Florence looked like I had always remembered: wispy thin with platinum blonde hair, wearing a black-and-white polka-dot blouse, red pedal pushers, and a pair of sassy red high-heeled shoes.
———
When someone we love dies, a part of us dies too, but a part of them also lives on in us.
She was my mother’s oldest and closest friend, and when she died, a part of Mom died too. But a part of her also lived on in Mom’s memory and heart. They’d known each other since grade school, and Florence’s husband, Ray, grew up near Dad on College Avenue. In fact, they were the ones who set my parents up on a blind date. Dad was tall, cocky, athletic, and handsome, and Mom was beautiful but quiet. Dad always said he married up. But their families differed, and their romance almost ended before it started.
Grandpa Jacobs was the vice president of Jansma’s Dairy, which meant that they lived well, and when it came to religion, he was old school. He and Grandma went to church twice on Sunday, and they also were regulars in Sunday school and the Wednesday night prayer meeting. They were Scofield Bible teetotalers who were loving but stern. The only time I ever got a licking with a belt was over Grandpa’s knee. I learned real quickly that you didn’t sass Grandma in front of Grandpa.
What we believe ought to be visible in the way we live our lives.
Grandpa’s world was very black and white. You either played on the side of good or on the side of evil, and there was no middle ground. “We’re living in the last days,” he’d say, and he believed it. He fully expected that without so much as a moment’s notice, Gabriel would blow his trumpet, the clouds would part, and the final Judge would come and separate the sheep from the goats, which meant that we all needed to be ready.
As far as Grandpa was concerned, that meant that what you believed ought to be visible in the way you lived your life. Ten cents of every dollar he made went back in the collection bag on Sunday, and if someone knocked on their back door looking for a handout, they got one. “You never know when you might be entertaining angels,” Grandma would say. I never saw any angels, but there was often an unexpected guest at their dinner table.
Grandpa and Grandma lived only a few blocks from the freight yard, and during the Great Depression a lot of people rode the rails. Each of them was in as bad a shape as the last, and eventually the word spread around the hobo campfire that if you were hungry, Mrs. Jacobs would always share their supper with you. But be warned, because she’d also share her mind and her gospel along with her goulash.
In fact, Grandma was such an easy mark that the hobos took a piece of coal and put an X on the curb in front of their house. Sometimes the rain would wash it off, and then when Grandpa would pull his big gray Hudson Terraplane in front of the house, he’d have to go downstairs into the coal bin to get a piece of charcoal so he could put that X back on the curb. “God has blessed me to be a blessing to others,” he’d say, and he meant it.
God has blessed us to be a blessing to others.
Grandpa Hunt, on the other hand, was an unemployed wallpaper hanger who had a taste for whiskey and White Owl cigars. He smoked White Owls for so long that he began to look like one, with black round-rim glasses, a weathered red beak of a nose, and bushy, feathered eyebrows. He bought the cigars at the corner store, three for a nickel, and he made whiskey out of potatoes in a still in the basement. Later in life, he switched to Kessler’s, but he made do with home brew during Prohibition.
His idea of being a regular at church was attending every Christmas and Easter (unless someone called and wanted to go rabbit hunting—then all bets were off). Just about every Sunday, Grandpa’s knee would start to hurt something awful right after breakfast, and as much as he wanted to go to church, he’d send Grandma and the kids on without him. They didn’t have a car, and it was too far for him to walk, what with his bad knee and all. The way he saw it, if God really wanted him in church, he’d have made sure they had a car. Besides, the sermon was the same every Sunday. “All that preacher wants,” Grandpa would say, “is to meddle in your business and get into your wallet.”
Grandpa Hunt had a little chip on his shoulder about how his life turned out. He didn’t think he got a fair shake. He felt that working for the WPA for side pork and a loaf of bread was beneath him. Every day he would have to walk downtown, stand in line, and then catch a wagon to whatever work site the government had for him that day.
