Cleaning Out My Parents Last Home

With the death of my mother a week and a half ago my siblings and I have been having to go through her stuff; also my Dads stuff that she kept after he died last December. I just got home from spending three hours there tonight. Anselm was with me. While I was fighting back tears the whole time he was having a blast. One of the last things my Mom said to me was "I always want my grandkids to be happy when they visit my house." Though I miss my mother and father so badly I wish I could die I am glad Anslem was there tonight, and that his last memory of their last house together will be of having a good time going through closets, looking at pictures, and eating all of their candy.

My father was a preacher. He has many books, and many of them I read when I was a boy. When they moved into this little apartment a few years ago they got rid of most of them but they kept one case full. Among them a seires called the Biblical Illustrater. (It is out of print now but there is a software version available.) It is probably, the best and most thorough commentary on the Protestant Bible in existence. When my Dad was pastoring in Los Angeles back in the 1960s the congregation there bought the books for him. Each volume was purchased and dedicated by a different person in the congregation. I started reading them when I was about 13. The text was so tiny (my astigmatism wouldn't be diagnsed until I joined the Army at 17) that I would get headaches from working so hard to see the words. But I loved them. I am sure that after my Dad died she kept them for me. I left them in their apartment. I don't have room for them. I can hardly believe that they are going to wind up in a pulp mill.

I don't have room for any of the stuff I brought home tonight. Pictures, mostly. But also some of my Dad's highschool report cards. My Mom and Dad's wedding certificate. My Dad's attendence and punctualty awards from elementary school - two years without being tardy or ansent! I took both my Mom's and Dad's 8th grade diplomas. My dad's adoption decree (he was a foundling).

Tonight I saw posters of my Mom when she was a teacher at summer camps in the 1950s. Anselm said, "She was very pretty. When did she get old?" I bet she wondered the same thing. I read some of her notes from when in the 1980s, as director of Christian Education for her denomination in Florida, she taught seminars for Sunday School teachers. I found songs, articles, and poems she wrote.

I took my Dad's minister's manuals (My mother gave one to my friend Jeff, who's father just died, a couple of months ago when he had to do his first wedding.). Essentially, they are sevice books for ministers in non-liturgical denominations. For my Dad being a Protestant he sure had a high view of the calling to be a pastor. The service he wrote for ordinations, which I only heard twice is really beautiful, being mostly quotations and paraphrases of St. Paul.

I was born in February 1969. In August 1969 my biological father murdred my biological mother. I have no memory of them and talking about them is to me like talking about a stranger one hears about on the radio news. I know it happened, but I don't even know what the people looked like. The mother of my biological mother suddenly found her self with a whole bunch of kids, including me. She was a member of the church pastored by my Dad. He had been by a couple of times to check on her, and each time he said to my Mom, "You need to go and see that baby", by which he meant me. But each time my Mom, who ws a teacer and a mother of three, said, "Billy, I don't need to go see a baby. I am with kids all day long." But on August 17, my Mom and Dad's wedding anniversary, he went and got me. I was only wearing a dish rag for a diaper. Be fore he took me into his house he said "Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-shhhhh" and he carried me into the the kitchen where my Mom was doing dishes. I am told that I did not make a noise and that she didn't know we were standing there. When she turned around and saw us standing there I became her son. A few days later she wrote this (my sister found it in my Mom's papers):

"What do I need with you, little boy
Looking so solemn with big blue eyes
There with Daddy holding you close
Smiling because of his big surprise?

What do you need with me, dear little one
Old enough to be your granny-
Why to love each other, what else? My son.
So God gave you to our family.

Thank you, God."


Yes. Thank you, God.