Category love

Committing Errors and Omissions

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Oh good grief, will that lady please sit down so the rest of us can see?

I’m at the spring school concert for one of my grandchildren, who is dressed in white shirt and dark pants somewhere on the third row, right side, there, in the shadow, just beyond the edge of the light. Yeah, him. Take your finger out of your nose, buddy.

But the lady, and a dozen others, are making it hard to see my kid at all because they keep popping up, holding cameras, iPads, and phones at arm’s length to record their little darlings’ anonymous instant. Me, I’m trying to sit back, focus, and be in the moment so that the images and sounds in real time are seared into my memory.

I won’t need to pull up a grainy, dark, blurry picture to remember the grainy, dark, blurry image of the event I saw – through a viewfinder.

Studies show you will remember something better and appreciate it more if you concentrate on the moment with your own eyes, instead of looking at it through a viewfinder.

Elizabeth Loftus, a psychological science professor at the University of California, Irvine, says when our concentration at an event is to record it, it’s like we are offloading the responsibility of memory from our brain to our phones. Or, we’re so distracted by the photo taking process that we miss the moment altogether.

People upload 30,000 hours of content to YouTube – every hour.

I’m not sure if there is an exact parallel to the “losing the moment to a photo” idea, but I’ve discovered a strange phenomenon relating to journaling and memory. I’ve been transcribing my handwritten notes from journals of 50 years ago when I was in the army. Everything was new and not so wonderful for a young, pacifist country boy who grew up in a town of 788 people now thrust into a world of strangers being trained to kill people.

Still, there were friends, events, churches, girls and Kodak moments from those years that I’ve shared with people ever since. Special moments, meaningful events and forks in the pathway of my journey seared into my memory.

Yet, I’ve discovered that many of the most memorable, transformative, fulfilling moments of those days went completely unmentioned in my journals. Stories that made it through my memory dozens of times during the past half century never made it through my pen.

When I first realized the omissions, it struck me as strange. What I’ve come to believe, in a totally unscientific insight, is that I didn’t write down such significant things because I knew they were so memorable I’d never forget them. Things like:

  • My first ski trip when we encountered girls from church at the top of Monarch Mountain. It was my first day on skis and I’d done well and wanted to impress them. After we chatted a minute, we all turned to go down the hill and I immediately fell. Trying to catch up, I fell again and didn’t see them the rest of the day.
  • After wearing a full leg cast from a ski injury I had my buddy drive me to the base hospital to get it off, carrying my bike along with us so I could ride it home. Ha. My leg was useless until I’d rehabbed it.
  • A spur of the moment trip to Tacoma to see a girl I’d met through her cousin in Wisconsin.
  • After saving for a big ski trip to Vail, buddies Steve, Paul and I brought a fourth, Dennis, from Florida. He hadn’t skied, but said he was a surfer, so we thought if he could surf, he could ski. Wrong. After sleeping in the heatless van in the parking lot, waking to a quarter inch of frost inside the windows, we spent the morning at Vail, the premier ski area in Colorado, with him on the bunny slope. He never got it and we abandoned him.
  • Or, feeling compelled to back out of a trip to San Antonio to see a friend I’d met when stationed there, feeling I shouldn’t go. Hours after I was to leave, my mom called to say my cousin Dickie had died in a one-car accident. I went home to Wisconsin instead.

So, what prompts recollection of these events as I transcribe my journals? As I’ve gone through chronological entries, little butterflies flap around in my mind, whispering, “Didn’t this or that happen about this time?” We are an accumulation of our memories and each works in some kind of symbiotic relationship with others.

It’s kind of like how the things we eat work together in our bodies for nutrition and health. Who knows how an orange releases enzymes from a pork chop? Or how fish digests better with a glass of white wine?

I don’t. But thinking about why I wrote about fairly mundane things without recording events I considered very significant then and since makes me scratch my head.

Now, please scooch aside ma’am…I need to get this pic.

And the angels sang

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(To read the prologue of this story, click here)

The snow outside church portended a brutal night and I watched the parking lot as much as I watched the costumed kids preparing for their role in the Christmas pageant. I expected the arrival of a new helper who was racing south from Colorado ahead of a blizzard.

She was a helper whose arrival I anticipated with mixed emotions.

I had been a volunteer at Templo Bautista in Espanola, NM for two months. Recently discharged from the Army as one of America’s last draftees, I’d gone there to exercise my faith with the goal of making a difference in an environment foreign to me, a Midwestern Scandinavian who grew up in Truman’s World.

