I got the idea to praise these outstanding local institutions by reading this delightful Ann Patchett essay in the New York Times just before Stuart and I set off this summer for Petoskey, MI.

Jessilyn Norcross

Following the places named in the Times article, we visited McLean & Eakin Booksellers shop, and there met the new co-owner Jessilyn Norcross, and her wonderful staff. Not only did we buy books about by and about Hemingway and the Michigan North Country, we also got “insider” tips on what to see, eat, and do in the area. Our journey was made twice as delightful by a visit to a thriving independent bookstore. The store gives back to its own community in very creative ways, benefiting local schools and libraries, as the YouTube below illustrates.

These two told told us about Tom's Mom's Cookies and lots more!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oORqypcVLxw&fs=1&hl=en_US]

But back to my own community, where there are other newspapers, bookstores, and public libraries to celebrate. Even though I get much of my news from online sources and NPR, I still subscribe to The Kalamazoo Gazette. Why? Because I believe that local communities need local newspapers. They provide a forum for democratic conversation and commonly-shared information. And they can do much good by focusing the spotlight on community needs, local politics, and local perspectives on the national scene.

They also can foster writers and workshops and a host of other issues I care about. I became a memoir writer because of this Kalamazoo Gazette community literary awards competition, where I won prizes in the adult memoir category in 2007 for “The Fresh Air Girl,” 2008 for “Daddy’s Girl,” and 2009 for “My Mother’s Pulpit.” I enjoyed going to the Portage District Library to accept the awards because the room was full of people who love to read and write, and I especially enjoyed seeing children and teenagers and MFA program students reading their work. Fantastic community relations, Kalamazoo Gazette! I also enjoy the Kalamazoo Public Library where I can browse, use a study room, and listen to local writers (so many wonderful ones) read from their work.

The Community Literary Awards brings all three of these institutions together. The newspaper partners with the local libraries and four independent bookstores (Bookbug a bookstore just for kids, Kazoo Books, Lowry’s Books, and the Michigan News Agency) in giving out these awards. All of these stores contribute so much to the literacy and economy of western Michigan. If you live anywhere close by, get thee to one or more of them! And buy!

Now, please comment below to add other local newspapers, public libraries, and independent bookstores you love and endorse. Let’s show our appreciation here and help to make our communities stronger.  Better yet, tell a story about how one of these three institutions changed your life.

Harvest is a good theme for all summers, but perhaps especially for the summer of 2009 in our lives. We celebrated 40 years of marriage and reflected on what we learned here. We helped prepare both of our children for their weddings, and now we are only a week away from the celebration of Anthony and Chelsea and only eight months away from the date Kate and Nik have set, May 1. Weddings celebrate the harvest of investments families and friends have made in their children and in the hope of future generations.

Institutions enjoy harvest seasons also. At Goshen College, where Stuart and I served together for 28 years, and where I was president for the last 8 of those years, harvest comes twice a year–at graduation in May and in the welcoming of the new class in August. The new “crop” of students at GC was large and enthusiastic this year to the delight of many.

President Jim Brenneman’s wonderful opening convocation address, which you can read here, focused on Healing the World Peace by Peace. President Brenneman has embraced the core values of Christ-Centered, Global Citizens, Compassionate Peacemakers, Passionate Learners, and Servant Leaders that the community adopted in 2002, four years before he arrived. Each president and administration gets the opportunity to start over–and needs to–but when some of the work deepens and grows from generation to generation,the fruit harvested deserves to be called heirloom. The core values simply named what Goshen College had been at its best in the previous century. They live on because the college continues to need, value, nurture, and support them.

