re-pea-ea-eat the sounding joy!”

The service ended and the bat was still up there flitting about all nimbly-bimbly. I tried to rush her up the aisle, but she got stuck visiting with somebody. I continued to the back of the church and was standing there with her brother looking upward. She came up the aisle and saw us. She followed our eyes, turned around and looked up. Then she saw it. “Is that a bat?” she said.

“Nah,” I said, “I think it’s a bird.”

“That’s not how birds fly! That’s definitely a bat! I’m gettin’ outa here!”

There must have been a hundred people crowded into the narthex waiting to shake hands with the pastor. Lisa pushed past the initial clump of people saying, “There’ a bat! There’s a bat!”

She cleared the first mob and skedaddled right past the pastor, knocking several kids out of the way as she made a bee line for the door. I made eye contact with the church secretary, a childhood friend of Lisa’s. I said, “Did you know there’s a bat flying around in the church?”

“Oh sure,” she said. “I’m used to it. They’re in there all the time.”

I found her outside the front entrance. “Well, there ya go!” I chuckled. “A mouse in your friend’s car and a bat flying around the church. Doesn’t get much better than that!”

She didn’t laugh. In the end, we made it safely back to her sister’s home and had a good lunch. A mouse living in a car? Bats in the belfry? What a time to be alive! Happy New Year, everybody!