Looking Back

My very earliest memory is a “freeze frame”—no action, just a mental picture of the dining room of the home where my parents and I boarded during our months in Paris. The picture in my mind is of a fairly dark room with one very bright, white window. We were there at the time of the war scare in September of 1938, but I was too little for it to mean anything to me.

We left France for Africa in April of 1939, and my second memory is also a freeze frame, this time of the dining room on the German ship we traveled on. Hmmm. Should I make something of the fact that my two earliest memories are of dining rooms…? Whatever, my picture of that second one is very different from the first. It is a white, white room with a high, high ceiling and filled with little round tables with white tablecloths.

The third memory follows on the heels of the second, but it has action in it. I was still two months short of my third birthday the day that ship docked on the west coast of Africa, at the port of Krebe in the country of Cameroon. The centerpiece of this memory has always been the sight, on shore, of our blue pickup truck that had preceded us.

The action part of this memory was the way we got off the huge ocean liner that day. Ever try going down the side of a ocean liner on a stairway and into a small boat? In my original memory, it was a ladder and a canoe, but I now know it was a staircase and a fair-size rowboat. All of it was especially precarious for my mother since she was six months pregnant.

We loaded our possessions on the little truck and set out for the interior of the continent where my parents’ missionary work awaited them. I don’t remember the trip, but I’m sure it was long—at least a week, perhaps a few days more than that. None of the roads were paved, of course. I wish my parents were still alive so I could ask them about where we slept at night and what we did for food along the way.

All I know is that my next memory is of my third birthday two months later. For whatever reason, my parents woke me up from my nap for my party—if one can call it a “party” since not another soul was around for it except my parents. The tiny black and white pictures show me with a deep scowl on my face, and I actually do remember being unhappy because they woke me up from a hard sleep.

What is your earliest memory? I’d love to hear about it.

Journey

I am not a poet, though I have written a handful of poems over the years—one about seagulls, one about determination, and other miscellaneous. The events of this past weekend stirred up the memory of a free-verse time thing I wrote in 1996.

My parents were missionaries in Africa in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and my siblings and I spent our childhoods on that side of the pond. Our dad came of age at the beginning of the Great Depression, so he never had any formal or trade education beyond high school. But that didn’t stop him. If he had the vision for something, he found a way of making it happen, with a crew of African workers or without—whether it was build a large home from scratch (“scratch” meaning making the bricks from a termite anthill to cutting the logs from felled trees, to adding electricity and running water personally installed), or whether it was seeing that his wife got a piano in Central Africa, even if he had to rebuild the whole inside following its travel traumas.

Another thing Daddy did was to carry equipment to Africa to take movies, and that brings us back to the events of the past weekend. Those movies are old now, old 16mm stuff. Last fall the family pooled some resources to have them digitized. Since my sister and I are the only ones left who “were there” and could tell for sure what was being seen, we had to do something about that, so last Saturday, with the help of her son/my nephew, we recorded three hours of narration to the movies. Then we allowed him to “interview” us for another two hours about the lives of our parents and others who are already gone. Sunday we spent at least a couple more hours coming up with as many names as we could of people in the old family photo books from 1925-about 1934. (Pictures and all are on his computer now.)

Talk about journeys into the past! I suppose it is not surprising that such journeys spur mental forays into the future—however brief those have to be. What will they say about me when I am gone? When I was awake in the night again last night, I was reminded of the “Journey” piece that I wrote more than a decade ago, and I knew it was time to get it out again. It is long, so I’m going to present it in installments, with another one tomorrow and at least two days after that. I call it simply “Journey.”

My life is a journey through a window of time,
a window in eternity custom designed for me
by the Master of the Universe.

In omnipotence He directed the beginning.
His omniscience has seen the end.
With magnificent omnipresence
He is lovingly orchestrating every moment in between.

The strands of humanity that are me were woven together by Him—
uniquely, purposefully, to make me who He wanted me to be.

My vehicle for this journey is a body of flesh, an earthen vessel, a jar of clay.
Though mortal, it birthed my immortal soul.
Though earthbound, it gives me eyes to see heaven.
Though temporal, it is my bridge to eternity.

This physical vehicle of my journey is both …
tough and fragile, complex and simple, dependable and unpredictable.

Sometimes it soars like an eagle, sometimes plods like a tortoise.
Sometimes it is exhilarated with vision, sometimes weighed down with the struggle.
~~ ©Copyright 1996 Esther Moneysmith Gross