Make Memories While You Still Can

BLOG #32, SERIES 4

WEDNESDAYS WITH DR. JOE

MAKE MEMORIES WHILE YOU STILL CAN

August 7, 2013

It has been said that when each of nears the end of our earthly journey and looks back, almost always the one thing we won’t regret is making memories.  As we get older, invariably we begin to downsize; in the process, ruefully discovering that out of all of our multitudinous possessions, other than family heirlooms, there is little our children want.

When someone dear to us dies, how often we say to ourselves, while we sadly travel to the funeral site, Oh how I wish we’d spent more time with Dad—or Mom—while they still lived.  Now it’s too late!  Too late to ask them to identify people in old photos; and now some faces will never be identified.  Too late to spend more time with them—time the folks yearned for, begged for.

But always we were too busy.  Time enough to be with them later on.  But suddenly—there is no “later on.”

Which brings me to a discussion Connie and I had at a family get-together last weekend.  It was triggered by a question: “Does anyone remember when Grandma had that terrible stroke”?  Since no one was certain of the date, I rummaged around in old journals until I discovered it.  Which brought us to the next question: “When was it we took both sets of parents on that memorable trip through New England?”  Once I found the journal entries that answered that question, my how the memories flooded back!

It was early in 1989, when we were living on the banks of that serene Severn River just a couple of miles west of the Annapolis Naval Academy.  I’d asked Connie if she could take time off work for ten days in late spring, in order to travel through New England with me as I investigated hotel sites for the fall New England Study Tour I co-directed at what was then Columbia Union College in Takoma Park, Maryland.  Once she’d cleared those dates with her boss, we began fleshing out our proposed trip itinerary.

Then came an epiphany: Both my folks and Connie’s folks love traveling, but for one reason or another they don’t get out much any more.  Wonder if they’d like to go along with us?

We phoned them, and while my folks leaped at the opportunity, Connie’s folks did not.  As the academic year wound down, everything began to fall in place for the trip.  Then that phone call from Connie’s folks who’d begun to feel left out: “That New England trip you invited us to take with you….is it….is it too late for us to go along too?”  Of course it wasn’t, and so it was that my folks flew in from Oregon and Connie’s folks drove from Texas, and we caravanned out early Friday morning, May 26 of 1989.  We’d rented a burgundy Mercury Sable in order to give us more room than our Toyota Supra or Celica; Connie’s folks followed in their blue Honda.

As I re-read my journal entries, those days all came vividly back to me.  That Friday, we’d stopped at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, followed by a tour through the Hancock Shaker Village, then on through Rutland to Killington, Vermont.

Next day proved especially unforgettable to my minister father, for we joined a small congregation in the Washington, New Hampshire Adventist Church.  When the presiding elder discovered who Dad was, he asked if he’d be willing to preach.  Dad agreed.  I sat on the platform with Dad.  None of the foursome had ever been there before.  As Dad stood, his mind time-traveled back almost a century and a half to his great great grandfather Frederick Wheeler, a Methodist circuit-riding pastor who’d been convinced by the now famous William Miller that Christ would return in 1844.  Those who agreed with Miller’s biblically-based reasoning were called Millerites.  Historians call that time-period when Christ failed to come, “The Great Disappointment.”

Today, tourists from around the world visit this particular small wooden church where the Methodist-driven [though other Christian denominations were well represented in the movement, Methodists were the most numerous] belief that Christ was coming in 1844 was preached by Frederick Wheeler, a man who later became the first Seventh-day Adventist ordained minister in this same church.

Well, you can imagine the thoughts running through my father’s mind as he stared out at this perfectly-preserved century-and-a-half old church, with its original biblical end-time charts still on the wall, his hands resting on the very pulpit his great great grandfather ( a man he never knew) preached from.  Everyone could see how deeply moved Dad was.  Especially me, sitting right behind him.  In the afternoon, we visited the William Miller home near Hampton, New York.

