Memories of my recently passed mother continue. The first five installments were:
1. The Early Years
2. The Depression Years
3. The Teen Years
4. Getting Married
5. Early Marriage
27. I imagine moving to Florida was difficult for my mother because of being so far from her family, although I don't remember her saying so. My family prayed about the move, and several different Scriptures jumped out at different ones in the family. My favorite was my sister Juanita's verse: "Thou hast given me a south land" (Judg. 1:15). I can't remember my mother's verse. It may have been a psalm.
This would be the farthest she had ever been from family. Paul would not make this move. On the other hand, my mother loved to explore new things. She was curious. A longstanding story in my family was a road in Tennessee called "Stinking Creek Road" north of Knoxville. Every time we passed by my mother would say, "I wonder what's down that road." On such occasions, my dad's "J" personality had a schedule he wanted to keep. He even timed rest park stops for fun.
When my mother suggested diversions or visiting someone or something along the way, he would say, "Helen!" But most of the time, he would indulge her. In retirement, on one journey, they took the time to go down Stinking Creek Road. There's nothing there. It goes for a bit and then ends in a T with another north-south road.
I don't remember there ever being any rhetoric in my home about who the head was. In keeping with the culture and my dad's abilities, my mother was more than happy to let my dad function in traditional ways. (She did once say that they could never have money because he gave it all away.) Yet I don't think my dad ever made a significant decision without discussing it with her. Decisions were joint decisions. Even the children were often brought into them.
My dad lived by the verse, "in honor preferring one another" (Rom. 12:10). This mutual deference often became frustrating to my brother-in-laws when it came to deciding where to eat out. "Where do you want to go?" "No, where do you want to go?" You couldn't trust someone when they said, "You have the last piece" because they might actually want it and be being polite.
On the other hand, my mother probably was often more prone to be straightforward about what she wanted. :-)
28. We made an exploratory trip to Fort Lauderdale before fully deciding. We stayed at a motel on Federal Highway. The beach and motel pool were relatively foreign experiences. I think my mother found a "bathing suit" that had a dress attached to it. She never did learn how to swim.
Having a house in Florida meant a steady stream of family and "friends" would come to visit us. We lived three miles from the beach and had a detached upstairs. Frankly, that was about the only time we went to the beach, when we had visitors from the north. Some visitors were more pleasant than others. Some were actually rather demanding and picky -- while getting a free room near a beach! But our peace-oriented family smiled and waved (and then of course talked about them around the dinner table later).
My Grandma Schenck came to visit once, maybe her one and only trip out of the state of Indiana during her life. This would have probably been around 1975, the year after my Grandpa Schenck died. She died in 1977.
29. My Grandma Shepherd and Great Aunt Nora (Harry Shepherd's sister) came to live with us for the better part of a year in the early 70s. These were precious days. Aunt Nora had been living in a trailer on my grandmother's land. For a long time, Grandma had lived off the rent from the original house in front and lived in a small shack at the back of the property. I remember it as small, and I was small.
Aunt Nora was in her early nineties, I believe, and had skin that reminded me of the crust of a pot pie. She loved vanilla wafers and gave them out fairly freely. She was very into politics (Republican, of course) and taught me to recite the presidents in order up to then-President Richard Nixon.
My mother's family had been Republican since the Civil War. Her grandfather had fought and been injured during the war, fighting for the Union. Abraham Lincoln was virtually a saint for my family, almost right up there with Peter and Paul. (I am still quite fond of him.) Aunt Nora had a frame with pictures in it of the three Republican presidents who had been assassinated (she got it before JFK).
In 1968 as Nixon was campaigning, he made a stop in Indianapolis, and my mother went to see him at the airport. Her picture was captured greeting him on the front page of the Indianapolis Star. If you were to visit my mother's book room today, you would find signed pictures of Reagan and Bush senior and junior. A Republican presidential candidate could hardly do any wrong, although I believe Trump sometimes made my mother uncomfortable the first time around.