Is it any wonder I wanted no intruders? Teresita Naranjo, left, recognized as the No. 2 potter in all of New Mexico, cut my hair with Mrs. Abbott.

Mrs. John Abbott – never Ethel – carried on the work at Templo that she and her husband started decades earlier. But John had been killed in a farming accident and Mrs. Abbott told God she could only carry on as God would send help.

Enter me.

I was the first long term helper and became bus driver, Sunday School teacher, wood splitter, phone tree operator, youth director, visitation director and encourager. Life was good. Mrs. Abbott treated me like a son, fed me like a king and taught me like Socrates.

Two months later I returned to the church I attended in Colorado Springs to tell my crowd what was happening in Espanola, and to raise a few bucks to buy Christmas gifts for the kids there. In that crowd was the daughter of a man I knew well. She had just left college and was at loose ends, struggling to discern a broader, greater plan for her life.

My heartfelt appeal and enthusiasm for life at Templo Bautista struck a chord in her heart and she wanted to pray with me about the possibility of coming to help. The last thing I wanted was an intruder to dilute my lone role as Golden Child in Mrs. Abbott’s realm.

But, we prayed and this girl and I had the unmitigated gall, the brazen audacity, the cocksure brass to demand the creator of the universe provide a clearly discernible answer within seven days.

I returned to Espanola with some cash for gifts and a secret. I didn’t want my apple cart upset. I wasn’t going to stand in God’s way, but I wasn’t going to feed him an easy assist, either.

So I waited several days before telling Mrs. Abbott about Sue Ellen Carver’s interest in coming to help. I figured Mrs. Abbott would take a couple days to  pray, to cogitate and consider. By then, the seven-day deadline would be passed and I’d be home free. So, at breakfast on the sixth day, I mentioned casually that Bob Carver’s daughter, Sue Ellen, was interested in coming to Templo to help.

“Bob Carver’s daughter?” she asked. Bob had been to Templo many times on weekend work trips and was a member of a very supportive church.

And yet, who could blame me for my resistance fading?

I nodded, smug in my manipulation of the calendar. To my dismay, Mrs. Abbott reached for the phone, asked me for Sue Ellen’s number, called it and said, “Come on.”

“OK,” I thought. “It’s a couple weeks before Christmas, and she’ll have to give notice at her job and make arrangements and well, maybe I’ve got three to four weeks before the invasion.

Instead, within three days she was on the road, racing a winter storm south from Colorado to New Mexico, sliding into the median, using every ounce of knowledge her dad gave her about rocking the car to get out of a drift, crossing Raton Pass just before it was closed and arriving at Templo Bautista just as the shepherds and angels were marching through the hallway to line up for their part in announcing good news to a waiting world.

She arrived covered in frost with a smile that would melt many a heart just as the kids were shuffling down the hallway to the stage. It was a Christmas pageant scene so perfect that it would have embarrassed even Hallmark.

Over the following months, we worked daily together. Eventually, of course, I began to see Sue Ellen far less as a nuisance and far more as someone I wanted to know on a far more personal level. Sure, she was the only green-eyed blonde in Sante Fe County, but just as attractive was her indomitable, loving spirit that pitched in enthusiastically to every task and made every person who crossed her path feel like they’ve been heard, seen and loved.

Whatever it was, we left Espanola heading in different directions and had only occasional, long distance conversation until in October the following year, she came to Oklahoma Baptist University to visit her sister and we reconnected. We talked for hours – much to the dismay of her sister, who felt neglected. We talked of our own perspectives of the future, who we were and who we wanted to be, never really talking about that future together.

Yet, when I returned to my apartment after seeing her off to the airport, I knew. The next morning I called her dad and said “I want to marry your daughter.” To which he replied, “Which one?” He had four and he had no clue Sue Ellen and I had been talking.

One month later we returned to Espanola for the first time – to plan our wedding, which took place one month after that.

I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life, but none were better than that one 47 years ago.

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)

Re-entry after a week of RAGBRAI

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It probably started when I forgot to flush. 

Then, my wife looked baffled when I drank a beer at 10 a.m. She was downright befuddled when, at 11 a.m., I ate a piece of blueberry pie, and asked at noon if she had any apple pie in the house. 

When I wanted a big, juicy, fried pork chop to eat while standing under a shade tree, she was bewildered, but she finally blew up when I went for ice cream at 1 p.m.

“You’re not on RAGBRAI anymore!” she declared. 

It’s true. Spending a week on my bike with my three adult children and my best buddy from the Army – and 10,000 of our closest friends – riding across Iowa in the oldest, longest and largest group ride in the world does recalibrate my sense of propriety.