Grandpa only had an eighth grade education, but he was a skilled craftsman who could work with wood, metal, and plaster. He also grew up around horses and had a way with them, but most days he’d end up working on a crew that was building roads out of paving bricks for the rich people. Every day Grandpa would tell the foreman that he was a skilled tradesman and that laying paving bricks was a waste of his talent and the government’s money, but the foreman wouldn’t listen.
Eventually Grandpa stopped talking with the foreman, and every time he’d get a mind to, he’d take a little nip of potato whiskey from the flask in his pocket and keep laying those pavers. The depression was hard on Grandpa, and he in turn made it hard on everyone else—everyone, that is, but me.
For some reason he liked me. He’d come by school and tell the teacher that I had a dentist or doctor appointment and then take me fishing. I’d row while he’d talk about people like Johnny Bosma and Jack Rietsma and how they’d get into it with the west-siders, and then they’d all go have a beer. You see, the Polish section of town was on the west side of the river that divided the city, and in those days there was bad blood between the Dutch Protestants and the Polish Catholics. Prejudice ran deep on both sides, and sometimes it was fueled by the clergy. Neither group wanted one of their flock to marry “one of them,” and it was the subject of many a sermon.
Both congregations were made up of poor, uneducated immigrants who competed for the entry-level jobs in the local furniture factories, and jobs were scarce. To hear Grandpa tell it, the west-siders were a little lower in the pecking order than he was. So naturally, whenever one of them got a job ahead of him, he felt like they were taking food off of his table.
Every time it happened, Grandpa and his boys would go out at night stinking for a fight, and the west-siders were more than happy to give it to them. Like Grandma used to say, “Grandpa would splash on his bitterness like cologne, and anyone who got close to him could smell it.”
Once he said to me, “The trick to life is to take what you can get, and then figure out a way to keep it.” I smoked my first cigar in a boat with him, and I had my first taste of whiskey from his flask too. I choked on both, and when I said that it tasted like kerosene, he said he’d bring me a Nehi soda next time, which he did. Grandpa kept his eye on the time, and he’d drop me off back at school before my bus left at 3:15. He’d always warn me not to tell my mother about our outings, and of course I didn’t.
I was always a little afraid of Grandpa, but at the same time, I liked him. One day when I was about ten, he was doing some painting at our house and I wanted to help. Grandpa was very particular and wasn’t about to let me help, so he took an empty paint can and filled it with water, climbed up the ladder in the garage, and pressed the can against the ceiling. Then he took a broom handle and stuck it underneath the can and told me to hold it. Then he took the ladder and went inside.
I stood there holding that broom handle, pressing the can against the ceiling, until my arms were aching. Finally I yelled, “Grandpa, I can’t hold this much longer. I need your help.”
“No, you don’t,” he yelled back.
“Yes, I do,” I shouted.
“Listen, boy, I don’t want to help you, and I don’t want you to help me, have you got that?”
“But Grandpa,” I protested, “if you don’t help me, this can of water is going to come crashing down and I’m going to get all wet!”
“A smart boy would let go of that stick and run as fast as he could,” he said. “And then he’d go play someplace else.”
And as that can of water came cras
hing down, that’s exactly what I did.
As a kid, I really liked going to Grandpa Hunt’s after church on Sunday. There you could ride a bike, throw a football, pound a nail into something, or play cards with the grown-ups, and you never had to go to church again at night. Besides, as tough as Grandpa was, Grandma was as kind and as gentle a soul as ever walked the earth, and consequently, there was always a lot of laughing at their house, even on Sunday.
Life is a matter of learning how to take the best from the people you love and letting go of the rest.
As you can imagine, there was a clash of cultures when Mom and Dad first started dating. My mother thought the Hunts were a little wicked, and my dad thought the Jacobs family was wrapped a little too tight—but somehow, they took bits and pieces from both sides and built a life for themselves. Life is a matter of learning how to take the best from the people you love and letting go of the rest.
