Category Aging

The day I turned old

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I turned old on August 30, 2025. I know the day. And the hour. And the moment.

No wonder the young lady stood to offer me her seat.

For much of my life, I looked younger than my age. I was a husband, father, and owned my second house before I shaved every day.

About age 26, I was in the barber chair with my hair wet and glasses off and my wife walked in, ready to take me home when I was finished, since we managed with one car. The barber noticed that she caught my eye, and asked, “Is that your mother?”

Later we listed some furniture for sale, some of our original “we-need-something-and-this-will-do-until-we-have-money,” pieces. A college girl called, said it would be perfect for her dorm, and arranged a time to come pick it up.

When I answered the door, she looked at me and asked, “Is your mother home?”

To say I was devastated is to say the Johnstown Flood was a trickle. I was floored. It took me days to get over it. Evidently, I still haven’t.

I was a college graduate, Army veteran, working a professional job with national connections and a college girl sees me in my Saturday morning T-shirt and jeans and asks if my mother is home.

I told her my mother lives in Wisconsin, 640 miles away, but if she’s here for the furniture, I can help. And then my wife picked me up off the floor.

Eventually, the sirocco winds of life aged my face, bleached my hair to arctic blonde and added enough wrinkles that I didn’t have to say, “No, really” anymore when my age came up.

My oldest son shares some of my facial features and when I’m introduced as his father, his friends invariably say, “I could’ve guessed.” I keep hoping one day someone will mistake me for his older brother.

Which brings me to the fateful day when the harsh reality of simple observation by a stranger shattered the mistaken impression that all the mirrors in my house are broken. I walk past a mirror, see the image it reflects, and I know that grizzled face can’t be me.

And yet.

In Budapest, Hungary at the beginning of a Danube River cruise taken to celebrate the 50th anniversary of marriage to a beautiful woman I had bamboozled long enough to convince her to marry me, the curtain came down on my illusion.

I stepped onto a tram car and a young woman stood to offer me her seat.

Glass shattered. Ego crumbled. Humility fallen over my shoulders like a granite yoke.

I implored the innocent to return to her seat. Over a language barrier, my pleading eyes, exasperated face and arm motions made my intention clear. “Please. No. Take your seat. ARRGGG.”

She politely declined, and I resolutely remained standing, amid the laughter of our traveling colleagues.

The insult of reality was exacerbated the next day when on a similar tram, my wife was warned that a conductor was on board and was checking tickets. In Budapest persons over age 65 ride public transportation free.  The local was kindly warning my wife that she needed a ticket.

Sue Ellen graciously informed her that she didn’t need a ticket, because she was 70. To which the kind commuter expressed astonishment, of course.

She then looked at me, seeing I was with Sue Ellen, and I swear I heard her ask, “Is that your father?”

 

‘/

Going to need extra chairs

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Me in the middle, with Janet and Bill in 2021.

When my grandmother died in 1979, I drove my young wife and one-month old son from our home in Nashville, TN to the funeral in Wisconsin. Grandma was young enough to have a large funeral, just 72 years old. My age.

Of course, in Rio, WI, population 788, funerals were as big a social event as Friday night football at the field in Fireman’s Park. I didn’t play football. I ran cross country instead, which I convinced myself was harder.

But I was at the football games, either running the sideline keeping stats, or in the stands playing “CHARGE” on my trombone.

After grandma’s funeral service at Redeemer Lutheran, one of six churches in town – equal to the number of bars – everyone gathered in the church basement for a lunch prepared by women of the church. Because the meal was free, and there wasn’t much else happening in town that day, the room was crowded.

My wife was most concerned with the one-month old son not accustomed to the noise and crowd and whose only real concern was keeping his tummy full and his diaper dry. So, he started fussing and wailing and that’s not the sound you want to hear piercing the din of chattery family members chowing down on store bought dinner rolls filled with a slice of ham and a slab of butter, potato salad and red Jell-O with marshmallows.

Suddenly, from across the entire fellowship hall, packed hip to hip at the folding tables, my aunt Janet yelled, “Give that boy some titty!”

