BEAUTY PLUS… [M, 6-2-22]

I was recently corresponding with a friend who asked me how to describe a woman who has been able to put up with me for 63 years. “I don’t know her well,” he said. “I know she’s pretty, but… what else? What’s the plus?”

We first notice a person--are attracted, interested, intrigued--because of physical appearance. But that doesn’t last 63 years, or even 63 hours, sometimes. There has to be a “plus.”

There are many subsets of “beauty plus” in women. So I tried to find the correct one to describe Helen to my friend.

Our late theologian friend, Mary McDermott Shideler, during a visit to her mountain top home in Colorado, described a mutual acquaintance as “elegant,” and went on to define elegance as “beauty plus organization.”

Helen has beauty. Church member Roger Hull once said to me, so wistfully, as he took me to a chemo treatment, “I’d like to have a wife like Helen. She wouldn’t have to be that pretty, just…”

And Helen is certainly organized. “Elegance,” however doesn’t really nail it. Elegance sounds a little bit remote. Helen isn’t.

There is also the “beauty plus…” of glamor. “Beauty plus flash.” Once again, no go. Helen is not flashy.

“Sophistication” is “beauty plus style.” Well, Helen has style, if you consider style to be an appearance appropriate to the occasion, instead of the ability to make everyone look at you regardless of appropriateness. Helen is not sophisticated.

“Refinement” is “beauty plus smoothness,” like white flour or white sugar. They are refined to a level that is superficial. Not even healthy. All the nutrients smoothed out. That’s not Helen.

So I settled on “gracious,” which describes Helen very well. It is “beauty plus casseroles.”

John Robert McFarland

THE TEAR IN THE VEIL

 

Old ministry friend, John Shaffer, and I exchange remembrances of times past. He and Barbara just celebrated their 60^th wedding anniversary, so we’ve been sharing wedding stories. Here is part of a missive I sent to him… [See, I’m not writing, just corresponding with a friend.]

In my early years of doing weddings, I prided myself on predicting which marriages would last and which wouldn’t. I had a right to; I was always correct. That turned out to be accidental and ephemeral. At some point I began to be wrong as often as I was right.

Also, during my early years, there was a movement for preachers not to accept gratuities for weddings and funerals. The idea was that we were paid a salary as a professional and should not be taking tips for extra service. In addition, it was to be a source of evangelism for non-members.

This absence of wedding fees upset the wives of preachers, whose only source of income was wedding gratuities, since they had to give their egg money to missions. [1]

Also, it confused people, who thought I was rejecting them by rejecting their largesse. After I realized that my gratuitous refusal of gratuities was causing more harm than good, I just took whatever came and said thanks, which is a pretty good approach to life in general.

I think my most… I’m not sure. You can decide what to call it. I was campus minister at ILSU. I had two student weddings the same Saturday. The second one I wrote about in CIW for 5-10-22, the Chinese grad students where the bride was so overcome that she could not answer the questions because she could make no sounds. It was poignant and meaningful, a small wedding in the chapel.

The earlier one was a big, formal wedding in the sanctuary. It was a horror, in a thousand ways, from pre-wedding counseling to rehearsal. The worst thing happened in the bride room, just before the service was to begin.

The bride realized that there was a slight tear in the hem of her veil. It was so small no one else had even noticed it. The wedding consultant from the expensive bridal store downtown said, “No problem, I’ll just use my scissors to cut off the entire last row of lace on the veil, and since all the rows are the same, no one will ever know.”

The bride went berserk. “This is MY wedding!! It has to be perfect!! I want a veil that is 17 inches and not 16 & ¾!!! It won’t be perfect if my veil is short!!” She made everybody wait for half an hour while the bridal consultant went back to her store and got a replacement veil of the “correct” length. [I always hoped that while she was at the store, the consultant cut off the last row of lace and told that bridezilla that it was the right length.]

That was only one of the indignities foisted upon everyone at that wedding. It was a total shallow sham, with me as the hired man, and everyone else, including the parents who were paying for the whole thing, treated as serfs and servants.

Then they went to the gym/reception hall to party so loudly that as I waited in the lounge beside the chapel, with the Chinese groom and his best man, the groom and I could hardly hear each other. We were just ready to walk into the chapel when the frat-boy groom from the first wedding burst through the door, with a retinue of boisterous nincompoops, pulled out his wallet, fanned it open, and said, “How much do I owe you?”