Seven days of riding over 470 miles ends with a tire dip in the Mississippi River in Clinton, IA.

I mean, who flushes after using a kybo? (Kybo is the RAGBRAI term for a porta-john, coined by Australians, or, as the acronym that Boy Scouts appropriated for it, Keep Your Bowels Open)

And, a beer by 10 a.m. is appropriate because by then we’ve ridden 40-50 miles and the temperature already is 90 degrees with humidity approaching sauna level.

Pie? Pie makes the world go around, and provides the dietary fruit necessary to make kybo visits regular. It seems every church on the route has conscripted their resident grandmothers to make pies to raise money for roofs, mission trips or video equipment. 

Army buddy Steve likes pie as much as I do.

Mr. Pork Chop is one of several food vendors that position themselves each day at a distance from the start appropriate for their particular specialty. You could always find Farm Kids in time for breakfast, and Beekman’s homemade ice cream was near enough to the day’s finish to justify a satisfying stop. 

This was my fourth RAGBRAI and first since 2013. What made it special for me was riding it with my kids, who live in three different states, and my Army buddy, who lives in Nebraska. We covered nearly 500 miles in seven days, starting at the Missouri River in Le Mars on the west side, and riding a serpentine route east to Clinton, where we dipped our tires in the Mississippi River. 

Beekman’s Speciality ice cream was always a popular afternoon stop.

Iowa possesses its own beauty. The relentless corn fields roll endlessly to either side of us, their golden tassels wafting in the breeze like small waves in open ocean. They also provide handy a kybo experience for those who can’t make it to the next town, given the likelihood of a long waiting line. Just be sure to go at least four rows deep. 

When my daughter yelled, “Keep going, Dad,” another rider at the rest stop sprayed his mouthful of pickle juice all over the grass. Some guys need to go deeper than others. 

Each night thousands of RAGBRAI riders pitched their tents in villages with populations dwarfed by our swarm. It seems every town had railroad tracks on which ran trains whose engineers enjoyed sounding the piercing whistle way too much.  

A couple of nights featured local infantile knuckle draggers screaming past the campgrounds, blowing air horns and shouting some nonsense about what idiots we were and what nasty things we supposedly did to our mothers. But the joke was on them. The trains already made sure we weren’t sleeping, anyway.

The week was exceptionally hot, in the high 90s every day until the last. One day our campsite was in an open field, just across a gravel drive from a graveyard where a big shade tree held open its arms.

Our little clan erected five tents beneath that tree, in close proximity to graves. The practical temperature in the sun was 106 degrees and it was more like 90 under the shade. We were grateful, and heard no complaints from our immediate neighbors. 

The lone shade in Waterloo turned out to be off limits.

But, someone who didn’t like us there protested to someone they deemed to have authority and that someone asked us kindly to move. We refused. When he asked if we’d prefer to get the police involved, we said, “OK.”

Slinking five minutes later into our shade, while the complainers sat in their car 10 feet away with the air conditioner running, the young policeman obviously hated to hold the conversation we forced him to have. We bantered cordially back and forth about rules, property,trespass, and lease agreements, neither of us convinced of the other’s position.

He pulled out what he thought was his ace in the hole when he asked, “How would you like it if it was YOUR mother or grandmother here and you were camping at their gravesite?”Simultaneously, all five of us said, “They would LOVE it.”

Ultimately, we decided a night in jail – even in an air-conditioned cell – wasn’t worth the hassle, so we moved our tents across the drive, 20 feet. We needed to get cool, so we decided to hitch a ride to an air-conditioned restaurant in Waterloo. After several quizzical looks by drivers who wondered how in the world we thought FIVE people could catch a ride, one lady in a big red pickup stopped. She had just come from the same cemetery where she was visiting with and praying for her recently departed husband, and she was curious about what the hundreds of people and tents were doing there.

When we said we were riding through Iowa and were staying there that night, she said, “Hallelujah, David will have some company tonight.”

It’s all about perspective, isn’t it?

As great a time as I had with my kids and buddy, riding 70 miles a day through several small towns, each of which threw us a party, the highlight came the last day as we navigated the rolling hills approaching Clinton. My team, The Jameson Jockeys, was riding close together and I punched it on a long downhill, tucking in and rolling past my oldest son.

Eastern Iowa on sixth day of riding.

He later told me he saw “an old guy” riding past him down that hill, which was his first surprise. But then he thought, “That guy has a bike like dad’s.” Then he realized, “It IS dad.” And my ride, day and week were made.

