At The Twinbrook Unitarian Universalist Society
She knew that she wasn’t allowed to openly get mad at Mason, the music director. It wouldn’t look good. Part of being a Unitarian Universalist minister, after all, was learning how to stifle your actual emotions and present a calm and even presence at all times. She was pretty sure this is also what her therapist had to do during the sessions they had together each Tuesday night. She had thought about asking her therapist about this but had concluded that it would take away some of the mystery and perhaps the mystery was one of the reasons that therapy worked. Although therapy had also stopped working recently and so she had taken to dropping an extra dose of CBD oil onto her tongue every Sunday morning right before heading out into the sanctuary. CBD oil wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be, she thought, but it did seem to make dealing with all the petty nonsensical emotional baggage that her congregants brought with them easier to deal with and forget. Most people just want to be listened to and most people don’t get listened to all that often. Most people don’t even get pretended to be listened to, and so she had settled on that, nodding and furrowing her brow and then saying something randomly encouraging or sympathetic after it seemed like they had finished talking. This method worked most of the time and it allowed her to keep her attention focused on the whereabouts of Mason. On the rare occasion that she picked the wrong response (i.e. condolences at the birth of a newborn) it did not seem to matter all that much for Unitarian Universalists are a self-centered group and most of the time aren’t really listening to what anyone else has to say anyway.
Mason Lieberman was a graduate of The Julliard School of Music and when the congregation had hired him many had been impressed and many thought it was too good to be true and perhaps the latter had been right. He played the piano like he was putting up dry wall and his right hand just was not what it should have been for someone who claimed to have graduated in “Piano Performance.” Every Sunday Mason had a habit of choosing the most asinine hymns from Singing The Living Tradition and would often rewrite lyrics he thought were “clunky” and then distribute them on mimeographed paper seemingly at random throughout the pews. He wore the same shiny black suit every Sunday and every Sunday it seemed to get shinier. He would keep the choir till one or two in the morning during rehearsals and so many had quit and only a few who otherwise generally struggled with boundary issues remained. He refused to wear deodorant and use mouth wash. He was a pescatarian.
All of these things would have been fine or at least manageable. She had dealt with some weird fucking people before. It was his love of musical rounds that she found truly obnoxious and this was the reason she was planning his untimely and “accidental” death.
He loved rounds and rounds are generally horrible. Everyone knows this. It is a fact that is undisputed. Many a scholarly article has been done on the subject. And yet Mason, in his ineffable obnoxiousness had taken to inserting at least one and often times two into each service. If you, dear reader, have had the misfortune of being a part of a round, then you have experienced the stern directions that are given before you start. The group is split up into sections, the seconds are assigned parts, and you are generally told how many times you are going to repeat the thing before you are allowed to sit down. Mason did none of this, and would just launch into a round and the rule-following Unitarian Universalists would follow suit and the proud would continue until it would fall apart due to sheer exhaustion. It was awful and made services drag on to the hour and forty five minute mark when they were supposed to clock out at a cool fifty five.
Much like the supreme court, UU music director seems to be an almost-life long appointment, although with music directors there is no mechanism for impeachment in place so she had decided that she would kill him but in a way that would be slow and would leave her in the clear. The idea of leading his memorial service was the one thing that kept her going and as time went on and Mason still showed up breathing and smelling bad the fantasy grew so much so that it began to not even matter that he was Jewish, and therefore would likely be mourned in a different house of worship if he was to be mourned at all. But in the middle of the night, when she would wake up and be honest with herself, she knew she was not a murderer. She also knew there was no God out there testing her. This was just random chance and it was her lot in life.
The next Sunday, Joseph Weller, 78, was rushed to the hospital after a 12 minute long version of “How Could Anyone Every Tell You.” After 14 hours of trying to save his life, doctors at Montgomery Hospital pronounced him dead. Lung failure.
Unitarian Universalists are a rhythmically challenged, opinionated lot, who know how to suffer so well that it sometimes actually kills them which makes the ones that are still living just a little bit jealous.
