From Wit’s End

‘Twas indeed a good Memorial day, remembering struggles of the past and how they had been overcome. Perhaps it’s hard to explain, but it only took five hours of driving last night to go 12-13 years back into the past. Of course i’m talking about our trip to Fort Benning, GA on Memorial Day weekend. It can be difficult for all three of us brothers to agree on anything (though over the years we have learned how to get along most of the time), but we all whole-heartedly agreed that our trip to the Ft. Benning/Columbus, GA area was eminently worth it. I must have taken 80 pictures (only a few of them shown here) with my digital camera, and Tom took almost 60 pictures with a mechanical camera.

Sunday night, before we found the hotel, we drove around Ft. Benning in the dark, through some of the old neighborhood (and we also got lost a couple of times), and the gloom merely enhanced the dream-like quality that was already thick all around us. And on Monday, even the heat of the sun and the smell of the Georgia red clay just brought the memories back in whelming waves. Flashbacks weren’t in it. It was almost a “Back to the Future” type feeling. To walk the streets, the playgrounds, the schoolyards, 12 years older and 12 years wiser. The world of Benji, Tommy, and Dave was kind of small back then, but it was still our whole world. Stretching from Dexter Elementary School to Faith Middle school, from Aaron Allen’s house to Dietrich Stogner’s house, from the “Mini-mall” to the Youth Center to the Officer’s Club Pool, from the creek to the woods to the so-called “Grand Canyon”, it all seems smaller now than it seemed then. And yet it all remains larger than life in our memory and in our experience, because it was the ground upon which these poor pilgrims learned a little bit more and grew a little bit taller and struggled with love and pain, friendship and social studies, puberty and mathematics, sickness and baseball. And somehow, what seemed like “a great gulf transfixed” between “Benji” and “Ben” was in reality just a matter of crossing a particular street,
jumping across a given creek, or running across a certain field. Wow. It was worth every golden minute, to be sure.

And i also had the opportunity to redeem past hurts as well.  I got to stand where my younger self had stood and give him the future memories of the next 13 years, and i was able to tell him that it all turned out okay after all, even though it was hard and painful at the time.  Does it sound too mystical to say that he heard my words and received my memories and took comfort in them?  Perhaps, but in some strange way it’s true.

Also, on a darkly humorous note, we found the Putt-Putt Mini-Golf course that we used to go to all the time as kids, or rather, what was left of it.  Tom and I were snapping pictures of that glorious ruination with great aplomb, while Dave was utterly appalled by it.  "How could you take pictures of this??" he cried, shocked.  Here are some examples of that great contrast, for your perusal:

Putt-Putt, Columbus, GA, 1988	Putt-Putt, Columbus, GA, 2001

And if all that isn’t weird enough….

We continued our correspondence:

Hey, cool.  I just found a neat verse.  Read Acts 5:36. 

Here’s the quote:

When she entered the wilderness of books she saw no one; but peeping around one of the many screens, she spied Mattie sitting with her back toward her and her head bent downward.  Looking over her shoulder, she saw that she had a large folding plate of the funeral of Lord Nelson open before her, the black shapes of which, with their infernal horrors of plumes– the hateful flowers that the buried seeds of ancient paganism still shoot up into pleasant Christian fields– she was studying with an unaccountable absorption of interest.

   "What >have< you got there, Mattie?"
   "Well, I don’t ezactly know, miss," answered the child, looking up, very white-faced and serious.
   "Put the book away and come and see grannie.  She wants you to take care of her today, while I go out."

   "Well,  miss, I would with pleasure; but you see father is gone out, and has left me to take care of the shop till he comes back."
   "But he won’t be gone a great while, will he?"
   "No, miss.  He knows I don’t like to be left too long with the books.  He’ll be back before St. Jacob’s strikes nine– that I know."
   "Well, ten I’ll go and make grannie made comfortable; and if you don’t come
to me by half-past nine, I’ll come after you again."

   "Do, miss, if you please; for if father ain’t come by that time — my poor
head –"
   "You must put that ugly book away," said Lucy, "and take a better one."
   "Well, miss, I know I oughtn’t to have taken this book, for there’s no summer in it; and it talks like the wind at night."
   "Why did you take it, then?"
   "Because Syne told me to take it.  But that’s just why I oughtn’t to ha’ taken it."

   And she rose to put the book in one of the shelves over her head, moving her stool when she had done so, and turning her face toward the spot where the book now stood.  Lucy watched her uneasily.
   "What do you mean by saying that Syne told you?" she asked.  "Who is Syne?"
   "Don’t you know Syne, miss?  Syne is–  you know ‘Lord Syne was a miserly churl’ –don’t you?"

