An simple story, forever rich

It's a simple human story, repeated countless times in countless lives. If it seems to have happened more frequently among the Dutch Reformed, it may just be my own faulty judgement; after all, most the people I know are Dutch Reformed. 

It starts with plain old hard work, an unshakable characteristic of so many people I know, an ethic people celebrate proudly--"we work hard." At 98, hardly able to walk anymore, my father-in-law still apologizes for having done nothing all day in the Home. What feels like laziness grieves him. He would love nothing better than to work all afternoon--doesn't really matter how.

Throw in a Depression as setting, an era when rural people could barely make it and many couldn't. In the memoir I was reading last night, a man named Carl remembered meals of lard spread on homemade bread. There was nothing else. When he'd pull it out of his honey bucket lunch pail at school, he remembered being afraid some other kid would smell it and know how dirt poor they were.

Combine that penchant for hard work with a strict religion fiercely practiced, a faith more fitted to condemn than love, a faith so heavy-laden with doubt that it spends whatever life it has snarling. There's that too.

Then, bring on the sadness, the tragedy, the death of a child, the worst experience life can afford any parent.

Those are the ingredients of the story I read last night, a simple story repeated countless times in innumerable variations, the story I can't help but remember this morning.

Carl, now deceased, remembered growing up in that kind of world as the namesake of a little boy he never knew, a baby who died at three months, another Carl, whose name he was given.  This is a story about Carl and his father. 

Several years later, he remembered a time when he and his siblings--there were eleven in all--got together to ask themselves whether it might not be better for their father not to know the truth about something--he didn't say what. They were serious. They knew how much anger they'd trigger and he'd generate if he found out. Mutually, they decided the moral course was to lie.

And then there was that time two of the girls accidentally damaged the soft top of the car and didn't tell him--never did in fact, not until he was on his death bed, and even then, Carl says, the old man still got mad.

That kind of father is in the story repeated thousands of times in countless lives. And it goes like this.

Once upon a time, Carl's parents went back to the church they'd attended when the kids were little. They walked out back together, into the cemetery, where a little grave stood along the fence, he says, the place his namesake was buried. 

There they stood, Carl says; and when he looked up into his father's face, the old man was crying. Those tears he said he'd never forget.

That moment is the heart and soul of Carl's story, a story with infinite variations remembered and told in a thousand settings and as many languages, a deeply human story created, at once, by startling tears from unimaginable loss and undying love. 

It's just that simple.