by jphilo | Apr 14, 2010 | Family
Looking back on the past week is like peering into a kaleidoscope, one lovely image melting into another before I have time to process them.
A walk on a spring evening beside a West Virginia river is replaced by a conference room. The psychiatrists and therapists cry and blow their noses as they listen to the story of my infant son’s surgeries and the legacy of trauma it created. Those people fade away, and I am eating pizza with family gathered for my son and almost daughter-in-law’s wedding. The next few days are a blur of more family arriving, watching my sister arrange flowers, using her kitchen to fix meals for out-of-town guests, decorating the hall for the reception, and going out to supper after the rehearsal.
The pictures in the kaleidoscope of my mind tumble and dissolve. But one picture never changes. The love on the faces of my son and his bride during the wedding ceremony never wavers. His eyes are soft and wet with tears. She smiles at him with an unfaltering gaze.
I see their faces while I walk this spring morning – in every leaf full of the promise, in every flower bud plump with beauty. A glorious sunrise greets me at the top of our hill, and in its glow I see two lovely faces. The kaleidoscope stops tumbling. For a moment, I can not breathe for the joy pressing upon my heart. I am home.
And so, I know, are my son and his new wife.
by jphilo | Apr 9, 2010 | Family
Most of the time, identifying with women in the Bible doesn’t come easy to me. I’m not queenly like Esther. I didn’t follow my mother-in-law to a foreign land like Ruth, and my chosen professions have been quite different than Rahab’s. My humility and faith fall far short of Mary the mother of Jesus, and I certainly didn’t raise a perfect child. (Sorry kids!)
I can’t dance like Salome, cut hair like Delilah, or sit contentedly at Jesus’ feet like Mary of Bethany. I can be as bossy and driven as Martha, but who wants to admit something like that?
Even with my rotten track record, one woman from the Bible made my kindred spirit short list about eight months ago when our son announced his engagement to a wonderful young woman. Sarah, wife of Abraham, is one chick I totally get. I get why she laughed when God promised she would bear a child, though she was old, old. old.
Two years ago, if God had said something like, “Your son will get married on April 11, 2010,” I would have laughed, too. See, back then my son’s career choice made no room for marriage. And after five long years of his stalwart resolution to pursue that course for life, I’d come to accept his choice. More than that, I’d found peace and a way to maintain a loving relationship with my son. I’d even learned to accept God’s will instead of demanding He fulfill my hopes and dreams for my firstborn.
After I made my peace, if God had dropped the he’ll-get-married-and-you-might-have-grandchildren-someday bombshell, I would have done one of two things. Either I would have gotten really mad and told God to quit raising my hopes about something I didn’t dare hope about, or like Sarah, I would have laughed at his joke. Sarah made the better choice, to laugh, drop the matter, and move on.
But God, in his infinite wisdom, didn’t drop the matter. He gave Sarah a son in her old age. In Genesis 21:6, Sara says this after her son’s birth. “God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me.”
I totally get what she’s saying because what she describes happens to my family these days. When we tell people about our son’s upcoming wedding, everyone responds with joy. Smiles, chuckles and beaming grins abound. Sarah’s words come alive.
God has made laughter for me.
Still, in the midst of joy, I am aware of the suffering and sorrow of others. My laughter could mock a mother estranged from a son, a single person wishing for a spouse, an infertile couple unable to conceive. So in the midst of joy, tears fill my eyes. I ask God to comfort those whose stories are so painful they can’t laugh for someone else’s joy.
Help them find your peace in their current circumstances, dear Father. Give them hope to hang on until you bring laughter back into their lives. Give them a sweet story to tell, one that brings joy to their hearts and to the hearts of all who hear it. Amen.
by jphilo | Mar 8, 2010 | Family
For the past month and a half, my cousin has been forwarding emails from her daughter, Lara, who is studying in Spain this semester. Lara is four days older than my daughter, and like Anne, she’s a junior in college.
Reading Lara’s adventures has been pure delight. She’s learned to live with cold showers, cook with butane fuel and purchase new fuel when the tank runs dry. She’s been befriended by a family of Bolivian immigrants, eats weekend meals and goes to church with them, and bakes them banana bread. She’s climbed mountains, ridden trains, taken taxies, and to make the most of this opportunity, forces herself to speak Spanish instead of English to fellow students to improve her language skills.
The wisdom of a comment she made in a recent email makes me smile whenever it comes to mind. After Lara describing a busy weekend with the Bolivian family, washing laundry and cooking meals together, she said this. “You know life is good when doing mundane, everyday activities is nice.”
Her insight delighted but didn’t surprise me. She’s part of the pack of girl cousins (Anne, my brother’s two girls, Lara and two of her cousins) who were born in a span of four years. They spend as much time as possible crammed together like puppies, playing games, talking, sharing clothes, writing stories. When they aren’t together in body, they connect on Facebook, joyfully sharing their “mundane, everyday activities.”
I don’t have a crystal ball. I can’t predict the joys and sorrows in Lara’s future or those of her pack of puppy cousins. But these young women already know what Dorothy had to learn over the rainbow and what many people spend their whole life never learn: life’s greatest pleasures are the small things, the ordinary days, and the people who experience them. They have what they need to appreciate the joys and weather the sorrows sure to come.
