Note: This article that follows is a repost from four-years-ago today. There is great value I think in recalling the people, location, smells and music that “can have a cinematic quality, playing out in the mind’s eye like an old Super 8 movie or vintage Technicolor film.”
As Louisa May Alcott wrote, “reminiscing does us good.”
Precious memories, how they linger. Here then, again, is one of those.
In this world of high-tech everything, my standard Timex watch-slash-calendar is not with the program. Not that it can’t do lots of stuff: record my workouts for example, store my workouts; wake me up in the morning; even tell me what time it is.
But currently it is a day ahead of everything else.
Computer, surveillance camera monitor, my wife’s GPS – all dutifully recognized this just recently passed Feb.29 for what it was and realigned themselves accordingly thereby keeping the earth’s position in the solar system where it belonged.
“Otherwise, seasons would occur in a different time than intended” and how bad would that be in this state where we, let alone the daffodils – tired of winter rain already – long for the sunshine of spring.
Not my wristwatch. It habitually slogs along, oblivious to happenings out there in the universe.
Which brings me to the reason I’m writing this: don’t live tomorrow today.
This week my wife got a phone call from one of her remaining two sisters. They used to be four and now they are three. They used to be a quartet, and now they are a trio. How they could – and still do – sing. Wonderful harmony, loving those old hymns.
The sister who called was in tears.
“Remember what our mother was most fond of baking?”
Immediately my wife responded, “Raisin-filled cookies.”
My wife was 14 when their mother died. The girls and their mom singing while baking, laughing, such sweet aromas and sounds are but memories no longer filling the room but only the mind.
“And do you remember what our mother’s favorite hymn was?”
“God Will Take Care of You,” my wife once again immediately replied.
Of the several hundred hymns and religious songs Civilla D. Martin was to write, it was her first one composed in 1904 that was to become world-famous. And it was this one that the sisters recalled.
A pause. More tears through the phone.
“That’s right. And as I was pulling the raisin-filled cookies from the oven, on the radio there began those very words: “God will take care of you, Through every day, O’er all the way . . ..”
Now both sisters are crying.
Over a half-century had gone by since they’d lost their mother but they had been taken care of; the promise of the song was still true; and the mother’s favorite raisin-filled cookies exiting from the oven at the very moment the mother’s favorite hymn played on the radio was a reminder, a memory, a hug from heaven.
Thank you, David, for another touching article. It brought back memories of joy, thinking of my Mom and Dad. They have been gone a great many years now, but the joy doesn’t fade.
Thank you Frances. I often reflect, as you do, on missing my mom and dad.