Some of the joy seeds we tried to spread fell on rocky soil during the eight years of my presidency, 1996-2004. But a few other seeds hit pay dirt and continue to prosper and grow year after year. One tradition I especially loved was the applause tunnel. Here is the 2009 applause tunnel:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4FvBwD8IMA&hl=en&fs=1&]

Below is another Goshen College video. This one celebrates the love of soccer and soccer teams at GC. I love the blend of urban and rural (rapper next to a corn field), the willingness to claim peacemaker identity even on the field of “battle,” and the connection between music,  sports, and the “5 cores”–the five core values: May each new generation harvest them with as much creativity as the one now filling the residence halls, classrooms, and green spaces of Goshen College.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70hkaOCFq8M&hl=en&fs=1&]

Touchstones

By

Lanie Tankard

I am holding in my hand a rusty key. No door does it open, but the mere touch against my palm unlocks a flood. Strange how memories descend unbidden.

At the top of this key is a six-sided hole through which I put string to wear around my neck. The bottom of the key has no teeth to toss the tumblers in a lock, however. It bends instead at a right angle encompassing another hole, this one square. That opening fit the bolts on my roller skates so I could tighten them around the underside of my saddle oxfords.

Then, once the straps were buckled around my toes and ankles, those gray metal skates were ready to roll down Selwyn Road. My six-year-old legs pushed first one and then the other forward — up, up, up that long ribbon of sidewalk between the postage-stamp lawns and narrow grassy strips dotted with maple trees next to the street.

Rolling like a river, I’d cruise until the toe of a skate caught one of the cement slabs forced upward by expanding tree roots, flinging me rapidly downward onto my knees and taking the wind out of my sails. Tears trickled across my freckled cheeks while blood oozed down toward my bobby socks. I tottered home a sadder but no wiser girl, though, for I would be out there the next day after school, my knees painted Mercurochrome red and my skates ready to spin again.

That powerful panorama from my formative years popped up on the Magic 8 Ball of my memories all because I held an old rusty key in my hand. The physical reality of a touchstone can have a powerful effect on our buried images.

Originally, “touchstone” referred to a stone that left a mark, like chalk. What remained behind was a representation, a reminder. It also meant a stone tablet (slate, for example) upon which a mark is left by softer metals. The word is defined as “a standard by which something is judged” and has thus come to mean an object we can touch that brings up a memory associated with it, akin to a memento.

A character named Touchstone in the role of the court fool appeared in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, constantly clowning, perhaps underlining the capricious nature of memories. A famous monologue from that same play may shed light on the role of touchstones in helping us recall earlier stages of our lives:

“All the world’s a stage

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.”

The interesting thing about touchstones is that what might be one for me is not necessarily one for you, although certain collective touchstones when seen or heard can come to represent a time or place for a whole country or generation — to wit, a poster with the image of Che Guevara, or a Beatles record, or a peace symbol. Of course, when these touchstones can literally be touched, they become so powerful that they represent an entire era.

From time to time, my three daughters would bring me boxes of “stuff” they no longer wanted, saying, “Do whatever you want with it — just don’t put it back in my room!” So, to reduce their clutter, I would sort through it all, culling the wheat from the chaff, donating, tossing out, until a certain wooden duck, say, or perhaps a Care Bears purse, or maybe a colorful Mexican pot would trigger a tableau in my mind of that daughter using the item, much like a scene from an old newsreel.

Swiftly and surreptitiously that object would go back into the “save” pile, which would soon overtake the “toss” and “donate” stacks. I felt honor bound as a mother to hold onto such things as if in a time capsule for an adult daughter searching for her identity someday, or a grandchild in the distant future on an archaeological dig for what made the parents tick.

From time to time, a daughter passing through the living room or den might spy one of these items I had cleverly woven into the interior decorating and pause.

“Didn’t I throw that out…?” she’d start to say, but then, shrugging her shoulders, move on.

Yet can we really select touchstones for another? While there are definite commonalities, there are also individualities — that Rosebud quality underscored by the classic movie “Citizen Kane.”

Indeed, I still yearn for the black cast-iron trivet given to me as a small child by Aunt Mary and Uncle Fred. It featured sheep jumping over a fence, with the words “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” above them. My father had attached the trivet to a small wall lamp and hung it as a nightlight in my bedroom. Every evening of my childhood, I fell asleep looking at those words in the dim afterglow of the bulb after my mother tucked me in. When I was at college, my parents passed the lamp on to my young nephew. One day when he was older, I asked my sister if she still had the lamp, but she said she had sold it at a garage sale.

