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
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