Just fits

He's done well over the years, as, I suppose, could be expected of someone from my world who basically always played and played hard within the rules. I'm sure he's maintained a presence in a local church, maybe even just one. I wouldn't doubt for a minute that he attained the prominence he had likely once dreamed of, both in that church, as well as an admiring community. 

A half century ago he showed early signs of reaching success in life. He lived across the hall from me during our freshman year of college. When he went off to class, he made sure he was neatly dressed, his short hair combed fittingly. Despite our proximity, I can't say I remember him as a friend, although I'm sure others on our floor of the dorm did. He was a good kid, even back then.

I'm not sure how wealthy he has become, but he is well-heeled, as could be expected. I don't doubt for a minute that he is a sure community leader, a wonderfully helpful neighbor, a good friend to whole numbers of people who've been part of his Bible studies.

Three times, maybe, our paths have crossed in the last 50 years, and all three times he has told me the same story. Goes like this: Once upon a time--he doesn't remember where or when exactly--he happened to meet a pleasant couple who, it turns out, identified themselves as the Schaaps, from Oostburg, Wisconsin.

"Well, you must be related to Jim," he might have said, or something to that effect because he told me, three times, how surprised he was to meet the parents of a guy he knew from the dorm so many years ago, and a guy who'd written all those wonderful things and become so, well, well-known.

I don't know the exact wording of the next line, but I know the effect. The conversation turned into a meditation, as conversations are wont to do among people like me.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" he might have said. "It's just plain amazing what God can do."

He claimed, all three times, that my mom and dad nodded their heads in fulsome agreement. 

Three times he told me that story, but I don't believe the numbers are the reason it sticks with me. There are other reasons, one specifically--that I am somehow supposedly to be just as taken as my parents were with the intended spiritual imperative. He wanted me to nod just as my parents had. It's as if early on I was a kind of Saul, someone the Lord God almighty had to blind before I could see. 

I have never seen myself via the gradients that emerge from that much-beloved story. I'm nowhere near Saul/Paul, and my life has very little to hide or bury. That sign at the top of the page is here in the kitchen of this lovely AirBandB we're renting, "up north" in Minnesota Nice country. My wife of fifty years says she's seen that sentiment before, but it was new to me, even though there's nothing particularly astonishing or even remarkable about it. It just fits--not too tight either--just fits.

I've been doing more than my share of looking back as of late, working on a kind of memoir I'd like my great-grandchildren to have should any of them wonder about their ancestor like I do mine, who left very little. The moment I walked into the kitchen, I couldn't help but think that single line up there on the wall might sit as a frontispiece to the whole collection of things I'm throwing into that memoir.

I don't know that it's something my straight-and-narrow dorm neighbor ever understood, but then the story has this tender underbelly too--I don't know that my own straight-and-narrow mom and dad ever quite understood that either.

I'll have to find a place for it somewhere, if it doesn't, as it has already, find that place itself. It just fits.