Now, in another context other than a rural Wisconsin farming community, that comment might have seemed out of place, even impolite. Certainly it caused all the blood in my wife’s body to flush to her toes and then recongregate in her face, making her flush a brighter red than the Rio High School Vikings mascot. But, it also gave her the freedom to excuse herself, find a quiet Sunday School classroom, and take care of our son’s immediate need.

Aunt Janet died this week, at age 91. She was my mother’s last surviving sibling and mom preceded her in death by 29 years. They were two of eight siblings, prompting my grandpa McFarlane to say he had “Two and a half-dozen children.” When grandma McFarlane died, petty sibling grievances broke familial bonds and later on, as one sibling after another died, obituaries did not list all surviving family members, as if they never existed.

But Aunt Janet was always a friend, in part due to the loquacious character of her husband, Bill, a former police officer and much longer a seed corn salesman who knew every farmer and what they needed most. Bill preceded her in death by three years.

I confess Janet’s was the first bare breast I ever saw, as I stood wide-eyed at age five while she fed her first born son, Mark, a man who grew up to be a Presbyterian pastor, nurtured as he was on the milk of human kindness. He could preach from I Peter 2, “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.”

Janet and Bill had five children and 10 grandchildren and money never flowed like water over Niagara. Janet always put her hand to the wheel to find additional resources, driving school bus for more than two decades and making wedding cakes for lucky brides and grooms.

She looked at driving bus as ministry, taking the opportunity to offer a bright, encouraging word to children with dour faces, lifting heavy, reluctant feet up the step on the way to school.

She was certain of opinion and ready with advice.

When Janet learned my cousin Allen smoked, she asked if he would rather kiss a girl or an ashtray. Allen, sarcastically defending his nasty habit, told me he responded “Ashtray.” He’s since grown beyond that – both in girls and habit.

 Janet and Bill built a house on a hill overlooking that of her mother Eva and she was diligent in looking after her mother to the end. Eva –my grandmother on my mother’s side – expressed concern that bad weather would limit the size of her funeral. She was mentally comparing her eventual celebration to the big crowd that showed up for her husband’s sendoff. In her mind, her funeral would suffer by comparison and somehow that would reflect negatively on her life.

Though such comparison is a false equivalency, if every person whose life Janet affected positively were to attend her funeral, ushers will need to bring in extra chairs.

Two Ways To Do It

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I grew up working with and for my Norwegian bachelor farmer uncle Donnie, who made a living milking 19 cows on 80 sandy acres in southern Wisconsin. As a kid I tried to impress him with my strength by carrying 40 pound buckets of milk to the cooling tank when I didn’t weigh much more than twice that. I struggled to make it look easy, but he knew it took all I had.

I get to practice what i learned while young at White Horse Farm in Pennsylvania, where my son’s family lives.

In the ‘60s corn had to be cultivated to keep the weeds down before “poison ready” genetically modified seed became the norm. So I’d sit on the tractor with Don as he drove the little plows through two rows at a time to dig out the weeds. If he hit a stone or lost concentration and the cultivator dug out some corn, I’d hop off, stick it back into the ground, and run to catch up.

Building or repairing barbed wire fence, learning how to drive tractor and truck, milk a cow and slop a pig, being rewarded with a chocolate milk and donut at the Midget Kitchen on Hwy. 16 all were part of my kinetic education – along with learning how to understand the punchline of coarse jokes.

Once I reached about age 13 my services were much in demand by local farmers who needed help detasseling corn, baling hay, picking stones or cleaning out stalls and stables. I was a tall, thin kid who was young Sheldon in the classroom and who saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in the mirror.

Our local farmers were basically one-man-and-a-son operations, and I replaced the boy who had grown and gone to the city. To make hay while the sun shined, we cut the alfalfa, let it dry for three days and hoped for no rain. Then we raked it into windrows, scooped it up and compacted it into 40-50 pound bales with a tractor pulling a baler pulling a wagon with a kid on the wagon stacking the bales.

