One day as we were exiting the fellowship after a Sunday service, my son Chris and I launched into a full-fledged war of words just as we were passing through the front door onto the porch. Chris was between eight and ten at the time. As we bickered heatedly, I suddenly heard Bill White’s cool voice query behind me: “So WHEN did you lose control of him?” Make no mistake: I was angry at Bill, but I also had to admit the truth implied in his question. So I muttered between clenched teeth: “The day he was born!” Chris and I took our argument elsewhere.
On another Sunday years later, on that very same front porch, I intervened in an escalating-into-physical-violence argument between two young brothers I had been teaching earlier that morning in R.E. As I broke up the battle, Gertrude Oakman remarked in a low aside: “It’s about time SOMEONE crocodiled those kids!” I laughed heartily to myself about the term “crocodiled,” but if I was tempted to feel a bit smug about my accomplishment, Bill’s voice suddenly drifted back to haunt me: “So WHEN did you lose control of him?”
There are little videos of them in my mind: tiny Erica Lindegren being carried into the fellowship hall on her father’s arm, looking as if she were floating on the gauzy cloud of crinolines encircling her waist; Kim Lauer and my son, both small children then, shrieking with excitement as they take off for a ride with Randy Williams in his pale-yellow, open air, “old-fashioned” car; William Vaughn singing solemnly, his face touched with candlelight, at the “medieval-style” Christmas service his dad, Stan, put together for the fellowship; the various foster children Chris Larsen brought to the fellowship from time to time, including one little boy whose legs were hopelessly twisted and useless; little Lexie Vaugh shyly entering the fellowship hall in the pretty smocked dress her mother, Pam, had bought or made for her; Nate Judd looking up from an art project he was working on to tell me: “You act like Mary Poppins!” I replied to him with deep conviction: “I AM Mary Poppins!” He seemed to half believe me.
And then there was the child I never knew. One day as a group of us were emerging from the newly finished “Piper Room” up to the children’s tiny R.E. room, and up again to the main level of the fellowship, a man I didn’t know well (a bit curmudgeonly, it seemed to me) remarked in a tone that grabbed my attention: “I miss my son.” The moment is frozen in time for me: the pain in his voice, his foot raised to step up into the kitchen, his head slightly bowed. Something about his tone of voice made me sure his son wasn’t just away at college, or something of the sort. I asked a friend where the man’s son was. My friend told me the boy had killed himself.
Our children. Nothing else so important to us. The most precious things in our lives, and they are delivered to us without instruction manuals. God/Spirit/Love (fill in with the name of your Higher Power!) please help them and us!
Denise Wong