Family Therapy

Dear Lou,
One of the things I do to avoid the cuckoo’s nest is to pound the PC keyboard. So consider reading this as your part in keeping me balanced.

Saturday, we went to Waterloo to attend Carrol’s Cahokia High School class reunion. Although she graduated from Sparta, she went to school at Cahokia for her freshman through junior years so most of her longtime friends are from Cahokia, not Sparta. We ate dinner with six widowed or divorced women at the table, each of them auditioning for a part in The Golden Girls

Sunday morning, we drove to Eckerts to pick up some Southern Illinois peaches. We got West Virginia peaches instead because the Eckert family decided to keep both the peaches from their trees. You may remember that we had enough warm weather early last spring to bring fruit trees into bloom early. After the peach buds had formed, we had several days of heavy frost that eliminated the peach crop. As one orchard owner said, “Apples pay the bills, but peaches are the profit.” Guess that is why there are no more orchards of just one kind of fruit like the Stahlman pear orchard was.

While we were at Eckerts, I enjoyed looking around at all the old style meat and produce they sell. How many places do you know that sell fresh, home-grown kohlrabi? Or still offer honest-to-goodness liver sausage? If you lived closer I would have bought some and brought it to you on the condition that I didn’t have to eat any of it. Carrol bought a muskmelon for Scott that came from Posey County, Indiana.

Back in Springfield Sunday afternoon, (God forgive me for shopping on the Sabbath.) I visited a couple of farmers who drive into town and our neighborhood to sell fresh vegetables from the back of an old Ford pick-up. I may not be able to convince you that their corn is as good as you can find anywhere, but I guarantee that you can’t find any fresher produce unless you have your own garden.

As one of the two farmers was sacking up my corn, I asked him how many tomato plants he had this year. “Oh I only put out 46 this year. These are my neighbor’s tomatoes.” (Forty six doesn’t provide enough to sell I guess.) So I asked if he knew how many plants his neighbor had. He said, “A couple a hundred.” And as if that demanded an explanation, he added, “He’s 95 and goes to bed at 7:00 o’clock every day. My partner and I sell his tomatoes for him.”

While I was out and about Carrol suggested we could have bacon and tomato sandwiches for dinner, IF I would pick up a loaf of bread. She knows how to motivate me! While at the store I found dark cherries for the less than three dollars a pound, so picked up a small bag of cherries. When I got home, and looked at the register tape, I realized I had paid almost ten dollars for a bag of cherries grown in Montana. The bag was larger than I thought.

Had a great dinner. I vaguely recall reading that the combination of fresh corn on the cob, tomatoes, cucumbers, and sweet cherries override the drawbacks of thick sliced bacon. I am sure I read that somewhere!

Monday, Carrol spent most of the day in the kitchen making peach coffee cakes. I joined her for a mid-afternoon break and forced myself to eat some warm peach coffee cake with her. By the time the last of nine coffee cakes were out of the oven, only seven could be accounted for. For a brief moment on that summer afternoon, I was sitting in Grandma Stahlman’s house. It was a Saturday morning and I was waiting for that old kerosene stove to spit out coffee cakes. As I remember, the first grandchild to show up got to choose which peach coffee cake he could take home. Last one to show up got the one that was a “little well-done.” I also recall that Grandma, however, didn’t allow Butch to come early because he liked to eat the unbaked dough before she could get it in the oven.

The weekend turned out to be a pretty good one – even though attending a spouse’s high school class reunion.

Too bad I couldn’t share any of my nutritional pleasures with you. But I did think of you.

Love you.

Your brother

Meet Professor Tomato

Shortly after Jack Frost left central Illinois, my dog, Alex, and I were walking the neighborhood. The fellow across the street, Bud, was out walking Scooter. We met a couple of blocks from home and stopped to chat while Alex and Scooter did the doggy version of shaking hands. Bud asked me, “Do you remember those tomatoes I gave you last summer?”

Even at my age, I rarely forget a gift of fresh tomatoes, so I said, “Yeah. And I hope you are going to continue that tradition this year.”