They’re ready to face the world.
by jphilo | Mar 4, 2010 | Family
My father died thirteen years ago this day, though it’s more accurate to say he drew his last breath on March 4, 1997. The vibrant, extroverted leader who was my father spent thirty-eight years dying after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at age twenty-nine.
The course of Dad’s disease was cruel and merciless, swiftly cutting him down in the prime of life and then allowing him to linger for decades, slowly sapping him of strength and then of his ability to think, speak and remember.
For all the tragedy he experienced, and there is no kinder word with which to sugarcoat what he endured, my father’s presence was the delight of my childhood. How can I describe this complex man? Depression stalked his lonely days while we were at school, but he refused to burden my sister, brother and me with it. But if he didn’t hear us come home, we would see him staring at the wall, his face all blank despair, his thumbs twiddling aimlessly.
The minute he saw us, a grin split his face, and he was all joy. He wheeled his chair to the kitchen table and asked us to heat up his coffee, light his pipe, pour ourselves some milk, and grab the cookie jar. He cracked jokes so funny we snorted milk up our noses. Then he turned a blind eye while we watched the after school cartoons Mom declared off limits. He waited until we were absorbed in the show to wheel up behind us, then poke and tickle us mercilessly. When Mom’s car pulled up, the TV went off, the homework came out, and Dad went along with our charade with a wink and a smile.
By the time we all married and moved away, he was mostly bedridden. When I came home to visit, and then when he had moved to the nursing home, I would stand in the doorway of his room a minute. Dad would lay there, wide awake, staring at the ceiling, his face blank and despairing, his thumbs too weak to twiddle.
“Dad,” I would say, “It’s Jo. I’m home.”
In an instant, the despair was gone and joy wreathed his face. His eyes sparkled, even in his last years, when he barely spoke at all. Though we were adults ourselves, he refused to lay upon us the weight of his constant loss.
My father spent thirty-eight years dying until he drew his last breath on March 4, 1997. But in those decades of disease and loss, he did so much more than die. He showed us how to live with dignity, find joy in the midst of sorrow, and love with undying faithfulness and sacrifice.
I miss you, Dad.
In memory of Harlan John Stratton: May 11, 1929 – March 4, 1997
by jphilo | Feb 26, 2010 | Family
During my childhood, Grandma Fern’s postcard collection was stored in a shoebox in our parent’s bedroom closet. Now and then, Mom would take the box down so we could admire the beautiful cards, collected from about 1900 to the 1940s, sorting them into piles by birthday and holiday – Christmas, Valentine’s, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Easter, New Year’s, and Halloween.
Somewhere along the way, I put part of the collection in an album for a 4-H project. After that, the album and the shoebox lived in the same closet until Mom moved to Boone, where they lived in a different closet and eventually in a safety deposit box at the bank.
A few weekends ago, my sibs and I divided the postcards among us as keepsakes for our children. An appraiser told my sister that some of them are quite valuable – the ones with Santas and Kewpie dolls and Halloween greetings – and I am sure they are. But for me, their value lies in the link they create, binding my children to my father’s mother, the well-loved woman who collected them for decades and died a year before I was born.
One postcard is written in Grandpa Cy’s hand. He sent it to his wife and only child, Grandma Fern and my dad, while on a fishing trip in Park Rapids, Minnesota. Two cards remind me of my farmer son – one showing a 1908 gristmill owned by an ancestor and another from the Farmers Cooperative Produce Company in Des Moines urging farmers to increase their cream checks. One, with little girls wearing wooden shoes and traditional Dutch dress, makes me think of my daughter at college in a very Dutch town.
Will I let these treasures live in a shoebox for another hundred years? No. I plan to display some of them, carefully matted and framed, on the walls of our old farmhouse. Others will be framed gifts to my children, their spouses, and to grandchildren someday, with a little story about beside each one. It’s the least I can do with such valuable gifts.
Thank you, Grandma Fern, for leaving a legacy to connect my children and their descendants to your life.
by jphilo | Feb 22, 2010 | Family
My husband says the package of Fig Newtons I gave him for Valentine’s Day was the best gift ever. Lest you think Fig Newtons sound like a loveless, cheapskate gift, remember we have a daughter in college and two weddings in three months this year. And don’t think I had ulterior motives in purchasing them, like eating a few myself. I consider the chewy, figgy, gritty things a waste of good calories.
If you still think I’m putting both words and Fig Newtons in Hiram’s mouth, let me assure you I am not. He loves them as much as Hobbits love mushrooms, so I check their price at the grocery store every week and stock up when they’re on sale, which hasn’t been very often lately. They weren’t marked down on grocery day wek before last either, but it occurred to me that they didn’t cost much more than a Valentine’s card. I closed my eyes and imagined Hiram’s face when handed a card, and again when handed a package of Fig Newtons.
After thirty-two years of seeing this sweet man get a pained what-do-I-do-with-this-now look on his face whenever he’s done reading birthday, anniversary and Valentine’s cards, the cookie face won. I bought the Fig Newtons.
So you can call me cheap and unromantic if you like. But over the decades, I have felt most loved by Hiram when he does little things that thrill him not one bit, but he does them because they make me happy. This year, I followed his example and gave him, not what delights me, but what he likes instead.
Next year, once the kids are married and the daughter is almost done with school, maybe a more expensive present will fit into our budget. Hiram will get two packages of Fig Newtons instead of one. Nobody’s gonna call me a cheapskate.
