Getting Loose

Oxfordshire

Kathleen and Peter were very generous and took us motoring out to Oxfordshire.

Now let me explain to my American friends.  “Shire” was originally an old name for county.  So Oxfordshire (pronounced OX-ferd-sher) is Oxford County.  In a lot of ways, that area is like home for Peter who is in his 80’s.

On the way to Burford, we went through Oxford University.  It was amazing to see this campus.  It has to be one of the most prestigious universities in the entire world.  I’m not sure that I saw Christ Church (the college where John Wesley studied), but I might have and did not know it.

On our way to eat, we stopped at Huffkins
to have a spot o’ tea.  It was great.  High Street which this faces must have a 1:4 elevation rise!  The Mrs. And I walked around town, and they were having a bazaar in the basement of the Burford Methodist Church (Zoom out and it's to the right of the Gallery) there on High Street. 

We then stopped at the Church of St. James the Great (zoom in all the way to the point and double click on the church at the top of the picture)  across the river at Fulbrook.  This church has been in existence since the 1200’s.  Absolutely astonishing to me.  They finally decided to take out a few pews from the back of the nave, and use more flexible seating to have a social area in which to visit and for community use.  Since doing that, the church has had more people to come to it.

We had lunch at the Masons Arms at Fulbrook. 
It was a pub at which we ate a wonderful meal. 
(The insides were really much darker.  The camera inside of my telephone compensates for the lighting in a way over which I had no control).  I had Oxford sausages and for dessert I had Apricot pudding.  But it is not pudding as we think of in America.  It is much more akin to the style and substance of bread pudding, albeit there is no bread in Apricot pudding.  (Just like Yorkshire pudding is not pudding as we think of it in America, but a baked, stiff, puffy, wonderful delicacy that was eaten before the main course, filled with gravy so that guests and family members would not eat as much meat!)

From there we saw a lot of the country side.  I have a couple of pics from St. Edward’s at Stow on the Wold (that's the name of the town). 

You have to almost be rich to live in England.  Two of our dollars about equals one pound (£).  Some of the residences out in the country with their dry stack stone walls were breath taking.  It was like in one of these kinds of places that people like John Lennon or Madonna would be living I suppose.

A very moving day and we covered lots of sites.

Acton Hill

I went to the Good Companion group at the Acton Hill Church.  It was a group that met in the back of a sanctuary designed to seat 1,000 people. 
Quite an impressive structure with stone facing (though this is the old church just around the corner, but you get the idea).  They were cordial, meaning not all of them fell asleep as I described my call into ministry, and a little of how we have had to do things differently at Terrace in order to survive and grow.  And that attendance has grown by 12% in three years as a result.

 

Graham, their lay leader was so gracious to collect me at the manse and drop me off again.  On the way back, we got to talking about the common language that divides our two great nations, e.g.,  they have no trucks in England.  What they have instead are lorries.  And police officials are not called cops.  Perhaps coppers, but never cops.  Cop is an Americanism that probably comes from the meaning of nabbing someone.  We stand in line.  In Britain they queue.  In NYC they stand on line.

 

In Britain, the further north you go toward Scotland, the more difficult Londoners find their ability to understand the accents in northern England!

 

For supper we went to Maxim’s. 
We are fortunate that it is on the same block where we live right around the corner.  It is most likely one of the best 4-5 Chinese restaurants in all of London. 

Solanum Tuberosum

We went to Tesco.  That is one of the main larger super markets of England.

 

It was interesting walking up and down their aisles looking at many of the same food stuffs we have, produced by the same companies, albeit packaged differently.

 

We were by the vegetables, and there on a bin were some lightly coloured starchy crops from the Solanaceae family.  I pointed them out to my wife and said, “Look!”

 

Busy with her own agenda, she glanced hurriedly at them and said, “What’s that?”

 

I said, “Y, they are peh-TIE-toes.”

