It was July 1967, I worked the night shift at the Big D grocery store in Utica, Michigan, 20 miles north of Detroit. Four of us guys were working a shift and at about 3 AM we heard a loud tap on the store entrance door. At the door we could see in the lighted parking lot an Army jeep with a large mounted machine gun. We opened the door, went outside and conversed with two National Guards. They had just returned from a stint in Vietnam. We were told to keep the doors locked at all times – a riot broke out in Detroit.

It was a day or so later, mom and I were talking in the living room of our home, one that dad, my brother Ron and I helped build. We heard a commotion in the hallway and we saw dad coming with a shot gun – he said he was going to Detroit. Dad, for years worked for Packard Motor Car Company in Detroit starting in 1928 – a lot of memories living and working in Detroit. He was originally from Nashville, Tennessee – and what he knew was racism – he ate and breathed it while growing up and so he wanted to help the cause to protect keeping what he saw as the natural order of things – “the blacks are way out of line and they need to be put back in their place.” My mom and I intercepted dad in the hallway and reasoned with him that this is a job for the National Guard, they do this work so you don’t have to. Dad listened to what was said and he let go of his intention.

I was really surprised by dad’s intense distraught over the riots – there was a side of him I did not pay all that much attention to. I did not share his disposition about race – but I could understand where it came from. It was a few days later we talked – not all that much but I wanted to learn more from his world. I was not embarrassed by him, I just wanted to listen, not fix or defend. I heard his world, and I expressed what I knew. I said that blacks I knew at college want the education needed for good paying jobs and the freedom to live where they want to live just like we do – and there is also a lot of poverty even among white folks who also live in unkept houses. I believe from our conversation dad wrestled with his own prejudice against what was honest and true from my end and he could see things were not so cut and dried.

As I look back, the summer of 67 was the beginning of dad’s world coming apart. Sometimes he came home from work and could barely eat dinner and wept. He shared with mom that some of his co-workers at Chrysler turned on him because he could not keep up with tasks. Soon he made an appointment to see his family doctor – who immediately referred him to a specialist. In a hospital a routine bone marrow sample was gathered and later analyzed – the diagnosis was early stages of leukaemia. Thus began a five year journey of chemo therapy,  hospital visits and grateful periods of remission. It was a year later dad had his work friends over – they had a party in the basement of our home – lots of beer and laughs. Dad was not one who held grudges all that much and when his co-workers knew the whole story their eyes soften and wanted to make things right.

[Our trip south that included a visit to Gettysburg – August 1961.]

[Our trip south that included a visit to Gettysburg – August 1961.]

[Gettysburg, Virginia August 1961.]

[Summer 1964 – brother Ron with dad working on home on Oriole Street.]

[Utica, Michigan house on Oriole lived in 1967.]

Recently an aged lady with a southern raspy drawl left a voice message. It so happened she, living in Alabama, came across my name in a church newsletter that mentioned a visit Ruth and I made to a small church in the upper peninsula of Michigan in summer 2016 – it is a marvel how connections linger.

I called back a few days later and our conversation went down memory lane of folks we all knew in a church – most have died. This church community with a strong southern history as its roots was situated in a village town called Utica in Michigan where I grew up. Marge, now in her 80s confined for now in bed, even recalled when my dad worked with Tom her husband (still living) on their family garage in Romeo, Michigan in the early 70s.

In our conversation I could feel the soft tug of my own southern roots – even though I was born in Detroit my dad was from Tennessee – my own accent is a homeward Salmon instinct that takes me back to my origins. Marge shared name after name and through her voice at the same time I was drawing my own lines of life connecting major turns in the road. Where does the line begin?

Perhaps where to start is my step-grandmother Mildred who introduced me to the church of Christ in my 1950s late adolescent years. The Utica church provided a semblance of stability, basics for life as it were, in the tumultuous 60s and 70s – it gave place for social connection, a moral ethic, and a language of religious content that made sense of the world around me. In my university years Tom was the “song leader” and one day I moseyed along side divorcee Ruth Hannah sitting in the pew – it caused a church stir for sure – we smiled and married a year later in 1972. All those happenings Marge and Tom remember and a call comes in from Alabama.

With strong church ideals we went north to upper Michigan, in ten years we settled in two towns, the last Menominee, Michigan. I was a minister there for 6 years and we enjoyed beloved friendships that endure to this day. Then in 1982 a turn was made to St. Louis, later to Vancouver, British Columbia. Over the years our faith has gone beyond the boundaries of this church community to places where the Spirit also resides…still grateful for precious memories that linger.

[Standing in front of lectern my dad made from which I spoke to the Menominee church from 1976 to 1982. Photo from memorable summer visit 2016.]

 

[The Menominee church building was erected in October, 1977 by a team of families from lower Michigan who came up in RVs and cars, the building was assembled in three days.]

[Beloved friends of the Menominee church.]

[Menominee church building Summer 2016.]

 

 

“I like this one.”

Mom and Dad stared down on the display, “Are you sure this is what you want” says mom?” We are at Sears and Roebuck in Center Line, Michigan, it is summertime 1961. School is out but my grade eight biology class introduced me to a new world full of discovery – I was determined to continue the adventure. I had my sights on a Tasco 1200X microscope, $49, a lot of money then. “Yes,” I said. I was excited.

My Tasco came in a crafted wooden box for storage – it was not a toy. At its base was a battery operated light, flip the holder of the light and a mirror was on the other side. It came with glass slides and cover slips. A few prepared slides included a fly wing, mosquito, and bee stinger. The adventure was to visit a new world of living creatures some almost invisible to the naked eye – swirling around in a drop of pond water.

I lived on Smiley Street in a hamlet area called Disco, it was country – the street I lived on had more open fields than houses. At one end of Smiley was “the woods” and the other end of the street crossing a busy two lane road called Van Dyke was ….”the pond.”

The pond was my favourite place to visit to gather water samples. It was a lush open marsh area with trees about 200 feet on the far side. On warm summer days I stooped at the water’s edge filling my jars. The pond was its own world of welcome – Lily pads, cat tails, water spiders scampering across the water surface, dragon flies hovering and darting in the air, and the sound of frogs – peepers, Leopard and bull frogs croaking and splashing into the water – alert to my intrusion at the water’s edge.

Back at home “lab” I would hold a jar up to the light, you could see movement of something. A drop of pond water is placed on a slide, gently a cover slip is lowered over the sample drop and the slide is placed on the microscope stage – looking through the eyepiece the moment arrives – the discovery of a new living world.

What is this? What’s that moving? Over the weeks I put accurate names to what I was seeing; hydra, amoeba, daphnia, volvox, paramecium, cyclops, stentor. And there was the myriad forms of algae, a marvel of shapes and structures that was intricate and beautiful.

My Tasco over time gave way to a compound microscope with camera hookup to a laptop, I can take video and pictures! The ponds nearby still beckon for visits and the occasional visit is made, the more the better.

Biology is the study of life, it is a science. If pond life taught me anything it is that there is more to life than what meets the eye, maybe this is seeing beyond just biology. Take any person, what meets the eye – first impressions and public persona is one thing, what is under the surface can be another thing, it usually is. You never know another person fully.

There is always more to the story especially if you know only one side of it. There is more to a person than what you see – under the surface is a lot of beauty and flaws – there is vulnerability, dark crevices, the unexpected, surprises, chaos, and creativity. And the one thing most needed to embrace the mystery of the self and another is humility.