My mom’s dad was a traveling preacher. At one point before I was born, Lennard aired a regular 15 minute long radio show across the midwest. “Rays of Faith” was the name.
He didn’t have much money. His wife stayed home with the kids in Seattle. He wrote letters to pastors across America pitching his revival services and traveling when invited.
When he died, I was twelve or thirteen. I’d only met him a couple times in my life, but I remember getting to buy my first comic books at Lone Star Comics for the flight to Seattle. My first choices were random inexpensive copies of Captain America and Iron Man. I also remember bringing my Gameboy and playing Dr. Mario most of the time we were traveling.
I don’t remember all that much from the trip, except I walked through the house my mom lived in as a child, and smelled the terrible mold in the basement where she grew up. She told me about the rats she grew accustomed to and, looking back, I feel terrible for her to have lived in a place that probably made her sick for life.
Ruth (my grandfather’s second wife) let me go through his things and pick out anything I wanted.
I found half a dozen neckties in his closet that still had his smell. It wasn’t an overly pleasing smell. But it was real. Somehow I could magically still smell the man after he’d gone. That made those ties one of my prized possessions for a time.
Some years later, Ruth passed and I asked for any materials she still had from Lennard’s sermons, teachings, etc.
One day, a box of cassette tapes and reams of sermon notes showed up in the mail. Each tape contained two fifteen minute sermons per side. The box included a long itemized list of titles for his sermons.
The sermon notes were something else entirely. This man had apparently never thrown away a piece of paper in his life. All of his sermon notes, and I mean ALL of them, were written on the back side of flyers and bills and other correspondence he had received over the years. Not a single fresh clean piece of paper in the bunch.
This time capsule of thought hid in the back of my closet for years as I journeyed through five and a half years of college and into the work force. From time to time, I’d pull a tape out of the box and go to the trouble to record the audio on my MacBook. I’ve lost most of those digital copies over the years, but a few are available at the website I set up for him. Maybe one day I’ll digitize the rest and post them online, long after anyone who’d care is gone.
Fast forward through marriage and into parenthood, and we faced a mold situation that required we remove everything from the house and remediate. Basically all paper that had been in the house was contaminated, and not worth the risk to our health.
With great precaution (safety gloves, filtered mask, eyewear, long sleeves, hat), I opened the tub of sermon notes outside and took photos of dozens and dozens of pages. Not only his notes, but some of the letters on the opposite side of the pages too. These indicated correspondence he’d kept with other pastors and missionaries in Texas, Chicago, and many other places.
This priceless time capsule had to go. I could have spent a month exploring those pages before they were tossed. But for the sake of my kiddos, they had to go. There was never going to be a safe time to hold them or read them.
How do you make that choice? To release something that will never exist again, and can never be repeated? How do you let go when you have so little to feed on, to find yourself with?
Lennard’s sermon notes, and the few family anecdotes contained within those sermons, are some of the only written/audio records I have of the generations that preceded me. No one kept a diary. Or if they did, I never heard about it.
That’s why journaling matters so much to me. People die. They pass on. They leave you. But WHAT do they leave you?
Some people plan. They leave behind letters. Or journals. Or recordings. They intend to love on their spouses and children and grandchildren long after they’re gone. I thank God that those people exist. But they don’t exist in my house.
I remember feeling a strange sense of grounding when I first read a sermon outline and heard his voice on tape. It was like getting a VIP access to things he cared about even though he didn’t intentionally provide those things to me.
I felt closer to the history of my people. In fact, I don’t even know if I had a concept of “my people” before I touched those things.
Lennard unwittingly tethered me to a time and a place and a people I had barely met. But they were mine. I came from them. Their stories literally created the path for my stories to be built on. I didn’t exist without them. These pieces are part of the story of how I came to be. And why.
Eventually the ties lost their smell. And they no longer offered me a tether to the man I barely knew. Where did they go? I can’t recall. Did I toss them? I wouldn’t think so. But they’re gone.
It’s probably just as well. I’ve come to enjoy the bittersweet ache that comes with saying goodbye to things that tether us to the past. There’s devastating loss, but there’s also something to be gained. The slate is wiped clean. Or something that passes as clean.
I’ve been filling journals since I was 18. And reams of paper in a three ring binder before that, sadly lost. All because a quote from a terrible movie reminded me that without a written record, our most glorious and hard fought words are lost forever.
I never expected to die young. But I knew in my heart that since no man is guaranteed tomorrow, it would be a crime to not leave behind some part of myself for my children, should they ever decide they just needed a little more time with Dad.
The greatest crime is to have the opportunity, and to never make the effort.
