Second Hand Stories

I called Grandma and Grandpa tonight to tell them about the movie Red Tails. These were the stories I got in return, plus one from my friend Brett.

On John Walling:

John Walling was a childhood friend of Grandma's and an only child in his family. He somehow mananged to make it on to Japanese ground, take pictures, and bring them back to Nantucket. Unfortunantly, John was killed later in a submarine. Naturally, most of the Nantucket boys joined the Navy, being seamen and all.

Grandma went on to say that in the basement of Auburn Cottage there is a wooden post with the initials JW carved in them. John had carved these when he was a kid, and Great-Grandma Jones didn't have the heart to paint over it after John died. Grandma said he was one of the nicest people.

I'll have to check that out next time I make it to Nantucket.



Auburn Cottage, where Grandma grew up

On Depth Charges:

Grandma and Grandpa asked me if I'd ever heard of these...and no, I'd never heard of them. Grandpa told me I'd lived a sheltered life. Indeed, I've never lived through a world war. Grandpa explained that the submarines would try to find other submarines. So the German submarine, for example, would shut off all of its power, try to make absolutely no noise, and the American submarine would listen for it, and use their machinery to figure out where the submarine was, and then bomb away at it.

Grandma, who lived on Nantucket Island during the war said that at nights they could feel the depth charges. Auburn Cottage was right on the harbor. They'd get to school the next day and ask each other if they felt the depth charges. Some had, some hadn't, but they hoped they'd gotten the German submarines.



Ginette, Colette, Aunt Anne (mom's sister) and Uncle Jack with an ocean facing picture by Auburn Cottage

On the Tuskegee Airmen:



My friend Brett used to work for a carpet cleaning company and one night he got a call from a house that he didn't realize he was supposed to be cleaning. It was an honest mistake, but it caused him to be quite late to that appointment.

When he got there the man was irritated. To make matters worse, Brett blew a fuse. And to make matters even worse, he blew the fuse again. The very irritated man at this point brought Brett down to the fuse box. On the way down, the man pointed to a photo and asked Brett if he knew what it was. In fact, he did. And he realized that this man was a former Tuskegee Airmen. The irritation melted on the part of the man when he realized Brett knew what he was, and respect grew on the part of Brett, and the entire feeling of the night changed. The man showed Brett a book about the Tuskegee. There were so many more people in the book that Brett expected, until it dawned on him that every single mechanic, personel, etc. were all included in this group and they have reunions every year.

On the desegregation of the U.S. military:

Grandpa said that he was a part of the military when Harry Truman integrated blacks and whites in the military. Grandpa, a northern boy, was in the navy and working in the hull of a ship when a new man came down to work with them. Since he was coming down on a ladder, his feet were the first thing they saw. There was a southern boy down there with my grandfather and as soon as he saw the color of the man's legs he found a phone and called upstairs.

Southerner: Sir, the man coming down here is colored.

Officer: What color is he?

Southerner: Black.

Officer: Well, don't worry, it won't rub off on you. [And he hung up.]

Smile, You Don't Know Who Is Watching

This morning I stopped at my usual stop light on the way to work when that strange feeling you get when someone is looking intently at you came over me. Looking to my right I noticed a pedestrian on the street looking right at me as I waited for the light to turn. I suddenly became very self-aware. What was so unusual about me sitting in my car that it would cause a pedestrian to pause? - I mused. It was then that I realized I was just sitting there in my car with a huge, genuine smile.

I couldn't help it. The guy on the radio had cracked an incredibly witty joke causing me to laugh outloud, alone in my car. But you don't just go from laughing to straight faced, you kind of smile for a while after - and that was the very moment the pedestrian caught me. I guess there is something that gives a pedestrian pause when a person sitting in her car during rush hour traffic in downtown St. Louis is randomly smiling.

With that said, later in the day I came across this:




Enjoy!

Something Strange is Lurking....

My second year of college, I noticed that there was something strange about these people, but I couldn't put my finger on it. There was this...helpfulness, that I just didn't understand. A case in point was this guy in my apartment complex, Will. One of my roommates was not feeling well one day and Will, in his usual Will way, went door-to-door in our appartment complex trying to find her an asprin, or something of that sort. After 20 minutes or so, he did find it for her, and brought it by. But the thing was that Will, and so many others did this kind of thing ALL THE TIME. They seemed to always be on the look out for helpful things they could do, and then they would do it.