He smiled and said, “I can do better than that.” Then I smiled.

He continued, “My grandson gave me the tomato plants last year. This year, he brought me three more than I want. They’re the same kind he gave me last year. If you want those three plants, I’ll give them to you. Just come over and get them when you want them. They’re sitting by the back door.”

A few days later I pulled some flowers I now disliked out of the border along the back side of our privacy fence. In there place I planted Bud’s three tomato plants. Our daughter Joni didn’t plant any tomatoes this year so she offered to loan a couple of conical, wire supports designed to support tomato plants. For the third plant’s support, I set a plain, three-foot wooden stake next to its trunk.

From those three tomato plants in my backyard, I have learned two lessons. Actually, at my age, learning is mostly re-learning. Nevertheless, the re-learning was a bargain for the effort I invested.

The first truth worth keeping grabbed my attention several weeks after the initial planting. Because I procrastinated, the plant without the wire supports never did get attached to its wooden stake. But it grew anyway. Unlike the two other plants, this plant didn’t have anything to lean on as it grew. So of course, as it stretched out from the earth, it soon collapsed and sprawled out on the ground. Even though it wanted to reach for the sun, it had no support for its effort. Lying on the ground with its small blooms just above the soil, I knew that some of the fruit of that plant would lie on the ground; vulnerable to the forces that would introduce rotting and scarring .

As it is with tomato plants, so it is with children. With a little help, with a little encouragement, the child will reach levels unattainable on its own. My supported tomato plants grew and are now ready to bear fruit. But make no mistake --the sturdy aid of a wire cage didn’t cause the growth; growth came from within the plant. With or without an anchor of support, a tomato plant will grow and produce fruit.

My unsupported plant grew as well, but it will not be all it could have been because it lacked support and direction.

During a recent visit to a church I left nine years ago, I wanted to see what changes time had wrought. I noted lots of new faces, air-conditioning, revitalized choir, and the new organ, But guess what impressed me most. Eric is still there.

Eric has grown up since I saw him last. That is in itself quite an accomplishment. Not the brightest kid on the block, Eric was one of those children the world thinks needs a “special education.” Without a family functioning as enthusiastic cheerleaders and lacking a strong bulwark against tormentors, Eric’s future was not bright when I first met him.

But God is a better gardener than I. He surrounded Eric with a congregation that stood with him and supported him by accepting him in a youth group, paying his expenses to attend a life changing youth conference, and engaging him in patient conversations that began as dialogue and ended as soliloquy. With the strength and stability of a Presbyterian congregation near him, Eric’s destiny now more closely matches his Creator’s design.

In a similar way, every time I witness a baptism of a child, my flickering little candle of hope is rekindled because I look at the child and the congregation and imagine that another tomato plant has been staked so it can grow and bear good fruit.

The second truth reconfirmed by my tomato plant is this: A young plant is more pliable and more easily trained than an old plant with thickened trunks and stems. When I try to train the plant already set in its ways or make it conform and adapt like a young plant, sometimes the mature plant breaks … and dies with green fruit still on its vine.

So I have learned.

What truth do my tomato plants reveal to you?

for one more day

Looking for a "quick" read? Mitch Albom's for one more day fills the bill.

Have you ever wondered what kind of life the dead live. Do they play harps all day long and float endlessly among puffy clouds or at the other place, do the condemned do anything but shovel coal into hungry, insatiable, and fiery furnaces for the pleasure of cruel, little devils with pitchforks?

Albom suggests another possibility. Spirits of the dead might just spend their days visiting people on the living side of the grave. Not all people. Just to those folks who, on the eve of their own deaths, are thinking about some relationship they had with an already departed soul.

In Albom's story, a man is at the point of dying in an accident. Before he crosses the line separating life from death, he spends one more day with his mother who died a few years earlier. For one more ordinary day, the dying son and his mother are together.

What do you suppose he learns in the one more day he has with his now-dead mother?
I won't -- can't -- tell you. You have to read the book and answer that question for yourself.

But I can give you a clue. If you are a motherless child, his answer is a probably a lot like the answer you would get if you had the opportunity to spend one more day with your mother. And who wouldn't like that opportunity?

