I used to visit the Convent of St. Helena here in Manhattan until they closed their New York houses and moved to the southland. We had Eucharist and breakfast together and I got well acquainted with the sisters there. They were a delight, and I think that they became some of my closest friends in New York. One of the things we occasionally talked about was the foibles and quirks of personality we noted in ourselves. On one occasion, I told the story of the Punch Bowl.

It began simply enough, when I decided that I needed a new punch bowl. Now a punch bowl is not something one wears out; I don't know of a soul that has found that his punch bowl sprang a leak. But I needed a bigger one: that was the issue. I often have big parties, and sometimes the church has big functions, and over the years I have found that a nice punch is a good way to offer drinks for such occasions. I have some wonderful old punch recipes, some from as long ago as the l8th century and many of them are fun to make and offer not only a taste for the palate, but also a taste of history.

So, on a quiet holiday weekend, I visited my favorite “store” to do a little shopping. I went to EBay. I found a very large punch bowl, which I later found held exactly three gallons of punch; that is a lot of drinking. Now, because it was a holiday weekend, I think, there were no other bids. I got it. It arrived a few days later in a shabby crate. Inside, however, it was beautiful; just what I wanted.

Here is where I began to get into trouble.

I decided that such a punch bowl needed a box to protect it, so that its rim would not get creased and dented, and that nothing should fall upon it and damage it. A little protection would not hurt. I happened to be visiting my cousin in Oklahoma near this time and her friend Jim actually volunteered to make a box for me. I decided that I was really in luck, because the carpentry was way beyond me. The finishing I could do, but not the nails and hammer stuff.

So, in due course, the box arrived. It was just what I wanted; however, it was about half again as big as I had hoped. But, I could fix that, I thought, and filed, for future consideration another idea. More about that later.

And, so I set about preparing the box. Since this was going to be a box for a silver punch bowl, solid sterling, at that, I decided to cover it in leather. Not a paint job, not a stain-and-varnish finish, but a leather covering. Very elegant, I thought. Now, getting the leather was no small matter—literally. The box is a cube about two feet on all sides, and that requires about half a cow worth of leather to cover properly. I found the leather in Sacramento, at an incredible deal.

Next, I covered the box with the leather, carefully gluing around the corners, stretching it over the edges, tucking it around the opening, and smoothing it out so that it looked nice. It looked good. A normal person would have stopped right about here and put on some hinges and latches, and ended the project.

Oh, no. Not a chance.

I could feel the neurotic crescendo of compulsivity beginning to swell. First, there was the matter of the box being too large. Well, what better way to fill up all that space than to have punch cups to go with the bowl? My good friend George Bowen found the cups for me, at a factory outlet crystal shop in Secaucus. By the time he used his senior citizen discount and a newspaper discount coupon, they practically gave him the cups and paid him five dollars to take them away. So, I now had 24 cups to go with my new punch bowl.

So, I got to work. I lined the box with velvet, and made a framework to hold the bowl. Then I made two trays to sit in the box above the bowl. Each tray would hold some of the crystal cups and one would also hold the punch ladle. I made interlocking dividers for each tray so that each cup would fit in its own velvet-lined cube.

Here, I think, is where we go over the edge.

I like to play around with boxes and add to them something that suggests their contents. I decided that the thing to put in the lid of this box was a lithograph of some sort of winemaking scene. I found one in England and made a leather mat and a plastic cover for it and mounted it inside the lid. While I was at it, I found the name and location of the company that made the bowl and prepared a label to fit inside the lid and beneath the lithograph of the French wine country.

Labeling being another favorite domestic neurosis of mine, I ordered a small plastic label (ah, labels…!!) with the words ‘Punch Set' and the name of the silver company in Rhode Island that had made the bowl. That label fit perfectly on the lid of the box.

I was beginning to feel a certain sense of neurotic satisfaction in the project.

Although I had made one serious mistake, the consequences of which now presented themselves.

It has to do with the decision to use the extra space in the too-large box to hold crystal punch cups.

Glass is heavy. Glass is very, very heavy. I could barely pick up the box when the bowl, the ladle and all two dozen cups were therein. I asked my friend Jorge to try to pick it up, and he could not even get it off the floor. We had a failure to launch.

The next couple of weeks found me in a large hardware store and I found there this perfectly nice set of four casters, one for each corner of the punch bowl box. The four casters made the whole case move easily across the floor and make its way to any room where it might be needed. How about that? Moving the punch bowl now looked a little like walking a chunky black dog.

But years from now, when I am dead and gone, and some estate salesman is sorting through my household stuff, he will find a carefully labeled box, with a lot of crystal and silver inside. I can imagine his calling to a colleague in the next room, “Hey, Maxie, come in here, have you ever seen anything like this?” I doubt that anyone ever has.

Out of control, the project just got out of control, and I laughed about it when I reflected upon it, and the day I told the sisters of St. Helena about it, they laughed about it too, knowing how much it revealed about the craziness in my own soul and spirit.

On the other hand, people who do things like this do make the world a lot more orderly than it would otherwise be.

Come by for a glass of punch one day, and we can take the bowl out for a walk.

The Rev’d Lloyd Prator, Rector
Saint John’s in the Village Episcopal Church

New York City