Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. – Henry David Thoreau
Earlier this week I drove to Lehigh University in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, for work-related business. An unseasonably warm and sunny March day,
I cracked opened the car windows and let the early spring air brush against my
forehead and refresh my senses. The hour plus drive up the Northeast Extension
of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a scenic and peaceful stretch of hills and farms,
allowed me to reflect on life, longing, and the passage of time.
Upon arriving, I took a moment to walk around the beautifully
wooded hillside campus spread across 2,300 acres of Pennsylvania’s Lehigh
Valley. Situated fifty miles north of Philadelphia and 75 miles west of New
York City, the campus contains a vibrancy that belies its quiet location. Although
I was born a few miles away in Easton, my only previous visit to Lehigh’s
campus was in the early 1970s when I accompanied my family to a
Wittenberg-Lehigh football game. The air had a familiar feel and scent.
As I walked along the campus commons and watched students
lounge, talk, walk hurriedly to class, and toss Frisbees, I felt the years melt
away. I thought back to a time 35 years earlier when I walked across Wittenberg’s
campus between classes, books in hand and thoughts filling my head as I stopped
to talk with a classmate or to sit on a tree-sheltered bench in front of the
library.
When my meetings at Lehigh concluded and it was time to
leave, I took a final look around and felt a slight pang in my heart. A few
minutes later I realized what it was, this sense of loss as I left campus, for
I wanted to call home and talk with my Dad about work and life and my morning
at Lehigh. He would have liked that. He had spent nearly a decade in this part
of the country when he was a young Lutheran minister in Phillipsburg, New
Jersey, just across the river. Like me, Dad enjoyed exploring college campuses.
When I was younger, we occasionally found ourselves walking along the campuses
of Princeton and Harvard, Holy Cross and Dartmouth, and many smaller and lesser
known schools near places my Dad visited when we lived in New Jersey and later
Massachusetts.
I think now I know why Dad liked college campuses so much.
They remind us of when we were young, when life seemed full of possibility, the
world and everything about it a place of creative exploration and learning;
when opportunities awaited our advancing progress and many paths seemed open to
us. College was a time of hopeful uncertainty, when it was safe to dream of
being and doing anything; of being “a free man in Paris . . . unfettered and
alive” as Joni Mitchell sang on Court and Spark.
There is a reason young people are on the whole more
idealistic than the rest of us, and that cynicism and despair increase as we
grow old. For Dad and me, college campuses were a brief respite from all of
that. They reminded him, as they continue to remind me, of a time years ago
when we possessed grander visions.
When he was a pastor in northern Virginia in the 1980’s and
early 1990’s, one of Dad’s favorite activities was his annual visits to nearby
colleges attended by the sons and daughters of congregants, the same kids he
confirmed five or six years before and counseled in youth group rap sessions.
From his church in Maclean, Virginia, he visited schools like Washington and
Lee, Virginia, and VMI. Dad always had a sense of hope and optimism when he
talked of such visits. He enjoyed speaking to young people, learning about
their studies and college experiences, and discussing with them their future
plans, anxieties, and dreams. I love that too, and I am certain I have annoyed
more than a few college and graduate students with questions about their studies,
their plans, their hopes for the future. And yet, I have had some of my best
conversations with my daughters and their friends when focused on their goals, their
concerns, and the many options and obstacles that lie ahead.
In the final decade of his life, my Dad loved hearing about
what schools Jen and Hannah had applied to and, after leaving for college, what
classes they were taking, their activities and internships, and their
experiences abroad. He did not always have advice relevant to the 21st century
economy (nor do I), but the girls and I enjoyed his interest in their lives and
futures.
These are the conversations I miss the most since my Dad died
nearly a year ago. It hits me only occasionally now, but there are some days,
like my visit to the Lehigh campus, that leave me with a momentary sense of
remorse, when I am reminded that death is forever and there is no turning back;
and when I am forced to acknowledge that loss is permanent.
But then again, maybe the immutability of loss is but an
illusion. I am reminded of a scene in one of my favorite movies – a cute,
inspiring film I used to watch with my daughters when they were young about a 13
year-old girl named Amy who moves back with her Dad after her mother dies in a
car accident. Her Dad, played by Jeff Daniels, is an eccentric, free-spirited
inventor, who lives on a farm in rural Canada. Early on, Amy finds a nest of
abandoned goose eggs, which she nurtures and watches over until they hatch. The
baby geese immediately associate Amy as their mother, and she raises and cares
for the goslings as if they were her children. The goslings follow Amy
everywhere. But with the approach of winter, she and her Dad realize they must find
a way to lead them south. Based on a true story, Fly Away Home contains
beautiful scenes of the Canadian countryside and of the geese in flight after Amy’s
Dad builds two small engine-assisted gliders, one painted to resemble a large goose.
Ultimately, Amy learns to fly the goose-like contraption and, together, she and
her Dad fly along the east coast of the United States from Canada, with all of
the young geese in tow, before landing safely in a nature preserve in North
Carolina.
In one memorable scene, the Dad’s glider malfunctions and he
crash lands, dislocating his shoulder. He insists Amy continue on without him.
But Amy doubts herself.
“I can't find my way without you,” she says.
“Yes, you can,” insists
the Dad. “Because you're like your mother. . . . She was brave, you know. . . . She
went off, followed her dream. Nobody helped her. . . . You have that strength
in you too.”
“I wish she was here now.”
“She is. . . . She's right next to you. She's in the geese. She's
in the sky. She's all around you.”
There is wisdom and simplicity to this notion of spirit, of
the ineffable presence of loved ones no longer with us. I would like to believe
there is truth to the notion that those who precede us in death remain with us
in life, present in the sun, the sky, the trees, and the geese. And why not?
What is this life all about if not to fulfill some larger circle of existence?
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see,”
wrote Henry David Thoreau. “This world is but a canvas to our imagination.” To
find inspiration in the clouds, the grass beneath our feet, and the mane of a
wild horse, is to transcend the limits of time and mind. I can no longer talk
with my Dad about the things which most excited him, and from which he had much
to say. But I will continue to have those same conversations with my children.
And I will know that, in some inexplicable way, Dad’s voice continues to be
heard. For as the author Henry Stanley Haskins wisely said, “What lies behind us and what
lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
Give me the splendid, silent sun with all his beams
full-dazzling.
– Walt Whitman
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