Bumpa, put your hearings in. I got a question. It’s serious.
Okay. Just a minute. Now, what’s your question, Elijah?
We’re not supposed to lie, right?
Right. We should always tell the truth. We don’t want be liars.
Why? Everybody’s doing it?
No they’re not, Who’s everybody?
The mean guys!
Whatmean guys?
The Publicans!
You mean Republicans?
Yea, them. The Publicans.
Where’d you get that, Elijah?
I saw it on Rachel!. We couldn’t watch Simple Songs at daycare!
What did you see?
The Publicans putting little Mexican children in prison. I saw it on TV.
Okay, I see. Anything else?
Yes. Marissa says we don ‘t have to worry about dictators. We shouldn’t have to worry about dictators. Right, Bumpa? What’s a dictator?
Ah, I see. Dictators do whatever they want. They lie and cheat and get away with murder. Their countries don’t have constitutions to check their power. Understand?
We live in America, right?
Well, yes. We live in North America, like Canada, but yes, our country is called The United States of America. Does that make sense?
Bumpa, I’m only 23!
No, you’re not 23. You’re almost two. You’re 23 months, not years. You have 16 more years before you can vote.
That’s not fair! One last question before you clean your hearing aids, and don’t make it complicated.
Okay, shoot. Try me.
You said we don’t have a dictator. Do we really have a constitution?
Preamble of the United States of America
— Gordon (Bumpa) and Elijah, Chaska, MN, April 27, 2019.
What can be said that isn’t being said over and over and over again and that adds something of value to public reflection on our time? Fellow Presbyterian minister John Buchanan’s personal story of worshiping with his granddaughter took me by the hand and led me home to church.
I sat beside Rachel in worship Sunday. Rachel is my 24-year-old granddaughter. She is a young woman with Down Syndrome. She is part of a remarkable program at National Louis University, lives in university housing, works part time with infants and toddlers in a day care center. She rides the El and the Chicago Transport Authority buses, loves to sing, knows the titles and words to every Beatles song and can dance for hours. Rachel starred in a motion picture, The Spy Who Knew Me, in which all the actors have special needs. It was produced by A.B.L.E.- Actors Breaking Limits and Expectations, which also puts on several stage productions per year including Shakespearean plays and original work. Many of the volunteers who work with the actors are from the Chicago theater community. Rachel greets me with more enthusiasm than anyone else, throws her arms around me as if…
Days before reading and re-publishing Linn Ullman’s lines about memory and the loss of it (“You just can’t think too deeply about it”), one of the four remaining classmates of what we’ve called The Chicago Seven, The Gathering, and now The Old Dogs, sent the rest of us an article on Alzheimer’s our latest deceased brother, Wayne, had published years ago.
Chicago Seven Gathering L to R: Wayne Boulton, Harry Strong, Gordon, Steve Shoemaker, Dale Hartwig, Don Dempsey, Bob Young@ McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL, 2004.
As Wayne had imagined his ship going over the far horizon, his worst thought was not death. It was that he would live on, like his father had, without remembering how to tie his shoelaces and without recognizing Vicki, the love of his life, his sons Matt and Chris, daughters-in-law Liz and Libby, and the grandchildren who brought him such joy.
That nightmare didn’t happen. He went out with his mind in tact, as much as a hospice patient’s mind is ever fully there. Aside from his last few days, Wayne’s mind was clear and his heart was full. The article Harry sent the three other surviving Dogs is a reflection on Psalm 90:10, 12 (RSV):
The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.
When he died in 1989, the sum of Dad’s years came closer to fourscore than to threescore and ten. With the psalmist, I attribute this number to his strength, but I would not wish the manner of his death on anyone. He died of complications due to Alzheimer’s disease.
It was my first experience with the death of an immediate family member, so I was no veteran. I found myself up against a more complicated reality than I had anticipated. I remember thinking at the time that some portion of this is just plain death: nasty, sad, the way death always is. But it is not natural death. It is something else. In the words of Martin Luther’s signature hymn, the disease threw every member of Dad’s little nuclear family—his wife, daughter-in-law, and myself—into a “flood of mortal ills prevailing.”
“Amid the Flood,” Wayne G. Boulton, Reformed Review, Western Theological Seminary, December 1, 2000.
Wayne died the way he lived and lived the way he died. Faithful son, husband, grandfather, and friend. Wise. Compassionate. Pastoral. Realistic. Hopeful. Consoler. Prayerful. Private. Counselor. Social critic. Political wonk. Brilliant Christian theologian-ethicist. Follower of truth wherever it led him. All of that and so much more. But, if I had the pen to engrave his epitaph on the simple grave stone in the cemetery of the Mount Vernon Presbyterian Church, if might read,
A sheep of Your own fold, a lamb of Your own flock, a sinner of Your own redeeming, humble servant his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ amid the flood of mortal ills.
No, there isn’t. How would you know? You’re only 21.
You’re cruel, Bumpa! POTUS is kinder than you!
What’s gotten into your little head?
My head’s not little! My head’s bigger than 96 percent. Doctor said so! I’m in the top four percent!
