Category Archives: Memoir

Dad was bad today

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Barclay (Cavalier King Charles Spaniel) and bad Dad (homo sapiens)

Barclay (Cavalier King Charles Spaniel) and bad Dad (homo sapiens)

The new puppy (3 pounds 8 ounces) was leaping from my arms, flying to the sidewalk before I knew what was happening. It happened so quickly. Barclay was still excited from meeting the children around the corner; he was not his customary docile self.

The plunge from my arms was terrifying. The yelping was blood-curdling. I thought for sure he had hit his head or broken a leg or suffered some internal injury. He crawled forward under the Blue Spruce for protection, still crying loudly. I fetched him from under the tree, held him close, apologized profusely – “I’m so sorry, little guy. I’m so sorry” – and carried him into the house, still traumatized and whimpering. He settled down in my arms while I checked his body for signs of damage. Finding none, I put him down to see how he would walk. His walk was slow but straight. He spent the rest of the day more quietly but was fine as the day wore on, returning to his playful self during late afternoon play time.

Barclay greeted Kay’s return from work with a wagging tail and kisses to her face, as if to say, “Dad was bad today, but I forgave him. I’m glad you’re home!”

Bemused by Time

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Gordon C. Stewart, August 8, 2013 copyright.

I have always been bemused by time . . . and place. I am on a train listening in the night to the eerie sound of the train whistle and the constant click-clacking of the wheels. Where were we? Where are we going – and why, just my mother and I?

We were between times and places. My father had shipped out for war in the South Pacific. Hewas somewhere on a ship and might not return. My mother and I were on our way from LA to Boston. Two different places: one hours behind, one many hours ahead. But for the time being, there was only the now of the train, the whistle, and the steady clickety-clack from the track carrying us from there to here to there, from then to now to then. Perplexity with time and place is my earliest memory.

We are all in transit. But from where to where and from when to when have become less and less my questions.

I do not share the popular view that time is an illusion or that the material world is the prison from which we will be released at death. Time and place are gifts of creaturely existence, boundaries within which we live our lives appreciatively or scornfully in the midst of the Eternal. To scorn them is to deprecate existence itself in the Promethean hope that we can steal fire from the gods to become what we are not: timeless and placeless.

Time and place are set within the larger Mystery that Rudolph Otto called the Mysterium tremendum et fascinans – the Mystery that makes us mortals tremble and fascinates us at the same time, the Mystery of the Eternal without which we are nothing that draws us to itself like iron to a magnet. Time and place – birth, finite life, death – exist within the Mystery of that which does not die: Eternity.

I am not amused by the denial of death that is so rampant in our culture. Surveys show that roughly 90% of Americans, regardless of religious affiliation, believe in life after death, by which they do not mean that life will go on without them, but that they themselves will never die.

I have come to believe that the denial of death and the fear of death lie close to the core of American culture at its worst. Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death informs how I see the world and myself; Becker sits beside me as I turn to the Scriptures in the morning.

Psalm 90:1-5, paraphrased by Isaac Watts (1719) and sung as the hymn “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” is as much in my early memory bank as the train whistle on the ride to Boston. It has always represented a mature faith that takes seriously Otto’s Mysterium:

Before the hills in order stood,
Or earth received its frame,
From everlasting Thou art God,
To endless years the same.

A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

Time, like an every rolling stream
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
dies at the opening day.

O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while life shall last
And our eternal home.

Standing at the gravesites over the years, I have prayed the same prayer so many times that it has become an essential part of me. I confess that I don’t know what it means exactly but it expresses the sentiment of good faith as I have come to understand it for myself.

O Lord, support us all the day long,
until the shadows lengthen,
and the evening comes,
and busy world is hushed,
and the fever of life is over,
and our work is done.
Then, in Your mercy,
grant us a safe lodging,
a holy rest,
and peace at the last.

The shadows have grown longer since the trip to Boston and the first time I sang the hymn. Evening is closer now. The sense of the Mysterium tremendum et fascinans is different but no less real now than it was on the train to Boston. The hush of the busy world will come soon enough. Between now and the day my work is done, I want to listen more attentively for the Hush in the midst of time, and give thanks that the Silence is not empty. It is full of Eternity. I am bemused by time.

Click O God, Our Help in Ages Past for a video that captures the spirit of the hymn and the prayer.

