Short Stories: 1978: The Spot on the New Carpet

My wife, Polly, and I met as freshman students at Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan — an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) institution. Two years later, in July 1978, we stood before God and man and professed our love, devotion, and commitment to one another. After a short honeymoon, we returned to Pontiac to begin our new life as husband and wife.

Several months before our wedding, we rented an upstairs apartment on Premont Avenue in Waterford Township (Pontiac) Michigan. Our upstairs apartment had four rooms: a living room, bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen. The walls were freshly painted. The living room floor had recently been covered with green and white shag carpeting. The heat was controlled by the people who lived in the first-story apartment.

Shortly before Polly and I started living together, I stopped at a yard sale that had a bunch of furniture for sale. I made them a $150 offer for all the furniture, an offer they quickly accepted. Upon returning home from our honeymoon, Polly was quite surprised to see all the “wonderful” furniture that I had purchased to furnish our apartment. After a few months of marriage, we bought a love seat from Kay’s Furniture to replace the piece-of-junk futon I had purchased at the yard sale. The love seat, along with a new double bed we bought from J.L. Hudson’s, would be the last new furniture we would own for the next 20 years.

Our little apartment was all that we needed. Polly and I were quite busy. Both of us were full-time students. I also worked forty hours a week for a Detroit machine shop. Polly cleaned the homes of a Bloomfield Hills rabbi (Richard Hertz) and his wife, along with their daughter. Financially we were secure, and looking forward to starting our junior year at Midwestern. We learned quickly that life circumstances can and do change overnight. Six weeks into our marriage, Polly learned that she was pregnant. Severe morning sickness forced her to stop cleaning houses. This was a hit on our finances, but not a fatal blow. That would come three months later when I was laid off from my job.

One afternoon, I came home from school to eat lunch and then change my clothes for work. No ties were needed at the machine shop. We were still in the honeymoon phase of our marriage. All was well between us. That quickly changed on this day when I walked in the door and noticed a large brown stain on our brand-new light-colored carpet.

Polly had been drinking iced tea in the living room and accidentally spilled her large glass of tea on the carpet. Panicked, Polly decided to clean the spot; not with water; not with carpet cleaner. She used the one thing she thought would turn the dark stain light — bleach. That fateful decision turned the dark brown spot into a lighter-brown spot. The tea stain became permanent.

In February 1979, Polly and I informed our landlord that we had to move. The landlord told me she wanted to talk to us before we moved to Ohio. I thought, “What are we going to do about the stain?”

On the appointed day, the landlord came to our apartment. Everything was just as it was when she rented us the place months before. What happened to the spot? Oh, “God” led me to move a footstool over the stain. Viola! The stain magically disappeared.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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