Life is strange. Sometimes, we perceive it as a straight line; at other times, it gets a little crooked; and once in a while, we recognize that it’s a circle.
This weekend, my son brought his sisters and myself up to his maternal grandparents’ old farm. It was the first time my daughters had ever been there, and the first time that I had in many years. Located in an isolated valley miles outside a hamlet that had its hey day in the mid-1800s, it is one of the single most beautiful places in the country.
Since my auto "accident" in 2001, walking is something I do not take for granted. At the time of the accident, this son was a teenager, and he came to resent that I could no longer compete with him in sports. In the years since, he has become a huge, strong young man, and he has picked me up off the ground or the floor of our house dozens of times when I’ve fallen. He knows that I can’t navigate the steep farm roads that he has been doing "road work" on, and so he drives us slowly up, until we have a view of the old farm and the surrounding mountains that allows us to look down on a hawk soaring over the fields.
Finally, we get out of the Jeep, and walk a short distance to the edge of a stream. It ‘s a hot day, and the cold water tastes good. I show my son an area where Iroquois hunters had a seasonal camp, and as the girls run off to play in the fields and ponds, my son and I sit down and talk about the site. I have some artifacts from the site, that show that it was occupied seasonally over a span from approximately 800 to 1400 ad. His grandfather used to have a beautiful stone bowl from the site sitting near the creek, but we do not see it. Maybe the flood in 2006 washed it downstream.
Eventually, our conversation leads to what Memorial Day weekend means. Long ago, when I worked in human services – specifically, with domestic violence – the parents of one of my late friends had approached me. They were interested in making a donation to start a program for children who were the victims of neglect and abuse. Besides a substantial amount of money, they were willing to allow us full access to 40-plus acres of rural land and a log cabin, and to donate a house in a town as a "safe house."
I also used to drop small groups of kids off at my in-laws’, where they could spend a day on the farm, feeding animals and having experiences that kids from poor urban neighborhoods didn’t otherwise have access to. Of course, like myself today, not all kids could ram around on a farm, or out in the 40-acres. One kid that I remembered stuck out. He was 15 at the time, and he was an angry young man. His father had seen hell in Vietnam, and came back with some serious problems. His mother couldn’t deal with it, and she left. Although the father tried his best, he was not able to provide a stable home environment for his son, without assistance.
The boy was angry about that. But there was more: he was losing his eyesight, and the frustrations and ear of becoming blind made him far angrier than the usual "angry young man." I approached a friend, who is a disabled Vietnam veteran. He is in a wheel chair, as a result of an injury from "friendly fire." I figured he might be able to communicate with this angry 15-year old on a level that no one sitting behind a desk could. And he did: he discussed the difficulties that life can dish out, and how it is vital that a person not become bitter, but instead learn to adjust, and to make the best out of any situation.
Did he work a miracle? Maybe that depends on one’s point of view. If a kid has, for example, ten serious problems, and someone helps him learn to deal with two of them, some people may see an 80% failure rate. For myself, I view every day of life as a miracle – participating in this universal life-force – and if an angry kid has spent even one good afternoon, having fun and learning about life, I see success.
And so that is the type of thing that I think of regarding Memorial Day weekend. There are painful loses, and people who make sacrifices and do not come back whole, sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally. And sometimes wounded people find that they have exactly what it takes to reach out and assist some wounded kid deal with the stumbling blocks they encounter along the way.
I spent most of the weekend out near my pond. However, it was an active place. There were a number of kids, visiting for a few hours, or staying at our house for a few days. So there were kids catching frogs, swimming, cooking out, and sitting beside the fire. One girl is the daughter of my wife’s childhood "best friend." Her mother and step-father were busy over the weekend: his step-father, a WW2 veteran, is in the hospital, likely dying. The girl, age 11, was here for three days. She has an intense interest in fossils, and so we had a good time discussing what ones she has found, since I took here to SUNY-Binghamton last summer, to tour the lab of one of the country’s top scientists in the field of fern-tree fossils.
Her own father abandoned her and her siblings, and their mother, when he thought he found adventure in a young lady from the west coast. Other than on Christmas and her birthday, she never hears from her biological father. Her step-father – one of my friends who I introduced to my wife’s friend – does a very good job in his role, but it still must be painful to be abandoned by a parent.
Among the other kids here was one of my older daughter’s best friends. She is shy, and hardly seems to talk at all. But at night, sitting near the camp fire, she and my daughter were playing guitars and leading the others in songs. My favorite was when they did "Stand By Me."
She lives nearby with her mother. She knows who her father is, but has no memory of ever meeting him. He has several other children, scattered across the country, and she has only met a few of them. Yesterday, when I dropped her and my daughter off at her home, they told me to wait in the parking lot for a minute. They ran inside, and when they came out, the girl handed me an oil painting that she had done for her final project in an art class. It was a painting of me sitting near a lake. They told me that when other kids in her class asked her who the picture was of, she told them that it was her father.
I told her that the next time she comes over, to bring the picture, so that I could make a copy of it. She said, "It’s yours." I asked, "Are you sure you don’t want to keep it?," because this girl has real talent, and it is an impressive painting. She said, "No, I want you to keep it." As I was thanking her, she and my daughter were running off in the opposite direction, as 15-year olds are prone to doing.
There are times when I feel frustrated, and even angry, due to my physical limitations. I doubt that, even if I had not been injured in an auto accident, that I could beat my son at basketball anymore. Or in a race up mountain on an the old farm road. It sure would be nice to walk certain roads. But I’m on a different path these days, one that I did not expect to be on. Yet, it may not be the detour that it seemed like at first. There are some nice things along the way.
Peace,
H2O Man
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