Most generally it was me and the farmer – baling, loading, unloading onto an elevator and stacking in the barn. There were two kinds of farmers when it came to engaging my services on a hot summer day. One I’ll call Uncle Donnie’s way, on account of it’s about my Uncle Donnie. The other I could call “the efficient way,” on account of it’s the opposite of my Uncle Donnie.

When Uncle Don picked me up in the morning, we’d get to the farm and have to gas up the tractor, grease the baler and put in baling twine, hook the baler to the tractor, connect the power takeoff shaft and move the elevator into position to carry the bales up into the hay mow. It wasn’t unusual for us to have round up a wagon or two that a neighbor farmer had borrowed.

All the while I’m looking at all that hay, laying expectantly in windrows in the field, itching to get out there and get started, knowing it was going to be a long day. And it was threatening to rain.

Farmers committed to “the efficient way” and to getting all the work out of me they could, completed all the preliminaries before I got there. The baler was greased and hooked to the tractor, which was gassed and ready. The elevator was in place, all the necessary wagons were lined up, and mother had lunch in the oven.

We got twice as much done in half the time. And there are few things as satisfying as looking over a freshly harvested field, seeing it cut and clean and all the hay is in the barn before the rain comes.

That, and the fact that the more efficient farmers tended to pay $1.25 an hour, rather than $1.00.

Readiness makes the difference. Many of you work with non-profit organizations. Respect the time of your volunteers. Don’t let them show up on a work day or at a fund raising event and have to stand around and twiddle their thumbs. If they are volunteer tutors, have a student already selected and matched.

Then, let it rain.

Carting away your history

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Strangers carted away my friend’s history yesterday, piece by piece.

An auctioneer’s singsong cajoling held Dave’s life up for examination and bid. Chains, tractors, implements, house furniture, fuel tanks, rakes and hoes all appraised unemotionally for their “value” by area farmers hoping to find a deal, make a steal.

Dave’s farm, eight curvy, hilly miles from any main road, looked like a Ford dealership, as 120 trucks – at least 100 of them Ford F150s, 250s and 350s – parked nose first along the edge of the cornfield like piglets nursing. Amish neighbors in their round straw hats parked their buggies in the yard, and tied their horses to a shade tree. An early morning deluge left the grounds muddy but didn’t discourage potential buyers from picking at the accumulated instruments of Dave’s farming life.

Dave is in the second year of an ALS diagnosis and at age 72 he’d decided to sell the farm where he’d lived 46 years, raising his three children in a Trumanesque environment in rural Pennsylvania.

He is slowly losing muscle strength everywhere but in his smile.

When major items like his John Deere tractors didn’t sell for what he’d hoped, he shrugged and said, “Let’em go.” Trying to sell them on the open market later, hoping for a more equitable price, was just too much trouble to contemplate.

Dave and his dad built the house atop the hill, where his wife huddled now with a long-time neighbor to avoid seeing four decades of her life picked over, devalued and carted away. The house wasn’t quite finished in time for their first child to come home to it from the hospital. But it was finished two weeks later and she’s lived there ever since.

Dave decided to sell the house, barns and 45 acres on which he’d lived his entire adult life so that Debbie wouldn’t have to…later. Once decided, his second son, Mark, drove him through the rural neighborhood to pass out flyers announcing the sale. They left fliers with neighbors who Mark knew did not have the means as potential buyers, but he eventually realized he was driving his father around on a farewell tour.

“He just wanted to say goodbye to the neighbors he’d known for 45 years,” Mark said. When Mark realized that, he settled in and enjoyed the ritual.

The man who’d purchased the farm was present at the auction. He’d bought it for his daughter and son-in-law as a place to raise their children, in rural Pennsylvania, giving them the benefit of idyllic life in rolling hills, among Amish farmers, an area where church and school are the gravitational centers of community life.

Dave’s adult children and their spouses were present and helping. Grandchildren roamed through the barns for the last time, daringly climbing steep ladders to where hay once was stacked high, making sure that mom and dad saw their accomplishment. Dave’s sons recounted adventures with tractors, camping in the woods, trapping ground hogs and shooting that would make their survival a mystery.

