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12/6/15

A Few Adventurous Interviews about Families , Our Indefinable Core of Humanity

By Robert R. Schwarz

                            
The family is an integral structure of society and the primary
means for individuals to experience the reality of God.
What vehicle is more powerful to invite us into loving relationships,
relationships where we actually come to know God because we are
cherished, because we belong, because there are human arms to
embrace and hold us, because others do not give up on us despite our
shortcomings, where forgiveness heals, and where joy and laughter
create memories that bind? …JoAnne Mullen-Muhr,  former director
of faith formation, St. James church, Arlington Heights, Illinois

Healthy marriages are. . . . good for  children; growing up in a happy
 home protects children from mental, physical, educational and
social problems. . . .  the American Psychological Association

While the direct legal and genetic relationships you share with others can help
you create your definition of a family, there is more to family relationships
than these basic concepts. A true family provides its members with emotional
and spiritual kinship...from LovetoKnow website by Melissa Mayntz, freelance
 writer and editor.  

The family is the basic cell of society. It is the cradle of life and love , the place
in which the individual is  'born' and 'grows. '…Saint John Paul II

A cool, early October day and an overcast sky on Wisconsin's Door Peninsula somehow  triggered my muse to resolve an aging regret about having  "lost"  most of my extended family decades ago . That occurred  by my repeatedly  ignoring ,  without good reason,   invitations to weddings, birthday parties  and funerals. Since then, my attempts  to reconnect to those loving relationships I had enjoyed before entering my world of self-centered pursuits—I have no children, and I remarried soon after my wife of 33 years died— have been painfully  discouraging.  When I have given a friendly call to one of  many  nephews or nieces  or aunts or uncles I haven't talked to in years, our conversation usually ends with a lukewarm : "Well , Bob, we'll have to get together sometime. "  But we never do.  
An unexpected mending of this fragmentation,  however, began when  my wife, Mary Alice,  and   I  embarked on a  five-day getaway  to the Door Peninsular on Lake Michigan's Green Bay . During  the five-hour drive from our suburban  Chicago home,  I mentioned to my wife that maybe I should write something about  this  "family issue"  and that there were a few  hard-learned lessons to pass on to others .
       " Like what ?" my wife inquired.     
       " Like  don't take family love for granted; don't ever stop stoking the family embers, "  I  told             her.  " Old newspaper reporters never retire—"
     —"I know," she stopped me . " They just write away , " and then asked if  I had packed my voice recorder  and  camera , my two digital veterans of interviews with  individuals here and there.
     Problem was I hadn't the slightest idea who or what I was looking for. A lot more musing was waiting for me.  
     On the first night at our  resort on Rowley's Bay  ,  we met an 86-year-old storyteller—we'll call him Sam— who , before dinner, had entertained  a dining room audience with a historical narrative of the peninsula by assuming the role of 250-year-old man who had "seen it all. "  After our white fish dinner, a journalist's hunch prompted me to approach Sam with my voice recorder and a word of appreciation for his animated talk.  
     "I'm doing a story about family, " I said, hoping he had a family .  He did and  was eager to talk .
     Sam was   a widower and former dean of students at a New York  university  and  was saddened  by the  "lack of disciplined  structure "  within families of all socio-economic levels .  " I'm very disturbed , " he told me ,   "that when I talk to parents today, they don't even think about this anymore. They're so busy thinking about their own desires for more pleasure, more electronic devices. "      
     Sam admitted he had a son  who had lost everything because of a drug addiction problem. " How can this happen to  a guy who's been brought up by two highly educated parents ?"  He expressed dismay.
      I offered that  his son did have free will. "Yes, " he replied, " but he  didn't follow it ; he wasn't strong enough. "
     The interview didn't  exactly address my needs as a journalist, but it did prime my pump .  
     The  next day Mary Alice and I we  took an excursion to Gills Rock , a settlement on the peninsula's northern  tip  and boarded  the  "Island Clipper" ferry for Washington Island.
Once on board for the five-mile cruise,  I excused myself from my wife and went up  to the  open-air  deck to gaze upon  the dark blue lake waters to unleash everything from my mind  except   with an occasional thought  of  the waters'  bottom  littered with several  known ship wrecks ; we were crossing a  strait called Porte des  Morts (  "Door of the Dead" ) by the early French explorers .