I asked her once if she had ever voted for a Democrat. She indicated that she did once in a local election because she knew the person. But then she had second thoughts after he was in the position. Even with Nixon, the claims against him were scarcely to be believed. Even after he confessed and resigned, my mother had a sense that he had been mistreated.
My mother wasn't able to take care of her mother long-term. Eventually, her mother flew back to Indiana (I tried to build a plane to take her back but the aerodynamics weren't right). Grandma spent the rest of her days in the nursing home in Rossville where she passed in 1979.
30. My mother volunteered in the nurse's office at Wilton Manors Elementary School where I attended, about a half mile straight up the street from our house. She had to decide whether to enroll me as a four-year-old or to wait a year. She decided to enroll me. I was quite reluctant to go the first couple days, perhaps even hiding under the bed. But the second week I was into it.
While my father's family is loud and rather boisterous, my mother's family can be painfully shy, even neurotically fearful. This was me until my final days in college when the Schenck in me took over. My mother was understanding, probably remembering her own childhood.
We took a trip to the Philippines in 1976 (I believe) to visit my sister Juanita who was a missionary there. Those were the days when an overseas call cost an arm and a leg. We exchanged tape cassette recordings. We had stops in Guam and Seoul.
My mother loved these adventures. We had also made a trip to Brainerd in South Dakota when my sisters were there, maybe 1974. My parents would come to England twice during my education there. They would go with us to Europe again after I was married and to Germany when I was on my first Fulbright in 2004. It was a sign that my mother was moving slower when she wasn't interested in visiting us in Germany in 2011 while I was on a second Fulbright. I think Dad was game but she wasn't interested. He died right after we returned.
In the Philippines, I was quite neurotically terrified in the night at the sound of the "tikka" geckos up country in Rosales. Throughout the night, they made that repeated sound loudly, "TIK-KA, TIK-KA." My mother let me crawl into the way-too-small bed with them. My father was a trooper through such fears.
When our church watched the film, A Thief in the Night around the same time, I went through a long fearful period worrying about being left behind in the rapture. My mother gave me a little box of Scriptural promises to look at during school with verses like Joshua 1:6 and Jeremiah 29:11. One day in the sixth grade I was so fearful I was running a low grade temperature and they sent me home. In those days, she drove me to Sunrise Middle School and picked me up each day.
Perhaps she was overly indulgent, but my fears were irrational and real. When one woman at church told me that shyness was a matter of pride, I thought she was crazy. She was obviously an extrovert who had no idea what she was talking about.
31. My mom was an early version of a helicopter parent. In the sixth grade, I was not put in the track that students normally got on when they would eventually go to college. I was quite enjoying the run-of-the-mill math class. She made a hard decision and had me switched. I wasn't too excited about change at the time but was incredibly grateful for it afterward.
In high school, she was quite annoying at pushing me to get my homework done. (I tried to pass that along to my kids when they were in high school) I used to tell her to let me order my life. My first semester of college suggested her prodding had been helpful, in retrospect.
When in college I worried about whether I should date someone who didn't follow the standards of my background, my mom said not to worry about it. God would take care of it. Whereas I was wired at that time to be an idealist and absolutist, she argued for common sense and practicality.
When my personality at that time felt like it had to say everything I was thinking or doubting to a girlfriend, my mother urged that "You don't have to say everything you know." She also had a sense of protecting the family, I would say. Not that we had any scandals, but I would say culturally she was of the mind to keep any family worries in house.
Mom was probably too indulgent. She came to my rescue many times. On my graduation weekend from Central, she was busy typing my honor's project in our hotel room for me while I read my notes to her. My Aunt Bernadine raised an eyebrow. Those were the days before computers were fully in play (1987).
32. My mother was allergic to exercise. Even this last decade she has barely moved from her chair. Physical therapy was anathema. The by-weekly baths were of the Devil.