This was their home being carted away on the backs of trucks and trailers. They weren’t sad – yet. The hard decision had already been made – to sell the farm and auction off the equipment. This was just the physical manifestation of their decision.

But, when the last cabinet was pushed into the back of a minivan; and the last tractor was loaded onto a flatbed; when the camper the grandkids slept in the night before rolled away behind a pickup, the somber reality settled over the property like an early morning fog settles into valleys.

I hugged each goodbye, Dave’s arms limp at his sides, and thanked them for including me in their family. Through thick and thin, good times or bad, through the struggles inevitably ahead, he’s my brother and the auction was another milestone toward “next.”

One is the loneliest number

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My mother-in-law, during last days in nursing care.

In August 1971 anonymous government functionaries conducted a lottery to determine the order in which 19-year-old boys would be drafted into the Army, thousands of them eventually to die in the politicians’ war in Viet Nam.

They drew my birthday first. No. 1. It was the only thing I’ve ever “won” except a case of beer at the Rio Fireman’s Picnic, and the hand of my wife. I was too young to claim the beer, and my wife was almost too young to marry.

From that day on, the musical hit “One” by Three Dog Night became the soundtrack of my life as I went off to college, hoping to get a semester in before I received my draft notice. It’s resounding assertion that “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do,” pounded time after time out of my reel-to-reel tape player, putting to music the angst of a life on hold.

“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do…

“It’s just no good anymore since you went away

“Now I spend my time just making rhymes of yesterday.”

Then the resounding, pounding refrain:

“One is the loneliest number

“One is the loneliest number

“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.”

Every time that song surfaced on the radio or in sequence on my Three Dog Night album, I sank emotionally. No. 1 in the lottery. Draft certain. One is the loneliest number. The saddest experience.

Thoughts of “one” and being alone jumped at me recently while I stood in line for a table at southeastern America’s food oasis, Cracker Barrel. It hit me when the hostess asked the lady ahead of me, “How many?” and she responded, “One.” The loneliest number.

A sudden sadness for her and others being alone hit me like a gut punch through a curtain of memory.

One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.  And it’s a growing trend in America. We’re in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just aging widows and widowers. It’s younger people isolated by screens who possess no ability to communicate with real, live people.

Lacking meaningful, human to human connection can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to an advisory from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

We once called on a young man who visited our church to encourage him to become involved. He said he walks into his apartment on Friday night after work and doesn’t leave it until Monday morning. Week after week. Crawling out to visit the single adult class we led was a major effort.

The prevalence of single-person households is unprecedented historically,  rising from seven million to 38 million since 1960. 

I don’t equate “being alone” with loneliness or depression, but community involvement and social interaction is the leading indicator for health in senior adults. Of course many single adults lead vigorous, joyful, involved lives and God bless them.

It’s just that as I approach my 48th wedding anniversary I know the deep satisfaction life with a loving partner brings. I think of the shared joys, sorrows and triumphs of raising our three children, and of their loving spouses and our seven grandchildren. I would wish that common good for anyone.

Beyond that, what are the implications for a society in which so many of its members live as single, unaffiliated, isolated souls? Think – as I’m sure they are – of long term health, housing, community, end of life?

And yet, one out of four of today’s 50-year-olds will have been single their whole lives. Never married, never partnered.

Social isolation is associated with a higher risk of dementia and other serious health problems in older adults — while having positive social relationships can help people live longer, healthier lives.

In other parts of the world, nearly four in ten older adults live with extended family, an arrangement that mitigates aloneness. But older adults in the U.S. rarely live with family. 

Our culture almost demands we go it alone, that we not “need” anyone or anything. Yet that is not the preferred condition of most single adults I know.

And when the person ahead of me is asked, “How many?” her “One,” sounds like the saddest experience she’ll ever do.

What Color is Your Duck?

