Looking, but not seeing

August 17, 2012

I cannot tell you how many times I have walked past the painting that hangs on the wall across from our hospital gift shop. What I can tell you is that I never saw it until two weeks ago. If you had asked me before then if I’d ever seen it, I would have said “of course,” with the same smug confidence I would have used had you asked me if I knew the sun rises in the East. But I hadn’t seen it at all.

The woman who revealed the painting to me had been a patient in our hospital a few months back. She had come to talk with me about becoming a spiritual support volunteer. She is an artist I found out and after our conversation, I walked with her toward the front entrance of the hospital to see her off. The painting caught her eye. “It’s lovely,” she said as she walked toward it. Eventually, she got so close to it that her face was almost touching it. “It’s silk!” she said, “How beautiful!”

I walked closer to investigate and was amazed. The artist had used hundreds of brightly colored bits of silk cloth to “paint” a school of Japanese koi swimming in a pond. Up close, I could see the individual pieces that I had missed so many times before. Each piece had been meticulously placed to present the whole picture in such a way that you could not tell they were separate pieces if you were more that a few inches away.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about that painting and the detail I didn’t see for the last eight years. What else and who else have I missed seeing because I haven’t looked closely enough? I don’t know the answer to that. But I’m looking.

Blessing to you all,

Jerald

How I learned to eat a real breakfast

Glimmers August 9, 2012 “Through some moment of beauty or pain, some sudden turning of our lives, we catch glimmers of at least what the saints are blinded by…” (Frederick Buechner, Listening To Your Life, p. 169) Old Florida-style homes were mostly wooden structures built about two feet off the ground. Rather than being set on a concrete pad, they were supported on concrete blocks or concrete pillars. The space between the floor of the house and the ground, combined with lots of windows, allowed the air to flow through the house so as to cool it as much as possible in the sticky Florida Summers. You can still find old homes built this way all over the Southeastern United States. My grandparents on my father’s side had just such a house in Belle Glade, FL. When I was 10 years old, I spent a week or so with them. Alone. By that time, Ruben and Lina Smith were really old. He was 69 and she was 68. As I played with my toy brontosaurus and T rex, I was sure they had seen the real things. Every day but Sunday, he dressed the same, bib overalls and a short sleeve white button up shirt. She wore simple cotton dresses and her long hair was always in a neat, tiny bun. It was there during that summer that I learned how to eat a real breakfast. Sitting at the small table in their dining room, I looked at the fried eggs, grits and bacon on my plate and my stomach churned. Both my parents worked and breakfast at my house was typically a fix it yourself affair and was usually toast or cereal. All that yellow, gooey stuff seemed unappetizing. And it was, at first. I watched them spoon the grits on top of the eggs, cut it with a fork and knife and mix it all up. They added some salt and generous amounts of black pepper. I copied them, except using a little less black pepper and a little more salt. It was tolerable. Barely. These survivors of the depression and years of tenant farming in Southwest Georgia took nothing for granted and they expected that I would eat what was placed in front of me. And I did. By the end of the week, I loved eggs, grits and bacon for breakfast. To this day, when I eat the Smokehouse breakfast at Cracker Barrel, I’m often transported back for a few seconds to the table in that tiny, Florida-style house in Belle Glade, Florida in 1966. When I began thinking about my Granny and Granddaddy Smith and putting words on the page, this was not where I had thought it would go. Memories are like that. They creep into our consciousness and then take us on a journey to a land of long-forgotten sights, sounds, textures and scents that touch the deep places of our souls. Perhaps that is the reason we spend more time in our memories as we age and we enjoy taking walks down memory lane so much. Blessings to you all, Jerald