I’ll never forget the day the bulb of garlic appeared in my mailbox, wrapped in its coffin-shaped box and topped off with a pair of wax fangs.

This was the Brother Doug Taylor’s way of reminding me that he doesn’t celebrate Halloween and that I shouldn’t either. It was in many ways a political message, but you’ve got to hand it to Bro Doug: He delivered it in a way that was so much fun that a decade later, I still have the coffin and the fangs. Pretty sure I ate the garlic, and I didn’t disappear in a puff of smoke, either.

For years — from the very start, really — Brother Doug and I had been bickering about a weird variety of things. He cut up copies of Harry Potter books in Kennedy Park because he’s opposed to witchcraft at a time when I was dating a witch.

He was loudly against the concept of Halloween whereas Halloween for me was the Greatest Night of the Year and the cause for weeklong celebration.

Brother Doug was all about discipline and moderation while I espoused a more hedonistic lifestyle. He was a little bit country, I was a little bit rock ‘n’ roll.

Or something. The fact is that Brother Doug and I never agreed on much and yet I never could make myself dislike the fellow.

The first time I met him outside my official duties was at a local grocery store. I was shuffling my way to the checkout with a six-pack of Pabst and there he appeared, a big man in a cowboy hat large enough to cast a shadow over an entire city block.

I looked for an emergency exit and found none. I thought of crawling into a bin of corn to hide but it was not yet corn season. It was too late. Taylor had spotted me and I felt doomed to a long lecture on temperance and the evils of fornication.

Taylor’s former life as a bad boy is well-known, and to me, the worst kind of intolerance comes from those who have abandoned a vice and who now will condemn others for the same compulsion. I still feel that way, in fact, but Bro Doug never turned that kind of hypocrisy on me.

When he greeted me in that grocery store way back when, all he had to pass along was a tasty bit of gossip from the epicenter of the city in which he resides. His wife, Sonia, had something witty to say about some tripe I had written in a column. They were perfectly charming and likable and the fact that I had expected nothing but horror from the preacher and his wife says far more about me than it does about them.

As it turns out, I was wrong about Brother Doug in lots of ways.

A few years ago — this was after I’d resigned myself to liking Taylor — I wrote something snide about the man in a column. It was a Halloween piece in which I took my customary swipe at Taylor’s stance on the holiday. An editor approached me with misgivings about the comment. I didn’t want to offend anybody, so I wrote to Taylor and told him what I had in mind for the column. His response was prompt and resolute.

“Bring it on,” he wrote.

So I did. I wrote my column and he wrote a response in a Letter to the Editor. There was no animosity in this exchange or in any of the others. I stated my opinion; he stated his. When we met in public, we joked about it and landed barbs where we could. We debated a little bit and moved on.

My relationship with Brother Doug was always a bit strange, but I’ll admit to this: Taylor never waffled in his beliefs where mine have ping-ponged all over the place like bugs trapped in a bottle. He knew what he stood for 20 years ago.

Twenty years ago, I didn’t know much of anything. As one with almost no religion in his background, everything I knew about the devout I learned from Carrie’s mom. Taylor provided me with the lesson that not all preachers are about fire, brimstone and eternal damnation. Somehow, when this guy preached about even the most serious of matters, he managed to be mirthful and always open to discussion.

For a long period, Taylor seemed to be everywhere, in the middle of everything and there were plenty of people who didn’t like him. I’ve heard earnest debates about what scandal would eventually take Taylor down: a pound of coke found in an office drawer? A titillating prostitution arrest? Such cynical thinking, and mostly by people who’d never actually met the dude in the flesh.

It’s weird to me that the era of Taylor’s Jesus Party is coming to an end. It got off the ground, after all, right around the time I arrived in Lewiston, fresh off a breakup and looking for a job. For a time, it looked like Taylor and his mission would be my first arch rival, although that turned out to be not much of a thing.

Taylor, with some of his beliefs in opposition to my own, turned out to be more of a faux foe, and our seeming clash the kind of light-hearted rivalry that proves mutually beneficial.

We had some fun, Bro Doug and I. What’s weirder to me is that I learned a few things from the man. If you’d suggested that back in the day when I was trying to hide from him in the grocery store, I would have laughed you all the way back to the canned goods aisle. Bro Doug made me reconsider things I thought were foregone conclusions.

And now, with all that said, I have to go out and find a new arch rival, and the sooner the better.

I’m all out of garlic.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. If you want to be his new arch rival, email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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