This is just the tip of what a week of RAGBRAI is like, not to mention the miles and smiles, temporary friends and cornfields that never end, the heavy heat and rough streets. There is no way to explain it, even to a long-suffering spouse who is doing her best to help me through re-entry into normal life. 

But, she did put her foot down when I programmed the white noise sound track in our bedroom to be a train whistle. 

Moments planted yield the fruit of memories

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Members of the Rio, WI high school graduating class of 1971. Not a bald head among them.

Confession up front: before my 50th high school class reunion in June I looked over my year book to reacquaint myself with the names – and cherubic faces – of those from my class who might appear. 

Having delivered our graduates’ speech as valedictorian of our 53-member class five decades earlier, I was asked to “say a few words” on this very convivial night, decades past the gateway to a dream that seemed to open to us in 1971. We’re also decades past having to color our palette of life, careers, marriages, successes or failures in hues that confirmed that we’d “made it.”

So, I talked about “making it,” and memories.

Members of our class were born in 1952 or 1953. I mentioned notable characters born in those years, including Vladimir Putin, Patrick Swayze, Liam Neeson, George Strait, Floyd Mayweather, Mr. T and Roseanne Barr, Hulk Hogan, Cyndi Lauper, Pierce Brosnan and Tim Allen.

We remember these politicians and entertainers because in our minds and in our culture, they “made it.” They are rich and famous, at the top of their respective fields. Say their names and people know who you are talking about. 

“Did we make it?” I asked. “Are we making it?” 

I was pleased to hear an immediate “Darned right,” from Jerry, our star athlete who was an all-conference football player in college and who has concluded his career in insurance, primarily among farmers in two counties.

No matter what we think “making it” means, I know we all have a different perspective on that than we did 50 years ago – or even 20 years ago. Success? Riches? Fame? Security? Family? Love? Inventions? 

My 1971 high school graduation picture. Naive, hopeful, eager.
Fifty years of sandblasted life later, mostly in Baptist communications.

Except for seven months, I’ve never lived closer than 600 miles from either my parents or my in-laws. My quest to “make it” took me from state to state. I’ve lived twice in Texas, twice in Oklahoma, twice in Colorado, in Tennessee and now North Carolina. My daughter was six when we moved to North Carolina and North Carolina was her fourth state to live in. 

I came home annually to visit – and as long as my dad lived, Rio was always “home.” For the longest time, I thought “making it” meant anything away from Rio, population 788. My dad always told me Rio’s population stayed at 788 because any time a young woman had a baby, an older man left town. 

Looking across the room I saw vibrant senior adults, many of whom never left the area, and all of whom have “made it.” They stayed, invested themselves, coached the local teams, served on the school board, nurtured the children of other families, and offered their voices of wisdom among their peers. They’ve been important to many lives. 

Reunions are the fertile soil in which the seeds of memory planted much earlier blossom and flower. We harvested those blooms at our 50th.

We remember moments, rather than days, as philosopher Cesare Pavese said. We all have memories of high school. Some we share, others are unique because none of us lived the same life. And the best part of those remembered moments are the people we shared them with.

Writer and theologian Frederick Buechner said, “When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me.”

And we want to be known. And remembered. Someone has said you die twice: first, when your heart stops and you’re buried. The second time you die is the last time someone says your name… whether it’s a year, a decade, or a century.

So, I named the seven members of our class who are with us no longer. They remain alive in our memories. 

Then we had fun recalling not only the names of our teachers, but some of their idiosyncrasies: the teacher/coaches who helped athletes with grades; the biology professor we called Bernard the Monk because of his curly bowl haircut and demeanor; the English teacher who the girls always felt was peeking up their skirts.  

Gas was only 33 cents a gallon at Bleigh’s service station during high school. I’d drive across town to the Farmer’s Union Co-op if it was 32 cents there. Of course, “across town” was less than a mile, with one stop sign.

Janis Joplin was singing “Me and Bobby McGee” and “The French Connection” competed with “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Dirty Harry” for your $1.50 movie admission. 

Living in the south now, I told the class every region has its rednecks, but southerners are special. You know you’re a redneck in the south when you take your dog for a walk and you both use the same tree. Or, when grandma’s wish list includes ammo. Or when you think “The Nutcracker” is something you do off the high dive.

One anomaly I noticed was that not a single person in the room was bald. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, male pattern baldness at some level affects more than 50 percent of all men.  It stands to reason that someone would be bereft of hair. 

Perhaps humorist Garrison Keillor’s observation of his little hometown of Lake Wobegon – the model of which easily could be Rio, WI – is right. There, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

For all of you who are having reunions and special functions, blessings on every classmate and friend who has “made it” this far. May you have many more years to be a positive influence in your children – who always need their parents – and their children, who more desperately need the positive influence of grandparents now than ever before. 