If I had my own copy of for one more day– I have more confidence in my daughter's choice of books than in my own – there were a couple of short paragraphs I would have underlined, thinking I could benefit from a periodic repeat reading. Here they are.

It's funny. I met a man once who did a lot of mountain climbing. I asked him which was harder, ascending or descending? He said without a doubt descending, because ascending you were so focused on reaching the top, you avoided mistakes.

"The backside of a mountain is a fight against human nature," he said. "You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as did on the way up."

Life isn't just about growing up; it's also about getting old. Life isn't just the ascent to the mountain peak of life's best years, but includes the descent back to being hairless, toothless, dependent, weak, and trusting as a little child.

Mitch Albom helped this reader to enjoy the journey whether ascending or descending and encouraged me to set my eyes on the horizon where heaven and earth meet.

There's something extraordinary about an ordinary day spent with one's parent while looking for the horizon.

Word Abuse

Apparently there is a crisis looming on the horizon. Actually there may be several, but the latest one that grabbed a piece of my attention for a few minutes happened on my way to the Farmer's Market to buy some fresh corn, tomatoes, and a couple of cucumbers. (Besides thinking about what's for lunch, what does a retired guy do on a Saturday morning?)

When I turned on the car radio, National Public Radio was broadcasting an interview with an entomologist who was bemoaning the diminishing numbers of pollinators. Without pollinators, he said many plants would not produce the fruit that assures the continuation of the species. At the end of this certain extinction of some plant species, he predicated the human race would soon go hungry.

Wow! All of a sudden, I was interested in the sex-life of plants. With that interest piqued, my memory yanked me back to a sex education class in the seventh grade.

Mr. Frazier, a public school coach, seventh grade teacher, and Presbyterian Sunday School teacher was the one who first introduced me to the science of reproduction. Of course, his pedagogy was not of the "show and tell" type. He used no anatomically correct dolls, no pictures like you get from magazines at Barnes and Noble, and no television soap opera illustrations. In fact, Mr. Frazier never even mentioned sex in the same paragraph with any word about human life. He stuck to biology when he talked about the "birds and bees."

His lesson was not really about birds and bees, but plants; stamens, pistals, pollen, anthers and a dozen other words I can't remember. But I do remember learning that bees had a role in getting the pollen from the stamens to the pistils. And that's all I got out of my introduction to the subject euphemistically called "the birds and bees."

I was confused. Mr. Frazier hadn't talked about birds at all, only about flowers. Why didn't he just say he was going to teach us something about bees and flowers? Even though I learned nothing, I was afraid and ashamed that I didn't catch the apparent meaning of the birds and bees stuff. To avoid the shame, I wasn't about to talk to Mom or Dad. Fear of ridicule and the threat of being thought "slow" kept me from asking anyone questions.

Not until I overcame the fear of my mother catching me in Riley Cox's Pool Room did I learn that there was a different language available to learn about the birds and bees. The pool-shooting, poker-playing crowd in Cox's Pool Room didn't use botanical language like Mr. Frazier. They didn't seem to know or care much about stamens and pistils. Instead, they talked about people; people like Mike and Ike; people you could laugh at. Mr. Frazier didn't laugh much. Pool room regulars had a way of speaking that seemed to be easier to understand. Or maybe I was just older and wiser at 14 than at 12.

I digress.

Back to the entomologist on the radio. As he ended the interview with a plea for more accurate use of language, I thought maybe he was going to chastise teachers like Mr. Frazier for using words in the way politicians do, to conceal rather reveal truth.

I was wrong. Instead, he begged, "Please, do not call plants weeds and never refer to insects as bugs. Weeds are still flowering plants even though they grow where you don't want them." He continued his rant about insects deserving better treatment than being associated with negative ideas as in "Stop bugging me."

A comparison of Mr. Frazier's dance around words and a contemporary entomologist's longing for a taboo against certain words with the dialect of the pool room, I think I understand Jesus' preference for the straight forward language of the underclass and Luther's passion for getting the Bible into the language of ordinary people.