On Your Eightieth Birth Anniversary

 

It's another 4th of July.

As we all know so well, the 4th was always your birthday. Born in Holdenville, OK, among the few of your siblings not born at home in Browns, IL.

I've never been to Holdenville. But it's on the list to go to one day and see.

You died just shy of your 47th birthday. 

I'm now past that age by two years. Nathan is the same age you were. We both realized how short that timeframe really is. Neither of us could drink an adult beverage or drive (even as you occasionally let us take a turn steering whatever vehicle we had at the time).

With every milestone or significant family activity, we ask how different it would be if you were alive with us. Beyond the grave awareness or presence is still robed in mysteries to the living. Our personal, or professional achievements? The graduations, marriages, and grandchildren you never met in life? Those grandchildren are now young adults, shaping their life goals and achievements. 

Indulging an active imagination, let's celebrate your 80th birthday. It would be a cookout, at 248 E Franklin or some farmhouse you always wanted.  I'm sure you would insist on minding the grill, as Mom and daughters-in-law prepared the other dishes. Your sons would join you in adult beverages, chatting over your Michelob Ultra with our chosen beers, spirits, or wine on a porch, deck, or the ever-conversational pit of the garage. Talking about our work, seeking your wise counsel, and you reminding us how great retirement will be. The grandchildren would interrupt, anxious to share their lives with you. And you would let great-grandchildren do whatever they wanted to do with you. You gleam with pride as the center of attention, your laughter filling the yard.

Cake and ice cream (maybe homemade) served. Or is it apple pie? We know that whatever place you lived would have some dwarf apple trees.

Evening comes, and with it the fireworks. You probably share your idea of taking a plane and watching all the towns set off their fireworks at dusk, having that birds-eye view.  But whatever local display we would have chosen to go to, a little caravan of cars would travel together to sit under the stars and wait for the spectacle.

The fireworks are completed, and we linger as an extended family trying our best to say our goodbyes but delaying the inevitable, though brief, separation (I can't imagine you not checking in at least weekly by phone or some technology!?). The invitation is always the same: you can stay over if you don't feel like driving at night. Since your birthday falls on a Thursday, most of us would have to say our regret, since we all have to work on Friday. You would remind us that you don't have to work anymore. 

Back to the present, I return. While there is an empty chair at every milestone, it reminds me of the precious value of life and living in this place now. Make memories. Have experiences, whether good or bad, as they have the power to form or inform you. Take risks. And as long as we can recall you, you live among us again. 

Oh, and we would celebrate Mom's birthday (it's on the 7th) and you would join us in Decatur on the 8th for your grandson's 21st birthday.

Remembering Robert Dean Day

Most of the time our full Christian names are used in ceremonies and legal work.

You were first known to me as Bobby Day. And I probably first met you in first grade. Sure, you were in Kindergarten class, but in those ancient early 1980s, there was still Morning Kindergarten and Afternoon Kindergarten at Bement School District No. 5. Morning was for "townies" and Afternoon was for "country." I was one of those "townies" and you were one of those "country."

I'm sure if I could track down all of the class group photographs through our Elementary and Middle School years I would remember when we had the same grade school or middle school teachers. I know we shared many field trips.

Even in those early years, I can recall you being between our emerging class athletes and our emerging scholars. Sure, there was a little scholarship among the athletes as there was a little athletic prowess among the scholars. You didn't shun either, and seem to move freely between both worlds, often laughing and sharing those invaluable tokens of friendship that seem to radiate from your positive, if a little shy, developing personality.

Whatever you seem to focus upon, you did well. No, some academic subjects were not your best, but no one would doubt your tenacity in trying. Some excelled while others struggled. You may have barely crossed it, but you finished all the same.

As those children of the eighties became the awkward young adults of the early nineties, you changed from Bobby to Bob. The event that I will always recall involving you and I in those early adulthood days was both of us struggling a bit in Mr. Hensley's biology class Freshman year. And so we agreed to cheat. I would allow just enough of my test answers to show and you would somehow arrive at the same answers.

But having the exact same answers gave away our cheating conspiracy. We were both summoned into Mr. Hensley's office in the Chemistry lab and were informed that the next time we planned to do that, one of us should at least change one of our answers so they would not be exactly the same.

And we never cheated in science classes again.

Our 1994 Bement High School yearbook makes a good gateway back to those memories long forgotten. Of course my high school activities centered around music; your activities were athletics. But if Bement High School had a Future Farmers of America chapter in the early 1990s, there would be no doubt in anyone's mind who would be involved. You. That calling into agriculture was present early and impossible for you to resist.

Being fellow classmates in a small town school forms unbreakable bonds of friendship. We completed our studies together, and each moved into other chapters, other places to start new life, form new relationships, find loving partners, and raise our own children. Many of those small town values of faith, community service, and helping others remain as markers of our identity. Your legacy is a rich tapestry of those values loved and lived.

In the busyness of life, we often believe that we will always have time to reconnect, to reminisce, and perhaps naively, live long into our healthy, seeming invincible lives.

But mortality has already brushed near to our 1994 class. Strokes and heart attacks have touched a few of our classmates, me included

And then came the tragic news of you passing from us. Suddenly the fragile nature of life came into our everyday, seemingly invincible middle ages.We knew someday the common fate of all living things would begin its painful harvest. We did not know that you would be the first to cross the threshold of eternity.

We were all given a special person to share our lives with in just forty-one years.

We are shocked, upset, angry, and grieving at your passing from our lives.

We will feel your absence every time we gather again as the Bement High School Class of 1994.

