The growing war in Ukraine has made me much more aware of the freedom, comfort, and family I enjoy. Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it’s threatened or gone. Such was the case when I was in fourth grade on a cold, gray day in March 1963.
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It was snowing when I raced off the school bus, eager to get home, out of my wool skirt, and into my snow pants. Helen Thompson and I were were going to build a fort in the massive snowbank at the end of her driveway, but Mrs. Thompson flagged me down in the middle of the street before I got home. Her dilated pupils, searching for light in the storm, focused on my face. “Your Dad called to say your Mom had an accident. He wants you to wait here until he comes home.”
Worry lines pinched her black eyebrows, as I pondered the word accident. Polly Handel had a skiing accident, broke her leg, and everyone signed her cast. Laura Leary had broken her foot fooling around with a baseball bat. She got a walking cast and could still hobble around the bases. It never occurred to me that accident meant Mommy would be in the hospital for five weeks. That her accident would make the front page of the Schenectady Gazette, “Woman Hit by Bus.” That the photo would show snowbanks on the corners of Balltown Road and Route 7 even more colossal than those at the end of the Thompson’s driveway. That the police would report an impatient bus driver rushed a red light, hit Mommy broadside, threw her barely hundred-pound body out of our two-ton Ford station wagon, across four lanes of traffic, and onto another snowbank the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.
No, the reaction Mrs. Thompson was looking for wasn’t on my own face. My ten-year-old mind was intent on simply filling my snowball arsenal for an icy Armageddon. Me and my friend against a world of invisible enemies on the other side of the driveway.
Daddy picked me up from Helen’s and my brother from Eric Snell’s. I slithered out of Helen’s borrowed snow pants and hung my frozen mittens on the heater grate. Daddy popped my favorite TV dinner, Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes and peas, and Bruce’s, spaghetti and garlic bread, into the oven. Bruce and I set up TV trays in the den because Daddy said we could watch a Tarzan movie on the Early Show while we ate supper–something unheard of unless Mommy and Daddy were going out.
I had no idea Daddy had been waiting for the doctors to remove Mommy’s ruptured spleen, set her broken collar bone and pelvis, and re-inflate her punctured lung. I had no idea that while I was heaving snowball after snowball at the invisible bad guys, Daddy was waiting to see if Mommy’s brain still worked after sloshing around her skull like the contents of a snow globe.
In the morning Daddy dropped Bruce and I off at the Palmeris, family friends. Mrs. Palmeri gave us strawberry Pop-Tarts, and we watched Captain Kangaroo with Tony Palmeri until the school bus arrived.
After school, Mrs. Spath, a gray-haired woman I’ve never seen before, was in our kitchen making ham steaks and succotash. She didn’t know I didn’t especially like ham and Bruce hated succotash because it contained lima beans. But every day the old lady in the belted black dress came back to do our laundry, make dinner, and babysit, even though we weren’t babies anymore.
My teacher, Mrs. Barrington, was teaching us how to add fractions and find the lowest common denominator. One Thursday during math, my new best friend, Marie invited me to sleep over. Since Mommy was still in the hospital, Daddy said an easy yes.
Friday after school, I rode bus number four instead of bus number twenty-two, and Marie and I got off at her stop. Marie’s mom was divorced and worked, so we walked into a motherless kitchen. Marie got a Pepperidge Farm chocolate cake out of the freezer and handed me a fork. We hacked at it until the whole package was gone. She showed me the phone in her tiny room. It had a long, curly cord that we stretched into her closet to make prank phone calls.
When her mother came home later, she said we could sleep in Marie’s older brother’s room because he had a double bed. There was a TV right in his room, and we stayed up way past the Flintstones watching the Tonight Show with Jack Parr. The audience was laughing, but I didn’t get the jokes. When the only thing broadcast was the Indian chief test pattern, Marie turned off the set, and hauled an 8mm projector out of her brother’s closet. I fell asleep watching home movies of her father with her whole family skiing down Mt. Fujiyama in Japan where her dad was stationed before the divorce.
I didn’t see Mommy until they took all the tubes out and she could smile. She was cranked up in traction as I told her about Lum Fung’s Chinese restaurant where Daddy took us after church for Sunday dinner. I told her how Bruce and I tried moo goo gai pan, egg foo young, egg rolls, and wonton soup, and how there was a huge picture of a red dragon hovering over our table.
After Easter, Mommy came home, but not before I learned what it was to have a kitchen without a mother in it, and that a father could leave you without a trace of his existence except grainy films taken in a foreign country. And not before Marie showed me the broken-down piano in her garage and taught me to play my part of the duet, “Heart and Soul.”
So, sisters in Christ, let’s pray for those caught in the war in Ukraine, and may it remind us that daily we walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. That sounds ominous except as an encouragement to trust God to fight the battles we could never win on our own and to hold each other tight until kingdom come.
Even in the unending shadows of death’s darkness,
I am not overcome by fear.
Because You are with me in those dark moments,
near with Your protection and guidance,
I am comforted.
You spread out a table before me,
provisions in the midst of attack from my enemies;
You care for all my needs, anointing my head with soothing, fragrant oil,
filling my cup again and again with Your grace.
Certainly Your faithful protection and loving provision will pursue me
where I go, always, everywhere.
I will always be with the Eternal,
in Your house forever.
Psalm 23: 4-6 (VOC)
Cover photo by Jessica Fadel on Unsplash