These are the people of our lives, thrust together by time and circumstance, calling up the memories created by moments together. I’m grateful for them. 

‘I want to marry your daughter.’

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It was Oct. 13, 1975 and I had two calls to make from my two-room apartment in Shawnee, Oklahoma. The first, was to Bob Carver in Colorado Springs. His time zone was an hour earlier than mine, but if I woke him up, I didn’t care. 

“Bob, this is Norman Jameson.” 

“Yes?”

“I’m calling for your blessing because I want to marry your daughter.”

“Which one?”

That’s not as odd a question as it might seem. Bob had four beautiful daughters. I had grown quite close to the eldest, Sue Ellen, when we both were volunteers at a Baptist mission in Espanola, NM a year earlier. But then we went our separate ways, me to Oklahoma Baptist University to finish a college career interrupted by the Army. Sue Ellen back home to live and work. Our contact was infrequent.

In the meantime, Bob’s second daughter, Leslie, had come to OBU as a student, more in pursuit of my roommate, Loren, than of a degree. But, she was there, and Sue Ellen wasn’t and Bob hadn’t yet learned of the sudden, unexpected reunion that I had with Sue Ellen the Columbus Day weekend she came to “visit Leslie.” 

So, when he asked, “Which one?” the question was legit. For all he knew, Leslie and I were dating. But, my answer was, “Sue Ellen.” 

“Do you love her?” 

“Yes sir.” 

“Ok then.” I think he was anxious to get back to sleep. 

The widow Ethyl Abbott ran Templo Bautista and stayed as long as the Lord would send her volunteers. Her first two volunteers married each other, on Dec. 27, 1975.

My second call was to Sue Ellen. I asked her over the phone to marry me and she agreed. We saw each other at Thanksgiving in Colorado. We married at Christmas in New Mexico. In that two months, Sue Ellen basically did all the planning and sewed her dress and her bridesmaids’ dresses. 

Army buddies from Texas and New Jersey stood up with me. My parents from Wisconsin met Sue Ellen for the first time when they came to the wedding. I don’t think mom fully believed I was getting married until she met Sue Ellen. Once she did, mom would have disowned and dismembered me if I had been fool enough to let her go again.

That was 45 years ago. December 27. Between semesters at OBU. Sue Ellen worked at a local bank to cover groceries and our $65 a month apartment rent. I edited the college paper and paid tuition with the GI Bill. 

A year later, she loaded the U-Haul while I made my senior marketing presentation to a local bank, then we drove into the night to Colorado Springs where I had an outside hope of landing a reporter’s job at the Gazette-Telegraph. 

We’ve made a lot of interstate moves for work ever since, each one supposedly improving our lot, moving from the newspaper to Nashville, TN where I started a career working mostly for Baptist entities. From Nashville to Texas for seminary, traveling now with two little ones. I didn’t know until we arrived in separate vehicles that Sue Ellen had cried all the way to Texas. 

Seminary was the most difficult time of our marriage. Working fulltime and going to school full-time. Leaving for the library at night with my son tugging at my leg. Discovering we had different goals for when we were finished.

One afternoon while agonizing in the combination porch-guest room-laundry room-study of our tiny rent house I cried out to the Lord for clarity of purpose and future. I heard clearly as if God had texted directly to my brain, “Stay in religious journalism.” Within 48 hours the editor of the Oklahoma Baptist Messenger showed up out of the blue and asked me to join his staff. I could finish my seminary degree by extension classes at my alma mater, OBU.

So, it was back to Oklahoma before the fundamentalist effluvium seeped into that state convention and made it untenable for anyone who possessed a contrary thought. We “told” God not to present a professional opportunity that He didn’t want me to take, because I was grabbing the first one that would carry me out of Oklahoma. 

Then Baptist Children’s Homes of North Carolina called, and we crossed the Mississippi with three children. Our daughter was six and North Carolina was her fourth state. We figured to stay two or three years and make our way back west. That was 33 years ago.

We’re in our fourth North Carolina city, or sixth North Carolina house and am retired from my seventh North Carolina job. 

45 years later, the years truly are golden and the mystery of oneness remains worthy of continual examination

I say all that to say Happy 45th Anniversary to the bride of my youth who has followed me, encouraged me, supported me, bore our children and taught them how to live, provided incredibly valuable insight and wisdom, sacrificed her own dreams for those of her family and laughed with me to keep me from crying. She’s been a rock, always trusting in the hand of God on our lives, and in me. She makes me a better man.