Was that the point at which the trivet became a touchstone for me, when I could no longer physically touch it except in my memories? Is an inaccessible object a touchstone? I’ll always wonder, I suppose, what memories might be unlocked if I found it. I’ve combed eBay with no luck. Jorge Luis Borges speculates through a short story in his book Ficciones that things  “lose their detail when people forget them.” The loss of that trivet hasn’t erased my memory of it, but Borges suggests that the excavation of old objects allows us “to question and even to modify the past, which nowadays is no less malleable or obedient than the future.”

Recently I sent a book to a friend who had just given birth to her second baby. I love to help stock the libraries of newborns, to enable them to discover the joy of reading. When I received the thank you note, I cried. The mother said her daughter would definitely treasure the book because it was the only one she now owned. Their house had burned down three days before my gift arrived, and they lost everything, even their beloved dog. The parents and the two little girls were not hurt, thank goodness, but I couldn’t help thinking about all those touchstones. How does a person recreate the tactile reminders of a life lived?

When I turn the well-worn pages of my copy of Rachel Field’s Prayer for a Child, I am on my mother’s lap again. If I could find Evelyn Scott’s The Fourteen Bears in Summer and Winter, a book that I checked out of the library almost every other week to read to our three girls, I would have a daughter on my mind’s lap for sure. I could probably find electronic versions of these classics to download, but the tactile nature of books is important to me in my reading. The adult is always searching for the child still within, as well as reminders that the person’s own adult children were actually smaller at one time. Touch plays a major role in accessing our inner selves.

But so do all the senses. If I sit down and try to recall with clarity the summer of 1954 in my life, I can likely dredge up vague events that probably occurred. Yet if I chance upon a black-and-white photo of a blond short-haired girl sitting in a blow-up wading pool with a friend on a warm Cleveland afternoon, it is not the contact of the picture on my hand that brings a rush of memories but rather the sight of the image on the paper that does. I can feel the water against my legs and the concrete driveway underneath the pool’s thin plastic bottom. I can see Mrs. Kirby’s laundry hanging on the clothesline next door, and my mother coming down the back steps with a couple of Brown Cows for us to drink.

I can hear the bubbles I blew through the straw in that root beer float as we tried to outdo each other with the biggest mound. I can taste the cool liquid going down my throat, and feel the ice crystals in the vanilla ice cream against my tongue.

So a touchstone may not need to be felt — merely seen, or heard, or tasted, or smelled, perhaps. What if you don’t have a touchstone? What if your house burns down? How, then, will you ever access all those memories? Through memoir. If you write it, they will come. Touchstones simply speed up the process. They’re not a requirement.

But still . . . if you should happen upon an old rusty skate key, oh what a flood of skinned knees it will unlock in your mind.

#

©Elaine F. Tankard                               August 2009

You wish you had time now to organize your pictures, mow the yard, sit on the deck, kick back and watch the hummingbirds before you need to head back to work?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TNP1oCSUv8&hl=en&fs=1&]

Well, what if you actually dispensed with the cruise, the airports, and the souvenirs–and spent your vacation watching the hummingbirds at home?  What if you tried to see hummingbirds the way Emily Dickinson, who seldom left her house in Amherst, MA, saw them? Here’s her famous poem:

Within my Garden, rides a Bird
Upon a single Wheel —
Whose spokes a dizzy Music make
As ’twere a travelling Mill —

He never stops, but slackens
Above the Ripest Rose —
Partakes without alighting
And praises as he goes,

Till every spice is tasted —
And then his Fairy Gig
Reels in remoter atmospheres —
And I rejoin my Dog,

And He and I, perplex us
If positive, ’twere we —
Or bore the Garden in the Brain
This Curiosity —

But He, the best Logician,
Refers my clumsy eye —
To just vibrating Blossoms!
An Exquisite Reply!

What if you saw the sky above you every night and day–your own azure sky–the way Van Gogh saw the starry night and wavy sky over wheat fields? Could the familiar become unfamiliar to you? Could you live intensely in the present? Could you become truly grateful for what you have?