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I was not a self-assured little kid. I lived in the country and wasn’t particularly athletic, didn’t know my way around the terminology of machinery as it seemed my friends did. I was reticent in a crowd of my peers. But I was an early, voracious reader and I felt confident in the classroom.

white duck on grass field

Photo by Christian Bowen on Unsplash

At least until Mrs. Roberts assigned a coloring project that I blew.

Louise Roberts was my first grade teacher. She was lovely, kind and patient. But my most vivid memory of my nine months with her (not the same nine months as each of her sons experienced) is the zero she gave me on a coloring assignment.

I’m quite certain it was she who delivered my first academic trauma. First grade seems right for that kind of project. I doubt it was second grade, because Mrs. McGowan never would have given me a zero.

Mrs. McGowan lived in the county seat of Portage, 14 miles and a half century from my little school in Rio, and possessed a sense of savoir faire. She loved her students enough to invite a select few one at a time to her house in Portage overnight to give them a taste of “city life.” Portage had 10,000 people, to Rio’s 788.

I was one of the lucky chosen for an evening in Portage with Mrs. McGowan and her husband, a local official. She made dinner, then they drove me around the city, and introduced me to city hall and the jail. Come to think of it, maybe she was trying to “scare me straight.” Anyway, she was sweet enough that she would have given me a second chance, not a zero that haunts me 64 years later.

Mrs. Roberts’ assignment simply was to color the animals pictured on the white sheet of paper she distributed. I forget what all the animals were, but the ducks… oh, the ducks.

What color are ducks? In all of my six years of limited exposure to Disney and storybooks in which ducks floated in ponds near where Snow White lay waiting for the kiss that would bring her back to life, or beneath the tower that held Rapunzel, the ducks were white. Pure, innocent, naïve images floating blissfully about the main story characters to remind us that even when things appear to be going smoothly, we need to paddle like crazy.

The ducks I was to color were presented to me on a sheet of white paper. So, very logically, I colored the other animals and left the ducks alone. White ducks on white paper. That’s the color of ducks.

When I got the assignment back with a big ZERO on it, I had the temerity to ask Mrs. Roberts why. She said I didn’t do the assignment because I didn’t color the ducks.  “But ducks are white,” I said, a nascent lawyer arguing for the defense.

“You should at least have colored the bills and feet,” she said. I could see her point, but how about a second chance? Maybe they were albino ducks.

Fortunately, I recovered from that initial academic setback and grew up avoiding drugs, thievery, rock and roll and mayhem.

Thank you Mrs. McGowan.

Don’t miss it: put those memories on PAPER

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Other than seven months in our second year of marriage, my wife and I have never lived closer than 600 miles to either set of parents. I grew up in Wisconsin, she in Illinois, and then Colorado, where we met.

We were faithful to stay in touch with our parents as we moved from Oklahoma, to Colorado, to Tennessee, to Texas, back to Oklahoma and then to North Carolina. Long distance phone calls were expensive so I consistently wrote weekly letters to bridge the miles and months between visits.

Each letter recorded the previous week’s events, which at our stage of life always seemed many – certainly more fascinating, important and original to us than to our families. But mom and dad always hung on every word and my mother was good to write in return.

At first, I wrote the letters in long hand, which to today’s teens is like code. Around 1980 our office moved from an exotic, spinning ball electric typewriter to early computers. Wow. The monitor itself begged me to write as it seduced me with the string of little green letters corresponding to the keys I pressed.

By the time children started arriving computers were more common and it was easier to chronicle the many initial, unique, and unprecedented achievements of Nathan, Erin and Austin – first smile, first roll over, first word, first step. I’m sure I went into detail ad nauseum. Eventually, I realized these letters were a chronos record of my children’s lives – and mine – and I started keeping four copies of every letter.

I wrote on different computers, duplicated them on various printers, was not consistent in type face, margins or paper quality. But my intention was to keep a file of these letters for each child and present them as a bound volume for a high school graduation gift – their life in print.

The books were such a hit the kids never pressed me for that new car I never offered.