The Hitch-hiker and the Cop

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Three college classmates who didn’t have two nickels to rub together decided to hitch-hike to B.T. Biggart’s home in Reynoldsburg, OH for the Thanksgiving holiday.

One of the rides was like the one in Steve Shoemaker’s story “Hitch-hiking” posted just minutes ago here on Views from the Edge. The three of us sat in the back seat of the driver’s big 1960 Ford 500 while he and his buddy passed the bottle between them, belted out country music, and swapped stories about women that are un-publishable. Eventually, by the grace of God, they dropped us off on the interstate in downtown Cincinnati.

Soon after we had stuck out our thumbs on the Interstate about 3:00 a.m., a Cincinnati squad car pulled over.

The officer asked for identification.

I had no wallet. My wallet was back at the college.

The officer declared that he could take me in for vagrancy.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Gordon Stewart, Sir,” I answered with my heart pumping faster and my knees about to buckle.

“Where you from, Gordon?”

“Broomall, Pennsylvania, Sir.”

“What’s your father do?”

“He’s a minister.”

“What church?”

“Marple Presbyterian Church in Broomall where I grew up.”

“What kind of church?”

“Presbyterian.”

“What’d you say your name was?”

“Gordon Stewart.”

“Did your father serve in World War II?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where did he serve?”

“Saipan, Guam, and Tinian in the South Pacific.”

(PAUSE)

“What branch of the service was your father in on Guam?”

“Army Air Force, Sir. He was a chaplain.”

“What’s your father’s first name?”

“Kenneth – Kenneth Campbell Stewart.”

“O my!!! After all these years! Red Stewart! Chappy Stewart! Well, I’ll be darned!

“You can go son. Just get a ride out of here as soon as you can. God bless you.”

…

So the cop who could have taken me in for vagrancy celebrated a vicarious reunion with his old Chaplain while we hitch-hiked to B.T Biggart’s for Thanksgiving – thankful for a serendipitous rescue from the boys in the Ford 500 and from the holding cell for vagrants.

Thanks, Dad! And thanks, Officer Anonymous! I never got his name. Grace abounds…even when you have no money and no identification.

Hitch-hiking

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The Hitch-hi8ker

The Hitch-hiker

A friend
said that when in college
in the 1940’s,
he once hitched a ride
in the car of a guy
who drove to an airport
and flew him in his plane
all the way to his school.
…
But another driver
who stopped at his thumb
was drunk and about rolled
the car at the first bend
in the road.
…
He mused: Only some
Samaritans are good…

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 24, 2013

The Fight in the 7th Grade

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Two boys I did not know
were to meet after school
in a park just two blocks
away. We all went to see…
…
The girl they were fighting for,
or over, was surrounded
by other girls from her class.
…
The first boyfriend stood
in an open space
looking down the street.
…
Boy number two
was pushed by friends
into the ring
made by classmates.
…
There were thuds,
then a headlock,
a bloody nose, and
tears from the boy
left on the ground.
…
His girl ran past
the victor and fell
to hug and wipe away
the blood, dirt, and tears
of the boy she had
just learned she loved.

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 20, 2013

Time

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My son once asked me “What is time?”

I answered, “I don’t know. It’s a perennial question of philosophers and theologians. But, so far as I can tell, time is what we have.”

Some people think that time isn’t real. It’s a human construct and only eternity is real. They think of time and place as the prison of the soul, the antithesis of, or the prelude to, eternal life.

It always seemed a bit strange to me. Like the imaginary friends children make up because they’re afraid of being alone in the dark. I could never understand.

“Time is what we have.”

The animals know what time is. They also know eternity. They wake and sleep with the rhythms of the sun – rising and setting daily – the markers of what we call time. They know nothing about clock time or the names of days, months, seasons or years, but they live in the reality of time.

Time is what we have between birth and death. Eternity is the depth of time, the Mystery beneath, within, and beyond the limits of time. We participate in the eternal, but we are not eternal. To think otherwise is to consider ourselves the exception to nature itself.

The illusion of superiority to nature – the idea that the human species is nature’s singular exception – is a fabrication peculiar to the species that considers itself conscious. The imaginary friend of eternal life may help us sleep better at night, but it leads to slaughter and, eventually, to species suicide.

Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death) saw the denial of death as bedrock to American culture. The denial of death – the refusal to acknowledge it as real; the flight from the knowledge of our mortality – not only deprecates life here and now; it takes into its hands the life and death of those different from ourselves. It builds towers to itself that reach toward the heavens while it plunders an earth it considers too lowly for its aspirations.

