POP!

Acts 2:24

I came across this verse referenced in a book I was
reading, and even though I’d seen it many times
before, this time it really caught my attention.
”But God raised him from the dead,
freeing him from the agony of death, because it was
impossible for death to keep its hold on him. “

I looked in other versions to see what word they used
instead of agony, and found pains, pangs, and suffering.
None of these things are good things! Death is not
meant to be a good thing. Romans 5:12--sin entered
the world through one man and death through sin, and
in this way death came to all people because all sinned.
So death is this big bad repercussion that we all earn,
and it is meant to be an agony that we all go through. 

But it was impossible for death to keep its hold on Jesus.
Not even possible! Like trying to keep carbonation from
rising to the top of your glass of soda--or your champagne.
Or like trying to keep an air-filled ball submerged in a
swimming pool. It can’t stay down--it just goes POP
up to the top and freedom. 

I love the fact that Jesus was irrepressible--he just could
not stay dead. Of course, this is because death came for
all people because all sinned. But Jesus never sinned so
death had nothing it could grab onto, and so it couldn’t
keep its hold on him. Not. Even. Possible. Honestly, that
kind of makes me laugh--ah HA Death! 

So what about us? Yes, we die, because we are part of
sinful humanity. Even though the sins of Christians are
forgiven--put away as far from us as east is from west--
the fact remains that we did sin, as all humans do. So
death waits for all of us regardless. 

But the Bible talks in Revelation about two deaths. We all
go through the first one, but 20:6 says that the second has
no power over us, because we are God’s children and
Jesus’ sisters and bride. He presents us washed clean
and pure, so the second death has nothing to grab onto.
Once we go through death once, we never go through it
again. We will be irrepressible, like the bubbles in
champagne. I love this thought--it fills me with gladness.

Love, Spud

Legacy--Dad

My dad was a man of many passions. He loved travel, history, machines, cars, woodworking, gardening, pie, old hymns, flirting with children, the Ohio State University Buckeyes, and my mom--not necessarily in that order. But one thing that he really loved was a good story. Consequently I have much more material on my dad than on my mom. The trouble has been deciding how much to leave out, as he had a full life with lots of stories. 

Dad claimed that he was born leaving Michigan, and to be honest I have no evidence to the contrary. He was the son of a veterinarian, and a housewife who loved to sing hymns as she worked, but it all fell apart during the Depression. Grandpa could find plenty of work, but nobody could afford to pay him for it, so his veterinary career went by the wayside. He spent a few nights sleeping in Grand Central Station and looking for work of any kind during the day, and finally landed as post as a federal meat inspector. A good steady job, but he had to travel a lot for work.

His wife, my grandmother, soon fell ill with an illness that plagued her for the rest of her life, and she died when my dad was around twelve. But since she had been ill for so long, and her husband was constantly on the road as an inspector, Dad and his older brother had been farmed out (literally) when Dad was still quite small to Aunt Ottie and Uncle Henry's farm. Ottie and Henry had seven children living, and so they barely noticed two more little boys added to the house. 

Dad was the youngest of the nine cousins, and sort of became everyone's roly-poly pet. His nickname was Itty Bitty Teeny Tiny Earl Tommy Tiner Baby, and he tagged along after the eight older ones and thrived. For the rest of his life, he considered all those first cousins to be siblings, and I was relatively old before I recognized that they were not in fact aunts and uncles of mine, but cousins instead. They were very close, and we paid lots of visits. 

The kids all fought every morning for the honor of taking that day's milk down the road to Aunt Susie (after whom I was named) because the person who delivered the milk invariably got a lovely home-baked treat fresh from Aunt Susie's oven. Dad became a really good baker himself, living on that farm, specializing in pies and Christmas fruit cakes. Another feature of Dad's childhood was, surprisingly, embroidery. Dad broke an ankle at some point, and Aunt Ottie declared that no one on a farm could lie around all day with nothing to do, so sewing and embroidery it was until he was up and about and into mischief again. 