Ray was the best man at my parents’ wedding, and Florence was the maid of honor. My folks returned the favor for them a few months later. They were as close as any two couples could be. Dad and Ray joined the Navy when World War II broke out two years later, and Mom and Florence got an apartment together. After the war, the four of them lived together in a tiny apartment until they got on their feet financially.
Both Dad and Ray served an apprenticeship as tool and die makers, and they later changed from building dies to designing them. As tool engineers, they made a good living, but growing up, I always thought the Kowalskis were a little above us.
Ray had a good job at a furniture company, and it showed in their lifestyle. They lived well. My dad, on the other hand, went into business for himself, and the early years were lean. One year, for example, I remember Florence and Ray’s oldest boys, Ron and Tom, each got a brand-new three-speed bike with those skinny racing tires. I had to share an old, fat-wheeled girls’ bike with my sister. Ron and Tom went to East High in the suburbs, while Sharon, Ben, and I went to Ottawa Hills in the inner city. They always had the latest style of clothes, and I always got their hand-me-downs with patches on the knees. Each year Ron, Tom, Sharon, and I would go downtown and get our picture taken with the department store Santa Claus. Year after year, I’d have on the coat that Ron or Tom wore in the picture the year before. Ben was five years younger than me, so all the hand-me-downs had made their way to the mission by the time he came along.
I guess I always felt a little inferior to the Kowalski boys, but if they felt superior to me, it never showed. They always let me tag along with them wherever they went, and if someone asked who the squirt was on the girls’ bike, they’d say, “This is our friend, Sky,” and it would be all right. I looked up to them, but they didn’t look down on me. Like their mother, they were always gracious. I guess that’s why I didn’t really mind when Ben tagged along with me. What goes around comes around, and what I got from Ron and Tom, I tried to give to Ben.
Ron and Tom were the coolest guys I knew. They played baseball and basketball, and in high school, Ron ran cross-country and Tom played football. For several years, Ron held the state record in the mile and the two-mile run, and Tom was an all-conference football player. Ron won a full-ride scholarship to Michigan, and the next year Tom went to Michigan State on a football scholarship. They were in the limelight, and I stood in their shadow.
Our families remained close throughout the years. When Ray died, his kids asked me to say a few words. Of course I agreed, but for some reason their minister felt threatened by that. When he found out I wasn’t from his particular denominational tribe, he prohibited me from participating. I tried to assure him that I didn’t know anything about denominations, and I certainly wasn’t going to talk about any of that, but it didn’t matter. His mind was made up.
I don’t think I ever thought about it before, but I don’t think God ever intended for there to be denominations. Satan drew those lines. He’s the master of divide and conquer, and history is full of examples of that. Wars and rumors of wars have too often been about religion, and it breaks God’s heart. He said we should love one another, not argue with one another, and never is that more true than when someone has lost a person they love.
Everyone always welcomes a word of encouragement.
In the end, Ron decided to make the service more of a memorial, and a few of us shared our memories of his dad. To be honest, it was as holy as any service I’d ever been to, and nobody seemed to miss the liturgical stuff. “That’s not who my folks were,” Ron said. “They always included, not excluded.” And he was right—that was who they were, especially Florence. She had a way of looking after stray cats, and kids, and frightened baby birds. And to me, she was my other mother.
Florence was what some people call “a Barnabas,” an encourager—someone who always found some way to make you feel better about yourself. Everyone always welcomes a word of encouragement, and I was no exception.
When Ron ran in the Olympics in 1968 and no one could talk about anything else, she praised my performance in the senior class play. She said that I was remarkable. I wasn’t, but I needed to hear that then.
When Tom went off to football camp for the Detroit Lions and everyone was saying what a tremendous future he had, Florence said that she thought it was simply fantastic that I played guitar in the Ya Ha Whoopee Band. I needed to hear that too.