 

She took her hands off the handle bar of the trolley (i.e., shopping cart) and put her finger in my face and said, “You are not one bit funny.  I’ll not have you making fun of these people!”

 

I said, “Buh, tha is the Y they tahk over here.”

 

She said “You sound silly, and it is demeaning to them.  It’s just like when you try to speak French to French people.  They roll their eyes at your pronunciation, and you  think you know so much, and you end up making a fool of yourself and you don’t even know it.”

 

I said, “Well, I was just saying . . .”

Residential Homes

We call them nursing homes, but over here, the governmental municipalities take far more of a proactive role in caring for the indigent in their old age.

 

Like the States, the workers are way underpaid for what they are asked to do and to put up with.

 

There is a jewel of a couple who take it upon themselves once a month to provide a keyboard and try to lead in some old beloved hymns that touch a few of these people’s memory banks.

 

I told them a story about creation from Genesis chapter 2.  There is humour in it, but you would never know it to read it the way it is printed on the page.  I told it in a fashion much truer to the intent of the Hebrew redactor.  And much to my surprise there was laughter at the appropriate parts of the story.  Until that moment, I did not have a clue as to how much or how well I was communicating.  I had to walk around telling the story, getting in their faces, making eye contact.  A few fell asleep.  And that’s OK.  Some are suffering with Alzheimer’s.  They may never fully understand what I said, but let me tell you what they will take away from the experience.

 

It was a welcome change in their routine.  Someone invited them to be present at a gathering.  They heard some music that was vaguely familiar.  Someone was talking to them, not as barking an order, but rather with verve and energy.  And they received a touch and a hope and prayer for their own individual peace.

 

Later that day, they will feel better.  They may never be able to tell you why, but their day will have gone better. 

 

And you know what?  That’s just good enough.  God was there.  He saw it all.  And his heart was touched.

 

That’s not just good enough, it was good enough for me.

Family

I have always been interested in family. I grew up starved for family connection. It took me at least 900 miles as a kid to go from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania to where there were close relations and cousins. One of my big disappointments when our family moved to Texas when I was 9, was discovering that we would still be 900 miles away from them, when I was hoping beyond hope that somehow we would be closer.

I loved being around my cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles. In ways I could never explain, I knew they were part of me, and I was part of them, and they could never cut me off. I would never be shunned.

So many of my friends had relatives near by and they were almost complacent about them. "Him? Oh yeah, he’s my cousin. Whatever."

I could not grasp that thinking. I could not make sense of it.

A while back a very distant cousin to me, Carl Budd (4½ cousin?—ha ha), got into contact with my youngest son. And Leigh told me about this guy. He came from a part of my family that none of us knew anything about. When, over the months I began putting 2 and 2 together and slowly updated him with what little I knew about my side of the family, he then sent a family tree that showed me scores and scores and scores of relatives I had previously known absolutely nothing about. I was stunned. It was, and still is, very difficult for me to take the enormity of it all in. I am having a hard time comprehending what I am seeing.

One of the tools, though, that has helped me immeasurably is FaceBook. I am astonished, how, with a little detective work I have been able to figure out who some of these people are, and to date, I have connected with 5 of my distant relatives. I get to see their faces, and learn about their children. It is like a whole new world is opening up right before my eyes. I am still in a state of amazement.

Mildred Campbell Yates, 1920 - 2010

Back in 1934, Thomas Wolfe wrote a book, You Can’t Go Home Again. It is a book that has haunted me in some ways for many years wondering if, as its title suggests, it could possibly be true. Is it really true that you cannot go back home and find life much as you knew it or remembered it?

I never knew the answer until one day I realized that you could never really go back, because of death. Death ultimately, permanently changed the landscape of what I had once known and cherished, however much I did not appreciate that at the time.

Death has once again changed my landscape. It has made it even more impossible to go back home, because one of the giants of my life is now gone. My 5^th grade teacher, my most favorite teacher. A teacher that nourished me, and fed me, and praised me, and encouraged me. A teacher who never had a discouraging word, but who rather would stand on the sidelines and cheer me on to enter into a journey of my own self-discovery—education in the very truest sense—leading out that which is within.

