[Technical Stuff: Hey! Are "ignoring" and "ignorant" the same word?]
...or ignorant of my other posts, I love Olympic Figure Skating. With bittersweet heart today I watched the last event in this Olympic series and so am now on Olympic Figure Skating hiatus until 2014. It was bitter because I will miss the excitement of watching this, the most prestigious of all Figure Skating events. Sweet because I am on the verge of being over-satiated with the Olympics, feeling very fatigued as if I myself have performed twenty triple-triple combinations per day during the past two weeks. And also sweet because the Figure Skating finale was the icing on a glorious account of art on ice.
Just so you'll know, in case you have been sleeping, ignoring or ignorant of said 2010 Olympic Figure Skating, the weight of all of South Korea was placed upon, packed firmly down, shaken and stacked sky-high upon the shoulders of one sweet little young lady named Kim Yu-Na. In all of time, no South Korean had ever won an Winter Olympic Medal in any sport other than speedskating. According to the American press, if the favored-to-beat-the-pants-off-the-other-ladies Kim Yu-Na had NOT won the gold, she would have been tarred, feathered, indentured into a life of slavery and never allowed to set foot onto Korean soil again- north or south. It was a good thing that this gracious young "girl" seemed to find humble joy in her situation and in the skating and did not let the pressure of putting South Korea on the map, so to speak, get the better of her. Not only did she do well by her country, blowing her own world record scores out of the water by 18 points, she has ensured South Korea more than their fill of their 15 minutes or so of fame.
Onto a more somber subject...
Chapter XI of Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad" has a rather dour ending. Being in Marseilles, Mr. Twain's and a group of his compatriots hire a boat and a guide in order to take a tour of the island prison Chateau D'If. This particular castle is not a happy one, but a place where political offenders were held in abject circumstances and without much hope of escape, kind of like an Alcatraz on steroids. "Its use as a dumping ground for political and religious detainees soon made it one of the most feared and notorious jails in France." (a quote from Good Ol' Wiki). Twain piercingly depicts what it may have been like to be locked away and forgotten:
This ancient fortress has a melancholy history. It has been used as a prison for political offenders for two or three hundred years, and its dungeon walls are scarred with the rudely carved names of many and many a captive who fretted his life away here and left no record of himself but these sad epitaphs wrought with his own hands. How thick the names were! And their long-departed owners seemed to throng the gloomy cells and corridors with their phantom shapes. We loitered through dungeon after dungeon, away down into the living rock below the level of the sea, it seemed. Names everywhere!--some plebeian, some noble, some even princely. Plebeian, prince, and noble had one solicitude in common--they would not be forgotten! They could suffer solitude, inactivity, and the horrors of a silence that no sound ever disturbed, but they could not bear the thought of being utterly forgotten by the world. Hence the carved names.
Wow! While reading this, my mind went to thinking about how quickly my own earthly life rushes by and the niggling fear that can creep in that soon it will be gone and in what terrible manner might it end and how long after my death until I am completely forgotten? My own memory being a weak one makes my understanding of the concept of slipping away all the more acute.
During my recent move from a house to an apartment, a move which yet transpires as I still have belongings which need to be sorted, dispatched into exile or moved over to my new home, I came across a precious treasure- a little blue and white porcelain bootee painted with delicate pink, blue & green flowers. It was evidently sent to or via my now deceased mother-in-law at the birth of my eldest son. Handwritten in tiny letters in red ink on the bottom sole of the bootee are these words:
x/xx/83 8 # 2 oz
Bret D(xxxxxx) Brown Jr. (BJ)
Parents: Bret - Tamara
Gr. P- Keith - Barbara B -
Along the side of the sole was scrawled the name Lulu Smith and inside the bootee was tucked a faded bit of blue construction paper with the words: "Congratulations. Painted for you by Lulu Smith".
Who is Lulu Smith? The bootee had been stashed away and long forgotten. I vaguely remember having conversation with my mother-in-law Barbara about it at the time of my son's birth, but what with it having been so many years and with my bad memory and all, I needed help in putting the facts together in my mind. Quickly I called my Dad-in-Law Keith to ask him who Lulu was and to find out what he knows about this mystery lady.