They’ve used the books to reaffirm memories, to share with spouses – and eventually their children – something of their lives growing up. The first born – trying to recall for his wife his foray into independence at about age seven – rifled through the pages to the specific time he was running away from home, pulling his wagon, when I drove into the neighborhood from work, saw him and encouraged him not to be late for dinner.

Boyfriends, girlfriends, grades, sports activities, family moves, home building, job changes, awards and disappointments all are recorded in black and white in a bound volume, a ready reference for those mystical days when a fireplace, rain, wine and melancholy need a tiny, tangible toehold to step full blown into nostalgia.

Is our self-identity anything more than an accumulation of our memories?

We’ve moved a lot so to keep things simple we never clung to things. One moving team looked around our empty attic and spartan walls and said, “Mrs. Jameson, you don’t do clutter, do you.” I struggle against the tide of my wife’s tidying to cling to pool noodles of memorabilia.

Comedian Billy Crystal, in his hilarious memoir written upon turning 65, Still Foolin’ ‘Em, believes we ought to keep mementos that take us back to happy moments. Remembering them helps us to relive them, and who doesn’t like to go back to mental images that bring a smile?

The letters I wrote to my parents were subject to time, travel, USPS sorting and handling machines, the vagaries of weather, transportation and distribution. But each was a package of joy upon arrival.

Great historical biographies have been written based solely on the written correspondence to and from the subject. I join the chorus of lament that this kind of communication no longer is in vogue. It’s a lost art; a neglected source of historical reference, of anchors to memory.

My children have asked me to write letters to their children celebrating certain occasions, passages into “adulthood,” or encouragement in their Christian lives – requests I eagerly fulfill.

Perhaps one day they’ll come across such letters in their files or boxes of childhood treasures, pause and reread them, and whisper to no one in particular, “Ahhh, Papa. I remember him.”

Picking the bones with buzzards

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I walked among the buzzards at an estate sale today.

An estate sale is where a house filled with the relics of a life is picked over like road kill by vultures, tugging and pulling remnants of his memory off the skeleton and carting them off to cars.

Under marital duress, I joined the kettle of vultures who gathered well before the scheduled 9:30 a.m. viewing. Senior adults almost exclusively, none of whom needed anything being offered inside. All of us curious about what we’ll see, about how this man lived, what he’d considered important enough to collect, gather and keep through his final days.

Curious to see if anything in the house was a treasure his children didn’t know of, something we could “steal” for a few dollars and store in our own lockers for our children to offer in our future estate sale.

I chatted up other vultures, most of whom were in good humor, happy to spend a morning picking at the carcass of a deceased man none of us knew personally. We weren’t hungry, really. But if we found a morsel we’d happily chew on it.

And besides, in the cycle of nature – birth, life, death – weren’t we doing our part? Just like real vultures keep the highways clear of road kill carcasses?

I learned our guy was 95 and died after living in the house 30 years. His closets, cubbies and cupboards were filled as if he’d just stepped out for lunch, telling the house, “I’ll be right back.” But now, except for how the estate sale team had arranged and tagged everything, it stands as a cavernous crypt.

I wandered with the flock, poking, pecking and prodding. He loved Christmas music and books on history and architecture. His shirts were once expensive – but dammit, too large. The tools in his garage were well worn. His china cabinet held fine crystal too delicate for me even to want to examine.

It was the bathroom that arrested me. The sink counter was covered with personal care items that revealed an individual vanity, as would all of ours – how he cared for his teeth, his hair, his nails and skin.

Inside the tiled shower stood a collapsible walker, tight and forlorn against the wall. Available. Unused. The walker had wheels on the front two legs, so he could lift the back two legs and roll it along, dropping the back to the floor to rest or stand when he’d gotten to his destination in the house.  

The walker – alone among all the mementos of a long life – stood in mute testimony to the infirmities at the end of a long life. And it moved me from carnivore to compassion. I left silently.

Oh yeah, we got an Elizabeth Geisler basket. It was a steal.

Fateful day half-century in the making

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Sept. 13.

Fifty years ago today my dad wrapped his arms around me and said out loud for the first time I can recall, “I love you.” Then I turned toward the bus idling there to take me to Milwaukee where I was inducted into the U.S. Army.

