Provenance, in Posterity

For someone raised in the church, someone who learned to read on parables and psalms and proverbs, I find myself narrowly conscious of a time before I knew why. Before I knew about God. Or sin. Or mercy. Before I felt any assurance of faith. A little boy, unpretentious and fundamentally simple, surrounded on all sides by walls and doors and people with purpose…

…These walls and doors and people that preceded me were the ramparts and the gateways and the paragons of American Christianity. The very essence of an organized and fortified religion. A steady, but voluntary fellowship of men and women with something in common. Something sacred. What I saw and learned as child, about these walls and doors and people, gave me no reason to pause. If anything, I wanted to be just like them. To be a bulwark. A catalyst. A saint. A credit to the family that raised me.

My mother was the Kentucky daughter of a stern, but upstanding Free Methodist minister. My father, the youngest child of a modest, but influential Free Methodist musician. Almost every branch of our family, from uncles and aunts to grandparents and greater, was dedicated to one providential function or another. Be it drafting a sermon, rehearsing a song, or preparing a feast.

I never did meet the minister. My grandfather. He died in 1976, just a few months before I was born. But I knew my grandmother. And my mother. And they both spoke of a serious man. A man with strong convictions who did not believe, for example, that women should wear jeans. Or that anyone should ever dance. Or drink. And though I have heard tales of his occasional humor and jest, I have no lasting image in my head aside from the one I surmise. That my grandfather, the minister, was a man of uncompromising austerity.

I did, however, meet and learn to revere the musician. My other grandfather. He raised a family in upstate New York and built an indelible reputation as a college professor, teaching voice lessons at a school in Rochester. But I only ever knew of his life in Canada. My grandfather moved his family to the city of Moose Jaw in 1965, well before I was born, taught music at Aldersgate College for almost three decades, and was eventually buried nearby, in 1995, the same year Aldersgate closed its doors.

What I knew of my grandmothers, on either side, was their ingenuity for catering a crowd. Be it flesh and blood or the choirs of angels. They made rhubarb pies and molasses cookies. Fresh bread and pimento cheese. They grew vegetables. Peeled potatoes. And creamed corn. To visit either side of the family was to anticipate the odds of overindulgence. But my grandmothers were also strict. And quick to slap a greedy hand. They could feed a church in a day. Then turn around and do it again. They were the stewards of every polite, Christian appetite.

Whatever nuances I still remember, from the scruffy, yet clean-shaven face of my grandfather to the cozy, reclining chair that my grandmother fell asleep in every night, none of these memories are sufficient enough to account for the longer, fuller lives they led before I had cause to remember. Even to say they were God-fearing, or religious, or traditional, while certainly true, detracts from the intimate relationships they built with their children. My aunts. My uncles. And my parents. I was there when my father fell apart, six weeks after the funeral in 1995. Only one other person ever held me so tight. With unfeigned mourning. I have listened to my mother share dozens and dozens of stories, admirably repeated, about the faithful charity of the woman who raised her.

Never once, in youth or in age, did my parents ever speak to me of their parents as an ill or a burden. And to this end, I have given myself the deferential task of doing the same for them, despite a topic that alludes to our gradual and spiritual parting of minds. For I was, and still am, the child of a tender and forgiving father. A thoughtful and steadfast mother. Two people whose lives, whose journeys have inevitably overlapped my own. And I overlapping theirs. One after the other in posterity.

My mother, the daughter of sobriety and southern hospitality, was something of a starlet genius. An instrumental prodigy. She taught herself to play piano by the age of six. Then the organ. And just about anything else that made sound. Bells and glassware in particular. Everything was a novelty.

A local paper eventually got wind of the little girl who played piano and organ at her father’s church and ran the story. I only remember that article because it was encased in a frame on the wall of my grandmother’s house for years. It was the earliest account of my mother and her impeccable hearing. Her perfect pitch. But the music my mother played was more of an avocation. A hobby. Most of it she played for fun. Even her younger brother, my uncle, picked up a few instruments along the way, building some of them on his own, a craft he would hone for years afterward. So while it was true that my mother had a remarkable gift, she had no intentions of ever trying to be the next Joni Mitchell. Or the second coming of Myra Hess.

What she wanted, my mother, was far less colorful or dramatic. As a little girl, she would often ride along with my grandmother. The cook, the seamstress, and the jack of all trades. When my grandmother went to work at a local nursing home, my mother took a liking to the patients, assisting them in any way that she was allowed. Reading. Feeding. And waiting. Then reading, feeding, and waiting again. My mother saw the entire field of medicine as a public service. A calling of sorts. Not for any of the frills or the public adulation. But a pursuit that would demand the highest measures of her academic resolve. Driving her to the top of her class. And, given the right opportunity, to any college or university in the country. Everything was on the table. Everything but that unexpected offer.

At the age of 16, my mother was recruited by Oakdale Christian Academy, a secondary boarding school in Jackson, Kentucky. She had never thought seriously about Oakdale, but a generous bid made the school hard to ignore. A place she would, in time, cherish and support. They knew about the starlet genius and were willing to give my mother $1,000 per summer if she was willing to play the piano and help to promote the school at a string of Free Methodist campgrounds. For a teenager in 1973, that was a pretty good deal. But as it turned out, my life, my faith, and my restless journey also depended on that arrangement.