It was ninety-four degrees the day we buried my father.
The air conditioning at St. Mary’s had broken down that morning. Of course it had. It was the second week of July in Wayne, Michigan, and the old church was an oven. The big stained glass windows don’t open. They never have. Father Kowalczyk had propped the front doors wide with two cinder blocks and set up a box fan in the aisle, but all it did was push the hot air from one side of the church to the other.
Everybody was fanning themselves with the funeral programs. Little folded cards with my dad’s picture on the front. Raymond J. Dombrowski. 1944 to 2026. In the photo he was wearing his Detroit Tigers cap and squinting into the sun on his fishing boat, not smiling, because my father never smiled in pictures.
Two hundred people in black, sweating through their clothes, fanning my father’s face back and forth in front of their own.
I was in the front pew with my husband, Greg, and our two kids. My older brother Mike was on my other side with his wife, Denise. Mike’s collar was soaked through. He kept running a finger around the inside of it.
Father Kowalczyk was just stepping up to the altar. The organist was finishing “On Eagle’s Wings.”
And then the back doors opened wider.
Somebody gasped.
I turned around in the pew.
Walt Kowalski was walking into St. Mary’s in a full red Santa suit.
The big red coat with the white fur trim. The wide black belt with the brass buckle. The black boots. The red pants. He wasn’t wearing the hat. He had it crumpled in one hand. And the long white beard was hanging down around his neck on its elastic, like a bib.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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