With a draft lottery number of one, received a year earlier, this day was inevitable. But it arrived under a dark cloud of dread that wouldn’t lift for months.

I never doubted my dad loved me. I never asked myself if he did. I never wondered, pondered, considered, weighed or suspected his love. He showed me in many, non-verbal ways: working hard to provide for his family, being present, shooting baskets with me, including me with tasks we could do together, assigning me responsibilities like cleaning the barn or splitting the wood for our farmhouse furnace, then bragging about me to his friends when I worked beyond his expectations.

Primarily, my assurance of dad’s love and my subconscious security in my household growing up was how he loved my mother. Our dinner time was consistently 5:30, but no one sat down until dad arrived home from his gas route. He drove a fuel truck that serviced farmers in a four-county area, but he consistently arranged his days and route to be home for dinner on time.

Then mom would meet him at the door and the kids would have to sit at the table, waiting while they hugged and kissed and got all sloppy in the doorway.

Dad never fully grasped the implications of my lottery number. It didn’t penetrate his consciousness that radio announcing my birthday as No. 1 had changed the trajectory of my life. Nor did he comprehend my heart when I petitioned for and received status as a conscientious objector, willing to serve in the military, but not willing to bear arms.

To my surprise and delight, my basic training platoon at Fort Sam Houston consisted entirely of conscientious objectors of my same persuasion. We were all to be trained as medics. Logic was, I guess, if we weren’t going to carry a gun, we should run around with a target on our backs.

Religious belief was the overwhelming rationale for conscientious objection in my platoon. And not all represented religions were Christian. Consequently, our discussions were invigorating and affirming. Our attitudes were positive and our nascent friendships sincere.

Then, we graduated from basic. And our 40 men were divided among 10 other platoons of men who had just finished basic training that included weapons, and an indoctrination of “enemies” versus the right and righteous arm of the United States.

Suddenly, barracks were bellicose. An undercurrent of distrust and tensions ran through the room where long rows of bunks ran down both sides of the room, with lockers in the middle and footlockers at the end of each bunk. You never wanted to leave either open or unlocked.

One day I hung a pair of clean underwear on the hook while I showered. When I got out, mine had been taken and replaced by someone’s dirty underwear.

Discussions were not harmonious, but usually disintegrated into offensive and defensive positions on issues, especially religious and political. The most hard core guys could not wait to get to Viet Nam and “kill some Charlie Cong.”

Such was the atmosphere that debilitated my spirit one night when I walked to the bank of phones to call my dad for a word of encouragement. I know he loved me. But he still didn’t understand.

Depressed, I was walking back to the barracks to face another miserable night when my path took me past a base chapel. It was brightly lit and happy sounds were coming from it. I walked in. Why not?

There was a youth group on the platform getting ready to perform a musical. And I found a couple of my buddies from basic training there. After the musical, the youth offered to come pick up any soldiers who wanted to attend their church on Sunday.

Pretty girls populated the platform. I eventually dated one. My buddy Steve ended up marrying her sister.

Events of that night, and that group from Baptist Temple in San Antonio, opened the portal to the rest of my life which included a career among Baptists in communications, and marrying a girl I met at a Baptist church in my next station.

Fifty years ago. Today. As I’ve said many times since, it’s not something I wanted, nor would ever want to do again. But my life was set on course by having done it once.

The Abbotts defined dedication, and I got to play

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John earned the shrapnel lodged in his legs, making them ache when the weather changed, when he labored in the fields. When he remembered.

As a battlefield chaplain during World War II, John Abbot worked among wounded and dying American soldiers in Europe fighting the scourge of Nazism. His was an active faith. He believed he incarnated Jesus as he walked, crawled and bled among soldiers who needed assurance that God loved them and that their destiny was assured.

Author as jack of all trades in Espanola, after the Army, before finishing college.

