A Father’s Legacy

My cousins called him “Zeus” or “the Americano” every now and then. This was my father. He loved to preside over dinner-table conversations and would sometimes even instigate discussions of controversial nature to hear how and what we thought. Of course, he won every discussion, and characteristically would say “You Filipinos . . . in my country, God’s country. . . “ We all knew he was referring to the United States. That was his country, and he never tired of extolling her virtues.

Emiterio P. Reyes. That’s how he always signed his name.  He never left out the “P” which stood for “Panganiban,” his mother’s maiden name. If he were alive today, he would be 121 years old. The story is, at 13 years of age he joined the US Navy. He added 3 years to his age on his papers and off he went to see the world to escape his “fearsome” American Thomasite teacher. At that time the Philippines was an American territory. Somehow he was accepted in the US Navy. So began the adventure of this third grader that spoke very broken English. He traveled the world before there were the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain. He saw active duty in World Wars I and II. The family joke was he went to war not with a rifle, but with a coffee pot! He put in 33 years of service and was a Chief Petty Officer when he retired. He was very proud of how he had conducted his life with very scant formal education.

Growing up, I was unaware of how differently my father was raising his family. He was a product of two cultures and many a time I would hear him pontificating about how “You Filipinos just can’t be completely honest. Even if you mean ‘yes’, you say ‘no’. Why can’t you be frank?” This is a complaint about the Asian way of non-direct communication. When our neighbor gave him a bad time about wasting his money on having his girls (there were four of us) go to college, I heard him say, “Listen, their being girls is all the more reason to get them educated.”

Years ago, a friend asked me how it was that I was a Protestant though the Philippines was a Roman Catholic country. The answer goes back to the life-changing experience my father had as a young man. One night as he was walking on a city street in the United States, five guys mugged him. He was beaten up and left sprawled on the sidewalk. A kind man from a nearby rescue mission came to his aid. My father talked about getting even etc. etc. And the kind man admonished him that vengeance belonged to God. I believe this was the first time he heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. When he went back to the Philippines, he and my mother looked for a church that preached the same. He raised his family in this faith, teaching them from the Bible. The church became a very vital part of our lives.  

I have fond memory of little things he did that may have not have meant much to him, but did to me – how he would take me to the ferry landing at the American naval base at Sangley Point, so I could take the ferry boat to Manila during my college days. He would sometimes treat me to an American breakfast, just the two of us, at one of the base cafeterias. One summer I spent a month in a Christian camp in Southern Philippines. During one mail call I was sure I wouldn’t get any mail, so I announced to everyone that my parents were not into writing and it was fine if I didn’t get any mail. To my great surprise and everyone’s amusement, I got a very thick brown envelope from home. He had sent me a short note with the four-page comics portion of the Sunday paper! Then there was that time he took me to the Manila Airport for my trip back to my teaching post in Mindanao. He stood by the lamp post pretending to read a newspaper, but my quick glance at him revealed his tears at seeing his young daughter fly so far away from home.

When Don and I got engaged, Don asked my father for permission to take me to his home to meet his parents. He was adamantly against it. “I cannot allow my daughter to make this trip with you,” he told Don so strongly. (His parents were in Fresno, a good 3-hour drive from San Francisco where we lived.) “You tell your parents to come here and ask me for my daughter’s hand in marriage.” By American standards, he was being hard-headed and stubborn. Don had fears that his parents would not agree to driving the distance from Fresno. (His dad was just as bullheaded as my father was!) But they did come. Don’s Dad asked for my hand in marriage in traditional fashion, over a beautiful dinner hosted by my parents at the Empress of China restaurant in Chinatown. Days later he explained his action to me. Before he married my mother, he had an Irish girlfriend. When he proposed to her and talked to her parents about it, her father rejected him saying, “No Chinaman is going to marry my daughter!” My father wanted to make sure that my American future in-laws would treat me with respect. Many years later, Don’s sister told me her Dad’s account of that evening. She said they went home completely impressed by my parents. They were so proud that Don chose a girl with good values.

