A return to childhood's summer

BY DEBRA-LYNN B. HOOK

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

I sat one afternoon recently in the back yard of this house where we've lived 17 years, listening to the sounds of my children wafting through the open window.

I had no interest in joining the three of them in the kitchen, where they were laughing, shrieking and making a mess while concocting homemade peach ice cream from a recipe they got from a book at the library.

I didn't want to ruin the moment by stomping into their space and shouting "Look at this kitchen!"

I also didn't want to tamper with what appeared to be a rare return to childhood.

There have been many summers around this house when scenes like this were plentiful, when my children would individually and collectively make colossal messes while spending hours creating clubs and forts and homemade Popsicles in the kitchen. With no concept of time, space or serious living, they'd ride tire swings until dusk and make up plays and songs and games with marbles until they fell over, exhausted.

There was no shortage of time in these summers of childhood, when days were governed not by dates and commitments but by when the sun rose and set.

Summer was a time of much and plenty and each other.

Of course the summers of childhood don't go on forever. My eldest has spent his last three years, including summers, working at a government job in Washington, D.C., hundreds of miles from home. His sister, a rising senior in college, has likewise spent her summers working, two and three part-time jobs, and traveling with friends. Their younger brother, a high-school senior, has held the occasional odd job, but mostly he has focused his summers on high-school soccer which begins making demands on students as soon as the previous school year ends.

Those languid, barefoot summers when my children rode tire swings into the sunset, were gone.

And then my eldest child announced he was quitting his job and enrolling in graduate school. The gap between his job and school in the fall would be three weeks. Which he wanted to spend with us.

Chris' announcement, that he would be home for half of July and much of August, created a flurry of activity: His sister Emily figured a way to be home, too, so we could all be together. His brother Benjie needed no coaxing to forego a school backpacking trip and soccer practices. My husband and I rearranged already flexible schedules and hurried to secure a cabin for a week along Lake Michigan where we vacationed every summer when the children were young.

Our week at the lakeshore was relaxing.

But it was the two weeks that followed that left the indelible mark.

Surrounded by the familiarity of home and each other, unhindered by work or school or FAFSA forms, our children fell back into ruling their days by who wanted to play what board game in the basement, when. Aided and abetted by parents who look for the return of childhood, too, they started their days with sunrise bike rides, runs and swims together along old familiar trails and waterways. They made bonfires into the twilight, climbed the tree house ladder and rode the zip line in the same back yard where they once kicked the can and caught fireflies.

Who doesn't fantasize about a return to childhood? For two weeks, our children did.

And then it was over. My eldest went back East, where he has a serious girlfriend, and soon, a $50,000 college loan and at least two years of graduate school. My daughter began familiarizing herself with the course load necessary for her last year in college. My youngest child began making his way through the summer reading list required for AP senior English.

We know, meanwhile, what we had this summer, that this summer was rare and a gift -- a summer, that, given the trajectory of our lives may never come again.

Of course, we thought that before this summer.

And look what happened.

Of course, you can never know, when you are beginning a family - and even when you are 25 years into it - what shape your family will take and how events will affect it.

Against the backdrop of these idyllic weeks, as my son was taking leave this morning, I asked if he thought he would ever refuse a permanent job because it takes him too far from family.

An ambitious young man who wants to travel the world, he surprised me when he said, "Yes."

A mother who prides herself on never pressuring her adult children to live near home, I surprised myself when I responded, "Thank God."

(Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio, has been writing about family life since 1988 when she was pregnant with the first of her three children. Visit her website at www.debralynnhook.com. Read her blog: debralynn-bloopbloopotter.blogspot.com; email her at dlbhook@yahoo.com , or join her column's Facebook discussion group at Debra-Lynn Hook: Bringing Up Mommy.)

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/08/12/6037530/family-returns-for-a-moment-to.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

i wonder as i wander

Every week, I go to the nearby town of Canton, Ohio, to get water from a spring where hundreds of local folks also get their water.

Today, instead of simply filling my glass jugs and leaving, I thought to explore the area -- a riverfront where I’d often noticed people walking and jogging. 

I pulled around to a parking lot, got out of my car and began to walk the manmade path with everybody else. But then I noticed a path into the forested hills beyond the asphalt. 

And that’s the path I took. 

