My Favorite Place

“In a good book room you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.” [Mark Twain]

Baldwin Book Barn has been a significant part of my life since 1968.  It has been and remains one of my favorite places to visit.  I’ve spent hours wandering the five floors in the old barn and bought hundreds of books there. I’ve enjoyed taking special friends to the Book Barn, including my granddaughter, Katie, for over a half-century.  Imagine that!

Three years ago I had to down-size my library for lack of space.  Hundreds of books were returned to the Book Barn—most of which had been bought there.  What a painful process that was—giving up a full set of the Harvard Classics and other great volumes of similar worth.  I still grieve the loss of those treasures!  Sometimes I think of something I read in a book and begin to search for it, only to find that it was in one of those I had to “let go.”  It is a great comfort, at such a moment, to know that if I really want to find that book again all I have to do is go to the Book Barn.  Or, I think, (and it is a comforting thought) that perhaps some other person has bought that book by now and has discovered the wealth of wisdom within it. 

Henry Ward Beecher asked the question, “Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”  Knowing my weakness in the Book Barn, and my limited space, I have tried in recent years to avoid going there.  But Home Depot, Staples, and other such places just can’t measure up to the Baldwin Book Barn.   I’ve made up my mind to give up this avoidance tactic.  I shall begin again my regular visits to the Book Barn, where I will browse once more to my heart’s content and buy a book (maybe several) now and then, if so led.  “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” [Cicero]  After all, what good will the new recliner be, if while sitting in it, there are no books to read?

My Mother's Diary

It has been over a year since my mother died at age 94.  In the last several years of her life I traveled to NJ to visit her nearly every month—and now I feel that just wasn’t enough!  Before her death, she insisted that I take the three decades of her personal diaries and her travel journals home with me.

Yesterday, I finally mustered up enough gumption (courage) to browse through some of this material.  It is a strange feeling for a son to peruse his mother’s diaries and sort through her keepsakes.  It was an emotional moment, for example, when I held in my hands, Mom and Dad’s wedding certificate which I found tucked in her Bible.   They were united  in marriage in 1939  by Rev. William C. Snowball in Belmont, Ohio. The marriage continued for sixty-two years until Dad’s death in 2000.  They increased the world’s population by seven—seven children.  How fortunate I am to be one of the seven!

Mom wrote down in her diary each time one of her children called her and then underlined the entry.  Each visit was duly entered and underlined too.  No wonder she could tell us who called and when!  No wonder she could remember when we visited and for how long!  It was not wise to question her about such things, for when questioned, she would pull out her diary which proved her right every time.

The diaries also record her journey: her ups and downs, her joys and sorrows, her worries and  frustrations, her irritation with her failing eyesight and hearing, and her grief (missing Dad and losing friend after life-long friend to the inevitable).  Much of this she shared only with her diary.  Now the diary is sharing Mom’s journey with me—a deeper and more profound journey than I ever knew!

Greek Coffee At Last…

Fifty-five years ago I enjoyed my first taste of Greek coffee on the island of Crete.  I liked it and I liked the Greek way of drinking it—sitting inside or outside a village taverna and sipping it slowly, leisurely, and surrounded with good company.  I bought a briki (the pot in which the coffee is made) and a little coffee cup when I left Crete with every intention of making my own Greek coffee once I returned home.  The briki  and the little cup have been on display in my various homes ever since and have never been used.

When I returned to Greece in 1997, and Turkey in 2001, and another visit to Greece in 2002, I again enjoyed Greek coffee and once again promised myself that I would make my own when I returned home.  Whenever I have visited with Greek friends through the years this wonderful  brew has been served and each time I have renewed my intent to make my own at home.  But the briki and the little cup have never been used.

Making my own Greek coffee has been on my bucket list for a long, long time.  Last week I decided it was time to fulfill my 55-year old intent.  I purchased some Loumidas Greek coffee and a new briki from Amazon and three days ago I made my first cup of Greek coffee here at  home. Helpful videos on “How to Make Greek Coffee” were discovered on the internet to guide me through the process.  The second and third cups have been superb!  Now, at last, I can cross "Making Greek Coffee at Home" off my bucket list!  Unfortunately I won't be able to drink my coffee at a taverna in some mountain village in Crete.  However, as soon as my new recliner is delivered, I'll make a cup of Greek coffee, sit down, recline, and while sipping, remember those idyllic days of yore on that enchanted island!

Old Age Mumblings...

Yesterday I wrote of the futility of fighting old age, suggesting that we ought to use it and make the best of it.  However, I am well aware that old age brings significant and oft times crippling changes to our bodies.  I know that hearts fail, strokes happen, and cancer strikes.  Still, I think  (and I will someday know if it is possible in a personal way) we can use even these moments to  enhance rather than diminish life.  Even in such debilitating situations our “real person,” or “soul or spirit” is alive (and some of us believe that “spirit” is eternal).  When someone asked John Quincy Adams how he was, he replied:  “John Quincy Adams is well, thank you.  But the house that John Quincy lives in is falling to pieces; the doors are falling in and the windows are sagging and soon John Quincy Adams will have to move out of this house.  But John Quincy Adams is well, very well, thank you.”   What an attitude! It reminds me of the passage in 2 Cor. 4:16, “Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.”  

