By Anita Huntley
I wasn’t trying to be standoffish. It’s just that, in that moment, I could see the entire interview flash before my eyes:
“So, what possessed you to buy the church?”
“We can’t really explain it. It just felt like something we were supposed to do.”
“And what’s your plan?”
“We don’t have one.”
“Well … what happens next?”
“No clue whatsoever.”
It would have been the most unsatisfying interview ever. Still, the decision to say no to Celia did not sit well with me, and after a few days, I marched down to the Times office and asked if I could write a regular column about church life, instead. Ryan called it an exercise of my inner control freak; but really, I just realized that although we would make lousy interview subjects, we did have lots of stories – tales so strange and unexpected that they would never have come up based on a reasonable line of questioning…
