Christ In Winter:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…
One way to keep a marriage
growing is to keep some loves hidden, even for 60 years.
In this column for 9-12-18,
I wrote about one of my hinge books, Jesus
of Nazareth, by Gunther Borkamm. He pointed out that the New Testament was
written by and in a community of followers of Jesus, people of “the way,” for
whom Jesus was a present reality. It was an inclusive community. That book was
the reason I worked so hard to learn names all the years I was a pastor.
“Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.” If the pastor calls
you by your name, you feel like you belong. I want everybody to feel included
in the community of “the way.” So I love knowing everybody’s name, even in our
current congregation, where I am just a member, not a pastor. Helen said, “All these
years, calling everybody by name, I just thought you were showing off, because
you could do something that is hard for everybody else.”
So, there are two things
that I really love—in addition to my wife, my children, my grandchildren,
babies, little kids, puppy dogs, mincemeat pie, coffee… knowing names, and
Twinkies.
Our older daughter, Mary
Beth, telephones us a lot--because she likes us, and we’re old and she wants to
check up on us, and because she has a wedding coming up. That means, of course,
that she wants to talk to her mother, mostly. However, sometimes Helen is off
at water aerobics or at the grocery store when MB calls, and then I get to talk
to her.
Recently Helen got back from
Lucky’s with the ingredients for taco salad [it’s been a long, hot summer]
while I was talking with MB and overheard me say, “I love Twinkies.”
She later told MB, “You
think you know somebody… I’ve been married to your father for 60 years and I
never knew he liked Twinkies. I’ve never seen him eat a Twinkie. It must be
some secret addiction.”
Well, not exactly. I love
Twinkies, but I never eat them, because they are not good for me, or anybody
else. They aren’t even food. They are “a food-like substance.” That makes them
really good. That’s why I love them.
Or maybe it’s because they
were such a surprising first love. At the age of ten, I became a brown-bag kid.
When we lived in Indianapolis, I walked home for lunch each day. When we moved
to the country, I rode a school bus and so had to take my lunch to school. No
school cafeteria, and we couldn’t have afforded school lunches even if there
had been one. We couldn’t afford a lunch box, either, so I took my lunch in a
brown paper bag, or, if we didn’t have one of those, the long wax-paper sleeve
that a loaf of bread comes in. I did have a thermos for milk, which I just
carried along with the lunch bag.
It was a pitiful
lunch—chicken legs, or pork chops, or ham, home-grown tomatoes, home-baked
biscuits, real food, because we couldn’t afford “store-bought” food-like
substances. One day, as I gnawed on a pork chop, feeling sorry for myself
because the other kids had sandwiches of bologna on white bread, Bobby Joe
pulled out of his lunch box a Twinkie! I had never seen such a wonder. [Before
the days of TV ads]. It was in cellophane. It was bright yellow. Well, “it”
wasn’t just an “it.” “It” was a two. Two short yellow sponge cakes. He gave me
one. I bit into it. It wasn’t just sponge cake. Inside was a filling that was
sort of like the ice cream we had at “socials” in the church basement. It was
sweet and soft and creamy and sugary and… different. I was in love.
To make it even better, at
the same time I saw a cartoon about Twinkies in a comic book. [I love old-time comic
books, too, but Helen already knows that.] Automation was the new, big thing at
the time, and “untouched by human hands” was the way you said something was
really up to date. In the comic book, we saw the Twinkies factory, with
“Untouched by Human Hands” under the Twinkies name. And inside the factory, in
the next panel of the comic, the Twinkies were being made by… monkeys! It was
the perfect joke for any ten-year-old boy, but especially for one who had just
fallen in love with Twinkies.
Do I have still more
secret loves that, unlike Doris Day, I did not “…shout it from the highest
hills, even told the golden daffodils?” Well, like every other boy my age,
there is Doris day…
John Robert McFarland
The music for “My Secret
Love” is by Sammy Fain, with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster for the 1953 movie,
“Calamity Jane,” starring the beautiful, lyrical, and slightly-challenged
dramatically former Doris Van Kapplehof.
No comments:
Post a Comment