Mrs. Yates is gone.

Oh, she is not really gone. Her physical body has died. But she is still very much alive. And not in some hallucinatory way through some group memory recall. I will one day meet up with her again. Of that I am positive. But man, what an impact she had on my life in this physical sphere.

* * *

I remember early on she wanted us to write a paper about some experience we had had on vacation or one we had had the summer previous to entering the 5^th grade. I wrote about being on the farm of my 5^th cousins—Monty & Karen Diew—up in Nauvoo, Illinois. I remember writing about how Monty and I got on the roof of a little chicken coop early in the morning and with a BB gun started shooting at the tin water pail from which the chickens were drinking and how they would run and flap from being scared and how much Monty and I laughed at that.  I also remember writing how their water was so mineral laden that it tasted like poison to me, and I really emphasized that terrible stench of a taste. She just loved my budding writing talents and gave me an A.

* * *

I remember Jon Seaux. I had always interpreted him as a quasi miscreant from the other side of the tracks who knew how to draw bawdy pictures that with a few lines could be turned into something innocuous on Miss Rogers’s black board at James Bowie Junior High School when she was out of the room. Jon Seaux had a wicked smile, an impish grin. Who knew how to just barely stay on the right side of respectability, but whom you never wanted to cross. And that is the way he was etched into my mind, until one day, many years later, I was talking to Mrs. Yates.

As she and I began to sift through halcyon memories of old, she asked me if I remembered him.

Well, of course I did, but I was shocked he would even stand out to her.

She reminded me of a time when one of my classmates, and thankfully the mists of time through these 50 years has blotted out his identity, had had an accident in class with respect to bladder control. Of course that misfortune was the object of snickers and eye-rolling. But what was Jon’s response? Without being prompted, Jon went to the janitor’s closet, and got a bucket and a mop and proceeded to clean up the accident in silence as we all watched in wonder. He moved some desks to do a better job, and when he had finished, he looked us all in the eye and said, "This could have happened to any of us sitting here. I don’t ever want you to remind him of what happened, nor should you ever speak of it again." And with that, Jon left the room to return the janitor’s tools to their closet.

Mrs. Yates said, "I was so proud of Jon that day. He was years ahead of his time in maturity."

I had never stopped to contemplate what that action meant—the compassion, the initiative, the sensitivity of Jon Seaux until Mrs. Yates interpreted it for me.

Way before his time, before he ever graduated from high school, Jon died of a brain tumor.

* * *

And then there was her beloved husband, Reed. Oh how she loved to talk of his mischief, and how different they were from each other, and yet how so very much she loved him and his ways.

* * *

It had been rumored that when she was a girl, Mrs. Yates had read every book in the Tyrrell Public Library on the second floor. She was a voracious reader. She would read to us from time to time. She knew how to interpret and inflect and put in pregnant pauses.

I remember one book she read, whose name I have forgotten about a man who supposedly hated the United States back in the early 19^th century. His punishment was to be put on a ship where he would never again be allowed back into the country.

But it was only in the later years of his sentence that he began to understand how wonderful of a country the United States of America was, and that he was so hungry for any scraps of information as to what was happening to our great land. Finally someone drew a map for him of how the country had expanded to the west, and his eyes were wide with surprise and shock and he cried for having missed out on some of the greatest adventures and dream making ever given to any country in the world.

* * *

Mrs. Yates could fire your imagination with a very ignited illustration that would burn in your mind. One day she said to us kids, "And what would you do if a madman with a machine gun came in at our door and started firing?" I never forgot that image, for it frightened me. It scared me. I did not know what I would do. I did not want to think about death.

* * *

From time to time she would pass out supplemental hardback readers for us to read from. In the front of the book, there was the template like there were on those of the standard issue books in which you were to sign your name to the textbook you were to study from all year. Except in these temporary texts, books of years gone by, I started to sign in ink mind you, every time one was given to me, even though I knew that within an hour we would be handing them all back in.

