CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections
on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…
GOOD ENOUGH TO BE IN THE CATALOG [F, 5-4-18]
I
love college catalogs.
I was standing beside our old gray Chevy, in a gravel
parking lot, outside Oak Grove Church, in the open country, on a humid summer
day, waiting for my little sister, to drive her home from Vacation Bible
School. It was the summer of 1954, before my senior year in high school.
The windows on the car beside mine were down. On the
front seat was the catalog—five by seven, plain white, with a round seal in
restrained red, which I later learned was crimson, and underneath, in simple
but elegant type, Indiana University. I reached through that car’s window and
pulled out the catalog.
As I leafed through it, I knew my life had changed
forever. I saw those pages a world where no one in my family had even visited,
but I knew it was a world where I wanted to live. If I could get into that
catalog, I would no longer be a simple country boy. I would be a college man.
One
of the greatest sacrifices I ever made was putting that catalog back into that
car when Margey came running out the church door to show me the picture of Noah
and his ark and his strangely shaped animals that she had drawn.
The idea of me going to college made no sense. My father
was blind. We were on welfare. There were three other children. No one on
either side of the family had ever gone to college. I was already working
part-time to help support my family. But when Iva Jane McCrary, our high school
Home Economics teacher, asked me what I would do after high school, I said,
“I’m going to IU.”
Iva Jane was a large and forbidding woman. In addition to
Home Ec, she taught biology to the girls. Because of scheduling problems, I had
been in her biology class, one of two misplaced boys. She looked at me strangely
and finally said, “Yes, I suppose you are college material.”
Suddenly I was not sure about that catalog. Iva Jane had
given me her imprimatur, said that I was college material, more or less, but I
had never before considered that I was not.
Sure, I knew that I did not have the right clothes or the right money to go to
college, but I had not considered that I might not have the right stuff.
I had been class president for three years. I was editor
of the school newspaper. Only James Burch did better in class than I. But maybe
I wasn’t college material. Ann
Turner, the doctor’s daughter, was going to IU. Bob Nation, who was going to be
a doctor, went there. So did Shirley Black, the cheerleader, whose father had
his own business. Was college for the likes of me?
When I heard that the factory in the next town was
hiring, I applied, set the record on their aptitude test, [which James Burch
later broke], and quit high school to go to work.
My forewoman said that I was their best adjustor of
electrical relays and got me a date with her very attractive daughter, but I
think she knew my heart wasn’t in the factory. They didn’t have a catalog.
Because classmate Jim Shaw said to me, in the middle of
July, “On your day off, let’s drive up to IU and see if they’ll let us in,” I
did go to college. I went to graduate school. I got a doctorate. Altogether, I
did ten years of higher education. All the way, though, Iva Jane’s grudging
acceptance of me as “college material” pulled sideways on me, trying to get me
to write dim and shaky answers on the pages of life’s Blue Book.
I think one of the best things I did as a minister was
expecting people to be better than they wanted to be. I said, in any way I
could, “Yes, you are Christian
material.” I was sometimes wrong, but more often, people who had little faith
in themselves learned to have great faith in God, because their pastor expected
it.
I suppose I’m thinking about college catalogs because
tomorrow granddaughter Brigid graduates from The James Madison College at
Michigan State University and starts a PhD at The University of Chicago in the
fall. Later this month grandson Joe graduates high school and starts college at
The University of Iowa in the fall. I get excited when I think about what
treasures are hidden in the catalogs of those universities for them. I know for
sure that there is no catalog big enough to contain my pride.
I
still love college catalogs. I regret, though, that they are now usually
electronic instead of paper. It is unlikely that some poor girl or boy will see
a CD on the seat of a car with open windows and pull it out and stick it into
the computer that just happens to be sitting there in that gravel parking lot
on a humid summer’s day.
JRMcF
I used to keep a careful
index of stories and ideas used in CIW. That became cumbersome, though, so I
gave it up, figuring that when one writes a blog for old people, they won’t
remember if they’ve read it before, anyway.
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