This year has been marked by the deaths of several men I have loved, including my father. The discovery of how much I loved each one came the instant I heard of their passing, a common experience, I’m sure. Had these deaths not come in such rapid succession, however, I might have missed a curious phenomenon: that the person became more present to me, not less.
As these men have ridden around with
me as I move through my days, I’ve come to see our time here on earth not as a
journey, but as a passage: a paragraph
punctuated with commas and periods, with a beginning and an end. A ticket on a steamer, a route through the
mountains navigated with difficulty or ease, but short term, in fact. Here and gone, yet not gone without effect.
This past Saturday at the Visalia
Friends Meetinghouse we memorialized one of this region’s most adorable and
pugnacious Quakers, Bill Lovett. The
stories of fights he entered on behalf of the common good were as numerous as
the people who came to tell them. One of
my favorites was of Bill and his wife Beth and four other people standing off
Tulare Irrigation District’s bulldozers over the canal concretization
project. Eventually they were joined by
local farmers and others who realized the impact on the groundwater table would
have been horrible, but had felt helpless to do anything until that standoff. Eventually TID became a positive force in
recharging the aquifer, which might not have happened but for that standoff.
I know that story was somehow
responsible for my own conversion, if you will, to the Friends. So was the place they built there just off
Highway 198 adjacent to Kaweah Oaks Preserve: a meetinghouse handcrafted of
wood and stone tucked into a wooded glade, garnished with a Christmas Tree farm
that served to bring people into that beauty once a year. But the story I offered to the gathering
Saturday about Bill’s impact on me was more modest, a small example of a big
effect.
We were renovating the billboard
along the highway. That old billboard
had also been responsible for my eventual move to the Visalia Friends,
announcing as it did their very existence and some smidgeon of what they stood
for. New poles were sunk into the
ground, new panels created to hold the message, and our job one November
Saturday was to raise those panels from the ground and connect them to the
posts. As much planning as possible was
done in advance, but you know what they say about plans. Late in the afternoon, we had those panels
suspended by ropes tied to the bumpers of pickups, but somehow the linking
mechanism fell through and a new one had to be devised. Bill gave orders for retrieving certain items
from his now infamous scrap pile, and then scaled the tallest ladder to the top
of the poles and hammered the essential link into place. “He was only in his eighties then,” I said
with only a little irony, but it was his lifelong ability to know what needed
to be done and then do it that made me a follower.
And it seems to me that what Bill’s
passing has done for me is allow me to accept his passage through my life with
new joy and gratitude. To arrange his
contributions with the others’ on the deck of this ship, and plough
forward. Some are longer than others,
but all our passages are limited. Make
them count.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a grateful carpenter’s daughter who writes. You can send your stories of passage to her
c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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