CHRIST IN WINTER: The
Personal Identity of An Elderly Grandson—
Michelle Obama said I was doing it wrong.
Starting in high school, I was pleased with, yes, even proud of, my ability to remember names. This hit its zenith in my campus ministry years.
College kids went to church in those days. Every September, I’d have a thousand new names to learn. I just happened into the plan I used to remember them. I asked their name, asked their major, and asked their home town. And at each answer, I pointed out something we had in common: “Oh, my grandmother’s name is Margaret, too… Jim Kiefer is a special ed major, too. You’d probably like to meet him…” [If the student were a guy, it would be “Ann Wierman is a special ed major…”] You’re from Illiopolis… so Gary Ford is your pastor?” By that time, I was associating their name not just with their face but a standard background important to understanding a student—a major and a hometown.
There is a difference, of course, between just trying to remember a person’s name and trying to get to know them, to know their story. Yes, their name is a short form of their story, and remembering it is a good place to start, but knowing a name and knowing a story are not the same thing.
Michelle Obama, in the film about the tour for her book, Becoming, talking to a group of students, said, “The way you get to know someone is not the surface things, like where they’re from. Ask what their grandfather was like…”
I’m inclined to say, “Well, I’d eventually get around to their grandfather, later, after I got through trying to remember 999 other students…” The truth, though, is that I don’t think I ever asked anyone what their grandfather was like.
If someone wanted to know me, grandmothers would be a better place to start, but asking about my grandfathers would be intriguing, in part because my mother’s father, Elmer Arthur Pond, was dead when I was born, killed in a coal mine cave-in a decade before. I wish I knew more about what he was like.
The strange thing is, he’s been a major part of my life, because I have spent so much time wondering about him, what he was like…and because of three things I do know…
First, my father said that Grandpa Pond was always interested in what other people thought. He would listen carefully as you talked.
Second, my mother was the outlier among his eight children, the “sensitive” one, the one who needed extra attention. He gave her the extra attention she needed.
Third, he was killed because he knew the mine was unsafe, but the owner insisted the miners go in anyway. Grandpa told the other miners to stand back, that he would go in first.
So, yes, you might learn about me by asking me about the grandfather I never knew, because I wanted to be like him.
John Robert McFarland
The photo is generic; not
of my grandfather.