We docked at a small landing and boarded a tourist tram  for a  ride through a portion of  Washington's  Island's 23  square miles , which are populated with almost 700 residents , many of  Scandinavian  (mostly Icelandic)  and Irish descent  .  The tram rolled us  through farmland and forests as we heard the history  of  missionary work done here with the Ojibwa and Potawatomi Indians  by French Jesuits between 1650 and 1816.  I grew restless  waiting for something to spark my writing that would  put closure on this family issue that had dogged me far too long.                                     
" My Husband and I have Put Together a Blended Family"
     The tram made a 15-minute refreshment  stop at a small grocery store . I was about to follow Mary Alice into the store  when ,  on the other side of this country road ,  I noticed  a small café with a fairly large wooden statue of a monk holding onto some birds. The statue left no doubt that it was Saint Francis, the l3th Century   saint who addressed the moon and the sun as well as nature's creatures as his " brothers  and sisters " . "I'll be just be a minute , " I told Mary Alice who , knowing how distorted my sense of a minute could be, indulged me with a  smile  and  suggested I return in time for us to catch  the  return tram . "Meanwhile," she said, "I'll look for some souvenir post cards."  
Valerie Fonds outside her cafe
            Inside  the café , I watched a perky woman of senior citizen age wait on two customers who were buying some Washington Island fudge.
           "Excuse me, miss, " I said. "  I  saw your statue of St. Francis outside.."
            "Oh, yes, " she replied and, anticipating the usual tourist  questions from me, cheerfully gave her spiel:  " Well, each morning here I serve a free breakfast of yogurt, granola , coffee and fruit to anyone who shows up for our prayer group.  Any denomination. We eat at 7 a.m. " 
            My pump had been  primed .   
            She introduced herself as Valerie Fons, the proprietor.  I asked if she minded giving me her thoughts about the value of a good, healthy  family.  Her expression said no one had ever asked her this . I felt for my pocketed voice recorder;  but with the  tram  returning soon, I felt uncomfortably rushed, especially not knowing if Valerie had anything to say which I  could really use. Why don't I simply get a few library books about families  when we get home, I thought . Surely  I can  get  a few valuable insights that way. . . No, that's being a lazy.
  "I  guess it's all right," she said cautiously, then  immediately dove into a long reply .
             In between Valerie  waiting on  an occasional customer, I kept our conversation going and eventually learned that  Valerie was an ordained elder of the United Methodist Extension Ministry. And when she told me she had earlier that morning carried lunches for her six adopted children  to the island's only school , I now happily anticipated golden nuggets of  family insights coming from  Valery. [ As a footnote, I want to say that before the days' end , my total  disbelief in the reality of coincidences or luck would again be affirmed . ] 
 " My husband and I have put together a blended family, " she said, explaining  that one  of her children is  Haitian and  the other five are Afro-American . Their ages range  from 12 to 21   and  "have come from  abuse and trauma " and were placed in the Fons home by a foster care agency in Michigan . Today the entire family lives in a ten-bedroom home behind the café. 
            " We try to open up our lives  to the children's special  dreams and issues," Valerie  continued, now enjoying what she was sharing, likely for the first time.  "We emphasize emotional intelligence .  I thought that now that our children are teens ,  I would have  to be leaving the island because of their need to see a wider world. But we have invited diversity to this island  ,  and it's  the best work I have ever done [ as an ordained elder ]. "
            She explained that Washington Island residents  are currently  sponsoring several high school exchange students from Belgium, Spain, Costa Rica, Korea,  China, and Columbia . " We have changed the face of this island ," Valerie boasted, , " and have brought energy to this school and to the community and to our families . "
            I asked Valerie what she thought was the main problem  facing American families. " I can't speak for anyone else,  but what I do is   listen  to my children and try to hear what they're really saying , and to let them know they are heard. "
            Mary Alice entered the café to tell me our return  tram was outside. I asked my wife to  take some photographs with her point-and-shoot camera—I had left my Canon Rebel at the resort. She  did.  

