CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—Remembrance of Presidents Past [SU, 3-12-23]

 

Daughter Katie Kennedy, the author, has driven 10 hours to be here for the weekend, and lost another hour overnight to DST. We keep up pretty well with one another--by telephone and email and text and zoom and grandchildren—but it’s always special to be together in person. We do wish, though, that she didn’t have such a long trip.

She is willing to do it, though, so that she can watch me in person for signs of…what…oh, yes, memory loss. Because I did not remember a paper she wrote in fourth grade.

I read recently that John Adams, even though enough of an American patriot that he became our second president, had been the lawyer for the British soldiers who were on trial after “the Boston Massacre.” Not only that, he mostly got them off.

He took the job because no other lawyer would touch it. Adams felt that if America became a democracy, it was necessary to have a justice system that treated everyone equally, that gave everyone a fair defense. Now, there is a guy who should be president!

So I emailed Katie about that, because she has been writing a book about the presidents, as a companion to her The Constitution Decoded. I told her that I had not known about Adams defending those soldiers.

“Oh, yes you did,” she replied, “because that was in a paper I wrote in fourth grade that you typed for me.” And she went on to tell all about the trial and its aftermath.

I forgot about that paper that she wrote in 4^th grade, but it’s really because I remembered a paper she wrote in 5^th grade.

I was the Teaching Assistant for Jim Spalding, the Director of the University of Iowa School of Religion. Actually, I was more of an administrative assistant. For tax reasons, or separation of church and state, or some such, the School of Religion had its own board and raised its own budget. So the Director had to go to a lot of meetings. Except, he didn’t, because he sent me in his stead.

He did, though, teach one Intro to Christianity course, one of those hundred students in a big amphitheater room classes. Sometimes he had me teach the class, and he always had me grade the tests, which were essay type.

One day I was grading those papers when 5^th grade Katie handed me a paper she had written. “Good grief, my grade school daughter writes SO much better than these college students!” I realized that I should not be a college teacher; I would flunk them all because my expectations would be too high for them to match.

Being Jim Spalding’s graduate assistant wasn’t much use to me, since I already knew I didn’t want to go to meetings, and now I knew I didn’t want to teach, because I’d have to grade papers.

A column like this should provide advice, so: Don’t tell your children anything, because it is probably something they told you and you forgot.

Katie’s book on the presidents will be published in October. I’ll give you the details when we get closer to that time. If I remember to…

John Robert McFarland