George & Earl who made old age "A Wonderful Life"

It irks my soul when in these golden years (and they are golden) many of us  tend to harken back to an earlier time when things were, we say,  just wonderful.  It irritates me even more when politicians and others suggest that we need to go back to those days. I look back on my youth with great delight, those beautiful yesterdays, when “we caught lightning bugs, went fishing in the creek with our makeshift fishing poles, and knew all our neighbors, etc.” But I did not know back then what I know now.  I did not know then that some people were forced to ride in the back of the bus and use only those restrooms reserved for them.   I did not know about prejudicial attitudes toward Catholics, Jews, Blacks, etc., because there were very few of these folk in my rural neighborhood. I knew nothing of Jim Crow, South Africa, or Concentration Camps back then.  I do now!  Life is always idyllic for children because they cannot grasp and do not have the capacity to see or think through all that is swirling about them in the larger world. We are children no more!  

"The Best is Yet to Be"

Yesterday I met a young salesman in a furniture store.  He was an exceptional sales person and we had quite a chat while he gently persuaded me to buy one of the most expensive recliners in the store.  During our conversation, David told me that he had just recently lost his grandfather at age 79. I gulped!  I am old enough to be David’s grandfather!  How many years do I have left to enjoy this expensive recliner I’ve just purchased?

My mother at 93--She was an Adventurer!

Old age can be looked forward to with anticipation and with a sense of adventure, or one can fight it.  While walking through the cosmetic aisle in a drug store recently I was astounded at the many products available to fight old age.  There are products to keep your hair from turning gray and skin treatments to take away those inevitable wrinkles and things like that.  There are even pills available now to help your brain from deteriorating, or so they claim. You can set your jaws, clinch your fists, dye your hair, hide your wrinkles, take your pills and put on a defiant face, but you will still be fighting a losing battle.  Old age is one of those inevitable changes in life’s journey.  You really can’t do anything about it.  Or can you?

You CAN do something about it!  You can approach this time of life without fear and without fighting it.  You can use it and by that I don’t mean just bear it or live with it, but I mean use it by taking hold of it and making something really special out of it.  Make old age an adventure, the best you’ve ever had!  Make a “bucket list” and live it out.  Travel, see the world, enjoy your adult children and their children, have a ball!  Autumn is a beautiful time of the year, so why not make our own autumnal season beautiful and meaningful.  Spend the kid’s inheritance.  Buy one of the most expensive recliners available.  It’s okay.  Just don’t spend all day sitting in it!  

Afraid of Change

Most of us prefer the status quo.  We are disturbed by change.  And yet life is change and there is nothing changeless about life except change.  “What is” in life will always become “what was!”  Change is inevitable.  We know this.  What a great change it was (or will be) to move out of adolescence into adulthood, from singleness to marriage, from husband and wife to parenthood, from middle age to maturity and old age!  Change occurs every step of the way in life.  

Over the years I’ve noticed that most people tend to sit in the same seats—in their homes, in church, and in other settings.  We do not want to change—not even where we sit!  Some years ago I conducted an experiment.  I asked the members of the congregation I was serving to play “musical chairs (or pews)”—I asked them to change chairs and only as a game!  What a ruckus that created!  “Change our chairs—not on your life!”  Some refused to even play the game!  

Montana, USA

This morning I’m thinking about our attitudes and fears toward the inevitable changes in our personal lives and in our world.  Some deal with change as a season of spring—a new beginning.  Others deal with change as a season of summer—feeling it as hot, humid, sweltering,  unbearable heat.  Still others deal with change as a season of autumn—everything we’ve known is falling like leaves to the ground.  Still others deal with change as a season of winter—the changes that have come have brought us to the “end time!”  

Change comes.  How do we manage it?  With trepidation? With fear?  With acceptance? With desperation?  With hopelessness?  How we deal with change makes all the difference in how we live our lives.

Love Wrapped In Care

I shall never forget the day when Elton Trueblood at 93, his eyesight dimmed by the years and no longer able to read,  shared from memory  I Corinthians 13 with a group of us who were visiting him in his retirement apartment.  He told us that the word “Love” has become so misused and over-used in our time that it no longer conveyed what it is meant to mean.  In his recitation he replaced the word “Love” in Paul’s great passage with the word “Care,”  suggesting that love equals care, or vice versa, care equals love. Is love the same as caring?  I still ponder and work with that question.  

To say we love a person and then not care about that person’s need, his or her loneliness, wounds and brokenness doesn’t seem to cut it. Nikos Kazantzakis, pondering the loving (caring) spirit of Francis of Assisi and Albert Schweitzer, wrote these words:  “Both have in their grasp the philosopher’s stone which transubstantiates the basest of metals into gold, the gold into spiritual essence.  They take disease, hunger, cold, injustice,ugliness—reality at its most horrible—and transubstantiate these into a reality yet more real, where the wind of the spirit blows.  No, not of spirit; of love.  And in their hearts, like the sun over great empires, love never sets.”  Both of these men loved—but it was not an empty word for them—it was wrapped with care.

Perhaps one of the most painful things which can happen to us—and, of course, has happened to all us, is the feeling that no one has ever really cared enough to know what was going on inside of us.  We have all been victims of this kind of neglect and it  makes it difficult for us to sense that we are persons of worth.  For another to say, “I love you” and then not to care about what you are experiencing seems an empty phrase.  “I love all God’s children” we say, but do we care for them too?  Love makes human beings human, but only if that love is wrapped with care.