One day Mrs. Yates opened her text and saw my name, written in ink much to her surprise, and then she asked the class to all turn to the very front of their texts. She then asked "How many of you have Allison Cambre’s name in your book?" Probably ¾ of the class raised their hands. I was shocked and embarrassed. "Allison Cambre why have you done this?"

I had no answer.

She said, "You have got to get some ink eradicator and remove your name from these books."

I broke out in a cold sweat. I had no idea what that word meant, nor did I want to tell my parents the trouble I was in. So out in the garage that night I had my name written several times on a piece of paper and tried all sorts of solvents and chemicals to see if any of them might magically remove the ink. Much to my astonishment, I discovered that bleach would do the trick. And so the next day I brought a vial of bleach to school to undo the damage I had done.

* * *

I remember the time of her telling back in the late 40's or early 50's that she had broken her leg. She started crying not because of the pain, but rather because she had ruined some expensive silk stocking hose that she was wearing. None of us boys could possibly understand that.

* * *

Mrs. Yates said she used to smoke. And as a kid I had a hard time believing that! I mean she was like a high, benevolent priestess to me. And priestesses don’t smoke!

* * *

I remember the day I inadvertently saw Mrs. Yates’s letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal. She was hanging up her hat from teaching. She, many years later, had left the 5^th grade environs of Eugene Field Elementary School, to go across the street to French High School to teach English. How I wish I could have had her for that course! But what disgusted her was the ignorance of some of the faculty with whom she taught referring to the Civil War as the Silver War, etc. She had had enough.

* * *

Imagine to my surprise that one day, I discovered that her own brother, Jeff, like me, was a clergyman. I just could not believe it. I got to meet him one time before he died. I went to a gathering knowing that he was in this room with over 100 people, and I began to look around for someone who looked like Mrs. Yates in the face. I found that someone, and I approached him by asking, "Did you ever live in Beaumont, Texas?"

* * *

Well . . . maybe you get the picture. Many of these memories are 50 years old, but they shine as bright for me as the very day I experienced them the first time.

Mildred Campbell Yates. Her passing means that Beaumont is forever, inextricably changed. I thank God that our paths crossed, and I thank God for the beneficent impact she had on me. There will never again be anyone like her in my life.

The Ravages of Time

When I was little, I can remember on more than one occasion saying to my mother, "When you get old, I’ll take care of you."

She said, "Oh, I would love it if you did."

* * *

Sometimes it is not easy to willingly go gentle into that good night. Your physical apparatus begins to fail you not by changes in kind, but by changes in degree. A degree here, a couple of degrees there, and before long, you find yourself confused and wandering in a fog surrounded by familiar objects, but lacking a sure way of contextualizing all of them to make sense like they used to make sense.

She still has her ready laugh. She is sharp on the uptake. But there is a wobble in the short term memory. Asking things she had just asked about perhaps 10 minutes ago. Allowing others to do her thinking for her, instead of straining and working the old noodle to figure it out for herself.

"Well, maybe I’ll be where June is before too long."

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, what use am I? I can’t do what I used to do. I can’t move around like I used to to make cookies. I’m just not much help in the kitchen." And this is from a woman whose identity was bound up in doing and baking and cooking for others.

And I don’t have a comeback.

I’m not going to give false reassurance, and I listen and sift, and think "Why does she think that?" But then I further think, "If I were in her shoes . . . would I be thinking much differently?" I mean I could come in as the cheerleader and verbigerate at trying to restore one’s confidence, but would I want that done to me?

It’s got to be exasperating. She had so much life and vigor at one point. A workhorse who had unlimited energy, seemingly. Ready to get up and go.

I remember one time my mother-in-law commenting that she did not have half the energy that my mother did. She sat in awe of it.

Mom kept talking about if she only had access to a stove and pots and pans, but then they can’t allow that. Why, what if one of the residents were to leave a burner on. It is too dangerous.