Do you think you could discover the exotic right in your own home and community? To make it more challenging, what if you decided to limit your spending to no more than $25/day? You would save lots of money, reduce your carbon footprint, and increase your creativity within limits you set for yourself.

Stuart and I have done exactly this in the last three days. Not only have we watched the hummingbirds, we have also biked 12-15 miles every day, exploring familiar and unfamiliar paths.

Here are eight tips from our three-day experience:

1. Start with a set of feelings you want to experience, a vision of memories you want to create. For example, you might want to feel healthy and fit and decide to eat really well and focus on fresh, local produce. Or you might want to feel inspired and therefore focus on the arts and museums in your local area. Or you might do physically challenging things. Conversely, you might seek rest above all else. You might want to read the stack of books next to your bed. Watch movies. Make love. Your feelings and your vision can be located in the body, mind, and/or spirit. A great vacation does all three.

2. Make a list of options.  Use the research and suggestions of other people.  Here is a great link with 37 more ideas from Super Eco. More tips here from Consumer Reports. And below is the first staycation book! Just click on the image to order it.

3. Decide which of the options are essential and which are not.  Use the feeling/memory test (#1 above) to decide which ones come closest to creating your ideal experience.

4. Go to some places you have never been before as well as some of your favorite places.

5. Set a budget and have fun deciding the best way to spend the money. Don’t be a slave to the budget if something wonderful costs more and you can afford it. Think ahead, yet expect to be spontaneous when opportunity arises.

6. It’s OK to do some projects around the house–if they will help you accomplish goal #1.

7. Get eight hours of sleep every night. If you wake up early, get up and do something on your list. Take a nap later.

8. Share your experiences with others the way you enjoy best–conversations with neighbors, strangers, Facebook, Twitter. Take pictures as though you were seeing the familiar anew.

As Stuart and I prepared for our staycation last weekend, I made a list of activities on a piece of scratch paper. Inside, I had a vision for rest and for adventure close to home. I wanted to feel leaner and fitter. I wanted to feel connected to God and to Stuart through awareness and attention, listening, seeing, hearing the small miracles all around me.

I knew we would get our weekly share of fresh produce in the middle of our staycation, so preparing it and enjoying it together was part of the goal:

This week we got local cherries, blueberries, squash, pepper, onion, and wax beans.

We also wanted to get to know Kalamazoo better. We explored the Kal-Haven Trail, an old favorite:

And we rode our bikes the other way, too, on the Kalamazoo River Valley Trail to downtown Kalamazoo and the wonderful Water Street Coffee Joint for a delicious lunch:

Here’s a short slideshow that describes all of yesterday’s adventures, complete with captions.

The weather all three days was perfect for biking, but today was warmer than Monday and Tuesday, so we decided to bike for breakfast instead of lunch or dinner. We made Rykse’s on Stadium Drive our destination. We rode on some new streets (for us), past corn and bean fields. I ordered a “Lite” breakfast and then laughed–a cheese omelet with homemade whole wheat toast for $4.69.  Had I ordered the famous cinnamon roll instead of the toast–that would have been a “lite” breakfast also. Stuart ordered eggs, sausage, and succumbed to the gigantic, fresh out of the oven, cinnamon roll–all for $5.49. I gladly helped him eat the roll.

And how wonderful to be able to park our bikes outside the door without needing to lock them down!

Today’s Huffington Post carries a story by Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, praising Kalamazoo for its commitment to the arts. I wanted to take advantage of our fabulous artistic community in these three days. The Georgia O’Keefe exhibit at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art will have to be experienced another time. However, in a few minutes I will drive down to the Kalamazoo Public Library to hear my writer friend Bonnie Jo Campbell read from her new book American Salvage. which recently received a laudatory review in the Chicago Tribune here.

When I get back home, there will be time to finish another blog, take a walk in the full-moon-light, and thank God for what Virginia Woolf once described as “three perfect pearls”–three days of renewal and wonder.

