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