Who is Lulu Smith? The bootee had been stashed away and long forgotten. I vaguely remember having conversation with my mother-in-law Barbara about it at the time of my son's birth, but what with it having been so many years and with my bad memory and all, I needed help in putting the facts together in my mind. Quickly I called my Dad-in-Law Keith to ask him who Lulu was and to find out what he knows about this mystery lady.
By the excited yet soft tone that his voice took on at the mention of her name, Keith not being a sentimental cry-baby like his dear old daughter-in-law (me), I could tell that the name of Lulu Smith meant something to him. My heart and ears pricked up as he told me that Lulu Smith and her husband "Pappy" were the Young Singles Sunday School Class Teachers when he and my mother-in-law Barbara were dating. They were evidently one of those special couples who invested deeply in and touched the lives of the young adults they mentored, enough so that Keith and Barbara kept in contact with them past their season as singles and into their years as young marrieds. Eventually Keith and Barbara moved to a different state from Pappy and Lulu and their contacts weren't frequent.
Keith said he could hardly imagine that this bootee had been sent to Barbara for my son's birth, that it must have been for my husband Bret's.
[Tip: Bret Jr. and Bret Sr., my son & hubby, have the same 1st name. This causesoccassional frequent confusion....]
This gift from her a generation past their times of closer association helped me understand even better what a sweet spirit "Little Lulu" must have had. And by the fact that her husband's name was not written on the bootee, just hers, I surmise that Pappy had passed on by 1983 when Bret Jr was born.
Keith said he could hardly imagine that this bootee had been sent to Barbara for my son's birth, that it must have been for my husband Bret's.
[Tip: Bret Jr. and Bret Sr., my son & hubby, have the same 1st name. This causes
This gift from her a generation past their times of closer association helped me understand even better what a sweet spirit "Little Lulu" must have had. And by the fact that her husband's name was not written on the bootee, just hers, I surmise that Pappy had passed on by 1983 when Bret Jr was born.
What a treasure this little bootee is to me now! And to think that it was almost put aside and its significance forever forgotten. If I had come across the bootee even a few more years down the line, perhaps no one would have known who Lulu Smith was and what an impact her and her husband's lives had made on my husband's parents and the other young adults they mentored.
My heart sinks at how many treasures in life are so soon forgotten. My mom has dementia and my mother-in-law passed away many years ago now, and there are so many household treasures whose histories have now faded away with no one left to fill in the blanks. It is poignant to think of how fragile life and the memories of those we have loved are! Typically we know little about family who lived a generation or so before our grandparents and if notes aren't made and kept with the objects that they pass down to us, their true value, their value as representations of love passed between people, dwindles away.
There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.
It's a process for me, learning to age gracefully. The going gray, getting wrinkles, aches, pains and sags are secondary. I am afraid of dying and being forgotten. When I think of how many prisoners at the Chateau D 'If died while withering away in loneliness and obscurity, perhaps to rarely if ever be thought of again by others, it breaks my heart. It is here, in these moments of fear of fading into insignificance, that I thankfully learn to latch onto true Grace. In my middle-age I'm reactualizing the fact that there is One Who always remembers and Who always, miraculously, thinks I am significant. Only in Him do I have abundantly more than my "fifteen minutes of fame."
Ecclesiastes 1:10-12
It's a process for me, learning to age gracefully. The going gray, getting wrinkles, aches, pains and sags are secondary. I am afraid of dying and being forgotten. When I think of how many prisoners at the Chateau D 'If died while withering away in loneliness and obscurity, perhaps to rarely if ever be thought of again by others, it breaks my heart. It is here, in these moments of fear of fading into insignificance, that I thankfully learn to latch onto true Grace. In my middle-age I'm reactualizing the fact that there is One Who always remembers and Who always, miraculously, thinks I am significant. Only in Him do I have abundantly more than my "fifteen minutes of fame."