It is amazing that though he has been gone a long time, there’s hardly a day passes that I do not feel his imprint on my life. Sometimes I hear him in what I say. “It is important that you make your bed soon as you get up,” I would tell myself and everyone else in my family. This was a discipline my father learned while a young sailor. I open my linen closet, and I notice how I fold my linens, exactly the way he did. He had worked as a steward for an Admiral and knew how to run a household. “When you open a door, you close it behind you.” A habit I have easily acquired. When I oversleep, I tell myself, “Look to the ant you sluggard . . .” One of my father’s favorite Bible quotes. He impressed upon us the importance of being true to one’s word, citing Matthew 5:36-37, "Nor shall you make an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. But let your statement be, 'Yes, yes ' or 'No, no'; anything beyond these is of evil.” Years ago, I lost my whole Philippine stamp collection to a friend, and realized how deeply this admonition has been impressed in my heart and brain. My friend had just started a Philippines stamp collection and I promised to give her my duplicates. I made a mistake and inadvertently gave her my own collection. My friend realized my mistake and tried to give me back the stamps, but I couldn’t take it back because I had given her my word. I thought my father would have been proud of me, but I did feel sad at losing my collection.  

His legacy runs the gamut of varied lessons and values - how to make a perfect pie crust, how to make a bed, how one has to be reliable, to being honest in my dealings, to working hard and being diligent, to caring not just in words but in deeds, to being balanced in conducting my life (“Too much of even the good things is no good.”) This third grader ran away from his American school teacher in the Philippines and into a faith in an encounter in an American city street, a faith that permeated our whole lives. Today, that faith lives on in his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. A son, three grandsons, and a son-in-law have been pastors serving in New York, the Bay Area, in Arizona and in foreign missionfields. They have served in ministries in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, in campus ministries, youth work and in helping children traumatized by war in Bosnia, Israel, China, etc. Not a bad legacy for one who spoke broken English and had very scant formal education.

MY DISAPPEARING WORLD

If you’re a regular reader of my ramblings, you will have noticed how I ramble so much about changes I’ve seen in my lifetime. I reminisce a lot. I write about my complaints and near complaints about transitions. I beg your forgiveness. Naturally, it comes from where I am now with more years behind me than before. I fight a constant battle against the tendency to spend much time looking back and bemoaning how times have changed. Don and I have tried to keep engaged with life though retirement seemed to have pushed us a bit off the mainstream.

A couple of weeks ago I had a pesky molar extracted. I tried to suffer the pain for the longest time, but it could no longer be helped. As I sat on the dental chair, the oral surgeon and his assistant talked while working on my tooth. They talked about how the surgeon attended a conference and evaded paying the $650 attendance fee. He paid $20 for the name tag of a registered friend. Then the friend reported it as lost, so he could be issued a replacement tag. This upset me quite a bit. I wondered if I could trust this man. And they didn’t seem to be concerned that I could hear all this. It was as if there was nothing wrong with what he had done.

In the movie “The Sound of Music” there is a poignant scene where Capt. Von Trapp had just received a telegram from the new Austrian order. He gets lost in his thoughts and stares at a distance. The Baroness comes and asks, “You're far away. Where are you?” The Captain answers, “In a world that’s disappearing.”

My world, too, is disappearing. The core values that were taught me and passed on to me by my parents, grandparents, teachers and mentors are being slowly eroded by secularism, pragmatism, cynicism and various other “isms” that through the years have been introduced and taught by school systems, parenting authorities, political systems and the entertainment industry. For sure there are some good things that have come out of contemporary influences. There is a greater openness and tolerance for some ideas and ways which were so unwelcome years ago. The increase in the amount of information available to everyone has educated us more effectively and productively. The new technologies have made life a bit easier to manage to a certain degree. But I often question if the trade-offs we make for these new things and new values have made us better people. Our relationships with one another have become very superficial. Our new core values have sometimes made us very selfish and self-centered. I look at Facebook postings and see narcissism oozing out of its pages.

