Childhood’s end

Mid morning and I’m trying to remember what it was that had me pining for the graveyard of my childhood.  That is not a metaphorical statement, I’m talking about a literal graveyard.  I know what reminded me of early morning’s reminiscences: I was rereading an article about Fred Rogers that says at one point that Mr. Rogers loved graveyards (Tom Junod’s 1998 profile in Esquire).  But what had got me dreaming about the cemetery at St. John’s LCMS early this morning?

I don’t think about my home town that often.  I haven’t been back since my father retired from the ministry (an act which, typically, has had little impact on how much he actually engages in the duties of a pastor) and my parents moved to a different rural town far enough away to make a day trip a reasonable imposition.  We have a hard enough time getting visits to the grandparents accomplished.  Beyond that, at last review (and this is a good few years ago, now) I had one real friend left in that town, and the state of my relationship with him is that he told me he would call me right back, four or five years ago.  I feel a little bad about never seeing the members of the churches my father served or the teachers from high school and grade school days (almost none of whom are still teaching at those schools - it has been, after all, twenty years).  They did a pretty good job of being my community growing up, and I’d like them to meet my kid.  But so it goes.

The parsonage, the church-owned house provided as a form of compensation for ministers, is becoming a thing of the past.  I learned this as an elder at a former church of mine, going through a difficult process of calling a new minister.  Nobody wanted the parsonage, they wanted their own house.  When my father retired the house I spent most of my childhood in stopped being in any sense mine.  I suppose that this is not a strange occurrence but it seemed to me of a different character from a house merely being sold and a different family moving in.  That house, I came to realize, had always had a separate identity, it was a property of the church, and had in some respects never been ours.  It remained an element of that community, the temporary home for a new pastor’s family.  If I went back, I’m sure there would be no objection to my rambling the surroundings, the little tangled grove, the orderly shelterbelt that are engraved indelibly in my brain (not the least of which as the scene of thousands of surreptitious cigarettes).  But I think I would feel like an interloper there, now.

I think I could feel at ease in the cemetery, though.  I’m sure it is technically the property of the church, but whatever the legality a cemetery is in my mind part of the Commons.  I surely know that graveyard as well as I know the fields and hills around my former house: I must have pushed a heavy lawnmower around each of its stones a hundred times.  And I went there in the night sometimes, while my parents slept, an anxious, restless, depressed kid, and found a peace of sorts among the dead.  Of course, what I knew then would only be a part now: who knows how many stones have been added to its field in the 20 years since I left home?

I’ll probably never see it again.*

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 11, 2009 11:21 AM

*An assertion of more style than substance as it turns out. I was there quite recently, in fact, for a special event observing the church's 125 year anniversary, where my father was invited as a guest pastor (the first time I have seen him preach in quite a long while). Will I be back again? Who knows.

Further update, May 31 2012... forgotten this writing though not the sentiment.  It says something about the true obliviousness possible on one's solipsistic internal experience that it literally never occurred to me that my father would have chosen this very field as his final resting place.  We did not expect him to be gone so soon, but go he did, the day before Thanksgiving, 2011.  And it turned out to come as no surprise at all that he had chosen this place where he spent more than a third of his life and most of his calling as the resting place (as they say) of his earthly remains.  So I was indeed back again, sooner rather than later, and will be there again, I imagine, many times.