There will be that empty chair, that silence where there used to be the sounds of your contagious laughter and gregarious personality.

We will keep vigil and share our stories of you and our love with your grieving widow Kristina and your beloved son Lukus Dean.

Bobby, Bob, Robert Dean Day, you will be carried in our hearts, in our thoughts, until each of us cross the threshold.

And when we do, I know the first sound we will each hear.

The sound of your laugh.

Requiem & Epilogue for a Home

On the morning of January 13, 2015, my childhood home was destroyed by fire. The aftermath was pretty shocking. Rooms full of memories reduced to burnt timber and open sky. Loving shelter now open to the elements of nature. For 23 years, this was the memorized address, phone number, and identity of "home" I would have. From learning to bicycle on the back yard sidewalk, to venturing around the "hometown" as a growing teenager, to finally commuting to college mostly from my still vibrant revolutionary war soldier wallpapered bedroom with star curtains gradually changing to blinds and solid valances, my life revolved around a small speck in a Central Illinois village until I moved out as an adult.

It is an odd coincidence that in the midst of hearing my childhood home being destroyed, that I also heard my Grandmother's (and even my Great-Grandparents) home had been demolished in the little village in southern Illinois where generations of my family were born, nurtured, died, and buried. Again, it was not something destined to be a landmark to tourists. But it was a landmark to our family story.

Funny how such places can, in a sense, live with you even after your daily life has settled elsewhere. In my mind's eye, I can recall the various pieces of furniture my parents bought and sold and their locations within walls now damaged, probably irrevocably, by fire. I can recall the black telephone that sat on an end table in my grandparent's house, the staircase in their dining room, and the way the curtains flapped against the cabinets in the kitchen when caught by a warm Southern Illinois breeze.

Physically, they have vanished. The timbers, plaster, vinyl floors, and berber carpets are gone.

I said goodbye to both houses years ago. My grandmother left her house for a nursing home not long after I began college. My mother sold the fondly remembered Butterick Homestead in 2004, but I had already moved into my own home in 1999.

But now I cannot go back "home" ever again. My grandparent's town, with its stores, even a bank, gas station, was already fading away in the 1950s, as better opportunities grew in larger towns a few more miles away. My hometown seems to change a little slower, but still changes nonetheless. I can still stand in the high school, walk the elementary school hallways. But I know the school district has fewer students than when I attended. Nostalgia is casting its polish over the cherished childhood memories and story.

Many of my friends will recall fondly the neighborhood parties my parents hosted at their home. Many of my cousins will recall visiting our home and wandering the streets and parks of Bement. I knew that my family had arrived in the pantheon of small town citizens when someone referred to the fire location as "the old Butterick house."

Cast a set of good memories, stories, struggles, and celebrations where you live. Take them with you whenever you leave. Let nostalgia tickle your soul a little. It is in those things that one can truly always find a way to home, again.

Home Again?

Recently, I returned to Christian Theological Seminary for a public seminar. While a majority of my wife's family reside in the Indianapolis metropolitan area, it had been more than a year or two since I had walked down the grey stone hallways decorated with modern art and sculpture, peered up to the bells in Sweeney Chapel, admired the looming pipes of the Holtkamp organ, or gathered in the Shelton auditorium.  In many ways, it appeared unchanged. In other ways, everything had changed.

I suppose it is what to be expected. Time is a relentless scorekeeper. For four years, this spiritual center had been a weekly experience of challenge, comfort, and community. Those years have long been sealed by time. Each experience is now some form of memory. With the years between, unexpected changes have intervened in my life, and I am not exactly the same person I was when I was last striding across the stage of Shelton Auditorium to receive my MDiv degree.

The same is true when it comes to my first college experiences at Millikin University. Construction has certainly intervened to physically change the appearance of campus and even department locations. Where my car nearly always parked is now where the Leighty-Tabor Science Center now stands. With the current capital campaign, the Richards-Treat University Center, like Mueller Hall and the homes on West William Street, will be just a memory in my Millikin memories.  I can stand in Staley Library, sit at my favorite study table, and yet marvel at the road my first alma mater and one of her son's has traveled since we met in the recent past.

Perhaps your childhood home is no longer where your parents live. Driving by it today, it seems like a distant part of your story. Or a favorite park, or store, or a popular festival or event. Traveling home again, you realize that home is not exactly what it used to be. Like a stage play, the scenery is changed for the next chapter, the next scene. Each moment is never fully captured, but slips often too quickly from our grasp and control. No amount of money or education can make time stop. It moves, irregardless of wealth or poverty, doctorates or drop-outs. While it is easy to form judgments, whether some place was "good" or some event "bad", time seems to allow each to happen in its own time and its own place.

I used to chuckle when I heard the phrase, "You can't go home again." Naively I believed time is a bit slower in the midwest. Now I believe it runs the same speed, but its consequences may be slower to comprehend fully.  On some level, yes I can go back to 248 E Franklin. The physical location has not changed. But my relationship between my childhood room and my adult life has changed.

The same is true about high school, college, and graduate school. Each is still physically in the same location as they were when my life traveled with them. But each now has a different relationship to my life now than then. Some educators, some instructors, some professors have moved away. Some still remain, a spot of familiarity in a place that has become less familiar.

These places in our lives, our career paths, our experiences, remain with us. Each is in some way a loving parent, each has given us some part of our current life.  But like our parents, they also change, and our relationship to them evolves. We will always be children of the institutions who were formative in who we have become. Yet we cannot remain children forever. Home again? Yes and no. As a stepping stone, yes. As an unchanging shelter, probably not.