Reflection
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 04 October 2009 01:00
- Written by Earl Smith
I last shared this pulpit with my brother 13 years ago this month. Massachusetts had gale force winds and monsoon rains that day. The Concord River went over its banks. Very few attended church. Many were saved.
Of course I was much younger then. On Tuesday I will turn 70. Three weeks ago my wife Barbara turned 70 as well. (As you can see, I married an older woman.) Earlier last month we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. I have waited to tell you about all of this because I know it is too late for you to plan a party. I don’t want any parties.
With my bride in the room, I hasten to say that the wedding anniversary is a matter of considerable pride, but you can’t be married 50 years without having lots of birthdays, and it’s the birthdays that bother. And then there’s the retirement. You can’t work 40 years in the same place and loving every day without struggling with retirement.
So, I’m telling you, the whole thing put me in a tizzy and sent me into bouts of pondering. The problem, as I first saw it, was that I had lost my place. It was as if I had picked up a book in which I had forgotten to mark the page, or come to a four-way back country intersection with no signs or maps. Barbara has sometimes wrestled with the same lost feelings, and I have reassured her without believing what I said.
Gary doesn’t know it, but he helped me sort things out when he asked if I would come here and split a sermon. It wasn’t that he couldn’t perfectly well do the whole thing by himself, but as he put it, he thought it would be “fun.” Now my baby brother has become a very wise man, and he knows a lot of things, but what he didn’t know was that the prospect of sharing a speaker’s platform with him would further unsettle an already unsettled man. We were in Arizona at the time. I think we might have been on the rim of the Grand Canyon, because I jumped .. and accepted.
The assignment put me into many idle sessions in front of the computer, and I made no progress until one day several weeks ago when Gary called to wish us a happy anniversary, and to gently ask if I was prepared. I wasn’t, but when I returned to stare at the computer once again, I realized I had already solved the twin dilemmas of finding my place in life and finding the topic of this half sermon at the same time. I’ve copied the screen-saver to show you.
Here it is. See the icons on the edges:
CONCORD GIG – a word document, blank at the time.
DAM FINAL – a splendid novel I have finished, in quest of a publisher.
COMMITTEE AGENDA – a euphemism for a “to do” list we use to sort things out over cocktails, before dinner.
2009 TAXES – Exactly what you think.
SUGAR CHART – A close record I keep to amuse my diabetes doctor.
MAINE PUBLIC RADIO – where I escape the madness of movie stars and Michael Jackson.
Of course these things are peripheral, both in location and in fact. What matters is at the center:
Aidan Gim Smith, age three. An Irish name for a Korean boy with parents of Italian, Lebanese, Polish, and English descent, two months old when he came from half way around the world to join with three other grandchildren, all four of whom are well above average.
See the determined look on his face and the night crawlers clutched in his hand. (You probably can’t tell from there, but I think the worm has an anxious look on his face.) And please, take note of the Red Sox cap.
The story began months before, early one morning at our home in Belgrade Lakes, on Great Pond in Maine. Aidan was in bed with me, or more accurately, on me. I felt a tiny finger probing my ear. I believe he was making sure the passage was clear.
“Pop Pop,” he said, his mouth very close to the freshly cleaned ear.
“Get the boat. Go fishing.”
It seemed like an altogether fine idea to me, but alas, it wasn’t possible. “Can’t do it,” I said.
“Why?”
It’s a good idea to give complete answers when a three-year-old asks why. Otherwise, you will be over-run with more ‘whys.’
“Because it’s 5 o’clock. It’s dark. It’s March. The ice on the lake is 20 inches thick. The boat is covered with blue plastic, in the back yard, buried in snow.
Tiny obstacles don’t faze him. “I’ll get the boat,” he replied.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We have to wait.”
This spring – like every Maine spring – was a long, drawn out teasing affair, but the snow finally melted. Pussy Willows, Colt’s Feet, and Forsythia all followed in proper order, and one warm, windy morning in April the ice broke into tiny crystals and, in a symphony of bells, piled up along the shore. By nightfall, the loons were back, calling out, announcing spring. But even then we had to wait a week or two until at last the lilacs signaled it was time to put the boat back on its mooring – and go fishing.
And so it was that one fine morning we headed out to the special place where the perch were supposed to be. As we sat waiting, I gazed at the precious bundle in the seat in front, wrapped in a puffy life jacket, grinning, hands tight on a tiny rod, eyes filled with excitement. In that splendid moment, strangely, suddenly I became my own grandfather, and my mind raced back more than sixty years to another lake nearby. The little boy and the old man were in a wooden, flat-bottomed boat, and oars had replaced the motor, but otherwise it was all the same – warm sun, water chucking under the bow, dragonflies on the tips of rods, and new green on the hills behind us.
In that momentary trance, my memory gave back to me the tiny cabin on the shore of that other lake, and the long, joy-filled days we spent together there. I watched as the little boy squirmed in a wet, wool bathing suit, and I laughed when he brought me a turtle, caught in a makeshift net we fashioned from a stick and a red bandana. I showed him the moose that came to the water to drink at dusk, held him as we listened to the rolling thunder of an approaching storm, and raced inside with him to beat the rain. And I recalled the sweet smells of earth after a soaking rain, the chirping crickets in the cabin walls, and the taste of thick molasses on home made bread.
In that fleeting moment of changing places I knew my own place in time, and all was well when the trance was broken by the delighted yelp of the little boy when his first perch took the hook. I cleaned for him as my grandfather had done for me, and cooked it in the same cast-iron pan. All familiar. All secure. All in place.
So now I will go on from here in peace, making dog-ears in my book of life, knowing all will be well if I stop from time to time to look at myself and see a determined grin on my face, the undying hope of a Red Sox cap on my head, and the great possibilities of night crawlers in my hands.