Dad, his  brother, and his dad moved to Piqua at some point before high school, and he graduated early in order to join the navy. Uncle was already on a ship in the South Pacific, but World War II ended before Dad could get out of basic training and onto a ship of his own. He did join the army later and spent a tour of duty in Korea, as a cook for the army. He found out that war wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and for the rest of his life didn't like Fourth of July fireworks as they reminded him too much of the sound of the guns. 

After the army he went to Ohio State, traveling home on the weekends to be with his church and his future bride, and they were married while he was still getting his second degree, in agricultural economics. There was a problem though--Mom was determined to not be married to a farmer; so he ended up working as a sales manager (for seed corn, naturally) for a while, and eventually ended up working for the air force. Ellen and I were born during the sales job, and Tom later on during the air force job. 

Dad designed the house we built on the hill above town, and Ellen and I helped to the degree that people in elementary school could. My hands were the smallest, so it was my job to stuff insulation into the cracks around the window frames. The house was largely done all by us, with the exception of some things like the basement digging and the cement walls, the framing, and the plasterwork. Otherwise, it was very much a family affair. Grandpa Martin did the wiring, Uncle James worked on duct work, and it came together in about two years, in time for Tom to put in his appearance. 

Most of my memories of growing up with Dad center on the fact that he was what you could only call jolly. He was constantly humming, whistling, beating time to his singing. He was one of the few men I know who actually laughed until he cried, and it happened often. I think my son inherited this personality. Not that Dad wasn't serious when seriousness was called for. He somehow managed to always be on the governing board or a committee of our church, and that gave him no end of frustration. It was a case of duty calling, I suppose, because he certainly didn't enjoy that experience, and yet it persisted for decades. 

Dad also had a history of heart attacks. I'm not sure now how many there were, but there were quite a few. That must had been very scary for him and Mom, as his own father had died of heart failure before I was even born, so I never met either of those grandparents. When we met with the pastor of the church to work on Dad's funeral, we were read an interesting document about Dad and his heart which he had penned to be given to us after his life was over. Apparently at one point it became apparent that Dad's heart was not going to last. He spent some time desperately begging God in prayer to let him live long enough to see Tom graduate, and God came through. As he slept, he saw a golden light come into his chest and rest on his heart, and he knew his prayers had been answered. Sure enough, his heart healed up significantly from that point on, and he died much later of something else entirely. Our own little family miracle. He ended up seeing all his grandchildren, and that made him happy too. 

Dad loved to travel, and as a result I ended up visiting a majority of the states. We were always short on funds though, so I'm not sure how he managed it. I suspect he took out hefty loans from the Bank of Uncle James, and there was some evidence to support this. And one more thing Dad loved--battlegrounds. We never saw the things that would appeal to children, for the most part, but we did see a LOT of battlegrounds. It was part of his love of history, because an awful lot of recorded history involves battles, so there we went. When I finally, in my fifties, voluntarily went to visit Valley Forge, I knew that my Dad would have been proud of me. 

And that's another thing about Dad. He was immensely proud of all three children and all four grandchildren. And he let us know it. This man of great enthusiasm was enthusiastic about US, and it made all the difference in the world to an awkward child's aching heart. He was proud of Mom too, and even occasionally managed to sneak in a hug when she thought nobody was looking.

When I was a new mother, I was working a job that gave me one weekday off every week. From the beginning of my motherhood until the kids were in school, there would come a knock on my door in the mid-morning on those days off, and there would be the proudest Grandpa in the world, come for a visit. He was with me one day when I was lugging around my two-year-old non-mobile child with a bunch of bags of equipment in a medical building (another feature of my weekly day off was an endless round of specialist doctors for my son), and I was pregnant again at the time. I could tell by his reactions that he was distressed that this had become my reality, but I was oddly comforted that there was one other person in the world who had a small clue what my life was like at that point. Proud Grandpa was also Understanding Grandpa. That helped, emotionally.

