What I Learned In A Give Away

So here’s one more story about Washington. Only this one is a about a big windy mountain, that Roger and I happened to be exploring via cog railway about five years ago. We stood in line and had our picture taken with the other tourists at the very top of Mount Washington.   

It was a beautiful fall day. I sat on a sun- warmed bolder and watched Roger go a few hundred feet down a trail. I also gazed at the other mountains and listened to the wind, high, lonely, and tame today. 

Then it was time to go down. We waited with the other tourists to take our places in the cog railway cars, while around us the hikers began their own downward trips. Another couple stood waiting, letting others fill up the railway cars just as Roger and I did. We didn’t want the golden afternoon to end. 

Finally, I spoke to them. They had delightful British accents and I wanted to hear more so I asked them how they liked the trip to America. 

They chatted a little about touring New York City and then the man put his arm around the woman and said, “I just asked this beautiful woman to marry me while we stood at the peak of this mountain.” 

We congratulated them, got in separate train cars, and began the ride down the mountain.But in my heart, a dialogue began. I give away some of my jewelry when I feel an inner prompting. Now I looked at my fingers, each with a ring and thought, “I have eight rings but the woman that just got engaged didn’t have one at all.”

But these were my favorite rings, each one of them.So my inner battle was fought on the way down the Mount Washington. 

When we got to the bottom, I found the couple as they got off the train.

“Did you give her a ring?” I asked.

He hadn’t.

“May I offer her one until you get home?” I said. 

He nodded and she looked over the eight offerings. I still remember she picked a ring that was black enamel with a white outline of the Washington Monument on it. It said, “A souvenir of Washington, DC.”

She said, “I will take this one because it has Washington on it.” 

I handed it to him and his hand shook as he began to place it on her finger. I walked away, gave them some privacy. Then I thought that someday their children will ask for the story of how he asked her to marry him and some American woman gave them a ring. That felt pretty good.  

What I Learned In Washington DC on Vacation Last Week

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”  

Sounds like hospitality to me, but I didn’t find that poem in Washington. It was written for the Statue of Liberty. But as I walked around the nation’s capital, I kept thinking of the “yearning to breathe free.” That’s how it all started. 

“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.” That sounds hospitable, right? But the ALL has been a stumper to the USA.

In 1830 we passed an Indian removal act, we all live on somebody else’s land. Women fought for the vote from 1852 until 1920. Lincoln freed the slaves and their descendants were arrested as they sat at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960. The lunch counter is in the Smithsonian. 

 “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal, hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” Jefferson said, yet we run a risk when we mention God in public schools.

It seems that hospitality runs on an alternating current in this country. Seems it might be up to individuals, like the woman who repeatedly said excuse me and even followed us through the subway station. I was thinking, “Who is this weirdo?” and she said, “Can I help you? Where are you trying to go?” I guess I have a thing or two to learn about hospitality still.

What I Learned From Canned Beans

“Here’s the deal,” as my friend Joyce says. “Here’s the deal.” It pays to say yes to a party. It pays to have a few cans of beans on your pantry shelves. It pays to have well trained help.

Anny asked me on Monday to make dinner for us —Roger Anny and I—and a couple friends of hers coming in from Pittsburgh on Friday, and another local friend home from college. I said, “Sure thing, bring them over,” then forgot about the whole thing. So on Friday when she called to say it would be an hour or so before they arrived, I panicked—for a moment.

            Then I went to the pantry and took inventory. Anny is a vegetarian. I had cans of kidney beans, black beans, pinto beans, tomatoes. I had peppers, onions, garlic, in my fridge. I began to put together a pretty respectable vegetarian chili.

I used an old tried and true recipe for coffee cake and made one of those too. The chili wasn’t quite done when the company came in the door so I pretended I intended it that way and made them talk to me in my cozy kitchen while I finished the chili.

The coffee cake took forever to bake, but it smelled good as its cinnamon topping browned and it was an event of its own when we took it out of the oven piping hot.

            Dinner was delightful because Anny and Roger are well- trained assistants. We’ve thrown together enough parties that they know the drill. Roger comes in the kitchen and says, “What do you need?” does the required job and then comes back for more.