  

Except for the rough-cut paths and the occasional sawed log, the forest seemed untainted by humans. Chipmunks skittered, unafraid, across the path in front of me. An inordinate number of songbirds flitted from tree to tree, singing as they went. I even saw what appeared to be a wild, abandoned kitten. She seemed no more than six months old. Grey and curled into herself as she was, I thought she was a rabbit.She looked up at me from her ball of fur and scampered into the weeds, too fast for my camera.I was surprised to find nobody else here: The place was so beautiful, so serene, so natural and meandering, one sun-dappled path gently leading to another and another. I felt my pulse slow as I experienced majestic trees and wildflowers guiding me, my camera lens and my hungry soul.

 I meandered back and forth along the many paths, up, up, up into the wildflower-dotted hills as if I were in the true Appalachian mountains of my youth that I long for sometimes. 

I came upon aster red-painted steps leading ever higher into the hills.  

 

 I came upon a stream crossed by a curved wooden bridge.

Still, there was nobody but me to echo and relish the silence. In rare and perhaps longed-for solitude, I walked along the stream and across it. I took more photos, and then down the other side where I saw a large field of lilies. 

As I approached the lilies, I began seeing other manmade structures. I saw an arbor and stone paths, a bench, landscaped flower gardens flowers, a butterfly garden, a bell tower, and the sign, "Canton Gardens." 

I stayed here in this place for an hour or more that day, marveling at the lovely things that can happen when my feet take me where they will. 
~
I delighted in the discoveries I can make when I have no provocation or agenda. 
~
I felt awe, pure, childlike delight and joy at what can happen when I allow myself to wander.

The church youth group transcends religion

By Debra-Lynn B. Hook

Bringing Up Mommy

Special to Tribune News Service

Every Sunday afternoon, my 17-year-old son stops what he’s doing and voluntarily drives to a church up the road to be with a couple dozen of his friends. 

They eat. They play games. They make and serve meals for the hungry. Sometimes they go on extended trips -- most recently to New York, where they spent a week staffing Harlem soup kitchens and Brooklyn food pantries and reflecting on their rapidly evolving world views.

Anybody who has belonged to a Christian church in the past 50 years recognizes this as a church youth group. 

It’s an institution that’s been around since the 1940s when a Presbyterian minister started Young Life to help students learn about Christianity. 

It’s also an institution being labeled, of late, a failure.

“To read books on youth ministry these days, it is hard not to get the sense that this experiment we call youth ministry in the local church has failed,” blogs Dave Wright, coordinator for youth ministry in the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina. “Seventy percent of young people will drop out of church after high school, and only 35 percent will return to regular attendance.”

Other church watchers tag youth groups a failure, because leaders don’t put enough emphasis on religious teaching, because young people are leaving meetings full of pizza instead of Scripture.

“The state of youth ministry is not good,” blogs evangelical seminarian and Christian activist Andy Gill. “We’ve danced around the issue saying it lightly and gently. Or either being in complete denial of it. It’s time to man up and step up. Take on courage, live out our faith and preach the word of God.”

I am admittedly not a minister with a vested interest in church growth, nor an evangelical Christian, nor even an official member of a church. I am merely the parent of a teen-ager living in an age of mixed moral messages, far-flung extended family support and religious schism, in a culture where discussion of values inside the public-school classroom can get you in trouble with the law.

And I see my son’s youth group as a godsend. 

Within my son's group, two meetings a month are devoted to fun events like broom ball or other games, while two are devoted to service projects and attendant opportunities for reflective conversation. Values are understood explicitly because they are supported during group interactions. They are understood implicitly because the group meets under a church roof. As for religion, students take turns leading a prayer at the end of each meeting. A couple of times a year, the pastor visits the group to talk about such heady matters as sexuality.

Parent co-leader Gayle Wall, a teacher by profession and mother of one of the students, believes the secret to running a successful youth group is listening to what the kids say they want.

“We had a planning meeting, and they told us they did not want religion, religion, religion,” says Ms. Wall. “They wanted fun and service work.”

A good youth group fills a niche not filled by school or soccer or the school choir. And if learning to give to others is the only takeaway, in fact, Ms. Wall says she’s done her job.

“If cutting out a time slot for service in their lives --- if  that’s a part of their lives for the rest of our their lives -- then we accomplished something,” she says.

Clearly, I recognize that my son’s youth group under the auspices of the progressive-leaning United Church of Christ might not share the same mission as all churches. In a recent online survey conducted by the conservative National Center for Family-Integrated Churches, 55 percent of parent respondents said they were concerned that youth ministry doesn’t properly train “mature believers.” 