Once Mom became a victim of dementia, Dad stuck pretty close to home. Those were some lonely years for him, but he didn't feel like he could leave her alone. The one time that he did go to an appointment without her, Mom left the house and wandered, crossing a busy road and getting picked up by a policeman who saw her looking vague and endangered. He never left her side again unless she was in someone else's hands. 

When Mom died, he was broken-hearted, because she had been the love of his life for more than fifty years. At the same time, he was freed. After a time of mourning, he set off cross-country in his car and visited all those cousins he hadn't seen for a few years. He was on the road quite a bit there for a while, catching up with his "siblings". He also did the other thing that Mom would never let him do, and grew a most luxuriant white mustache. He looked just like Wilford Brimley and I loved it. 

Mom had this little finger wave she would do to say good-bye. When Dad was in the hospital post-stroke and she had been gone for nearly four years, I paid a visit. He wasn't really aware of what was going on and who was who. As I went to leave, without even thinking about it I did that little finger wave. His face lit up like the sun and he did it back, and I realized that he was disoriented enough to think he was seeing his beloved wife once again. It made me sad, but I was glad that I had made him happy.

My dad had a big happy life, and I am sure as I can be that he's still having one. Someday we'll meet again, and I'm sure about that too. See you later, Dad. 

Love, Spud

Legacy--Mom

In the interest of providing a little history for my daughter, it's time to talk about her maternal grandmother. Some of the more important bits can be found in the August 2019 posting "Ambivalence", and so I won't repeat them here. I'll get to Grandpa next time.

My grandfather was born in a little place called Buzzard's Glory. The last time I went by, decades ago, there was little more than a crumbling wall of a brick building, so there probably isn't even that any more. Granny, my mom, was born in Dawn, which was one street long but had a church and a school for all that. They moved to Versailles sometime in her childhood, and that's where she went to all but the last year of her schooling. 

My mother was the oldest of four, with straight blonde hair and big blue eyes, and childhood photos often featured an enormous bow on the top of her head. She was a child of the Depression, so she knew how to get by with not much, which turned out later on to be a good thing. Her weekly chore was to walk to the store to get the family's ration of oleomargarine. It was white, and came with an orange capsule of food dye, and she would be the person to mix it all up so that the white oleo resembled butter, but fooled absolutely nobody.

They moved to the town where I grew up right before Mom's senior year of high school, taking her away from her good friends, an occasion for bitterness for the rest of her life. She had taken the secretarial classes in high school, and went right to work. She wanted desperately to go to college, and she would have been quite successful there, as she was extremely intelligent, but there was no money for her to go. This was another cause of bitterness, as her younger brother went to college with the rationale that he was the boy. Her younger sister went to a school for the deaf, and the very youngest was sent to college in her turn but wasted the opportunity, skipping class to run around with her friends instead. 

At some point in the first couple of years after high school Mom dated a man who later became a lawyer, and her mother used that against her when she complained about not having money later in life, saying "You should have married that lawyer!". Thanks Grandma, very helpful. But in a couple more years she married my dad. The way he put it was that he was the Sunday school president and she was the vice-president, and they just kept it that way for life. Dad was smitten with Mom to the end of his days, despite ups and downs and fierce, noisy arguments.

They dated and were married in a time of wide skirts, tiny waists, and adorable shoes, and went to live in off-campus housing on 12th Avenue in Columbus (the upstairs apartment of a family named Gump) while Dad finished his master's degree. Mom hopped on a bus and worked downtown as a secretary while Dad was in classes, and loved every minute of it. And in her spare time, of course, she typed up Dad's thesis. You can still view it from the Depository at OSU.

After graduation, they moved to Findlay where my sister and I were born, and when I was five we all moved to Piqua. We went to the church where Mom and Dad had met, and Mom had a wonderful, true, soft little voice for singing hymns. Sometime in those first couple of years back in Piqua, I think they came close to divorcing, although I don't know if my siblings even know this. I remember Mom taking my sister and me with her to an office which I recognized much later in life as that of a lawyer, and Mom cried and cried in front of him. Shortly after this my grandmother pulled me aside and told me that if my parents split up that I was to make sure to tell them that I had to go live with her. It didn't impress me at the time, but I put the pieces together later. 