When he returned from the blood-soaked fields of Europe and as America shifted gears to embrace a new, wide open world of possibility, John applied to Southern Baptists’ missionary support agency responsible for “home” missions – or missions within the continental United States. He wanted to be a missionary in his native southwest, serving people, showing them the way of Jesus and leading them to faith.

He was a committed churchman in that denomination and after his service as a chaplain in the military, he assumed that he would be approved for support so he could turn his attention to the purposes of that agency: winning people to faith in Jesus.

Instead, he was denied support because he was deemed medically unsound, due to the shrapnel in his body, lodged there in battle. Disappointed, but undaunted and illuminated by his own vision, John secured support from some Texas Baptist churches where he was known. He bought farm equipment and set up shop in a converted dance hall in Espanola, New Mexico, a small town 25 miles north of Santé Fe.

The dance hall occupied a strategic corner on the main road between Espanola and Chimayo, a tiny town that houses one of only two places on earth that claim to contain healing elements. It’s the dirt in Chimayo, and the waters in Lourdes, France, to which pilgrims crawl. Discarded crutches, canes and bandages testify to the healing properties of the dirt in the Santuario de Chimayo. People have crawled from Santé Fe to Chimayo to do penance before applying the dirt to their injury or illness.

On the north side of the windy, two-lane road between the two towns perched a wooden church, little larger than a garden shed. It was the focal point of religious Penitentes, who marched in a single line, flagellating themselves, seeking forgiveness.

In that environment, John remodeled the dance hall into a church, office, classrooms and an apartment for him and his wife, Ethel, and he utilized the equipment to open doors among the small farmers in the dusty arroyos between Espanola and Chimayo. They could not afford individually field prep and harvest equipment that would increase their yields, and they welcomed the method and message of John Abbott to work among them, to share the work and to share his faith.

With hard work, ingenuity, faith and commitment, John and Ethel started and built a church which membership was primarily Spanish, descendants of Spanish invaders of the 16th century and Native American tribes.  They called it Templo Bautista – Baptist Temple.

Then one day in one of those freak accidents that make Christians wonder if God is paying attention, a piece of equipment that John was working under fell off its jack and crushed him. I guess he was medically unsound after all.

Ethel was suddenly a widow. Much of her livelihood disappeared because she could not run the equipment. John was the pastor, breadwinner, husband, visionary, guide, energy behind the entire effort. I don’t know how old Ethel was. She always seemed old to me, but I was just 20 when I met her. I’m sure I’m older now than she was then.

She promised God she would stay at Templo, would continue the work, if God would send her help. Because of her winsome spirit and compelling stories, Ethel received a fairly regular trickle of weekend or week-long helpers to lead special events and do repair work around the ancient facility. But she needed an everyday helper.

Her prayer and mine – what to do now that I’m getting out of the Army – clanged together in God’s ear and I became that first long-term helper. I was a pale, nerdy Scandihoovian from Wisconsin, knew zero Spanish and was new in evangelical faith. I’d been drafted into the Army after one year at Luther College and now I was out and at loose ends.

I started in November 1973 as a bus driver, youth minister, preacher, log splitter, painter, floor sander, week-night Bible study leader, and encourager. We called many of our members on Sunday morning to wake them in time to catch the bus I drove.

I brought them to church, preached at them and hauled them home. All this was done with sincere, naive spirit and within a profoundly knit community. The names “Ethel” or “John Abbot” opened any door in the county quicker than an electronic key.

I realize now the way we did church was paternalistic. We expected and required too little of members. There was an easy believe-ism in which membership at Templo eased seamlessly into whatever other influences they were weighing. Part of our motivation with activities was to “keep the kids out of trouble.”

But we slogged on. I went back to my home church in Colorado Springs to tell them of the work in New Mexico, and to raise money for Christmas goody baskets for the kids. One young lady was struck by the need, by the opportunity and by my wistful pleas. A few weeks later she arrived as a second helper, in the midst of a snow storm, as the children were trekking down the hallway in their angel and wise men costumes to present the Christmas story.

Her arrival on that snowy night declared that what I’d thought to be the first chapter of this story was merely prologue.

(First chapter to come)