I meanwhile believe we are throwing the baby out with the bath water when we fail to recognize that church youth groups have more to offer than the future promise of religious affiliation.

This past Sunday, students who traveled on this latest mission trip to New York led services at the UCC church. Students played piano and sang Michael Jackson lyrics, "It don’t matter if you’re black or white” to the mostly white congregation. Students stood, one by one, and spoke of where they saw the face of Christ during their trip.

A few students spoke at length about their experiences, among them 18-year-old Sandra Creech, a graduating senior raised in our small college town in the Midwest, whose work in inner-city New York was providing child care for the toddlers of incarcerated parents. 

Based on statistics, Sandra may not step foot in a church again after this last youth-group gathering. 

Based on another set of statistics, the children she tended could end up in prison like their parents. 

They included a 2-year-old boy, who spent his time with Sandra feeding her pretend soup, who Sandra said "liked to be held and to wrap his entire hand around my one finger and lead me around the room,” and who transformed Sandra in the process.

“I realized on this trip, through this experience, with this youth group, why God has us help others. It isn’t to change the one huge world that he created, but rather to change all the billions of individual little worlds that exist for all of us,” said Sandra. “The future isn’t life. Today is life. Right now, the moments we are living and breathing in -- these are real and tangible, and the future is all speculation. Changing this child’s today, by making him laugh and smile, was indeed changing his life. By making him happy I didn’t change the world, but maybe I changed his world.”

The same could be said for church youth groups. The future for our teen-agers’ religious affinity is speculation. Today is life. Changing a young person’s today is indeed changing her life.

--Journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio, has been writing about family life since 1988 when she was pregnant with the first of her three children. Her blog is http://www.debralynn-bloopbloopotter.blogspot.com. Her web site is www.debralynnhook.com. E-mails are welcome at dlbhook@yahoo.com.

Remembering Mama on Martin Luther King, Junior’s birthday

Mama at a family gathering in Greenville, S.C., circa 1961,
with three of her four girls and possibly pregnant
with sister Kimmie.
 I'm on the right.

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Junior’s birthday today, thoughts turn to my mother whose compassion for the oppressed came from a place of knowing, too.

This knowing was wrought, first, by birth. Born Catholic and half-Lebanese as she was in the deep, intolerant South, the birthright of her and her family was not nearly what African-Americans were suffering at the time. But there was enough shared commonality to provoke her Uncle Jamile to secretly buy up land to start three black Catholic churches in South Carolina, one of them in my mother’s hometown of Greenville, S.C. 

There was another important piece that shaped my mother's identity as I remember it. That was her mother. Orphaned at a young age by an abusive mother, my mother's mother, my grandmother Essie, was a mean and bitter woman. Abusive in every way, jealous of my mother’s striking Sophia Loren beauty and a childhood she never got to claim for herself, Essie beat my mother and belittled her. “Shut up, you can’t sing,” she would tell my mother when she tried. She forced her to clean and cook and tend her sisters and brother beyond the normal capacity of a sibling and left her with claw marks Mama tried to hide under her Catholic school uniform. Though I did once see Essie throw a pimento cheese carton at my Aunt Cathy’s head and I certainly experienced her stomping through her house like a grizzly on the hunt, I never  experienced a pointblank measure of the effects of her behavior until one day when I was 30 and my mother 50. My mother said something in my grandmother’s presence that seemed benign. My grandmother startled both of us, wheeling around to my mother and with a shriek and eyes I can only describe as evil, said, “You better shut your ugly mouth, Missy.” I watched my 50-year-old mother shrink before my eyes that day to the stature of a frightened little girl. “Yes, ma’am,” my mother said, her head bent, her eyes downcast with what I can only imagine was fear. It wasn’t so overt as a skillet across the head like my mother said she used to experience. But it was enough for me to see. 

As a young mother in the early 1960s with four children by the age of 26 and an oppressive marriage, my mother dug her heels into the proper Southern culture of the times. Unhappy as I now know she was, she dressed the part and looked the part and seemed the part outwardly, taking us to extended family gatherings and signing up to be our Girl Scout leader. She paid for swim lessons and made Christmas cookies.