Broken Families Sadden this Pastor

            As our tram headed to the Stravekirke , a replica of a medieval church in Norway, I felt like an old time wagon train scout trying to gather helpful facts for a  report to bring back. Exiting  the church was a man and his wife and a son obviously challenged with special needs . (I later learned that the son, 23-year-old Timothy, was born after only six months of gestation. )           Though doubting the propriety of my act, I walked up to the father  and told him of my "mission" asked  if he minded answering a few questions.  I'm sure he thought me brusque and intrusive of his privacy , as if I were some  journalist hungry for exciting tabloid news about a family vacationing with a handicapped son.  
      But to my surprised delight, the father warmly replied, " I'm David Johnson, pastor of the Overland Baptist Church in Overland , Missouri . This is my wife, Marilyn, and my son Timothy. "   
The Johnson family by the Stravekirke ( in background)
We all  boarded the tram, and ten minutes later  Mary Alice and I were walking with  the Johnson family at an  outdoor  farm museum, where I photographed the pastor showing Timothy how to work an old water pump.  A few hours later we boarded the Island Clipper,  and on the cruise back to Gills Rock, the Rev. Johnson granted me an interview.
            " We're lucky to have Timothy ,"   he  said.  " He's lucky to be alive . He's the only son we will ever have because my wife is a cancer victim. "  I asked how God speaks to his pastor's  heart about families, that is , what's wrong and  right with them  nowadays?  "Family is instituted by God just as marriage is," he began. "With people in my community, I can tell you that broken families inevitably  lead to other problems,  like  loss of income, lower education levels . "
 What saddens this pastor  the most are  moms and dads who  part company , leaving  their children  without parents. "Parents who come from  broken families can have a very difficult time in life. I know of dads in prisons, and moms who , with their  children now living with grandparents,  cannot  survive on their  own. There is unemployment , financial struggles, but you can't just blame  it all on poverty. "  He said he's also seen  well-to-do families who come  from broken families yet   are  still "ironing things out. "
            How can a church help? "It's frustrating to all clergy that the rates of divorces and family disintegration are right on par with societal norms ," the pastor replied . " I don't know what we can do except pray about it and preach the  truth  of scripture and try  to be a role model. "        My  last question to him  was : How can we as a nation address this issue of broken families ?  He frowned, then managed  to laugh. . " If  I had an answer to that I wouldn't be a pastor; I'd be a politician or I'd write a book."
                        ---------------------------------
Signs of a Healthy Family
*You trust each other *You feel free to talk openly,
without fear of  disapproval *You support one another
                        during  difficult times *You have fun and enjoy one
                        another *You respect one another           
                      Signs of an  Unhealthy Family
                        *Substance abuse *Perfectionism  *Overprotection  
                        *Mental illness  *Neglect *Emotional, physical, verbal
                         or sexual abuse
                          ( from the SteppingStones  ministry )                   
           ------------------------------------
           
Melancholy and a Cherished Memory
      Feeling melancholic at the lodge late that night, I left my room and , hoping that the chilly night air and the dark expanse of the bay waters would absorb my melancholy, I walked down to the edge of the pier . I was alone in a silence broken only by wavelets   breaking against the pier's trestle timbers . I scanned the shore line for lights and but  saw none; then peered  upward at a few  starry constellations—I knew two  by name—and gazed at a yellowish crescent moon  across which   clouds were  drifting. For a long moment I seemed to exist as the only man on  the planet. And then my melancholy drifted—into a memory . . .  


. . . It was Christmas Eve in the mid  1940's  in my family's  two-floor  frame home surrounded with snow-covered maple trees , lilac bushes,  and evergreens at 801 S. Chester Avenue in Park Ridge, a middle class suburb  of Chicago. I am seven years old and , with my three-year-old brother, Lester, I am glee-stricken in our  living room nest of  love,  laughter and cheerful chiding . I see  Mom and Dad, " Gramps" ( who lives with us ), " Taunt" ( my great-aunt), and two, soon-to-be-orphaned , pre-teenage cousins .Various spontaneous  conversations keep  crisscrossing the room with  topics constantly weaving in and out with abandon.
            Mom goes to her  upright spinet piano and , with her  finely pitched, joy-filled soprano voice, begins  singing  her favorites from   sheet music while I stand at her side and sing  terribly off-key . As best the rest of us can, we follow or hopscotch through the lyrics of " Alexander's Ragtime Band", " Sierra Sue",  "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" ,  and Mom's special favorite , "Papa, Won't You Dance with Me " ( from the then  Broadway hit  "High Button Shoes" ) . Dad calls out for his favorite from the same show , " Indian Love Call . "   Fireplace logs are flaming.  The  floor is a hodge-podge of recently opened  gifts, toys, and Gramp's  perennial gift of a jumbo box of candied fruit. .  .   
You Can't Go Home Again
            . . . But I want no more of  this great  memory and walk back to my room. The title of a novel I had read as a teenager and which I had then thought meaningless , flashed at me. It was "You Can't Go Home Again"  by Thomas Wolfe, and it now barged into my mind with sobering, pragmatic reality. There was no going home.   Truth was I didn't want to go home again .