Some girls want ponies. Some want Barbies. Some are generous enough to think of others first, asking for world peace or food for the hungry. Others go straight for a million dollars. I would not have asked for any of those.

The thing I longed for was magic. All the other kids seemed to have it. At the first recess of the day lots of conversations began with “Did you see. . . .?”  And everyone else jumped in to share their impressions of what they saw the night before.

Lunch boxes, pencil cases, coloring books, cereal boxes, not to mention toy pistols, cowboy hats, holsters, dolls, and trucks–all these essential items of a child going to public school in the 1950′s–carried pictures of The Lone Ranger, Tonto, Annie Oakley, Dragnet, Gunsmoke, I Love Lucy. The coolest kids always had a new item to show off or a new story to tell from last night’s broadcasts. They even acted out the Alpo commercials at recess! They all had television at home.

Television. I wanted one so much I dreamed we had one in the cellar. When I woke up, I bolted out of bed and down to flights of wooden stairs, hoping that the vivid picture of a square wooden box with a grey-glass screen in front and rabbit ears on top was real. I traveled through all three levels of the dark, damp cellar, from concrete floor to hand-dug one, each level proving less and less likely material for a dream-come-true. I slowly came back upstairs to the kitchen and joined the family for breakfast, never telling anyone about my burst bubble.

My grandpa was a widowerer who lived alone–with a television in the living room! My brother and I begged to go to his house. When my parents took the train to Madison Square Garden to hear Billy Graham, we got to go to Grandpa’s house and watched the Lone Ranger. Oh bliss! We may have watched the Graham crusade also, but if we did, I don’t remember it nearly as well as that opening sequence with the William Tell Overture.

Not having a tv set was so much of a social handicap that I temporarily turned into a female peeping Tom. We had four near-by neighbors.  Two were Mennonite and, like us, had no television. Two were not. I found myself looking for excuses to go to their houses. I watched The Mouseketeers  at the George household, and by a stroke of amazing luck, I was sitting in the Wideman livingroom when this show was broadcast, perhaps the most famous “I Love Lucy” episode of all time. Oh how we laughed.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw0D-Rv_vro&hl=en&fs=1&]

Later in life, as I discovered friends who talked more about books, music, and film than about television, I looked back on my deprivation with something akin to gratitude. I spent long hours reading, enjoying the outdoors, playing with friends and family, and trying out my imagination.

All that longing found an object eventually. And even when I was a television-starved ten-year-old, God answered my prayers with the opportunity to see one really great show–Lucy stomping the grapes!

What role has television played in your life?  Do you watch more or less than you did as a child?

Like many explanations of my most anomalous behaviors, this one goes back to being Mennonite. And a little geeky (meaning bookish–not a math whiz!) on top of that.

I like to joke that I sang alto to the Beatles. And the Mamas and the Papas. And Simon and Garfunkel and Joan Baez and John Prine and even Janis Joplin. That’s about as much 60′s music as I remember. And after the 70′s I hardly paid attention at all to pop and rock.

I’ve been spending a portion of my late 50′s and early 60′s “making up for the sobriety of my youth,” to quote Jenny Joseph’s “When I Am an Old Woman.” Stuart and I took dance classes for two years, trying to find a little rhythm and erase some memories of sitting on the sidelines in gym class as our classmates do-si-doed with their partners.

So, when I learned that Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and John Mellencamp were doing a 4th of July concert in South Bend this year, I had to act. We were among the 10,000 who purchased tickets.

My FaceBook friends have asked me, “how was it”?

I wish I could give you details on who was “covering” which songs and how they differed from 100 other versions in 100 other settings. Sorry. Can’t do it.

I noticed that the short review in the South Bend Tribune included no musical information either. But you can see some pictures and even catch a little video here.

What I enjoyed most was inching my way toward the stage, feeling the beat grab my heart and almost rip it out of my chest, and snagging a few pictures. Here’s one of Bob Dylan:

When Dylan sang one of the few songs I recognized, “Just Like a Woman” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” it was thrilling to sway along with the crowd. For once, I let myself feel like a member of my own generation enjoying music that will last for many more.