My baby brother was born a little while later, and I have always wondered if he was a reconciliation baby, but I'll never know. We were living outside of town at that point, in a house Dad designed and built himself. We never had more than two pennies to rub together, so it wasn't the house they wanted, but it turned out to be a great house anyway. And there was room on our property for a substantial garden. Poor Mom--she had told dad before she married him that she wouldn't be a farmer's wife, and she never was, but thanks to that garden and the even larger plot down the road, she still spent all her summers canning, freezing, and otherwise bitterly processing produce. But technically, Dad was a military contractor, not a farmer!

Mom had two great loves in life--big cities, and books. Dad was thoroughly allergic to big cities, but he shared the love of books. I grew up with lots of books in the house and a well-worn library card. We kids didn't really own much in the way of kids' books, but I made up for that later. Mom was like I am, or perhaps I am like she was; if we weren't doing anything else we had a book open in front of our faces, and always carried one with us wherever we went. I still do.

When I was in junior high school, Mom was diagnosed as diabetic. I suspect she was diabetic several years before she knew it, as looking back I can tell that a lot of her behavior was that of someone who just wasn't physically well and took it out on everybody else. Taking it out on others took several forms, none of them good. Once she got treatment things got better, fortunately, but then her own mother died. Mom always accused her mother of "digging her grave with her teeth" as Grandma loved food and didn't let her own bad health slow her down any in the gustatory department. Mom considered it a form of suicide, and was bitter about that too. 

Once I was in college, as my college years overlapped with my older sister, funds went from "tight" to "pretty much non-existent". So Mom went back to work, using those faithful old secretarial skills, and was a happy woman at last. By the time we three were all out of college, she had that income but not as much to spend it on, and life got much better. She and Dad went to the UK twice, and in fact were stuck in Scotland at one point as they were over there on 9/11. Nobody could leave. Ah, what hardship, to be stuck in Scotland! And Mom, for the first time in her life, finally got to indulge in shopping for shopping's sake, and not as a dire necessity. One time my little family went to visit for the weekend and managed to miss taking one of the suitcases. Mom joyously put on her shoes and took me out to buy a small boy some pajamas and clothes to replace what had been left behind. I don't think I could have made her happier if I'd tried. 

In her last years, the doctor put her on progressively more restricted diets in an attempt to control her increasingly severe diabetes, and Mom got thinner and thinner. This was yet another cause of bitterness, as Dad could still have whatever he wanted, and was as large as ever. It really did not seem fair. And then dementia set in, little by little. It showed up in her cooking, as she began to leave crucial ingredients out of dishes she had been making for decades, and also in an unfortunate paranoia that had Dad as its focus. She was convinced he was hiding things from her, and that he was moving her bookmark in the book she was reading. Or trying to read, at any rate, as her vision was nearly gone by then--the final bitterness of one who lived to read. So she would hide her book when she wasn't reading so he couldn't get at it and move that bookmark. Of course what really happened is that she just forgot what had happened in the plot last time she read it. 

There is a trend, here, and it probably wasn't difficult to pick up on. Mom was a bitter woman. Of course, she had plenty of reason to be, and I understand that. I wish I could have changed her life for her, sent her to college and waved a fairy-godmother wand to fix all the frustrating events of the years, but of course I couldn't do that. I wish I could have known her as a young woman, and given her the female friend that she never had by her side during her married years. I wish I could sit down with her now and ask for some happy stories to mix in with the sad ones. Mom was baptized at the local Baptist church in her sixties, and I know that the pastor there would not have baptized her if he hadn't been certain that she was a believer. It's my consolation, the hope that God is making everything wonderful for her to make up for the years the locust has eaten. I do hope that indeed, and that someday we'll be able to sit down together and marvel that all the bitterness is gone, and never to come again.

Love, Spud