This Is My Stop

No adult Sunday school this morning, our combined Sunday school and Confirmation class is attending the annual parish meeting. Battin Hall, between services, with a nice continental breakfast.

We’ll resume our wonderful class next Sunday morning.

Meantime, my PreLent Retreat that is more mental than physical. That is to say, I’m not walking down front to sit by the Bay and read and contemplate, and swat mosquitos, wave gnats away and brush ants off, or wandering around monastery grounds and cemeteries to note old grave dates as I did last summer. natus. ingressus. obiit. Yet, like those Retreats, most of this Retreat is inside, within me, not the physical part, though last summer I made a point of heavy exertion at the first and third retreats. 

But here I am. Have to keep the mind working. Doing nothing mental leads down, down, way, way down. What brings that on? Maybe the season: with Longfellow, The day is cold and dark and dreary. But more than the sky is gray. Eight or nine years ago I visited Miss Virginia Parker, our beloved eighth grade teacher from Cove School, in hospital. For years in the Old Time she was pianist at St. Thomas by the Sea Episcopal Church, Laguna Beach; so where she had been my teacher, I had become her priest. When I walked into her hospital room and told her who I was she stared at me and exclaimed, “Carroll Weller! You had the most beautiful black hair.” Yep, more than the sky is gray. Gray? The clouds are white. A couple years later I scattered her ashes upon the sea. VP no longer exists except in memories of those who adored her. CW no longer exists and FrT is old and retired, and the day is cold and ... who's next? What’s wrong? First a Ford drives away. Then a Volvo. And -- "she's all grown up" -- another Volvo. My children are grown and gone and the hands on my grandfather clock tick only clockwise. See, this is what my PreLent Retreat is meant to counter, but here I posture, typing my way down into the cellar.

Need a change. I do not like the part of life where my children are grown and gone, I loved it noisy, “Daddy, pick-a-me-up, Daddy, read us a bedtime story. Daddy, tell us about when you were a boy. Granddaddy, I love you just like you were my own daddy. Granddaddy, tomorrow's Sunday, we forgot to change the hymn board. Papa, pick-a-me-up. Papa, can we go to the park? Papa, can I stay at your house tonight? Papa, come get me.” A child is a person who grows through your life on their way to becoming an adult, but I’m not getting used to this, the fog is getting thicker, what's out there? Five short blasts. And I didn’t know the Bay could be so flat or the sky so white. Or the trees so still. Five short, rapid blasts.

Remembering. Long years ago, it must have been during WWII or just after, a Superman Comic, probably read while crouched in Coopers' dumpster. This was Superman. Not Captain Marvel or Don Winslow, U.S. Coast Guard. Superman. In the Superman story there was a time problem that could not be solved. But dashing into the nearest phone booth to change and bursting out as Superman, our hero fashioned a long, heavy chain, wrapped it around the earth, flew faster than a speeding bullet out into space where, more powerful than a locomotive, he pulled on the chain, pulled and pulled and tugged and tugged and tugged until the earth ground to a stop, and then slowly began to turn in the opposite direction, and time along with it. Would you go there? How far back would you go before you told Superman to start time and life and the world turning clockwise again?

... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. It doesn’t say Happiness is a right, it says the pursuit of it. Whoever said you are responsible for your own happiness had it right, I think I'll go back and get mine, I know right where I left it. Nobody can do it for you, not even children except while they are passing through, and even then it's not the children making you happy; rather, it's your excruciatingly intense doting love for them. If Superman were turning life, time, world and clock back for me right now, where would I tell him “stop”? I’m thinking. Like Emily Webb Gibbs in Our Town, I'm thinking of an ordinary day. It's May 1990 and I’m just finishing my baccalaureate address for Tassy’s AHS graduating class. I'm just finishing, and these graduating seniors whom I love so dearly are still laughing at my kidding them about the aspirations expressed in their class prophecy. It's May 1990.  

Stop, Superman. I’m getting off here. 

This is my stop. This is where I change.

Worlds.

TCW