#10. Home Is How You Make It

I spent the morning treating a young man with a painful kidney stone. (Is there any other kind of kidney stone?) He is improving.  Bronchitis season is here, with the smokers being the first wave to fall victim. The  in -house pharmacy is stacked on metal cabinets left somewhere in the abyss of design changes that occurred between post war Viet Nam and IKEA. Nevertheless, we are stocked with the standard of care for these typical maladies, and then some.

The flu vaccine never came because there is no mail delivery since the military left.  But even with no mail, a paramedic was delivered in the recent group of incoming employees, and he has both Navy and urban domestic experience. He will be joining me at the new compound;   maybe I’ll  be there by Thanksgiving.  My holiday plans have never been so vague…but on the other hand, I won’t need to worry about a guest list. We are an instant community here.

Otherwise, this afternoon included the cumbersome, albeit safe, transfer to the airport. Now I’m in the veritable belly of Lufthansa, making dinner choices and declining white wine as if this is something I do any given evening.  There’s a no alcohol policy on the compound, so the context had been temporary misplaced.  I had almost forgotten that part of an international flight. It’s nice to have choices, even if it is to decline.  I’m speeding westward to the land of infinite choices. Westward to America, like so many before me, the tired, poor, and hungry, as well as lots of earlier  direct flights this week of the well fed who paid by credit card. 

I’ve left the compound again. But this time it’s no airport drill. I’m heading to the Tarheel  State, North Carolina, to meet my whole family there and celebrate my mom’s full and meaningful life. It’s pecan season where I grew up, and that means there will be a chill in the air and leaves on the ground. And if you stepped down anywhere, and I mean anywhere, on the rich dark earth where my feet first touched this acreage, your foot would land on a pecan.  Just pick it up, find a way to crack it open (there’s a way to do this right, of course) and taste one on the reasons we were meant to eat food right from God’s earth.

There will be no desert this trip: no Sonoran, my beloved adopted home in Arizona, or the Syrian, my new workplace in northern Iraq. This dirt is the kind that does not run through your fingers or blow in the wind. The terra firma of my home is mostly red clay , with some darker peat , and in combination you can grow whatever you have a taste for.  It’s the kind of dirt that makes a damp clump when you squeeze it in your hands.

This won’t work with desert soil, although you can dig down into the Sonoran and find clumps of something. I learned these white hard spots are called colechee, although no one told me how to spell it. I’m no geologist, but by my best estimation, it’s a cross between a white flour Sunday morning biscuit that went uneaten, and the chalk your third grade teacher used if you’re old enough to have had a blackboard at the front of your classroom instead of something electronic.  This biscuit and chalk mix won’t grow anything, but it’s rocky enough to keep you from planting  fence posts, so you get the day off if that was your plan.

But with the damp, clumping soil I’m flying home to currently, anything that tastes good will grow from it. If you can dream it, find the seed and pull up what’s already propagating there and you’ll have it within the season. You like tomatoes? Just drop a few, and you’ll have what we called volunteers sprouting up before you can grab a stake to keep them straight.  Summer and zucchini squash? You better have recipes ready and friends to give the excess to, or they will take over your garden. (That is a quote from so many people I can’t even assign it to one person.)

But for now, I’m going to land in Frankfurt this evening, and begin my folie with jet lag. It’s an 8 hr layover, with a morning flight over the ocean, at which point my body reverses day for night as we overtake the sun heading westward. Unfortunately, the sun will continue on its timetable as it’s done for, say, eternity, and we will have a mismatch by eight hours when I am firmly on the birth soil. It won’t be the first time I’ve experienced this phenomenon, and I’m certain practice does not help with the outcome.

I will present the words to remember my mother’s life on Sunday. I used the time on the treadmill to find the right combination words in the right order; it’s the best time to think. It might be the only time no one interrupts me in plain sight, as if there is something sacred about a 10 minute pace, not to be broken. There is a meditative element to the repetitive hoof beat, but it’s quite a reach to suggest the sacred hand of God would be involved in a 10 min mile… maybe a lesser angel who’s free at that hour. She wouldn’t even need to hasten very quickly.

But if you’ve read this far, you may want to go ahead and see those words copied below into this post. I’ll present them in the church that she helped charter, before my large family and the members of the small church, many of whom are the people I grew up with there.  Some of these same people are also children of the charter members – our lives forever linked by the goal of our parents to create and grow this church. Those parents, many also passed on now, just wanted the next generation to have a better life, an easier road than they had. The dreams were real, and within reach.

 Wishes of parents are the same everywhere I go. The distance from Iraq is half a world away. One jet lagged initiating day of travel. But the goals of our families are the same, and when I talk to the shopkeepers about their kids, it’s no different.  Safety, health, education, it’s not different for any parent in any country where I have travelled or worked. Three stores on the compound, three dads, and all want something more for their kids than they had, now that they have survived this war.  This was the same for my mom, whose parents came from Budapest, just after World War I, with nothing of material value, but very much survivors.