I was thoroughly disgusted with that bunch by then, so I said, “How much do you have?” He looked at it. “Fifty dollars.” [These were 1970 dollars. What would that be now? Five hundred, maybe?] “That will be enough,” I said, and held out my hand. All his friends, plus a couple of Chinese guys, were watching. He had no choice but to hand it over. I gave it to my wife.

When the Chinese groom tried to pay me after his wedding, I explained that the frat-boy groom had paid for him, too.

John Robert McFarland

1] When I started preaching in 1956, all ministers were male, almost all were married, and wives were considered unpaid employees of the church. They did not work “outside.” The tradition, in exchange, was that wedding honoraria were given to the wives. Also, parsonages had gardens, and many small-town preachers kept chickens. “Egg money,” returns on selling excess eggs, was understood as a wife’s contribution to missions.

 

 

 

 

 

GOOD MORNING, BLANKIE [R, 6-16-22]

 

I am no longer writing, but I do still read, and sometimes something I read makes me think, and then I reflect on it… 

So it is with psychotherapist Catherine Gildiner and “transitional attachment objects,” via her book, Good Morning, Monster: Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery.

We all know about blankies and binkies that little ones hold on to. But it doesn’t have to be a blanket or a stuffed animal. When a child discovers it is not actually a part of its mother, that it is an individual and has to live in the cold, cruel world on its own, it grabs onto anything that will provide company and comfort, the way mother did, in the transition from total dependence to growing independence. In psychspeak, that is a “transitional attachment object.”

We all need emotional attachment. It starts with the mother. If that attachment is interrupted unnaturally, we have emotional attachment troubles all our lives, with spouses, children, parents, relatives, friends…

All of which made me think of Sadie, my 4H pig.

 

I was about twelve. Uncle Ted, my mother’s oldest brother, took me cross-county to buy me a pig for 4H. It was a cute little Hampshire. I think we interrupted Sadie’s attachment to her mother. Consequently, she was always wary of attachment, even to me, especially when I tried to “show” her at the 4H fair. She was very uncooperative.

I was never really a farm boy, even though I lived on the farm for eight years, and did farm boy things. I wasn’t interested in cows and pigs and making hay and shucking corn. I did them. I worked hard. I was an efficient and persistent farm  laborer. But I had no interest in furrows and vegetables. I was migrant labor. We had lived in the big city until I was ten. I liked radio shows and Saturday afternoon matinees and comic books and libraries.

Sadie was special, though, because she was a gift from Uncle Ted. I held her on my lap in a cardboard box while Uncle Ted drove me home.

Her attachment problem to me was minor, though, to her attachment problems to her own piglets. She was not the slightest bit interested in being a mother. First she got her back end up against the barn wall so they couldn’t come out. I had to drag her away from the wall. Then she refused to feed them, all nine of them. She had milk; that was no problem. She just didn’t want to share it with those little piglets. She was a modern, independent sow.

 

When she saw the piggies coming, she would take off running, away from the barn yard, into the pond lot. She was fat, and they were fast, so they always managed to catch up to her. Then she would splay her cloven hooves and brace herself. It didn’t take them long—pigs are smarter than we think—to work out the geometry, and realize that if they all got on the same side and pushed on her, they could tip her over. That accomplished, they became nursing machines, as Sadie cursed at them in pig grunt language.

I’ve often wondered about Sadie as a piglet…what happened then to make her such a bad mother? And those little piggies…how did they fare in later life, knowing their mother didn’t really want them? I think the problem was that pigs have no way of getting a transitional attachment object.

Anyway, if you know someone with an attachment problem, maybe give them a blankie or a binkie. Or if they’re too old for that, maybe a friend. Just not a pig.

John Robert McFarland

A STORY FOR HOVEY [Sat, 6-11-22]

Anne Lamott says that “Stories can be our most reliable medicine.” I believe that.

Today is Hovey’s funeral. He used to own the funeral home where the words will now be said over him. It’s the same place where I used to hang out with my friend, Dave Lamb, when his father owned it. That funeral would be a return home for me in many ways.

But, I am not going to Hovey’s funeral today. I would like to go, to my home town, to my friend’s funeral. The return home after an extended absence is a major motif in stories. Often the return is because someone has died, and the opening scene is of people gathered in a cemetery, in the rain. That sets up the story so perfectly. That could be me today, a character in a story, where I feel most comfortable. A good medicine to cure my afflictions, my fears and anxieties and uncertainties.