Safety decisions are a killer. How can you take the right pills, if you don’t know what day it is? She can look back and recognize that she is in somewhat of a fog, and it perplexes her. How did it get to be this way?

So she sat a lot and watched and interacted where she could, but the hearing is not all what it used to be either.

We had her for six days, and I was glad to have her here, even though I still work a more than full-time job. I can remember that at my age my dad was retired, even my cousin was retired, but it will not be that way for me. I still have a few years to go before I can consider that option.

She and I think a lot on the same wavelength. Same sense of humor in so many ways. We can get so tickled with each other. I love pulling her leg. She always bites. That’s a lot of the fun, and I always play dumb.

I took her to Austin last Monday to meet my brother who carried her on out to San Angelo. We ate at Zoot there in Austin and had a pretty decent meal.

After lunch she climbed into his mini-van and sat while my brother and I transferred the luggage to the van. I went to the front seat and opened the door to kiss her good bye. And she gave me a look. A look that said, "I’m sorry I’m not what I used to be. I’m sorry I’m not as much help. I can never repay the time and the money and the kindness you have given me. I love you. You are my first born. I treasure you in ways you will never fully understand."

It is only now that I am unpacking what that look said. It is sad. It’s not what I want. It is not what she wants. But it is what it is.

Plus ca change, plus ce la meme chose.

Maybe I was one of the fortunate ones. My childhood to me seemed very idyllic.

Very early on, I loved to go on vacation. Going on vacation to me meant that we would get to see my grandparents—Grandma & Grandpa Cambre, and Grandma Anderson. They lived in the same little town of 5,000 in SW Iowa. It really is not until this moment that I am grasping how fortunate I was for that happenstance. For so many families, the members are flung far and wide. But the core of my family lay in SW Iowa. And when you push on that core, all four of my grandparents came from Illinois. How amazing is that? I knew relatives there as well. My Grandpa Cambre’s brother lived out his life in Illinois. My Grandma Cambre was an only child. My Grandfather Anderson’s siblings remained in Illinois, and my Grandmother Anderson’s two brothers remained in Illinois, while her sister eventually moved with her own family to Denver.

But when we went to SW Iowa, we stayed with the Cambre’s. I loved my Grandfather Cambre. He was a mysterious man to me, a witty man, a man with a smile.

I can remember my sister and I touching his bald head and asking him if that hurt.

Well, no, it did not. He said it was like touching the skin of our own arm.  We could not understand that.

In a vague way, I knew that my Grandfather was my Dad’s father, but I had a hard time putting that together.

Grandpa died when I was 10 years old. We were actually at his house when he died in the hospital, but no one told me. I knew that when I came down the stairs for breakfast, everyone seemed a little sullen at the table, but it wasn’t until I went to Grandma Anderson’s house later on that morning that I discovered why. My sister and I got into some kind of a verbal fight, and my grandmother said we shouldn’t fight on such a day like this.

I asked, "What do you mean? What is so different about today?"

She said, "This is the day that your Grandfather has died."

I said, "WHAT? Grandpa is DEAD? Why didn’t anyone tell me?" I was shocked, stunned, blown away. I could not believe it. I did not know he was that ill.

47 years later my Dad died. And now I am Grandpa Cambre.

It is hard for me to grasp this.  I am to my grandsons what Grandpa was to me.

But wait . . . Grandpa was old. And he walked with a cane. He had had infantile poliomyelitis. But now I am to the family what he was 50 years ago.

I grew up in a world that seemed impervious to change. What an illusion. I now grasp that in so many ways, change is the name of the game.

Andrea Ristorante Italiano

Last night we met the Rowley's at Andrea's.  It was fun catching up with them.  But as far as the venue, honestly, I wasn't that impressed.  It was OK.  But I doubt I'll be back. 

Reality

Sometimes you just have to go to the graveyard and look at the stone to grasp the reality of what has happened.