Little Red Church in the Pandemic: Interview with David and Peg Wittrock

During the COVID pandemic, parishioner Karin Forno conducted a series of interviews of St. Mary’s folks. She is publishing them as a series over time on the St. Mary’s website. 

October 22, 2020 

Interviewer: How did you come to be at St. Mary’s?

Peg: David and I [are] about thirty-five years into a marriage, a second marriage for both of us. We have been living in PG ever since then. In fact, David was living here for a much longer time than I was. But we were married here. We were in a church in Carmel. We first met in the choir, and the administration changed. The tone changed and we were no longer happy being there, so we started shopping for churches. And one of them was St. Mary's. My son Michael had been an altar boy for Dwight Edwards some years before. There was that connection. What I remember the most about the service that we went to together was that Chris Elstob was featured that day with his Special Olympics medals. And he went up to the front of the church and bowed to the altar and turned around and bowed to us. And because of my special education background, I was drawn to that. I thought, “any church that honors this child is worth sticking around”. So as we exited, we said to Dwight, “We'd love to belong. How do we belong?” And he said, “You're here, you belong.” So that's how we got to St. Mary's.

David: My parents were Salvation Army officers, but that close to ministry, I was not a believer. I came to Monterey to study at DLI, then went to Turkey, married a woman I had met in Monterey, and moved to Pacific Grove. When my marriage was beginning to fray around the edges, I had been out of church for probably 20 years. I went to Church of the Wayfarer and joined the choir. That was where I again met Peg. We had met at Stevenson school when I was a teacher and JV soccer coach there. I was her son's coach for a while. We became friends through choirs. Both of our marriages broke up at about the same time, but I was still not a Christian and was still just a choir member. When we married, her son, her daughter, and son-in-law were all very religious, and they invited me to a men’s retreat camp. At camp, we broke out to a prayer meeting. I was just sitting there hoping nobody would say anything, nobody would invite me to participate. I heard a voice as clearly as I hear yours. “Why do you blame me? If your father had been a cobbler, you might not have had shoes, but that was him. And I am me. And you are you.” I became a Christian. I was willing to keep going to Church of the Wayfarer, but we started getting sermons where he would hold up copies of the National Review and tell us what his workout routine was. That was a problem, if there was nothing to hold us there. We visited a lot of churches and that incident with Dwight at the front door made it for us.

Interviewer: Has there been a pattern to the feelings or experiences you’ve had during the pandemic?

Peg:  I would have to say that for me, it's when I fell in April, right near the beginning of the pandemic, and dislocated my shoulder [ . . .] I was in Westland House for eleven or twelve days. I can't sort out my feelings for you, how the pandemic affected that. A lot happened all at once. It was difficult.

When you were in Westland House were you separated? Did they keep you apart?

David:  Absolutely. Peg: Yeah. So that was very difficult.

Peg: I told a story at vestry meeting the other night because they were talking about the Twenty-Third Psalm at the beginning of the meeting. When I was in Westland House, for several days, I wasn't sure I would be walking again. I just had to lie still on this bed. And it was really scary.

So I called David and asked him to read the Twenty-Third Psalm to me at 10 o'clock when we turned the lights out. He did, every night, and that was comforting. One of our granddaughters who is very musical found out about that and wrote a song.

That doesn't really have to do with the pandemic, but it was the same timeframe.

Interviewer: Not strictly, but part of the reason you probably needed him to do that is because you were separated, right?

Peg: Right.

Interviewer: You had to do it over the phone.

Interviewer: What were some habits that have helped you during the pandemic?

Peg: We did some things to help others, work that we did together. One thing was writing letters for Vote Forward. We wrote several hundred. We could sit down in the afternoon and spend two or three hours doing that, each of us at the table and that kind of felt like we were doing something positive.

David:  We went through one box of 500 envelopes. And half of another of 250 or so.

I picked up a couple of the trays of letters and helped take those to the post office. I think I was talking to Eugene Loh and told him that it felt like it was a Buddhist prayer wheel, every letter that I sealed and put there to go out was a little bit like a spin of the prayer wheel.

Interviewer: How have you stayed connected to St. Mary’s during the pandemic?

Peg: I'm on the vestry, so we meet every month. I've been in touch with specific vestry members. So I feel close in that way.

We've also communicated with some of our choir friends--just phone calls, notes. People that we know from St. Mary's feel like a connection that's important. It sounds silly, but I got a lot of note cards and I've been writing notes to people and I don't have much to say except I'm thinking of you and hope everything's OK, that kind of thing. I do it as much for me as I do for them. Because it's a good thing to do.

David:  I've been working with Nicholas Mourlam and Cathryn Wilkinson processing the recordings that they make. I put the digital recorder in the audio closet so that it's hooked up to the two microphones that are up above the choir loft. That goes directly into the recorder. But then the volume needs to be changed [or] they make a mistake [or] they pause for 10 seconds and then go through it. So I've been producing those for John Willoughby, for the prelude, offertory, and postlude.

Peg: Having organ music helps a lot. Something that's happened this week, which you probably know about, is that Kitty Duvernois passed away last Saturday. She was a very good friend of ours. Before she passed, but was getting close, I wrote notes to choir members and several other people that I knew were close to her and asked for donations to put a plaque on the organ because that's what Kitty wanted. She shepherded that organ when it was put in back in the early 90s. She was really in there fighting for the organ and felt very possessive of it.

So we got a plaque. In fact, it is already on the organ now. We also collected money for putting a plaque in her honor out in Leslie Garden.

David: On Wednesdays at Christian Social Concerns, they distribute free boxes of food from the food bank at Robert Down, Arkwright Court, and PG High School. I've been at the PG high school location. I get there at about ten forty-five and we go through the boxes, make sure everything's there. And when they start serving school lunches at eleven thirty or eleven forty -five, they come by and we distribute boxes of food. It's good to get out and meet people.

Interviewer: How have you dealt with the uncertainty we all face?

David: The pandemic has created its own uncertainties, and it's one that we're all having to deal with. When will it be over? When will there be a vaccine?

Peg: One of the things that we do, which we haven't mentioned, is almost every day we drive along the ocean. If it's not too cold or smoky, we open the windows and get some fresh air and that is a habit that has been positive. You look at it, all of that beauty, and you have to thank the Lord for this world. We see birds on the feeder. They're not bothered by all of this. That’s encouraging to me, to see the garden and all the animals.

David: The other thing I've noticed is we're seeing animals like deer more. There is a doe that has raised two fauns in this area. And that's been lovely watching them grow up.

Peg: They walk up and down our street.

Interviewer: What’s been the most difficult thing about the pandemic for you?

David: It's been watching people who don't get it, who don't seem to know that it's happening, who are defensive about their right to not wear masks, to not stay distant. As if it’s not happening.

Peg: One of the things that I've noticed is when people are out there on the street, people we don't know, walking around with masks, there is a zombie-like quality to interacting with them, there is almost no interacting. It's like [they look] straight forward and don’t look up and don’t wave. [They don’t] acknowledge you. It's spooky kind of stuff.

David: Right. I miss seeing mouths. A smile. It's hard to read faces with just the eyes.

Interviewer: Has anything about the pandemic been positive for you?

David: It’s kind of the obverse of the people that ignore the pandemic. It's the numbers of people who are willing to take responsibility and protect others. I really appreciate that. And there are enough of them that I can't say thank you to all of them.