The title of my mom’s eulogy is “Faith Hope Love and Joy”

Mom   -Mimi-  would be very happy today. She would be happy because all of her family is together, and not only are her children, her children’s spouses, her grandchildren and their spouses and children are here, but also because her church family is here. We have all gathered here in Griffith Baptist Church, which was her second home in Winston-Salem.

We can be certain Mom is smiling today. There was nothing more important to her than family and faith. We know this, because if you shared this church family, you heard many many stories about her children, and if you were her child, you  heard the prep for the next Sunday School lesson teaching.

It’s an enormous task to summarize a full and well lived life in the time I have today. In speaking for my family, it’s impossible to tell you how much we have loved our mom, or how much she has done for each of us. Given this challenge, I hope that you’ll reason with me that what I’m telling you is only a representation of a little lady who was always larger than life for us.

She made something of great value from little or nothing, over and over.  Resourcefulness, motivation and creation were themes throughout her life. The details are in the memories for us who knew and loved her, and these details are the treasures.

Our mother was born in the mountains of West VA to parents who did not speak English as their first language. They had come to America with a dream for a better life and willing to work hard for it. Her family was extremely poor, and with the sudden death of her father at a young age, the outlook was bad. But fate intervened, and she met the young gentleman who would become our father, Danny.

There must have been faith when she met Dan. What else could there have been?

They were just teen agers, with little else but faith to go on,their whole future ahead of them.

There was a world war breaking out across the Atlantic, and before long a young family in the making. There must have been a lot of faith to bring healthy children into the demanding environment of the hills of southern West VA. There were hogs and chickens and a cow to take care of. Dad’s breakfast had to be made at 4am before he headed into the coal mines. A vegetable garden big enough to feed them year round, and her helpers ranged in size from one pint to two pints, and had a tendency to squabble among themselves, from the stories I hear.

But what mom also had was hope. Lots of it, and it apparently sustained her well in these days. And she had the will to succeed. It would be safe to say she was driven. This was a little lady

who was never in neutral, never in reverse. She had faith and she had hope. Her faith and hope gave her an intense goal for

  a better life not only for herself and for those she cared the

most about and that was us, her family. She sacrificed for us. For this we will always owe mom a debt of gratitude.

She sacrificed not just her time, but her own comforts. Her children's needs

came before her own without a thought. Mountain life could be hard; and there were no conveniences to make it easier. But she had faith, and she had hope.

And before long, the family moved to this NC home and with it came the modern

conveniences that suburban living can bring. With it also came two more children to complete the family. Now this

home was really full of love. Faith, hope,and an abundance of love. We had these things in the home she made with dad. Her will to make this a home that we all loved to be in

was her purpose, and she succeeded in a thousand ways. We have memories of trying to fit around the kitchen table to eat. We could not. We have memories of picking up the pecans at this time of year by the bucketfuls. We did. There were Christmases when the presents wouldn’t fit under the tree, and summers trips to High Rock Lake when there was so much food and laughter.  We loved these family gatherings. There were so many people talking at once; I know I never got to complete a thought or sentence on my own – someone would complete it for me. This seemed to happen not just for me, though.

Recipes would be shared, tales would be told, Mom would often break in to “set the record straight” when the tales seemed to leave too much to interpretation. And that would only make the decibel level grow louder among the well fed crowd.

 Mom never had an alarm clock in her life, and never needed one. She just spontaneously was up and working, with the sewing machine going and pots clanging and the washing machine spinning all at once. I never needed an alarm clock either, because of her activities.  

The family was thriving. Mom was also a part of a new beginning with this

church, something that came to define her along with the family she created.

Faith , Hope, and Love

Mom's children, one by one, left the home to continue our education and start

our lives beyond the family home. Mom and Dad could not have been more joyful as each of us found success on our own. Mom never missed an opportunity to tell anyone how proud she was of each one of us, sometimes with great detail. Then, even this joy was exceeded when the next generation began to arrive. I don't know if there was anything that elated her more than those grandkids.

Faith, hope, love, and joy.

To have a life that is so easily identified by these four qualities is a life well lived. To find these qualities in the six of her children and then so clearly repeated again in the next generation is the legacy any person would want to leave behind.

What a generous gift to us all, this legacy. It’s a gift she could not have bought for us if she had saved for it her entire life, but it is valuable beyond measure.

 And we were the so fortunate to have received it,

because it was shared with us every day we were together.

It is a legacy born of selflessness. All she wanted was for us to be happy and to succeed in life. She and dad gave us the home from which to make this possible. It was not just a location; not just a street address. It was a place where the critical objectives were learned that would be the basis for pursuing our own goals. We learned to not back down from a goal, choose battles carefully, and when to tap into that intensity first witnessed in our own mother. It’s the imprint of a successful leader, an organizer, and a caregiver, who just happens to have been the one who raised you.

This was a powerful little lady who embodied faith, hope, love and joy.

We will miss our mom. But by having faith when we need it, or hope; showing

love to one another, or sharing joy, we will know she is still with us.         We will love her always.