reflections

“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” Ecc. 12:13

Last week was a cascade of reflections as I retraced some very old steps, revisiting friends and places from my childhood. The home where I learned how to ride a bike, discovered the magic of the Lone Ranger on radio, spent enchanting rainy afternoons rummaging in the attic, and was first set free to roam the neighborhood is now a slum. No self-respecting family would want to live there amidst unkempt yards, peeling paint, and “beware of dog” signs everywhere. The corner grocery store where we traded five empty pop bottles for a full one is boarded up, just one more dead building among many. I retraced my steps to school that had to have been a mile or two and found they were only 4 city blocks.

I visited my old one-room country school house where now lived Tim Fitch and his wife. He invited me in where I saw those same old floor boards where once I trembled as a fledgling 5th grader coming as a city boy into this strange new world. Outside, the boys’ and girls’ outhouses still stood, and I saw many of the same old trees, now ancient with age, under whose branches we played countless softball games. Memories returned of a red plastic lunch box and after-lunch story times as we listened to the old WLS radio station out of Chicago where dads could hear all the latest hog and cattle prices that so affected their lives.

By gracious chance, I met some of those old classmates from that humble school and was staggered at the deep pools of experience, life stories, joy, and calamity that stood before me in comparison to the easy, uncomplicated, exuberant lives I had left behind so many unscarred years before. The tall, strong boisterous one I so remembered was now disabled, struggling to deal with a number of near-crippling injuries. Another was caught in a mystery of pain, frailty, and estrangement from job and family yet the spirit that drew us together as friends was the same. He called me his “best friend,” which left me reeling as I reflected back on the 50 years of silence that had passed between us.

And then there were the high school classmates who had reached out to me, people I had really never known who now made a deep impression with their gracious hospitality towards me as a fellow survivor of that class of ’62. One spoke from his wheelchair, a man disabled in an accident in middle age who still worked, traveled, and created marvelous woodturnings. We talked eagerly of life and woodworking and jobs and children with him and his ever faithful wife as if none of his personal tragedy had ever happened.

I could not visit the grave of my longest boyhood friend for his ashes were scattered on some lake in Canada, but visited instead the resting place of his son who represented all that was good in my friend’s life. I met the son’s widow for the first time, and we filled in the pieces of our ragged accounts of years gone by and retraced the journey of faith that now bound us together; new family ties. Tears and prayers became cords of hope and love as we drew close together, a down payment on better days to come.

I spent time with old church friends, my now semi-retired “youth group,” as we reconnected the dots of our lives. The old church building itself was alive with a thousand memories as I went from room to room recounting the aches of adolescence. We talked of lives now ended, marriages dissolved, wayward children, and other tales of woe. Yet there were victories, too, as we witnessed those still smiling faces that bore testimony of a well worn and tested faith.

So many old faces speaking out with still familiar voices, so many stories, from classmates to cousins, lifetimes now ripe to the full, all spilling out, calling for some way to make sense of it all, while I stood there with my puny collection of years. I somehow am drawn to the words of another old man who looking back could only conclude, “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” Rather anti-climactic, I know, but it’s the only memorial that seems fit to raise.