Respecting mystery

What I remember her telling me about those mid-Depression days was how her father used to sit at the family table at night and shed very real tears. She was a teenager, as sensitive as teenagers are; but then, remembering her father's tears didn't require hyper-sensitivity.

It was spring, I suppose. Grandpa was the town blacksmith. Once upon a time we had a picture of him and his son, my uncle, in the shop. What I remember is horseshoes hanging from countless nails pounded in the ceiling beams, horseshoes that belonged to local farmers. 

Had to be spring because those supper-hour tears were about plowshares, sharpening them, as he likely did up until they were needed by the farmers who brought them in months earlier. Had to be spring, when those shares would get picked up, paid for. 

The tears fell from unpaid bills, farmers--just about all of them--who couldn't pay for work he'd finished. They had no money, no one did.

Which meant he didn't either. What he had was an ounce or two of hope, the belief--he was a pious man--that things would get better, that he couldn't get water when there was nothing in the well. But he couldn't keep the shares because the only hope for any of them was good crops come fall. So, my mother said, he worked for nothing. The Dirkse family was poor as the farmers he served. Grandpa's piety didn't outweigh the peril of his pennilessness. That's what she remembered. That's what she told me. 

The picture at the top of this morning's post was posted on a Facebook website devoted to historic pictures of Oostburg, the town where Grandpa and Mom and I all grew up. The woman who posted it claimed one of the actors that year was Jean Dirkse. . .my Mom. For the life of me I can't pick her out, but that she'd be in it makes all kinds of sense. Even though in later years she was prone towards depression, a part of her simply could not turn down a good time. Let me bring it up closer.

Huge cast it was too. When they gathered for the portrait, someone must have told a joke or two, made some smart-ass remark maybe, pulled a stunt that had them rolling. Clearly, they're all having a whale of a time on stage at the town hall, which has been itself gone for 60 years or more.

In fact, that huge cast is also gone--every last face in this darling portrait. All of the glee, the exuberance, the life, is no more. No human being I know could deliver a list of names.

Years ago, we had a cheerleading megaphone tucked away in an upstairs closet. I wish I could remember the colors, but what I'll not forget is the initials "OHS" across its flank. It was Mom's. She was a cheerleader for the basketball team. I loved it because it told me a tale about my mother when she was a teenager. Not much, really, but something.

One of the bite-sized morsels of moral truth we somehow learn and never forget is something Lew Smedes wrote in Mere Morality (1983), a compendium of practical advice. One of the issues he talked about is what to do when adult children profoundly disagree with aging parents, the kind of dissolution that happened altogether too frquently and did in my family during the Vietnam War. How do those who would follow Jesus deal with that level of family conflict?

His advice hit home. "Respect your parents' mystery," Smedes wrote. I can't quote him exactly, but the effect of his encouragement was that adult children like me respect the fact that tears at a supper table, a cheerleading megaphone, and the goofy portrait of a play cast, circa 1934, doesn't tell you everything. You don't know what factors played a role in Mom or Dad's development and upbringing, Smedes told me, as if he were right there beside me. You don't know their comings in and goings forth. You don't know what they never told you or even never told each other. 

Respecting your parents' mystery meant accepting the fact that you don't know much at all, honestly, about what shaped them into becoming who they were to you.

You can't help but love this picture. It catches the cast in sheer glee, a bunch of kids full of optimism and joy and the dynamo of excitement that adolescence creates in all of us. 

Years and years ago, my mom, deceased now for a decade, gathered on the town hall stage for a portrait of the cast of the OHS play. She was in it, and, goodness sakes', did they have fun.

That's all I know, all I'll ever know. 

You just can't help but smile.