Cross your I
heart...
and keep a secret By Julie B. Sevig
t wasn’t easy keeping a secret, but Chris Men- dola and four others—including his wife, Sally—pulled off a doozy of a surprise in Ocala, Fla., last year. The secret was revealed on All Saints’ Sunday at St. Matthew Lutheran Church. That morning, members saw what had become of the
flatware they had been bringing to church for months. They collected more than 2,000 forks: spares from around the house, from friends and from thrift shops. Mendola, a retired industrial arts teacher and principal, and his helpers transformed them into a Celtic cross for the church’s memorial garden. He’s quick to call it “a labor of love,” and with patience and detail describes the labor that went into it. The idea was planted a year before when the Mendo- las visited an art museum in a small town in Mississippi. There he saw an angel wing sculpture made of spoons. “It was just stunning,” he said. “I thought, what a neat way to use common things and do something beautiful.” Since he wasn’t allowed to take a photo (and he’ll tell you he tried), he drew a sketch.
An unfinished painting by his son-in-law also
Chris Mendola provided the idea and labor for a Celtic cross that graces the Memorial Garden of St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Ocala, Fla. But he can also provide statistics: 2,000 pieces of silverware, a 6-foot cross, seven months from idea to completion, and 25 pounds of stain- less welding wire.
32 The Lutheran •
www.thelutheran.org
inspired him. He couldn’t get the image out of his head: an angel just waking up, stretching her wings to meet the day. It, his sketch from Mississippi, and all the Celtic crosses he’d seen on trips to England, Wales and Scotland stirred him into action when a shrub in the church’s memorial garden needed to be replaced. He volunteered to create a focal point for the garden (something that would with- stand the Florida weather, including a hurricane) in time for the congregation’s 50th anniversary. The vertical and horizontal sections of the cross are made from stainless steel forks. In the center is a gleaming heart fashioned from spoons, surrounded by a halo of butter knives. The project was so top secret that when curi- ous members thought they might find a clue while snooping in the Mendola garage, he hast- ily turned his full size cardboard pattern over to make it look like it was catching grease. Mendola wanted the sculpture to catch a worshiper’s eye since it would rest in the area between the old and new sanc- tuaries. He also wanted something that would make members say: “I had something to do with this.”
After a plea for silver- ware, it started rolling in, much of it with a story. One member brought a fork he
found when digging in a window box. It had been his mother’s and he wanted it in the project. Even Mendola was emotion- ally attached to a fork he contributed—he had carried it in his lunches as an undergraduate and graduate student. His brother-in-law contributed a lunch fork his late wife had carried to work for years.
Another ‘C’: Counters
The Mendolas enlisted their grandchildren to help count and sort forks. When the total was short of what the computer rendering estimated he needed, someone contributed silverware packs from Sam’s Club. “There was a run on forks in town,” Mendola joked. “Everyone was going to the same thrift stores.”
His wife spent hours flattening the silverware by pounding each on an old railroad rail, and Malcolm “Butch” Pattie sawed off the handles. They wore out a 75-year-old Sears table saw passed down from Mendola’s dad.
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