It rained most of the evening, but not enough to really dampen spirits. There was both a festive and a nostalgic atmosphere.  Yes, children were turning cartwheels, and yes there were college students, but the average age was probably 45-55, and many hoary heads and a few canes and wheelchairs were interspersed among the crowd.

Like the corn growing a few miles from the stadium, the boomers were aging almost visibly in a setting like this one. Their younger selves hung over the stadium like a cloud. Mellencamp’s new songs are all about death, and Michael Jackson had just died. The country itself no longer seems young.

Those were some of my thoughts. Willie Nelson came on last, and he was the singer whose songs Stuart and I knew best, dating from our grad school days in Austin.  His command of the stage at age 76 served as an antidote to the lingering air of sadness Bob Dylan always invokes in me.

Willie’s songs are old-fashioned narratives. He sang variations close enough to the recorded classics to be recognized but new enough to keep life interesting on the lonesome road again.

We headed home, holding hands, as fireworks burst in the air. Two aging boomers who weren’t at Woodstock, literally or figuratively, not ashamed to seek out their first rock concert.  Even if they did not know the words.

In the summer life is one big bowl of cherries.

If Life is a bowl, then the cherries themselves are the sweet stories cool enough to sweat on a summer day. Cherries are stories that explode inside your mouth, that sustain you in the heat, that build up cravings for the next one. We cherish stories because they turn sunlight and shadow, heat and rain, into food for body and soul.

That’s all I have to say today. Off to eat another cherry and read another story! Here’s to the most succulent of fruits and books in your life.

What’s on your summer reading list?  Any great memoirs? What plump cherries can you share with us? Summertime memories?

Blogging in the red chair.

July 30, 2008, was my 60th birthday, and my son Anthony gave me the wonderful gift of setting up this website. On August 9, 2008, I wrote my first post on 100Memoirs.com. Today, ten months later, I am posting #100.  Beginning in January I began to be active on fb, which has broadened the readership of this blog.  Maybe Twitter will do the same if I can get to the next step of where to do my updates, how to make tiny URLs, and all the other little tricks of the trade.

I have not reviewed 100 memoirs yet, partly because the readers seem to enjoy a different mix of reviews, commentary, and mini-memoir. Following the advice of readers from the last post, however, I will try to start a list on the home page, building to 100 memoirs eventually.

I would never have imagined how much fun blogging would be. Thank you, readers, for your comments, critiques,  and words of encouragement. I thrive on them!

As Paul Newman might say, “This was a failure to communicate.” I thought I was bringing the value of simplicity and economy to the process.  My professor saw only shoddy thinking or academic sloth.

I named this blog 100 memoirs because of the advice given by Heather Sellers in Chapter by Chapter to read 100 books in the genre you aspire to. I have several thousand books in my basement library, collected over many years of being an English professor and avid reader.  I knew I had read 50-100 autobiographies and biographies. But I began buying new ones.  My future daughter-in-law works in the publishing industry, so new memoir began pouring in. Thanks, Chelsea!

So the question now is.  Which ones are best?  If reading forms the mind, and if reading takes precious time, then surely one wants to read the best 100 memoirs and not just 100 memoirs!?

When a form becomes popular enough long enough, a canon emerges. That may be happening in the memoir genre right now.  Perhaps you and I can contribute to that process by defining what we admire most and selecting memoirs that fit those criteria.  Or, we could flip the process by naming the books and then describing what makes them great. More and more courses are being taught about autobiography and memoir. Professors are creating reading lists and these eventually become the canon.

The beautiful sentences contest taught me that asking for the best without describing the criteria can produce frustration.  So let’s start with criteria.

I will throw out one criterion and give an example. Then I hope you will follow with your own examples or another criterion.

Criterion:  Authentic voice.  Agents and publishers love this word. And I do too. Voice on the surface looks like personality.  For example, Julia Childs’ memoir of her years in Paris and America as she built her career sounds just like her distinctive voice on the air–a little breathless and patrician without sounding pedantic.