This may not seem strange to you, but of course it is important to understand that I was 19 years old, just coming out of one of the most selfish stages of a person's life - here, most notably mine. My friends and I were coming out of the stage of life where you try to get away with as little responsibility as possible, and the bottom line is that YOUR convenience and YOUR wellbeing were paramount. Up until that year, my peers had always been the same age as me.

I had pondered this phenomenon for a while that year. What WAS it that drove these people, so many of them, to be SO helpful ALL the time? Didn't they get sick of it? What ever made them to be that way?

As a backdrop to the series of Stud/ettes of the Month, Will, coincidentally, was the first ever stud of the month. We blew up his picture and posted it prominently on our fridge that Will was our Stud of the Month. My apartment kept him as stud of the month for an entire year because each time we'd consider nominating someone new, he'd do something else so genuinely thoughtful that no one could compare. (So there you have it, Will was the Stud of all Studs of the Month).

A few years went by, and I found myself in France, with a black tag pinned to my chest announcing to the world that I was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ. As a missionary, my entire life changed. My life wasn't about me anymore. Not my schooling, not my goals. It was about everyone else from sun up to sun down.

Sometimes it was about serving my companion or other missionaries. But most of the time, it was about everyone else. Before my life had been about school work and adventure. I could bury myself in the library to get school work done for hours at a time. But now, I was on the streets talking to people, meeting with people - people who I would NEVER have met in my college life. I am convinced that there is something about representing Christ that causes people to open up much more quickly. There were so many times in meeting with people that they would tell us so much about their interior world. Things that are tender, personal and generally only shared with the closest of friends. We didn't ask for these stories, but I guess when people see that you are representing Christ, that it is their place to share these things with you. I found so many walls inside myself melting. Here were the poor, the tired, the hungry and the humble. So much comprehension of humanity that I didn't know I didn't have. My compassion for others grew.

There are promises that I suspect most missionaries make to themselves about their future. I will never forget this. I will always serve people. I will really listen. I won't let people around me in my future be so neglected as some of these people have been. And you really, really mean it.


(Picture copied from Will's facebook of him on a mission)

The thing is, that you generally come away from a mission a little...different. A little more Will-like. There was some point on my mission that it clicked for me. Those strange service-oriented people - they had all served missions. You see, boys in the Church of Jesus Christ typically leave when they are 19 to serve their missions. The women leave at the age of 19. So when I was 19, my male peers were all gone to serve, and the older ones were, for the first time, part of my peer group. As a 22-year-old, I too joined the ranks of returned missionaries.


(Me as a missionary in Marseilles)

Naturally, most of us fall short of the promises we made ourselves. We go back to school and life. We are still a little...different. But sometimes, those poignant feelings that caused us to become that way dim just a bit, but it is always still there.

But part of being a "Mormon" is that service is part of the program. Everyone is assigned people whom they are to teach and serve. Right now, I've got four ladies assigned to me. I teach one lady, we'll call her Judy for the sake of ananymity. She is much older than me, married, and handicapped with a degenerative disease. She rarely leaves the house, so visits are most welcome, health allowing. I dutifully visit her once a month. Sometimes, I don't. But today I had scheduled a visit with her. She had offered to make me lunch.

Over some homemade meatloaf we discussed life. Her legs are getting worse. Her eyes are getting better. She takes great pride in her garden. I've never seen her at a Sunday service, it is possible that I never will. She is incredibly intelligent and very giving. It was a genuinely enjoyable lunch and that feeling of admiration towards another human settles gently in. As part of my duty, I ask, and in addition try to seek out what her needs might be, and how I can best serve her. I left making the mental note that I need to be back this spring to help her plant her garden.

As I was driving home, I re-realized, just how great doing service for others makes me feel. It has a way of putting me in a profoundly great mood. Not only does it open my eyes and humble me, but it does bring a sense of genuine happiness that leaves its mark much the same way I feel my skin glow and my muscles feel more healthy beneith my skin for hours and days after a good work out. But strangely, service is like exercise, and I forget how great it feels until I do it again and then, the memories flood back of my mission, the promises - this amazing feeling. Remembering awakens the appetite that has been there, unnoticed, all along.

And in that perfect way that Heavenly Father manages to time things in my life, as I opened the New Testament where it is marked and I just happened to be reading in John 13 - the scripture about Christ washing his apostles' feet.

"If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you."

It took me a long time to realize that the strangeness lurking beneath Will and others stemmed from here.