Springs eternal

It's not de je vu. I wish it were only that.

Not that long ago, one powerful army lined up along its borders, threatening invasion. Putin, you may remember, denied that his moving into the Ukraine was even a possibility, claimed only the West feared an invasion. Not quite two years ago, I would wake up and open my iPad, fearing the news flash that would say Russia pulled the trigger. Finally, the invasion had begun.

First thing this morning, I swung my legs out of bed and opened the iPad to see if Israel had finally unleashed war on Gaza. 

No banner headline. Relief. Not yet, anyway.

My Uncle Gerard, Dad's older brother, was likely my father's hero when they both were kids, as older brothers often are. Dad used to say, admiringly, that Gerard was a shyster, constantly getting in trouble with the old man, who, I need to say, was also the preacher. 

It was Uncle Gerard who told the story and told it more than once at family reunions. Went like this. For some naughtiness, Gerard caught Grandpa Schaap's wrath. I wish I remembered what it was exactly--maybe taunting his little brothers. The sin that begat the story is long gone. 

Uncle Gerard might have titled this "Dad's Great Wisdom," because Uncle Gerard insisted that Grandpa told him in no uncertain terms that he'd deal with his wayward boy, then added, "sometime later." 

Well, later lingered. Time passed. Days passed, still nothing. Meanwhile Uncle Gerard said he was stewing in a cauldron of his own guilt over whatever inequity prompted all of this. The fact is, he'd say, he punished himself in the interminable time it took for Grandpa to settle up on whatever it was his boy had done. In that lingering anguish between crime and punishment, little Gerard had punished himself. The story ended, always, with the same moral: something to the effect of what kind of Solomon Grandpa Schaap was.

Once, I remember, little sister Agnes objected, forcefully too. She didn't want to buy her father's matchless justice, insisting that the good Reverend could be a curmudgeon, even harsh.  

Whose view was most accurate? My dad told me he sided with his big brother. I wasn't sure. Besides, what was not to like about feisty Aunt Agnes?

Dawn comes late these days. Yesterday, I stepped out back to check the rain gauge and spotted this little torch in a bed of old cone flowers, a single stem of timothy I should have pulled weeks ago caught a shaft of morning sun that turned it into an angel. I grabbed my phone to get a picture because hope springs eternal, even in mid-October.

Hope is what I felt again this morning. Israel's vaunted military has not yet begun a war that will kill a hundred thousand people.

And, they have cause. What happened two Saturdays ago was sheer horror to a people whose cultural memory includes six million horrifying deaths at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. More than 1500 died, many of them hideously. They have cause.

Honestly, I can't imagine Uncle Gerard's version of Grandpa Schaap's disciplinary methodology is being considered somewhere at this moment in Tel Aviv. But it did come to mind when I stood there at the site of a single shaft of timothy lit with the dawn.  

In all of us, hope does spring eternal, doesn't it?--and I'm so glad it does. We couldn't live with ourselves otherwise. See that little stem lit by the dawn? Somehow, hope springs eternal. 

For that blessing, this morning, I'm thankful--edgy, anxious, but thankful.