remembering two of "the greatest generation"

 

of Margie and Bus

who am I?

who are you?

the self is a wild combination

of constancy and spontaneity,

a basic amalgam, present from birth,

that constantly tinkers with subtleties of decision and response,

with each day and with each other

we are pulled out into refinement of the compound

that is who we are,

I have a project to do what I can

to remember and express both my parents,

my mother's siblings, and their worlds,

who really was my aunt and the person she chose and married?

I record a video of my first cousins and their kids

struggling to answer the questions of who these people were,

they tell stories of actions and of words,

love is the lens through which they acted

and through which we see them,

each though is clouded to us

by the limits of what we saw, what we heard, what we felt,

by our own imperfections that challenge our empathic leap,

so while we see them with love and appreciation,

we cannot see them as fully as to who they were as we'd like,

they must have adjusted their selves to fit

within the connections of who we were, with them,

I hear stories that ring true

to the persons I experienced and loved,

I also hear perspectives

that challenge how it all seems to me,

I can see and glory in the children and grandchildren before me

who live their lives as fully as they can

and who know themselves in significant ways

because Margie and Bus knew themselves as well as they did,

they found available paths to let that of God within them

be true to who they realized they were,

they then gave gifts by nurturing the young before them,

and letting them loose to fly as well as each can,

one way to know another

is to see the effects of one's life,

Margie and Bus, you lived your lives well,

your extended family shouts that truth!

by Henry H. Walker

November 10, ‘25

hold onto the stories

 

work at remembering

CFS approached its 60th anniversary

of working to be there for its students,

to be there so that staff can find their way

onto a path that lets them share

the gifts of who they are,

as the students share the gifts of who they are,

it seemed important to me

to record and share the stories

that our aging staff lived with the fullness of themselves,

as they answered the calling that grabbed them at their heart,

so a way opened, 

and many of CFS's former staff stepped forward

and risked the opening of their hearts

and the crafting of their words

to release what needed to be remembered,

the book, Callings and Answers, is now a reality,

and 33 views of CFS are recorded--

in the last year two of those staff contributing

have died and have gone beyond us,

I am glad that their stories did not 

go away completely with their passing,

years ago I learned a lesson

that by the time we realize

we want to hear and remember a person's stories,

often that person has just left us,

and the answers to our questions are silent,

how wonderful it is, and can be,

to not give in to easy procrastination,

and, instead, choose to open self

and to risk owning one's own stories,

sharing each unique take on it all,

as students and teachers are personal, true, and deep

in a school where truth is continually revealed, and noticed.

by Henry H. Walker

November 2, ‘25

Kathy and Connie are gone

 and then they're not

people are there, and then they're not,

two former colleagues were fully there with me, and then we lost them,

I visited one in her local assisted living home in the last year,

marveled at how "with it" Kathy Harris was,

of the marvelous view out her window

of the nature she loved so much,

got her to sign her permission to use the CFS story

she wrote for me and our book, Callings and Answers,

when invited the last few years, she has visited CFS

for a meal, a sharing of a middle school production,

her story for the book was of how thankful she was of her time at Friends,

a year ago I pressed another special colleague, Connie Toverud,

to write and share her story of her and CFS,

in the dark days of January this year in snowy Norway,

she defeated self-doubt and hesitancy

and wrote beautifully of the best of her

revealing itself within the challenge of being on staff in the upper school,

when she read the collected stories in Callings and Answers,

she emailed me that she "cried and cried" after reading it all,

deeply moved by the collective wisdom and experience expressed in those pages,

her own story told of finding herself and her gifts at CFS,

that in her latter decades in Norway

she was called to be there for whomever found her and needed her,

she answered by hearing them, seeing them, connecting with them,

people are there, and then they're not, 

now Kathy and Connie are gone.

by Henry H. Walker

October 30, ‘25

our ginkgo

 

a golden-yellow pillar

my wife bonded with the ginkgo tree long ago when she was a child

 as she walked the streets of Glasgow, Kentucky, going to and from school:

mesmerized by the story her third grade teacher recounted,

how it was saved from extinction by monks in China,

unlike all other trees in its family,

those monks invested their lives to hold the sacred,

that which pulls us out of the normal, the mundane,

and pushes us to get real,

to connect with the "unseen world,"

a deeper reality with which we need to engage,

they must have seen this tree,

the only of its kind that still survived

and tended it, nurtured it, effected its survival,

we planted a double-trunked ginkgo

in our yard over 40 years ago,

it now is dominant in our heart, and in our yard,

when the growing season is ending,

its leaves don't just go gently into the night of winter

but rather slowly ascend into the transcendence

of releasing themselves into golden yellow,

while the oaks around are still green

or resigning themselves to a crinkly brown,

the ginkgo marshals its last hurrah

and slowly, inexorably morphs

into a green-tinged yellow pillar,

shouting "I was! I am! I will be!"

by Henry H. Walker

October 30, ‘25