   Then, before Lucy could reply, she looked up in her face, with a smile hovering about the one side of her mouth, and said:
   "But it’s all nonsense, miss, when you’re standing there.  I don’t believe there is any such person.  But," she added with a sigh, "when you’re gone away– I don’t know.  But I think he’s up stairs in the nursery now," she said, putting her hand to her big forehead.  "No, no; there’s no such person."

   And Mattie tried to laugh outright, but failed in the attempt, and the tears rose in her eyes.
   "You’ve got a headache, dear," said Lucy.
   "Well, no," answered Mattie.  "I cannot say that I have just a headache, you know.  But it does buzz a little.  I hope Mr. Kitely won’t be long now."

   "I don’t like leaving you, Mattie; but I must go to my grandmother," said Lucy, with reluctance.
   "Never mind me, miss.  I’m used to it.  I used to be afraid of Lord Syne, for he watched me, ready to pounce out upon me with all his men at his back, and he laughed so loud to see me run.  But I know better now.  I never run from him
now.  I always frown at him, and take my own time and do as I like.  I don’t want him to see that I’m afraid, you know.  And I do think that I have taught him a lesson.  Besides, if he’s very troublesome, you know, miss, I can run to Mr. Spelt.  But I looks so mournful.  Perhaps he thinks it is wicked.  He is so good himself, he has no idea how wicked a body can be."

   Lucy thought it best to hurry away, that she might return the sooner; for she
could not bear the child be left alone in such a mood.  And she was sure that the best thing for her would be to spend the day with her cheery old grandmother.  But as she was leaving the shop, Mr. Kitely came in his large, bold, sharp face fresh as a north wind without a touch of of east in it.  Lucy preferred her request about Mattie, and he granted it cordially.
   "I’m afraid, Mr. Kitely," said Lucy, "the darling is not well.  She has such strange fancies."

   "Oh, I don’t know," returned the bookseller, with mingled concern at the suggestion and refusal to entertain it.  "She’s always been a curious child.  Her mother was like that, you see, and she takes after her.  Perhaps she does want a little more change.  I don’t think she’s been out of this street, now, all her life.  But she’ll shake it off as she gets older, I have no doubt."

Today as i was writing Leanne, i quoted from George Macdonald about an appropriate alternative name for the Man himself…

For what it’s worth, here’s hoping this nobody can help make things better for you, if Somebody has anything to say about it.

She wrote:

Oh, Somebody has something to say about it, I just don’t know what yet.

All in good time, i suppose. Oh, i found the initial reference to that name in
"Guild Court" by George MacDonald.  Here it is:

     " ‘What did Mr. Spelt read to you, Mattie?’
     ‘He read about >Somebody<–’
     It was very remarkable how Mattie would use the name of God, never with certainly with irreverence, but with a freedom that seemed to indicate that to her he was chiefly if not solely an object of metaphysical speculation or, possibly, of investigation; while she never uttered the name of the Saviour, but spoke of him as >Somebody<.  And I find that I must yet further interrupt the child herself to tell an anecdote about her which will perhaps account for the fact I am about to finish telling.  She was not three years old when she asked her mother, a sweet, thoughtful woman, in many ways superior to her husband, though not intellectually his equal– ‘Who made the tree in Wood Street?’   Her mother answered, of course, ‘God made it, my pet…’ for by instinct, she never spoke of her God without using some term of endearment to her child.  Mattie
answered– ‘I would like it better if a man had made it’ — a cry after the humanity of God — a longing in the heart of the three years’ child for the Messiah of God.  Her mother did not know well enough to tell her that a man, yes, >the< man did make them– ‘for by Him all things were made;’ — but Mattie may have had some undefined glimmering of the fact, for, as I have said, she always substituted >Somebody< for any name of the Lord.  I cannot help wishing that certain religious people of my acquaintance would, I do not say follow queer little Mattie’s example, but take a lesson from queer little Mattie."

[Oh, my mom just reminded me as she peeked in the door that the word somebody is in "The Wise Old Woman", the story i sent you a while ago -- at least in a similar usage, if not in the exact same way.]

Mattie also has her own name for Satan.  It is "Syne", which is the Scotch word for "time", you know like the New Year’s song "Auld Lang Syne".  Interesting, huh?  I don’t have time to type out the entire first reference where that term is used in such a way.  I’ll show it to you later, though, because it is fascinating.