I know. That’s good. But you shouldn’t get a big head about that! So, tell me, why do you think there’s a real national emergency?
POTUS declared it. I saw it on PBS!
On Sesame Street? Did Big Bird tell you?
No. It came on after Sesame Street. I saw it!
What did you see, Elijah?
MISSING children, Bumpa! Don’t you know? 1,475 kidnapped children, Bumpa! That’s a national emergency! We need to help rescue all those kidnapped children!
I hear you. We do. But the kidnappers didn’t come from south of the border. The kidnappers are not here illegally.
Bumpa, can I be president… or do I have to be a lawyer?
Yes, you can, and no, you don’t. Why would you ask that, Elijah?
‘Cause they’re the only people who count.
Oh, my, Elijah! You were born in a strange time!
Uh-uh! I was nine when I was born. Mom says it was past time. Mom was miserable before I got borned.
She was, Elijah. She sure was.
You’re miserable, Bumpa! Are you pregnant?
No, only young women get pregnant and miserable. Old men just get miserable and grumpy.
Yeah, we’re Minnesotans. When can we go ice fishing?
fish houses of ice fishermen in Minnesota
Grandpa doesn’t do ice fishing. Maybe Uncle Andrew will take you and Calvin together.
Does Uncle Andrew have a fish house?
No. You don’t have to have a fish house to go ice fishing.
But you have to have a big house if you want to be president or a lawyer, right?
Well, no. You don’t have to have a big house to be a lawyer. Some lawyers are street lawyers and public defenders. All lawyers take an oath to protect the constitution.
But some lawyers are bad, right? Like Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani. Grandma says they’re walkin on thin ice. It’s a national emergency!
Yes and no, Elijah. Mr. Cohen and Mr. Giuliani represented or represent the president. The president’s about to fall through the ice for making stuff up.
Yeah, the president’s a national emergency and his lawyers pretend he’s not!
Yes, that’s our opinion.
Right! I changed my mind. I don’t want to be president, Bumpa, and I’m glad I don’t have to be like Michael and Rudy.
Like I said, Elijah, you could be either president or a lawyer, but you don’t have to be. You can be anything you want.
OK! I wanna to be like Uncle Andrew! I can be a ice fisherman right here in Minnesota and grow up to be a grumpy old man. I wanna be like you, Bumpa.
— Grandpa (“Bumpa”) Stewart and Elijah (21 months old), Chaska, MN, February 17, 2019
We’re in a real pickle this morning, Elijah. I don’t know how we’re ever going to get out it!
dill pickle
I like pickles! Pickles are good. You’re getting senile, Bumpa. You can’t get in a pickle!
No, no, we’re not inside a pickle. It’s is an idiom.
You said a bad word, Bumpa! I’m telling Mom! Mom says we’re not supposed to use that word.
I didn’t say idiot, Elijah. I said idiom. It’s a figure of speech, like “It’s raining cats and dogs.”
It’s raining cats and dogs? You must be senile, Bumpa. I’m little, but I’ve never seen it rain cats and dogs, and I know we can’t fit inside a pickle! You’re freaking me out!
I like pickles, too. Well, most kinds of pickles. Especially sweet pickles, like bread-and-butter pickles. I also like Jewish deli pickles. But this morning’s pickle is a real pickle that makes me sick.
Yeah, I hate that. I was sick last week. I hate throwing up.
Some pickles are sweet. Some pickles are sour. It’s the sour ones that sour my stomach.
So, are we in a sweet pickle or a sour pickle? Are we in a little pickle or a big pickle?
A BIG pickle, and it’s really sour.
You should only eat bread and butter pickles, Bumpa, and stop watching Rachel and Ari. Turn off the television and have a bread-and-butter pickle. Pickle is GOOD!
TURN UP THE SOUND and listen carefully as Elijah with his pickle tells his mother “Pickle is good!”
19 month old Elijah, notice the pickle in left hand, tells his Mom, “Pickle is good!”
— Bumpa Gordon, Chaska, Minnesota, January 29, 2019.
As our way of offering Thanksgiving greetings, we share John Buchanan’s “Gratitude Doubled” reflection on becoming a great-grandfather of new-born twins in an incubator.
This Thanksgiving also marks the 18-month anniversary of grandson Elijah’s birth. Great-grandfather joy will have to wait a few years, but the sense of life as John speaks of it is immediate. Wishing you a grateful Thanksgiving.
Yesterday I experienced the most unlikely, most wonderful thing that has ever happened. I carefully extended my sanitized hand through the small, round opening in the incubator and, with my forefinger, gently touched the cheek of my brand new great-granddaughter, just 18 hours old. And then I did it again, reached through the small, round opening and touched the cheek of her identical twin sister, my second great-granddaughter.
I never thought much about great-grandparenthood. No one did. My great-grandparents were long gone when I was born and I have only vague memories of my parents talking about them, their grandparents. They were remote, to say the least.
But now, I am one, a great-grandfather and my new status has set me to ruminating – on, among other things, my own age. Unlike my great-grandparents, I’m still here, alive, well and reasonably active and healthy. And – I have seen and…
Views from the Edge 