Sometimes I wonder if there is still any virtue in being humble. We are told to do whatever we can to promote and market ourselves. "Selfies" have become a national preoccupation. Our politicians say character is no longer important as long as they serve their constituencies well and are productive. We have elected a president who outrightly lied to the Grand Jury and to the whole nation, but has become one of the most popular politicians of our time. To believe in God is to earn a label of being less than intelligent. And honesty? As long as you are not caught in your dishonesty, you are fine. The new morality keeps my head shaking. Promiscuity seems to be the order of the day. “What? You were a virgin when you got married? You must have been all messed up!” This was said to me by a friend who had had two divorces, an abortion and a couple of lived-in relationships. When I was planning my wedding, a concerned friend asked me if I was getting married because I was pregnant.

There are those of us who are caught in this transition and we don’t know how to cope with it. Recently someone called me to tell me how her act of thoughtfulness to someone in her time of grief was acknowledged with a little printed card that one buys at Hallmark. My friend belonged to my generation. Like me, she was taught that thank you’s are to be written by hand. I told her to be gracious and that not too many people go by that rule any longer. Personally, I have learned not to expect thank you’s any longer. Being thankful does not seem to be a practice among the 35 and younger. I don’t understand why people post Facebook pictures of their food at restaurants and at home. A young friend told me they do this to remember events. How meaningful is an event if it is only made memorable by the food served? Recently I saw a couple standing outside a grocery store. They were not talking to each other personally, but were texting each other on their phones. I’ve seen groups of high school students gathered at tables at Starbucks very quietly talking to each other through their smart phones – texting. I have been taught that looking a person in the eye when talking to him is the polite thing to do. Besides, the eyes reveal a lot about a person. Today I heard the former Senate Majority leader Harry Reid admit that he flat out lied when he accused Presidential candidate Romney on the Senate floor of not paying taxes. There was smugness in his confession and not a whit of guilt. And his fellow Democrats were defending this misbehavior with all their might.

Humility, integrity, honesty, Godliness, obedience to law, sanctity of life, respect for others, compassion – do these still matter?

Making Memories

From Downton Abbey
“Life is the business of making memories,” Charles Carson says to Mrs. Elsie Hughes in Downton Abbey.


Maybe it is the disease of the old that sets in during the retirement years – the constant excursions to things past. Two days ago, I took out an old Tupperware container that I hadn’t used for years. It was our old rice canister. It can hold 20 pounds of rice. It is over 40 years old. We bought it at a garage
sale in the home of missionary friends who were closing their years of missionary service in Indonesia as we were starting out on ours sometime in 1977. Tupperware containers were very valuable to missionaries who lived and served in tropical countries. They were so effective for keeping moisture and bugs out of flour, sugar, rice and even in protecting delicate underwear from silverfish and other little critters. If cared for well, they last and last and last.

Until just about five years ago, I had those avocado-colored canisters and orange containers in active service in my kitchen cupboards. They had traveled with us in our various sojourns that began with a one-bedroom apartment in Pacifica, California where we were young newlyweds. We got a few of them as wedding presents. Then they crossed the ocean to Indonesia to join us in the little town of Batu, Malang in East Java. About four years later they were brought back to California. They served us faithfully as we moved to Cincinnati, Ohio where Don went to Seminary for a couple of years. There they were mostly filled with not just the staples, but with cookies and homemade fudge as our babies

grew into toddlers and to preschool kids. The Tupperware molds continually did service for making jello and such other things as were popular in the Midwest. Coming back to San Francisco, they were like old friends. They were faithful and true, and could be depended upon to do what they were made for. As the years went by, our lives changed. The children grew up and our needs altered. The items in my kitchen cupboards and drawers had to give way to other things. We needed room for the bread maker, the Crockpot and the new coffeemaker that ground the beans and brewed the coffee to completion as I programmed it. The newer kitchen canisters looked so much better than the avocado Tupperware. My old friends were relegated to the bottom cupboards where they were retired and recently, to a closet where we kept donations to Goodwill.