Perhaps most of all, I remember when Tom died. He suffered an aneurism the next season in training camp. He was young and full of life, with so much to live for. None of us were ready to say good-bye.
No mother should ever have to stand beside the casket of her child. I went to the funeral home hoping somehow to help her, to be strong for her, to say something encouraging to her, but when I saw Tom lying there, I lost it. Florence did what only Florence would do. She put away her grief, put her arm around me, and said, “It’ll be all right, it’ll be all right. Tom is with Jesus now.”
But instead of making me feel better, her words made me feel worse. Before that, I thought I knew who God was and how things were supposed to work. He was the superintendent of the universe, and it was his job to make sure that things like this didn’t happen. Young people weren’t supposed to die—that was part of the bargain. Good was stronger than evil. That’s what I’d been taught, so even then, I half expected God to swoop in at the last minute and miraculously make things right.
Sure, we might have to temporarily go through some difficult times, but in the end, the scales would be balanced, we’d learn our lesson, and everything would work out fine. Life was supposed to be fair, at least for those of us who believed in Jesus and tried to live a good life.
But God didn’t swoop, and we were left to deal with the cold reality that life wasn’t fair. To be honest, I was surprised, hurt, angry, disappointed, and a little scared. After all, if Tom’s life could just be snuffed out like a candle in the wind, then none of us were safe. Then evil really was random. Then bad things happened willy-nilly, with no rhyme or reason, and no matter how hard we tried, none of us could make sense of it.
Of course, now as an adult, I’ve learned to take a longer view of such things. I understand that God never promised that life would be fair. He just promised that he’d be there when it wasn’t. It took me a long time to figure that out after the accident. I’m still trying to figure it out in some ways, I guess. But now as much as I can, I try to live by faith, not by sight. I trust that such random acts of evil will all be worked out by God someday. Someday, the scales will be balanced. Someday, we’ll learn our lesson, and things will work out fine. Someday, we’ll see things from God’s perspective and everything will make perfect sense.
God never promised that life would be fair. He just promised to be there when it wasn’t.
But having said that, even now, death and tragedy still catch me off guard, and then doubt comes calling once again. I lay staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, and I question. “Why, God?” I ask, and to be honest, sometimes hurt, anger, disappointment,
and fear smother my faith with a pillow.
———
“Is Tom with you?” I asked.
“No,” Florence replied. “He and Ray already had plans to go fishing out at Promise Point, but they said to say hi. You boys can catch up next time—you’ll have an eternity to do that, but this is my time and I didn’t want to share it. Is that okay?”
“Sure, that’s fine with me!” And it was.
We went inside and Florence cooked while we talked, mostly about our families, and time sort of got away from us.
“How’s Sharon?” she asked. “And Ben? Is everything all right with him?”
“Sharon’s great, and Ben is doing okay too,” I replied, not wanting to disappoint her.
“Oh, good. I always knew you’d look after him.”
Her words sort of rubbed salt in my already guilty conscience, but I smiled and nodded as if she were right.
We sat down in the dining room, I said grace, simple and quick, and then we ate. Florence’s dinner was comfort food: fruit salad with coconut, bananas, marshmallows, and mandarin oranges; smoked sausage; and macaroni and cheese—not the stuff out of a box but the real deal. She used aged cheddar, Dutch gouda, baby Swiss, and Stilton bleu crumbles, with Parmigiano-Reggiano toasted bread crumbs on top.
After dessert of French silk chocolate cream pie, Florence stood up and said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get going. I promised to pick up Davie, and he’ll be waiting.”
Davie had lived hard and died young, and Florence was just as happy to have him close. Two of her four children were with her and Ray in heaven now.
We said our good-byes as Florence cut me an extra piece of pie for later. As she wrapped the rest of the pie in aluminum foil, she said, “If it’s okay, I’m going to take some pie home to the boys. Davie might want a piece later.”
“Of course,” I replied. “Please take it. I’m sure someone else will be by with more food tomorrow.”
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