Haven Kimmel’s voice in her breakthrough memoir Zippy is down home and mystical and amused (therefore amusing).

Classic memoirs earn their status in part because of the unique voice of the author. Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, for example, takes you far, fast. You move with him through the quotidian details of the day with energy.  When he is hungry, his readers are also. He gets you to the destination rapidly, but your senses are more alive than if you had lingered for hours on the path.

Natalie Goldberg’s newest book on memoir contains a list of her favorite memoirs at the end.  Some Amazon reviewers have made lists of their best ones.  I would like to create my own here. But I need your help. I may also need Anthony’s help with the technology.  I think I need a list on the home page of this website. That way, readers can see it emerge.  There are books I reviewed in the blog that I would not put on the list of 100 best. And there are many on other people’s lists that I have not yet read.  There are also lots of books I have read but not reviewed.

Are such lists helpful to you? Would you like to see a list on the home page?

Is authentic voice a useful criterion for selecting high quality memoir?

What one memoir (or other book)  stands out for you because of the voice of the author?

Forrest Church is former Idaho Senator Frank Church’s son. He chose ministry over politics in order to become his own person. Church begins the book by telling us that love and death have been the subjects of almost all his sermons at All Souls Unitarian Church–even before he got cancer. When he was 19, his closest friend at Stanford died, leaving him bereft and changed forever.  This death taught him that “We cannot protect love from death. But by giving away our hearts, we can protect our lives from the death of love.”

When the doctor gave Church his recent cancer diagnosis, what surprised him most was the immediate acceptance he felt facing death.  He had no unfinished business.  I hope you can listen and watch him on a Religion and Ethics Newsweekly broadcast last October as he talks to Bob Abernethy about both his own acceptance and his wife and family’s rejection of that acceptance.

Church’s themes are repeated in this book many times. They illustrate the genius of simplicity, the kind that lies on the far side of complexity, and his approaching death seems to have boiled down even that simplicity into the most exquisite sauce. Like a fine chef’s reduction, each chapter of this book returns to what Church calls his mantra:

• love what we have
• do what we can
• be who we are

Church is a Christian Universalist and therefore uses the life and teachings of Jesus as a framework for his theology.  As a Mennonite, I appreciate this emphasis, which helps me to see the universal truths of my own tradition.

Forrest Church has come into my own life through an interesting set of “coincidences.”

• Our family spent Christmas eve of 2007 in New York and chose to attend the All Souls Christmas Eve Service before any of us had we ever heard of Forrest Church.  We heard him give the now-famous closing prayer (read it here) of the service, which is included in this memoir as the last chapter.
• Our son Anthony was with us and also heard the prayer.
• A few weeks later, he was searching on Match.com and noticed a young woman who was an active member of All Souls
• On Sept. 12 of this year, almost two years later, he and Chelsea will marry–at All Souls
• I ordered Church’s memoir because of Chelsea’s admiration of her minister and my appreciation for her as we welcome her into our family

Anthony and Chelsea

None of us, including Forrest Church, know the time when death will come.  But all of us can learn from him how to prepare–by loving what we have, doing what we can, and being who we are. Only the love we gave away will remain behind.  The motto on the wall of my childhood farmhouse home said it in a more Mennonite way:  “Only one life, ’twill soon be past.  Only what’s done for Christ will last.”

Next Sunday, May 31, 2009, I hope to hear Forrest Church deliver the sermon at All Souls, something he has not done in a long time.  Anthony and Chelsea will be celebrating their engagement that weekend with friends and family and have invited all of us to attend church with them. Our daughter Kate and her own fiance’ Nik will be there also. Love has already enveloped us this year, and for that we can only respond with gratitude.  What better place to do that than church?

Kate and Nik engagement photo

Chelsea tells us we will need to arrive early in order to be sure to have a seat. Apparently, love attracts a crowd.

Forrest Church does not know that his story has woven itself into a Mennonite family from the midwest. But he already knows that love is the greatest force in the universe.  He has lived this truth all his life–and, having looked into the jaws of death–is living it even more!