Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Memorial of Saint Benedict, Abbott
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
High school memories
Hide me in the shadow your wings. On waking, I shall be content in your presence.
We’re hoping to see a musical tomorrow afternoon. The drama coaches of Brigadoon’s dress rehearsal at Brentwood Christian School invited senior citizens to come free to watch and pray. Well, to watch, anyway, and shower our applause on the high school actors.
In my own high school days we performed Brigadoon. Dad had only just recently sold his dairy herd, releasing me to high school activities after school! I joined the drama club and acted onstage in at least one play. I was on the tech team for Brigadoon. I think my girlfriend Nancy was on the team as well.
The relationship between Nancy and me ripened after my after-school times and evenings became more free. Was I sixteen years old when Dad sold the cows? I think so, and after that it feels like my whole life changed. Dad helped me find a 1956 brown and white two-tone Chevrolet Bel-Air. Nancy and I had known each other from church and confirmation classes for years, but now things changed. We became Friends. She graduated a year early and began classes at Lincoln College, which actually brought us closer.
I remember seeing the movie Hawaii together, and a trip we took on a Lincoln College bus to the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. The “Climatron” had opened a few years earlier, the first geodesic dome to be used as a conservatory. The birds sang, the tropical plants swayed in the breezes of the fans, and I fell in a pool.
I was just a high school kid with all those college folks. Of course I fell in the pool! But Nancy helped me out, dried me off a little, couldn’t keep from laughing, and then, neither could I. Such a small price to pay for a day trip away from Lincoln with Nancy. Everything else simply fell away. We were very happy.
When she and her sister Dolly were younger they qualified to compete as a team in Las Vegas at a gymnastic meet. Their mom and dad were so proud. They put up a trampoline in the back yard of their house on Pulaski Street. I fell in pools and was not very athletic. They were!
Nancy might very well remember her confirmation verse. She still attends Zion Lutheran Church in Lincoln, where we grew up together. I had to leave for awhile to get the heeby-jeebies out of my system. I think some of them are still in there.
Our families remained friends after Margaret and I were married, sharing occasional meals, kids playing together, two boys named Chris born just a few months apart. My high school memories are sweet and wistful, as is probably true for most of us. Those were the days.
Jacob was left alone on the shore of the Jabbock, and some man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.
I wonder if Jacob, as he moved into his later life, remembered the stories we are reading now. About Esau, about Bethel and the ladder, about wrestling with the angel, who named him Israel. His twelve sons became the twelve tribes of Israel. His son Joseph changed history. Those stories are coming up. I can’t wait.
Jacob named the place Peniel, “because I have seen God face to face,” he said, “and yet my life has been spared.”
(Genesis 32, Psalm 17, John 10, Matthew 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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