Twenty Pounds of Brown Rice
Two days ago, I was at the Pacific Super, an Asian store where we regularly shop. I noticed that the 5-pound bag of brown rice for which we have been paying $3.99 has gone up by almost $2.00. Next to it was a 20-lb. bag of California-produced brown rice selling for $11.99. Even my mathematically challenged brain noticed how much better this deal was, so I heaved the 20-pound bag onto my shopping cart and brought it home.

I was proud of myself for making such an astute rice decision. The only problem was I didn’t have a container for 20 pounds of rice. Quick as a computer return arrow, I did an instant recall of the old Tupperware canister in the closet where I keep things to be donated to Goodwill. There it was – our faithful Tupperware canister that served us so well through the years – in the kitchen cupboard of a young bride, on the tile counter of our little home in Indonesia, on the shelf of an apartment in Cincinnati, Ohio and in a kitchen cabinet in Daly City and on and on the memories kept coming back. The sight and feel of this old friend opened the floodgates of memories. Once more, it will serve us well and make more memories with us.


The butler of Downton Abbey put it well. “Life is the business of making memories. “

"The Miller of the Dee"

Today a poem from long, long ago (and I mean l-o-n-g ago, like when I was in third grade), came to mind.  I don’t know what triggered this thought but I look back with fondness to this little poem.  At the time my teacher read it to us, it was a delight to my young girl’s heart.  But now, many years later it does more than that.  I thought I’d share it with you.

The Miller of The Dee 


There dwelt a miller, hale and bold,
Beside the river Dee ;
He worked and sang from morn till night-
No lark more blithe than he ;
And this the burden of his song
Forever used to be :
“I envy nobody no, not I -
And nobody envies me !”

“Thou’rt wrong, my friend,” said good King Hal,
“As wrong as wrong can be ,
For could my heart be light as thine,
I’d gladly change with thee.
And tell me now, what makes thee sing,
With voice so loud and free,
While 1 am sad, though 1 am king,
Beside the river Dee?” 

The miller smiled and doffed his cap,
“I earn my bread,” quoth he ;
“I love my wife, I love my friend,
I love my children three ;
1 owe no penny 1 cannot pay,
1 thank the river Dee,
That turns the mill that grinds the corn
That feeds my babes and me.”

“Good Friend,” said Hal, and sighed the while,
“Farewell, and happy be ;
But say no more, if thoud’st be true,
That no one envies thee ;
Thy mealy cap is worth my crown,
Thy mill my kingdom’s fee ;
Such men as thou are England's boast.
O Miller of the Dee.

UNKNOWN AUTHOR

THANKSGIVING THOUGHTS

This Thanksgiving morning I heard a rapper say over and over, “It’s Thanksgiving, give thanks.”  Also heard a lot of “We have so much to be thankful for” from the TV. Thankful to whom? 

Many years ago, I worked for a man who was one of the most abrasive people I’ve ever met.  He’s also made known to everyone that he did not believe in God.  He used to say that only people who needed a crutch to get through life believed in God.  God was man’s invention.  If you had enough intelligence, you can work things through yourself. 

One day he left for lunch and didn’t come back.  We learned later that he was on his way back to work when his car crashed into a pole. He was not killed, but was out for a while. His days and weeks were filled with hospital stays and visits, treatments, therapy and rehab, but he was alive.


He came back to work later that year.  The day before Thanksgiving, I remember him saying “goodnight”as he was about to leave the office, pausing at the door and turning back to the other secretary and me, he said, “Good night, ladies, and yes, I have so much to be thankful for.”