But the trip would be at least 2 hours each way, and I don’t think my body or my wife can manage that. So I shall tell myself a story… of an old man who cannot attend the funeral of his friend, but can still tell the stories that heal.

It was on a gravel road in the country outside Oakland City that I decided I wanted to be a story teller. I had walked to the home of neighbors on some now-forgotten mission for my mother. Mrs. Powers gave me an old copy of Collier’s magazine to take home. As I walked, I read a short story.

I do not remember who wrote the story, or what it was about. I do remember that it seemed more real to me, that story in the magazine, than my own walking did. It was magical. All my fears and anxieties and uncertainties were caught up into that story, where they disappeared. I was ten years old.

It wasn’t the first story I’d ever heard or read, of course. It was the first time, though, that I thought, “I want to tell stories like this, that catch people up into the reality of fiction.” I didn’t say it quite like that, but that’s how I felt it.

For many years I assumed that I had sacrificed my desire to be that kind of story-teller in order to keep my deal with God to be a preacher if “He” would save my sister’s life. I didn’t regret it, not exactly. I figured sacrifice was how you knew you were serious about God. And my sister was well.

It was only much later that I realized that in calling me to be a preacher, God had given me the fulfillment of my deepest desire. Every Sunday I got to stand up and tell a story that caught people’s fears and anxieties and troubles and made them disappear, as they became part of that story

Noon, on Saturday, June 11, in Oakland City. Time for Hovey’s funeral. Time for me to tell a story.

“There was a boy…and an old man…coming down a gravel road… toward each other…and they loved stories…”

John Robert McFarland

HOVEY DIED. HE REALLY TRIED. BUT HE WAS NEVER...SATISFIED. 6-5-22

I know I’m not supposed to be posting anything here, but when Hovey died, I felt I needed to write about him.]

 

Hovey Hedges died yesterday. Bob Wilson emailed to tell me. He spelled it Heavy. That may not have been accidental. At Oakland City High School, Hovey was just a little overweight, but his classmates called him Heavy Hudges, instead of Hovey Hedges. That’s how you know you’re accepted. Except that Hovey wasn’t… at least not by the school administration.

 

He was our most faithful classmate, in great part because he did not get to graduate with us. Early in our senior year, he and Miss Grace Robb, our class sponsor and Latin teacher, and some other kids, were coming back from a conference. When they let Hovey out at his house, he kissed Miss Robb, to her surprise, just because Hovey did things like that. It was seen by somebody, who reported it to the stiff-necked School Supt, Waldo Wood, for whom the new consolidated high school [Francisco and Mackey, along with Oakland City] is named. He reprimanded the flummoxed and innocent Miss Robb and threw Hovey out of school. Hovey had to transfer to Winslow, and graduated there.

 

But he always considered himself to be an Acorn, and an OC guy. He was one of the poorest kids in school, but with hard work and technical education, he became one of the premier business men in Gibson County, at one time owning both the funeral home and nursing home and main restaurant in OC, then branching out to become a landlord and business owner in Princeton, the county seat, to which he moved, to ever larger and more impressive houses.

 

He never, however, felt that he had made it, and this was expressed most in his relationships. He was always trying to do better, and it almost always went the other way. He was married at least four times, maybe five. Helen, as an honorary member of the Class of ’55, and the one who was always examining nursing homes for my father, knew several of his wives. “They were all great,” she said. “Why couldn’t he…”

 

We’ll never know. 

 

The wife we knew best was Sally. We were close as couples They came to visit us at least once. We stayed at their house for class reunion times. Sally took care of Brigid during Mother’s funeral, as well as her grandson, Austin, who was about the same age as Biddey, not quite three. He was the one of whom Brigid famously said, “That little boy is not paying enough attention to me.”

 

At one of those times at their house, Sally, who was an outsider, not having gone to school with us, said: “The reason all your classmates are always so eager to see you, and pass the word around so excitedly when we’ve learned that Donna has persuaded you to come to the reunion, is that we all live in the fear of divorce. We know it’s possible at any time, because we’ve all done it. But you two… you’re different… we want to see you because… to know that it’s possible…”

 

Hovey and I grew up pretty much the same way, in the same place. But I had an advantage he never had. Helen. As I mourn my friend, Hovey, I realize that it was Helen, the class adoptee, who made that witness of presence and fidelity possible… for 63 years…and counting… And I give thanks. For Hovey. For the Class of ’55. Most of all, for Helen.

 

John Robert McFarland