            " Where have you been so long?"  Mary Alice asked at bedside.
            "I think I know something important about myself. I want  to see   Ruth when we get back . "
            "Oh, I see, " my wife replied and went back to sleep.
Digging Up Family Roots and  Then Some
            The morning after we had returned to Arlington Heights,  I made a date for  coffee  at a McDonald's with a family friend--we'll call Betty.A few years after the death of her mother, for whom Betty  had been a devoted care-giver for many years .  Her mother's death, Betty  once told me, had left "a large empty hole in my life which I desperately wanted to fill. " She proceeded to fill that hole by climbing branch by branch  through her family tree. Through the years Betty  has reconnected with several family members by telephone calls and by ferreting out hundreds of family names from American and European  wedding and death certificates and immigration records , some of  which  have  been encrypted  for 300 years. Her library of notebooks, manuals , and digitalized  texts reflect countless  hours of research which, she insists,  "must be accurate before I record anything. "
            " What's on your mind, ? "  she asked over our coffee. 
            Anyone sitting tête-à-tête with Betty, notices,  with pleasure,  her full head of attractive white hair and her blue eyes that stay attentive to whatever  topic is being discussed.
             I confessed to her my dumb mistake—that of being seduced by the allures of the world—of ignoring all those family invitations of years ago  and my failure  to rebuild or reconnect to the several  relatives  who once loved me .
            " So? " she replied, as if to say how common that mistake is .
            " Well,  I don't want  to see others do the same. "
            " I get it,"  she said.
            " Well, there's a  bit  more to it. " 
         I started to tell her about my thoughts that night  on  Rowley's Bay pier when she interrupted (which irritated me , like a  strict teacher might  )  with  " all  I'd like to know is what exactly  have you learned ?"      
            " Well, I guess I learned the hard way; that sometimes to make and  keep a friend, one has to be the first to reach out and maybe do it more than once. "
            "I know . I have to work at that myself, especially with friends who really don't know how to  reach out."  We mentioned a mutual family member. .  
            My voice lowered to make sure the increasing intimacy of our conversation could not enjoyed by the McDonalds' customers behind us .  " On that pier, Betty,  I suddenly realized that I HAVE  found a new family and I am a member of it. Only thing is, I believe t I'm leaving something out."
            "Like what ?"
            "I don't know. Something beyond my finite mind."            
            When I named a least a dozen family members  I knew intimately , I stopped and looked intently at Betty and exclaimed :  "I get it !  I see a family here,Betty !  I've had a family, a new family,  ever since I remarried but didn't know it !
           Betty smiled and nodded.

           But another dimension was to be added to  my family life, rather a new vision of it .  A few months later I posted on this blog you are reading  an article entitled: " Digging Up Their Family Roots Yielded Joy, a Few Surprises and Lots of Inspiration. " It has interviews with several people , including Betty and another family member. At the article's  end ,  I waded into this other dimension  with a sort of metaphysical probing  of the  family dynamic, which seemed to enrich and expand my entire vision of  humanity. Here's an excerpt from  that blog . :
      Another statistic I came across  (http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2011/ How Many People… )    excites one's  imagination. Carl Haub, senior visiting scholar at the Population Reference Bureau, presents a cogent argument as to the number of people who have ever lived on earth: since 2011, he reports, 107,602, 707, 791 humans have lived or been born since  8,000 B.C.
            I talked with Stephen Szabados about the television program " Finding Your  Roots" (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/) . I had watched the episode where the moderator, Henry Louis Gate, Jr., a professor at Harvard University ,  documented  his own family tree.  Gates, an Afro-American,  traced some of his ancestry to a small community and was  surprised to see that some of  his  "kinfolk"  is Caucasian!  At the end of the episode, he expressed  amazement over "how we are all linked to just about everybody. I continue to be amazed at how connected members of the human family are. "   

What Gates felt when he discovered he was linked in a very real sense to all of humanity, I too felt one Sunday in church when sitting behind the grandparents of  a two-year-old , a three-year-old, and a babe whom grandpa and grandma  had been rotating tenderly  between their now tired arms for nearly an hour . Naturally, the grandchildren's patience was beginning to ebb; the babe now began to cry incessantly   and  the three-year-old broke loose  from the family corral and ran down the aisle  and the two –year-old was  moving every limb in assorted directions. Clearly, so I thought, this  two-year-old  could  and would not tolerate another five seconds of any discipline. 
As the congregation said the Lord's Prayer , the restlessness of the two-year-old girl  intensified. But at the "amen" , when all turned to show the customary  sign of peace to each other, she suddenly anchored her body and mind—and perhaps soul, too.  Then,  without  prompts  from either grandparent, she turned around  and, with that smile unique to child innocence,  politely extended her small hand over the back of the pew to give  and receive from me  the handshake of  peace  . We exchanged smiles.   Holding her hand  for  a second or two  and then glancing at her family and others  with outreached hands, I had seen that this little girl had been  the first to reach out, and by  so doing , had reminded me that I was also a member of a  body of family—indeed, a family both infinite and eternal .  


Other Families Interviewed on Exodus Trekkers


                      








***
             
             
The End
All comments are welcome.
© 2015 Robert R. Schwarz




An interview about 'moral wounds'
with a 2-star general in 
the next EXODUS TREKKERS


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