And she no longer answers her phone to an unidentified caller.

What I wanted for Christmas: To Be Found

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The strange church emptied quickly in the little town where my family was visiting grandpa and grandma at Christmas. Although at age 5 I didn’t really know them, my cousins, aunts and uncles comprised a large portion of the town’s population of 788. We were all at Redeemer Lutheran for Christmas morning service.

At its conclusion, everyone donned coats, scarves, hats and gloves (it was Wisconsin, after all) and headed out the door for the holiday meals and spirit that awaited. Thankfully, although there were lots of Norwegians in town, the traditional meal was still turkey and ham, and not lutefisk and lefse. 

I wandered about the pews, looking at the garland and poinsettias, not noticing that the sanctuary was rapidly emptying. When the room grew quiet, I turned to see I was the only one left. The only one. Five years old in a strange church, a foreign town. 

It’s no wonder I felt secure. Here, at five, with my dad, Marvin, in 1957.

Even at five I was too secure in the love of my family to panic – much. Surely this was an aberration and someone would drift back into the church to collect me. Dad probably just went out to warm up the car.

Nope.

The furry fingered fear of abandonment started to close around my throat just as organist Olive Shultz, who was closing up the building, came around the corner and spotted me. Since it was only her and me now, she knew I was as misplaced as a snow shovel at the beach.

A large woman, she rustled down the aisle and side-stepped between two pews, leaned over asked, “What is your name?”

 “Norman,” I said with some measure of certainty. 

“Where are you supposed to be?” she asked.

“Grandpa’s.”

Not enough clue for her, she asked if grandpa had a name. I wouldn’t know grandpa’s name for years but I offered that he was “Grandpa Jameson.” 

Given the size of the town and percentage of its populace occupied by my relatives, Olive knew immediately where to take me. She led me to her car and drove briefly down Hwy. 16 to the farm my Norwegian bachelor uncle Don rented, and where he lived with his parents – my grandparents.

I was relieved and grateful as I walked into the bustling living room, a joy that lasted only as long as it took me to realize everyone had just figured out I was not among them, and were arguing about who had get their winter garb back on and go get me!

The next year we moved to that little town, Rio, WI where the population stayed at 788, my dad told me, because every time a young lady had a baby, an older man left town. 

Eventually I graduated from high school there, in the same building where I started first grade. But, more about that, later.

Extra Money

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For decades into our married life, my budget-faithful wife Sue Ellen would ask, “When are we going to have extra money?”

As frugal as she is, she never willingly accepted my answer: “We will never have ‘extra’ money,” I said, “if by ‘extra’ you mean funds beyond what we require to take care of immediate needs and future retirement.”

In part because my career was in non-profit and denominational work, and in larger part because of my upbringing, molecules of frugality bang around in my DNA loud enough to keep me awake should I spend a dollar frivolously.

My parents first met my wife when they came to our wedding. No great story of family dysfunction in that fact, just issues of time and distance. I lived in Oklahoma. Sue Ellen lived in Colorado. My family lived in Wisconsin. And, we married in New Mexico after just a two-month engagement.

So, the summer after our wedding I brought my new bride to Wisconsin to meet the extended family. My wonderful, doting mother offered us a Pepsi, back in the days when we disrespected our bodies enough to drink carbonated sugar water. We said, “Sure,” and mom dutifully divided a single soft drink into four glasses, one each for me, Sue Ellen, mom and dad.

Later, mom offered a candy, from a bag of pink Brach’s mints. And gave us each one.

In the days when the only telephones were connected to each other through an intricate – and reliable – system of land lines, long distance calls were considered expensive and mom recorded each one made, to check it against the monthly bill. After a visit during which I had to make a call or two, mom sent me the bill for those calls – about 10 dollars.

I grew up on a farm with several out buildings, one of which mom transformed into her storage shed. In it were lawn chairs that needed re-webbing, a grill with rusted bottom, various non-functioning toasters, umbrellas, coffee pots, and kitchen appliances. She wasn’t recycling, she was storing these items against a day when they would miraculously spring back to life.

My dad, who once sprung for a brand new 1959 Ford Galaxy, later bought the more elegant Mercurys that our local leading businessman sold after he’d driven them a couple of years. Our little Ford Ferguson tractor, which never had working brakes, dated from the 1940s, was probably 20 years old when dad bought it and he used it at least 30 years – when it started.

When the 1948 Ford pickup I learned to drive on gave up the ghost, dad had the box cut off and made into a trailer – which I pulled with the tractor for countless hours while picking up stones in the fields.

