MY ROOTS

As I look back over my life, I feel so blessed with all the things I have seen and done. Much of what I experienced, and lived through, is not available any longer to those coming into adolescence—and if it was, they probably wouldn’t do it, anyway. I’m talking about the simple things that helped shape me into what I am today. Maybe I should clarify them as “simple experiences in life” and not “things.” Some people would call them hardships, but to those of us who experienced them, we don’t see them that way. We saw them as a way of life that we are enormously proud to have experienced, and although we now have evolved into the simpler, easier way of life of never ending electronics, climate-controlled environments, fancy cars and vacations, we probably wouldn’t go back to our roots if we could—but we do take pride in the fact that it wasn’t always this way, and we can attest to that.

I have told my kids and grandkids that, to really appreciate what you have, first you must relate to what it was like to be without it. I remember a day shortly after I had left home and went back for a visit. My mom wanted to show me something. She took me into the kitchen and showed me her new, used clothes dryer. I still, today, picture her walking outside in the wintertime, with a clothesbasket full of steaming laundry, and hanging those wet clothes on the clotheslines. Her hands would be chapped and red, her face weary, but on this day she was beaming. How many people do you know in your life that rejoiced over a used clothes dryer?

Our house was a shack—but in it was something you don’t find in a lot of houses. Not like we had, anyway. A family that truly loved each other and pulled together. When there was nothing on the table to eat but vegetables, no one complained. When your clothes were all hand-me-downs, no one complained. When you couldn’t play sports after school, because your dad needed you to help him cut wood, you didn’t ask why. And when you graduated from school, and knew it was time to leave, you vowed that you would work hard every day of your life, because that’s what you had been taught to do, and it’s exactly what you did. On the day that I left home, my mom, with tears in her eyes said, “Don’t forget about us, Mike.” Some fifty-seven years later, Mom, I haven’t forgotten and I never will.

I look around me now days and see all kinds of families, most of them rushing from one place to another. Hockey, football, and dance class—almost anything you can think of. But there does seem to be one exception—families in church. I go to church, and all there is, is a lot of old people with a few exceptions. My parents herded all eight of us kids to church every Sunday, no matter the weather or what was going on. When I once asked my dad why church was so important, he told me, “If I tell you now, it won’t make any sense to you, anyway, but there will come a day, son, when you’re going to slap yourself across the side of the head and say, Now I know why.” I see the greed, the lying and fighting in politics. I see the lack of morality in society. Shootings, assaults and killings are commonplace.” Drugs and addictions. “Yes Dad, now I know why.”