By the following morning, Connie’s folks had rebelled at missing all the conversations taking place in the Mercury Sable; so they left their blue Honda at the Killington hotel, and all six of us henceforth rode together.  It was a stunningly perfect day at Newport, Rhode Island, where we were guided through the famed “Breakers,” the palace constructed for the Vanderbilts on the ocean-front.  Eerily appropriate to the setting, our guide was more than a little snippy.  That night, the folks reveled in their oceanside hotel rooms.

By Monday morning the foursome was so excited by all they were seeing and experiencing that when Connie and I opened our door, there the foursome would be in the hallway, some sitting on their suitcases, having been there since 6 a.m., wondering what took us so long to get up and get going.  That pattern continued for the for the rest of the trip.  They were a close-knit bunch—always had been, for being childhood friends, Connie’s father had sung at my parents’ wedding.  That morning, the folks experienced living Colonial history on board the reconstructed “Mayflower II” and then in the rebuilt Plymouth Settlement.  From there, on to Walden Pond, made famous by Thoreau; and then to the Alcott House in Concord.  That evening, we can never forget the shrieks of joy that came from both our mothers as they entered their Bass Rocks motel rooms in Gloucester, and looked out the windows at the Atlantic Ocean waves crashing in on the rocks.  And then the sunset view of the ocean at dinner from the Best Western Twin Towers Restaurant.

Next day, it was on to Whittier’s home.  My mother, an elocutionist stage-performer who had memorized thousands of pages of short stories, poems, and readings—some penned by Whittier—was ecstatic at seeing the place where so many of Whittier’s poems were written.  Afterwards, everyone reveled in the Robert Frost home and farm in Derry, N.H.; then on to Portland, Maine’s iconic lighthouse and rapidly becoming iconic L. L. Bean, before moving on to Camden and Bar Harbor.  By now, my Mom was beginning to feel her son walked on water, for each night we stayed in beautiful (and generally expensive) lodgings, where our rates were either extremely low or comp (because of my yearly visits with a busload of students).  Both sets of parents, having always lived frugally, felt they were traveling in fairyland.  We stayed in Bar Harbor’s grandest hotel that night. And that night the tide (being near the Bay of Fundy) dropped almost fifty feet).

Next day, in the rain, we drove up to the top of Cadillac Mountain, the highest point on the East Coast.  Then it was on into the heart of New England, including stops along the way at Scotland by the Yard and Merrill Farms.

June 1 was the Palmer folks’ 55th wedding anniversary, much of which was spent on the road, for a special reason: There, near West Monroe in western New York, we finally found Frederick Wheeler’s weathered gravestone.  Dad was struggling to keep tears from running down his cheeks, for coming here had been a lifelong dream for him.  That night we stayed in Buffalo.

June 2, we all experienced “The Maid of the Mist” at Niagara Falls on the Canadian border.  We breakfasted in Canada, then it was on through Michigan to Berrien Springs, where we stayed with Connie’s sister Marla and husband Gary Marsh for the weekend.  Here we were joined by our own son, Greg, and our daughter, Michelle, who were then students at Andrews University.

June 5, en route back to Annapolis, we stopped at The Limberlost State Historic Site in Geneva, Indiana.  Mom, having always loved Gene Stratton Porter’s nature romances, was in her element.

Then, we reached home, exhausted, at 2:15 a.m.

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AFTERMATH

How incredibly appreciative our parents were for our making the time and effort to take them on this “wonderful” trip.  But, ever so apropos to this blog, only four months after our New England trip, Mom Palmer was crippled by a terrible stroke, and not long afterwards, my father died, followed by my heartbroken mother escaping into dementia.  Connie and I had thus, unwittingly, picked the last possible time when we could have brought such joy and fulfillment into the lives of our parents.

So…, when you have an opportunity to make memories with your dear ones – make them!  while there’s still time.