When I needed to drive that trailer and tractor without brakes down the road to the dump, I learned to manipulate the throttle and gear shift to slow sufficiently enough that I never ran into anything that didn’t need to be run into. 

So, my frugality is well earned.

Consequently, when my young children sang their relentless chorus of “I want, want, want, need, need, need, please, please, please,” my most frequent response was, “No, we can’t afford it.”

Admittedly, that excuse was my fall back to avoid drawn out explanations of our standards, versus the Joneses because in some instances we could have made the purchase. I just didn’t want the kids to be caught up in that “gotta have it because Suzy has it” burn cycle.   

The best pizza we ever ate in our house was the weekly Friday special Sue Ellen made to devour while we watched a movie in the wonderful world of VHS and Blockbuster. There was no TV during the week for us, so when we popped in Karate Kid, or Back to the Future or Flight of the Navigator, it was a special time made more special by the rectangles of crispy thin crust topped with pepperoni, hamburger, cheese and jalapenos.

On rare occasions, however, I’d give Sue Ellen a break and splurge for a ready made pizza for our Friday night extravaganzas. It was a splurge, but one night when I was feeling especially generous I ordered bread sticks to go with the pizza. I realized that night how our kids labored under the wet blanket of our frugality when the oldest son saw the bread sticks and exclaimed, as surely did Aladdin when entering the Cave of Wonder, “Wow, dad must be doing really well.”

I long for the days when I could impress my kids for a buck.

Be a spark or get tossed

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Sometimes we get into a cleaning, sorting, trashing, unloading kind of frenzy when we’re feeling burdened by stuff and stuff’s attraction, demands, care and maintenance. 

When Sue Ellen hits full frenzy fury, I chain myself to a post to make sure I’m not tossed into a box subconsciously labeled “of no further use,” or as an item that “no longer sparks joy,” in Marie Kondo’s terminology. 

Some few things have outlasted every purge in our 44 years together. Thankfully, I’m one of them. 

But this week Oskar died. 

Oskar was a small food chopper and came as a wedding gift in 1975. It endured several super glue fixes in recent years before finally throwing up its blades and sighing, “Please no more nuts, carrots, celery for salads, or styrofoam bars to make snowflakes for kids’ plays.”

When we think of “things” that have lasted the duration of our lives together, now that Oskar is gone, we can name three. 

First is a sleeping bag I bought when I got out of the Army. Mine was to be a wild and free life after the olive drab constraints Uncle Sam put upon me. That sleeping bag, and a tent that turned out to be a portable rain forest, so impermeable it turned my moist breath into morning showers, along with a 1964 International Scout that had a mind of its own, were my tickets to adventure. 

I still use the bag. 

We married while I was still finishing my degree at Oklahoma Baptist University. Summers were stifling and neither our apartment nor our car had air conditioning, so we bought a Gott cooler and a bigger tent and spent many weekends at the lake. 

We still use the cooler

It often carries goodies as we travel to see our children, none of whom were conceived at the lake. Every time we pack it up, I marvel that it has been with us for so long. Yet, it still regulates the temperature of the items it contains, like the thermos I once gave a secretary. When I saw her using it the next day she told me she appreciated its capacity to keep hot things hot and cold things cold. 

I asked her what she had in it today. “Coffee and a popsicle,” she said. 

Sue Ellen was just 20 when we married. She worked at a bank and had her own apartment after moving out from a home with six siblings, and had neither time nor money to accumulate much of a trousseau. But she had started her dish collection of the then popular Yorktowne pattern from Pfaltzgraff. 

For 21 years, these were our “good” dishes, pulled out to impress company and only after the kids were old enough to know dishes were not suitable as heavy Frisbees. When my mom died we inherited her china, which became our company dishes, and the Pfaltzgraff became our everyday dishes. 

Funny how the exceptional loses its aura when pressed into common use. 

The Pfaltzgraff is heavy, and hard to spell. We can always peg the length of a friends’ marriage within a year or two if they feed us on Yorktown pattern Pfaltzgraff. 

Sometimes we look at new dishes, brightly colored, modern patterns, disposable. They might brighten up the kitchen table and provide a fresh perspective. But, they wouldn’t hold our food any better.

I confess I hold this feeling much more closely than does my wife, but there is something endearing and enduring about the consistency of an everyday implement that has been part of our lives together – every day. Not temporary, not disposable. Just consistent. Present. Available. Useful. Non-demanding. 