My thought was, who was he thankful to? 

 

THE TALE OF THE UGLY CHAIR

(Today I have a guest blogger.  My daughter writes.  She’s a much better writer than her mom.  She usually says more in less words.  I thought I’d share this with you.)

By Kristy Coughlin

 I'm giving this ugly chair a sweater and God's grace is pouring down like rain. All of these pieces are failed attempts at projects, and time "wasted." And yet there is beauty yet to be made. I'm weaving them together to create something brand new and my heart yells, "Even our wasted moments were together and that makes them precious, Lord."

I saved each of these failures, because I sort of knew they could be redeemed. I get that from Him. The redeemer's heart yells, "Hold on. These are not failures. They are pieces for another thing." Hold on, dear ones! Your pieces might not make sense today, but some day...

 

 

A Ruby Anniversary

Forty years ago, on a beautiful October 26th afternoon, Don and I began our life together. It is hard to believe how the years have gone by so fast. I’ve been told that nowadays 40 years of marriage to one man is impressive. I guess so. I have not noticed much that it has been that long. We've just been busy with life doing things together, learning from each other, discovering things, and I want to think, getting a bit wiser each passing day. We have grown gradually together, but there have been growth spurts such as from times when we faced new adventures. On our second year of marriage, we began a missionary career in Indonesia. This was such a great time of learning, shortlived though it was. After one term of 3-1/2 years, we could not go back to the mission field for various reasons. When our babies came along, we found out much to our dismay that we were actually more self-centered and less giving of ourselves than we thought. (Those who have walked the floors at 1:00 am trying to quiet down a colicky baby who has cried for half an hour and still not shown any sign of falling off to sleep, understand this.)

I think it all started with a birthday gift. Don was the pastor of the little church I was attending. On my birthday one year he gave me a flowering Gloxinia and a copy of Amy Carmichael’s “If” with a little note saying, “I am giving you a book because they are an important part of my life, so I am sharing a part of myself.” Don didn’t know at the time that Amy Carmichael was one of my forever heroes (a first sign to me that we were kindred spirits.). As I got to know Don better I learned of his intense love for God in his characteristic quiet ways. I also found out that he had an insatiable thirst for knowledge and was a voracious reader.

At times young friends ask me about choosing future life partners. I usually tell them to evaluate a man apart from his job, accomplishments, the amount of money he makes and all the things that one acquires in his life journey, shedding these off to reveal the kind of person he really is. In life, there are no guarantees. Fortunes are lost, success is fleeting, careers change. Would one still stand by one’s choice if these happen?

I also believe that looking back at what attracted one to this particular person is helpful. I have found out that more often than not, the very qualities that we find attractive are the very same traits that become problems later on. I know of a couple who were attracted to each other by their good looks and fashionable ways. Once married, they found out how fastidious each other was with appearance. Soon they were constantly arguing about how much time, effort and money were spent by the other on these. I know of a man who married a woman who was very neat and organized. Once married this very same trait became a source of frustration on the husband who could not keep up with this near obsession for order. Many times our strengths are the flip sides of our weaknesses.

It didn’t take long for me to develop a frustration with Don’s reading habits. That which I so admired in him became annoying as I found out that when he had a new book, I could lose him to the book for at least three days. Besides, there were books everywhere on almost every surface available in our home. For several years, our bedroom felt like a library with bookshelves lining every wall.

 All in all, I can’t complain. It has been a wonderful ride with this man. Our mutual desire to honor God in our lives has blessed our marriage and has been the bond that has taken us through some very difficult times.  God has blessed us with wonderful children, children-in-law and five beautiful grandchildren and a lifetime that has produced such a beautiful tapestry of grace.

Oh, yes. Late last night, the mailman delivered Don’s 40th wedding anniversary present - a Kindle Fire with 600 books in it. Another thing to remember about marriage – we have to accept things that even the years cannot change!