Cultural Catholics, we attended Catholic school and Mass on Sunday. We belonged to the white church. But she often hied us away to the black one, St. Anthony’s, the church her uncle started. And here is where I saw my mother’s face lift into radiance. Contrary to what my grandmother tried to tell her, she had a strong, lilting voice locked inside, which she only opened when she was here.

“Faith of our fathers! Living faith! I will be true to thee til death!” she sang.

I have strong memories of my mother’s upturned face when she was at St. Anthony’s, of her singing and shaking hands and giving the peace to her African-American brothers and sisters. Her smile was broad and bright, not tight and controlled or non-existent at home like it often was. This sent me an early, subliminal message -- as did her rage when she heard anybody use the N-word. My mother could cower before Essie. But anybody -- including my Mississippi-born father of whom I think she was afraid -- anybody who used this word got the wrath of my mother. Especially if they uttered it in front of me and my sisters. 

“Don’t you ever use that word in front of my children in this house!” she would scream.

My mother showed no sign of derision or prejudice or fear or low self esteem like she did when she was with other people -- only joy and relief, when she was among African-Americans. She once hired an African-American woman named Velma to babysit for us in the afternoons when we got home from school during the short period of time she worked at the Greenville water company as a secretary. Velma was a large woman with an ample bosom, a damp, perspiring face and a smell I can only describe as musky, which I got to enjoy up close and personal when storms would come on a summer afternoon, when she would take me into her arms and rock me, back and forth, singing gospel songs to comfort me. I loved Velma, as did my mother, and when she died, I went with Mama to Velma’s wood-frame shack where she lived with her husband and children. I remember standing just inside the front room of her house, which was lit only by oil lamps as there was no electricity. The children, many of them, stood huddled on the steps, dark, misshapen steps that led to a dark upstairs that we couldn’t see. The steps, instead of being carpeted, were covered in different kinds of fabric. The family seemed stunned that we had come to visit. I guess white people didn’t go in black people’s houses. But my mama did.

My mother eventually divorced and moved us from South Carolina to New Orleans, the city of falling angels, some call it. For years, she was in bad relationships, suffered from depression and did not always know how to be an adult mother to us. But she found her way to “her people,” with the African-American musicians of New Orleans, many of whom became her friends, And when she was in her 50s, she found a way to go back to school where she earned an advanced nursing degree. She got a job on the psych ward at the infamous, inner-city Charity Hospital, where she tended the poorest of the poor as they lay weeping. She seemed to find as much solace in them as they did her, carrying into her soul their stories of joy and pain and wisdom. And then one day when she was in her late 50s, she found out she was sick. She'd contracted Hepatitis C, from a tainted transfusion she received during cancer surgery 10 years before. She quit her job and sank into a suffering I’d never known before.

Mama, a few years before she died, in her beloved New Orleans.

The stories and images of poverty, depression, isolation and self-medication are too many, too dramatic and too distracting to bring up here. Simply put, my mother didn’t know how to help herself. We didn’t either -- all the way up to the day she died in a Baton Rouge hospital, from burns suffered in an accidental fire. Wrapped like a mummy, intubated and sedated, with 38 percent of her body ravaged with third-degre burns, she fought four days for her life, until one-by-one, her systems shut down, and she died with her daughters singing and praying her to her passing. 

That afternoon after she died, we all went back to her house, where we found a holy card taped on the wall next to her bed. Inscribed with a passage from the Bible, the card said “Weeping may endure the night. But joy cometh in the morning.” 

Suffice it to say that my sisters and I learned compassion of the downtrodden by birthright, too, simply by being our mother’s daughters.

I don’t always get it right. I don’t always have perfect thinking about people who are different than me, in whatever way they are different. But I do understand the dream. And every year, on this day when we at least utter the name, "Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior," I find a way to commemorate that dream. Some years, I gather up the children and drive into inner-city Cleveland to participate in activities there. Other years, I drum in an African drumming group, performing before a church congregation in Kent. This year, I joined the Unitarian-Universalist choir in a song that put to words one of MLK’s sermons. It was a sermon delivered two months before he died, during which he spoke with some measure of premonition of his own death. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_the_drum_major_instinct/

    “If you’re around when I have to meet my day,

    I want you to be able to say 

    That I did try to feed the hungry,

    That I did try to clothe the naked,

    That I tried to serve humanity.”

This was my mother’s legacy, too. 

That she tried. 

That’s all. 

I don’t have to get it perfect either. But I do have to try.