There is a fourth thing that we brought to our marriage, but it is more intangible. We each brought a part, insufficient of itself, but required for the whole – like the final spark plug required to make a dead engine roar to life. 

That, of course, is love. Our love for each other, a love we thought fuller and richer in the first blush of our infatuation than ever known by previous humans. Yet, it has grown with time into intimacy, interdependence, tolerance, forgiveness, adoration and the mystery of oneness into a force to overcome many an onslaught. 

When my mother died in 1996, my dad stood in the window as the hearse pulled away, kissed his hand and put it to the glass. I know our birth canal opens toward death, but dad’s slide toward the inevitable started in earnest that day. Losing mom wasn’t just grief for dad. It was an amputation. 

They had been married 47 years. I’m older than dad was at mom’s death and when I survey my environment, the accumulation of things around me and consider those few things that have been with Sue Ellen and me our entire lives together, it’s easy to dismiss the sleeping bag, the cooler and the dishes. 

The one constant that matters for 44 years has been my partner, my heart, my life. We’re closer now to the end than to the beginning, but every day still dawns a treasure. 

Happy anniversary, Sue Ellen. 

You won’t regret it, if you live

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Next to a 5,000 lb. bale of cotton in eastern North Carolina

I ride a bike. A lot. I’m within spitting distance of 5,000 miles this year. 

Some days on the bike are sheer joy. Like when the wind is at your back, the sun on your shoulders, fields’ fertile pheromones filling your senses as you flitter by, cars giving you a wide berth and hitting 45 mph on a nice downhill and you’re smiling so much you get bugs in your teeth.

Some days are agony. Getting caught in a cold rain, or dark descending before you get home, or a friend crashing or another idiot throwing his Dairy Queen cup out his truck window at you makes you glad to reach your own garage.

But when I get home safe and sound, my skin tingling, my legs gorged with blood, every sense in heightened alert I’m always glad I went. Witnessing my children and grandchildren at the moment they learned to defeat gravity with that one extra push of the pedal to stay upright, stick out among my happiest memories. 

I remember the day I learned to ride.

I must have been 8 or 9 years old. We had no bike at home and we lived in the country where I never really saw cyclists, so it wasn’t like I lived longing to swing my leg over a bike saddle. That is, until we were visiting some family friends who lived in a tiny town and all of Richard’s buddies and him were zipping around the neighborhood like cowboys around their herd. 

On a bridge over the New River near Todd, NC

They weren’t shackled to the picnic table listening to the adults chatting. My sisters were talking boys or playing dolls with Richard’s sisters and I was going to have a long, boring, lonely day if I couldn’t latch onto the guys on their bikes. 

As much as I was intimidated by their easy rider skills, I ventured that it would be better to risk and fail than to consign myself to the outside looking in. Because the Almes had lots of kids, there was a spare bike and Richard encouraged me to come with him. 

Not having yet adopted the mantra “fake it ‘til you make it,” I confessed I didn’t know how to ride. “We’ll show you,” he said. And they did. 

I think the potential embarrassment of failure prompted my determination to succeed and I knew they didn’t intend to waste their afternoon teaching me a skill they were itching to employ. So, within probably 20 minutes, I was gallivanting around the neighborhood with all the vigor, confidence and windblown thrills of the gang. 

My legs still tingle remembering that critical moment of revelation when I trusted Richard and pushed the pedal one more time as I was about to fall over, instead of putting my leg out to catch myself. Risk, push, success. 

In a moment, I went from a near knee-scraped, broken-armed failure to being a rider. That day remains one of my favorites. I rode the wheels off that thing and when the other boys went home, I didn’t want to stop riding. 

And now, many of my favorite memories involve a bike. Riding with my kids and grandkids, RAGBRAI, hitting 50 mph down a hill, organized charity rides with friends, packing a clean jersey and a pair of shorts and riding for six days to the North Carolina coast, watching the fields we pass regularly transition from fallow to plowed to planted to harvested. 

A bike will take you to places, at a pace, you simply can never achieve on foot because you can’t go far enough or behind the wheel of a speeding vehicle because you can’t go slow enough. On a bike you’ll smell the teeming, loamy fields and the fresh cut grass – and people’s dryer sheets – and feel the warm womb of a wet breeze that heralds a coming storm.  

Deer won’t know whether to dart in front of you or hang by the ditch. Kids on porches wave and shout as you pass. And car-bound mortals fuming at stoplights as dusk falls shake their heads behind headlights and windshield wipers and mutter insults at the women who gave birth to such crazy guys in garish garments.

Still, any day on the bike is better than a day on the computer at which I write this. I concur with Mark Twain, who said, “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.”