I have often run during my life. More than once she quoted that verse to me, "Bodily exercise profiteth little" (1 Tim. 4:8). Her father did play baseball at Wabash and she remembered seeing him play on a field day on the property of C. G. Taylor near Russiaville at some point.
She was not known for her great cooking. No doubt, her childhood left her with more of a sense of creativity than excellence in this area. We ate extensively out of cans. My dad discovered he had diabetes soon after we moved to Florida, so that was a regular factor in our collective diet.
33. As the empty nest approached, my mother became more and more interested in current events. I think she would deny that it had anything to do with the empty nest, and she may be right. The 80s were the beginning of a new phase in the culture wars, as the Reagan years saw an increasing fusion of religion and politics. She rode that wave in her own way.
In Fort Lauderdale, we lived in the shadow of Dr. D. James Kennedy and Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. We had its radio station on all weekend. Coral Ridge was ground zero for the culture wars that were ramping up. Scientific creationism was now hitting its stride. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority was becoming increasingly activist on the issue of abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade in the 70s.
My mother and church took great interest in these issues. I attended a couple creation-evolution debates there with my mom. She began to buy lots of books as the Christian Book Store movement was in full swing. The lead-off hitter was a book on Globalism by Marlin Maddox, who had a regular daily radio show. In my opinion, this set my mother on somewhat of a trajectory toward conspiracy theories.
Radio shows were a staple for her in the later decades of her life. She loved a show by a Messianic Jew named Zola Levitz. She was on multiple newsletters by individuals like Timothy LaHaye. Prophecy would remain a continual interest with Hal Lindsey still keeping track of world events. My mother strongly hoped that the Lord would return before she died, and she was known for keeping up with the signs of the times.
She would become the outreach director of the district women's organization in the 90s and would bring to the women in the district the latest findings she had from her network of information. I believe she also shared some of this information with the spouses of Central Wesleyan College board members. My dad was on the Board of Trustees of SWU in the 80s and 90s, and they enjoyed their travels to South Carolina twice a year.
In this last decade, the radio shows were more along the lines of Tinyberg Tales and Al Smith's show that featured the origins of a hymn each week. However, she still to some extent kept up with current events with a steady stream of FOX News in the morning.
34. As my Dad was regularly working, my mother filled in some of the gaps in getting me to college before there was a car for me to take. One summer as I was about to drive back for summer school, I poked my eye on a candle sitting down to breakfast. She ended up driving me up. Interesting to think of now since she did almost no driving the last 20 years of her life.
My mother was not surprised when I felt a call to ministry. She never said anything, but she didn't really see me as a doctor. As I wrestled with issues of my study, she began to feed me resources. Given what was available, they tended to be fundamentalist, Coral-Ridge type resources.
For example, as I began to wrestle with whether the King James was the best Bible version, she gave me pro-KJV materials. I tried to go that way for a couple years but in seminary it just didn't seem correct. I believe she gave me a book that argued against Mark being the first Gospel. I'm sure she wasn't pleased that after due consideration I kept concluding for the other side.
At one point I apologized for arguing with her. But entirely sanctified individuals weren't supposed to argue. "We're not arguing," she said. "We're discussing."
She thought me a bit rebellious but nothing could be farther from the truth. It was with great pain that I changed my mind on these issues. We had a fundamentally different approach to truth. Her approach was to use your intellect to show how the evidence could support the position of your group and tradition. But I had started out as a chemistry major. I wanted to gather evidence, form hypotheses, test them, then come to the most likely conclusion.
At some point around the end of seminary, I largely stopped discussing my learning with her. I didn't really want her to change her mind, and she never would change it anyway. It wasn't beneficial to argue about things that, in the end, didn't matter. So I lost my conversation partner. She would at least listen to anything I wanted to talk about.
35. Around the year 2000, my parents sensed it was a good time to move closer to family. The days were gone when Patricia's husband was pastoring the church in Fort Lauderdale. Sharon had moved to Hobe Sound after being our pastor for a while. My dad was retired. They sold the house and moved to Lakeland to be near Patricia.
To be continued...
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