THE GIFT OF THE PRESENT [F, 6-19-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

THE GIFT OF THE PRESENT          [F, 6-19-20]

As I walked this morning, I thought of another story I could share. I’m sure I’ve written it before in this blog, but most of the CIW readers are old enough that you’ve probably forgotten, so…

It started with seeing a dandelion and thinking of Ray Bradbury’s semi-memoir, Dandelion Wine. One of the stories concerns an old lady and her neighbor children. I can’t remember her name in the book, so I’ll call her Mrs. Smith.

On hot summer afternoons, the children would gather on her front porch, and she would give them lemonade and tell them stories of her childhood. But they did not believe her! To them, she had always been old. She protested. No, she really had been a little girl and wore pretty frilly dresses and had heavy-head dolls and people called her “Missy.” No, they objected. That could not be. She had always been old. She always wore old-lady dresses and lace-up shoes. She didn’t have a cute little nickname. She didn’t even have a first name. She was Mrs. Smith, and always had been.

Day after day this went on, until finally, one day, they said, “What is your name?” “Mrs. Smith,” she said. “Did you ever live in a different house?” “No, I have always lived here.” “Were you ever young?” “No, I have always been old.”

There are so many immediate responses that rise up to that story, but today, mine was to understand why I called her Mrs. Smith. That was my Grandma Mac’s maiden name. Henrietta Ann Smith. To her friends she was Retta. To her 22 grandchildren, and 37 great-grands, she was always and only, Grandma Mac.

On a good day, she was five feet tall. Never had an ounce of fat. Worked it all off. Lived to be 96 and was in the hospital only on the last day of her life. Had seven children, at home, and raised from age four, as though her own child, the daughter of a brother whose new wife did not want little Genevieve.

While raising those children, in a house with no electricity and no plumbing, she worked fulltime, Oakland City, Indiana, doing the farming, including plowing with a one-share plow behind a horse, while Grandpa worked as a stationary engineer in a coalmine, and she also worked as a cook in a café and for a threshing crew.

Later, in Oxford, OH, she worked fulltime as a maid and salad cook at Western College for Women, now part of Miami U, while Grandpa worked as a stationary engineer in a factory. Those were depression years, and while working fulltime she ran a household that included three bachelor sons who couldn’t marry because they couldn’t get jobs, and also, on a random basis, three other children, and their children, including her first grandson, who moved in whenever they did not have jobs.

We grandchildren set up a “store” in the barn and filled it with things we took from her room and made her buy them back when she got home from work. She laughed and laughed. To her, we were wonderfully creative. Laughter was her most common response to anything.

I cannot remember her ever reminiscing about the past. She was always in the present. She played Monopoly with us kids, and beat all comers at Chinese Checkers. She rode the bus down to Cincinnati on Ladies Day to see the Reds play, and listened to them on the radio the rest of the time. She would gladly tell stories of her children when they were little, which involved naming all eight of them before she got the right one, but only if you asked.

In her 90s, she fixed her hair in a French roll and wore nice dresses, and high heels. Around the house. Not frilly dresses, or stupidly high heels, but she wanted to look nice. Not the way she used to look, but it was important to look nice right now.

Perhaps one reason she didn’t tell stories of the past was that she didn’t need to. With that many children, there was always someone else telling a story about a sibling, like how Uncle Bob didn’t like to get a bath, and so on Saturday night would run from the tub crying, “Dry me first,” or how my father chased Aunt Helen around the house with a butcher knife. [Neither one could ever remember why.]

The real reason, though, was that for Grandma Mac, all time was present. She was a Presbyterian, but no predestinarian. She believed you earned your reward right now, by working and laughing and loving. She didn’t deny the past, but she didn’t need it. She lived in “the eternal now.”

At a family reunion, when her children were in their 70s, our daughter, Mary Beth, interviewed them on camera. They had a good time, talking about their childhood, growing up on the farm and going to the one-room White Oak School near Oakland City, and later living in the big house my mother dubbed “Cedar Crest” in Oxford, never sure how many people would be there for supper or to spend the night. Uncle Mike summed it all up by saying, “You can’t understand our family until you know that we had an amazing mother.”

So, think again your reaction to that story of Mrs. Smith in Dandelion Wine. Those children were not unkind to her by refusing her stories of the past. They gave her a great gift, the gift of the present. Grandma Mac reversed the story; she gave that gift to others.

John Robert McFarland