Time is our friend and time is our limit. We are meant for this. “Grace and pride never lived in the same place,” says an old Scottish proverb, for pride always seeks to exceed what is given (grace).

Time is what we have. Time is a participation in the glory of God. If there’s more, it will only by grace.

Someone really died?

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Verse – “We All Used to be Equal Under the Shroud”

About half way through my life
(I am now 3-score and 10)
funerals became the new
thing, “Celebrations of Life,”
with friends (no enemies would come)
saying fine or funny things
about the very special one
who sadly couldn’t be there then
because the ashes were still stored
at the crematorium
and might not ever be picked up,
or buried (unless family had
a plot already bought and paid for,
then a private internment
might for seven very short
minutes remind a few folks
that someone was dead.)

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 8, 2013

Four brothers who sing together

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Our parents took us to their church four times
each week: on Sunday, twice, and then for prayer
on Wednesday night–on Thursdays they sang hymns
in choir rehearsal while one, two, three, four
of us played on, around, and under pews.
“You boys be quiet!” they would often say.

We learned to sing in Sunday School: “Jesus
loves me,” and “Hallelu Hallelujah!”
Soon all of us were singing in the choir…
Then we grew up, our parents aged and died.
One atheist, one pantheist, one pair
of liberal Presbyterians–none tied
to our folk’s Baptist faith, yet when we drink
we sing their songs in four-part harmony.

– little stevie shoemaker, urbana, il, july 6, 2013

The Pine Grove

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Thrice happy he, who by some shady grove,
Far from the clamorous world, doth live his own;
Though solitary, who is not alone,
But doth converse with that eternal love.

– William Drummond, Urania

Next to the big barn attached to the big house on the big hill in South Paris, Maine was my favorite place: the pine grove.

It was a quiet place. The pine trees reached up to the sky, so tall that I wondered whether their tops could touch the blue sky and the white clouds I would watch floating over them through the filtered light of the trees, lying on the pine needles of the pine grove floor.

Sometimes Annie went with me to the pine grove. She lived just behind Grandpa’s and Grandma’s big house on the hill.

Annie liked my grandmother’s sugar cookies almost as much as I did…and the gingerbread cookies and the toll-house cookies, but mostly the big white sugar cookies my grandmother made every day because she knew we liked them best. We would settle on the granite steps outside the pantry with big glasses of fresh milk from real returnable glass milk bottles brought that morning by the milk man, and eat the cookies and drink our milk. Then a cookie or two would go with us into the pine grove.

We would lie there and look up…without talking…smelling the aroma of the pines. It was a sacred place of solitude and quiet – God’s greatest gift – where I could forget that my father was somewhere far away on the other side of some great big ocean in a great big war against a great big monster. I would retreat to the pine grove to get away from the radio broadcasts we listened to that might tell us whether my father was alive or dead.

There was no war in the pine grove. There were no people there. Just the great big pine trees that didn’t seem to care about the war. They just kept reaching up to the sky.

After we moved far away to Pennsylvania following my father’s return from the war, we returned to South Paris annually for vacation. Every year those pine trees were there waiting for my return.

During the 10 hour drive to South Paris, I looked forward to lying on the floor of the pine grove with a fresh-baked sugar cookie. As we drove up the road from Gray and rounded the bend by the Fair Grounds, the anticipation grew. I could almost smell the scent of the pines of the pine grove.

Until the year I looked up to see a franchise submarine sandwich shop standing where the pine grove had stood. The pine grove was gone. Clear cut. All the trees. All the pine needles. And the hill had been leveled to street level.

Someone had declared war on the pine grove, and the trees couldn’t fight back. Trees don’t fight. I sobbed like a baby.

How to win over the new neighbors

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Cowboys may ask forgiveness,
but never ask permission.

The house-movers had slid huge beams beneath
the floor joist after they used jacks to pry
our home off its foundation. Hauling with
a dirt-filled dump truck, a long chain would try
and pull the house still filled with chairs and beds
and dishes, glasses, breakfast cereal,
to our new farm ten miles down country roads.
…
Our house arrived intact, but neighbors still
will tell of cowboy-movers cutting trees
and posts of mail boxes with their chainsaw,
then handing out one hundred dollar bills
to angry folks before they called the Law.
…
The foreman said, “We never ask before
we move a house for someone might say no…”

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL

house-moving

house-moving