            Anny knows how I want the table set in the dining room; she puts on the water and the napkins and the salt and pepper. Roger cleans up the kitchen right behind me as I make a mess creating dinner. Then after dinner, the cooperation reverses as we clear the table and fill the dishwasher.

I thoroughly enjoyed the party I’d forgotten about. I also never stressed except for that one moment. When I saw my cans of beans, and heard Roger and Anny offer to help, I just relaxed and enjoyed my company.

Maybe I’ll make all my parties last minute deals. As long as I have good help and canned beans.  

What I Learned Stawberry Picking With My Grandpa

“Oh, it’s nice to get up in the morning when the sun begins to shine, at four or five or six o’clock in the good old summer time.”

I’ll never know if my Grandfather John J Jaquish made that up or remembered it from somewhere. I’ll never forget him shuffling into my bedroom at his house in Tunkhannock singing with the first birds of the morning. I groaned and pulled the blanket over my head, but I knew it was time to pick strawberries.  

 I must have been the only grandchild living at Putnam Street right then because it was Grandpa and I, and Mr. and Mrs. Space from down the street, picking ripe berries like machines. 

 I was born the year he retired from the Cooperative Extension Service out of Penn State, so if I was twenty, he was eighty-five. He’d been the first county agent in Wyoming County, PA.

He knew how to get things done. He motivated his granddaughter to pick berries by making it a competition. I picked like mad but I never gathered as many quarts as he did. If I picked sixteen, he picked eighteen. Come to think of it, he always counted them at the end too.

We picked our berries early in the morning, before it got hot. His silly song got a college student out of bed on summer morning. I don't think he learned that in the extension service, though. He did raise eight kids. I was one of 27 grandchildren. All of us have Grandpa stories.

Our berries picked we’d go home. He was tired, and the Phillies were on TV. So guess who, washed, cut, sugared, pectained, boiled, and stirred all the berries into jam? Who made sure the jars were clean and the paraffin was just right?

At the end of the day, there were pints and pints of beautiful strawberry jam under paraffin seals stored out on the back porch.

It took me as long to clean all the syrupy, strawberry, sugary, goo off the stove and counters as it had to pick the berries in the first place. One night in bed, as I shut my eyes, I vividly saw a mountain of strawberries falling on me.

When the family visited on summer weekends, Grandpa bragged about his jam and me, as he made sure my aunts and uncles had a pint or two to take home.

I was proud of all that work, glad to present my family with jam. However, I really don’t eat many strawberries, and I never “get up in the morning as the sun begins to shine, at four or five or six o’clock in the good old summer time.”  

What I Learned From My Sis

My sister is the one to learn hospitality from this week. Up here in the North East where the flood waters have made people homeless, my sister is traveling with that most welcome of sights, The American Red Cross.

Over the years, she’s traveled from her home in Lewisburg, to Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and now New York. Her career as a Red Cross Volunteer began after hurricane Katrina. She was nervous, a little scared, and not sure she had anything to offer. But she’s there and has been used by Our Father to ease the loss, shock and misery of people who have lost everything. 

This time she’s been away from home for two weeks, and has traveled all over New York state. She drove into Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, quite a feat for a country girl, and then got to sleep in a fancy hotel. On that same trip, another assignment had her sleeping on a cot in a gym and sharing one bathroom with fifty other women. 

My sister does all that pretty cheerfully. She knows how to turn the other cheek and listens compassionately to frazzled flood victims. She makes new friends as she meets co-workers from across the country. She deals with cots, and little sleep, and detours, and even tarantulas when she was in Oklahoma. She just keeps working side-by-side with other volunteers to make life better for the ones who come to her shelters.   

My sister does not have a halo, just ask me, I’m her sister and I know. But she does have a determination to help. She does have years of nursing behind her, and wisdom from following God for a long time now.

She has some good stories to tell too, about the people she has prayed with, and people she has counseled and helped. Just ask her.

This week I just have to say I’m proud of her. I have to ask you to be proud of her too, even though she’ll yell at me when I see her again.  

When the Red Cross calls her, she goes and that’s a pretty good lesson in how to be hospitable.