The Irvington Lodge

Washington Street. I think every city has a Washington Street. Something about the founding father’s name and a place becoming ‘someplace’ go together. So villages become towns, towns acquire mayors and councils, and streets stop being “the road that runs past the Miller place”. Inevitably, they get named after presidents or trees. Business flourishes and with that fraternal orders and organizations are founded. These organizations fulfill basic needs: Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, and a hundred others have come and gone through the centuries – all of them geared toward serving the working man, providing benefits and gathering places and cementing the people of the town together.


Time passes. A hundred years of expansion and contraction, social upheaval, America re-inventing itself with cement and steel. Towns that had been isolated entities grow and merge, becoming cities. The growth obliterates the past, old buildings are cleared away for modern life. But some markers of the past remain.

On Wednesday we went to the east side of Indianapolis to visit Irvington. Irvington Lodge Number 666 (can’t make that up!) used to be (and may still be, I was unable to find information on the web about the lodge) the home of the Masons. We attended the Indianapolis Senior’s Center Spring Fling, a small dance intended for senior citizens. Kelly’s parents are members of the center and occasionally we attend one of their dances.

When I go to one of these dances I’m always impressed by the men and women there. Not because they’re all incredible dancers or that they’re doing any fancy moves, but because they’re out there dancing when all of society says they ought to be stored away somewhere. One fellow there was 94 years old – in fact it was his birthday – and he’s at a dance. I hope at 94 I’m dancing whether it’s swinging or shuffling.

The dance took place on the second floor. The hall was a lovely. At 6:30 the late afternoon sun was slanting in through the tall windows, casting bright rectangles on the oak floor. The arts and crafts décor is simple and elegant, not ostentatious or overblown like many Masonic lodges. We sat in folding chairs along the wall, the same way it would have been done a hundred years ago. As I’m prone to do I started wondering about how many people had sat in that same place and what they might have been thinking. Maybe one late spring afternoon, while the sun slanted in through the windows.