Though abiding in the house on Harding Avenue for one year, there was another wrinkle in the time / space continuum. First-grade worked my brain hard, in search of comprehension, understanding, acceptance, values, and faith.

I woke from sleep late at night, darkness enveloping me. Daring to only open a slit between eyelids, less I be discovered, I stole a glance at my bedroom door. It began to open. No. It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the unseen hand of a sibling playing a trick on me. My eldest brother, Steve was already in college. Bryan and Cindy, well, they were doing what all junior high kids were doing at four in the morning; sleeping.

The door opened, making no sound, not even a creak in the ancient iron hinges. The space beyond, newly revealed, appeared to be misty, white, with a smudge of grey, floating, as if supernaturally given life. My stare was returned with silence. It was a standoff. Stalemate. Like kissing my sister, boxers butting heads before parting, a tied homecoming game.

At that time, in that place, it was just my Creator and me. The only option available was running away bravely. I did.

Aunt Thelma was dead. Fallen down her cellar staircase. Mother said it was no wonder, consider all the prescription medications she was taking. Apparently, she liked to doctor shop. Remember, this was the late 1960s. Coca-Cola probably was still manufactured with cocaine.

Uncle Toad (his real name was Cloyde) and Aunt Thelma lived in the central Pennsylvania burrow of Lewistown. Dad’s older brother, Toad was the surrogate father of a family abandoned by a two-bit moonshiner and a piss-poor bottler of home-made beer. It’s told when the August heat endured long, dozens of cases of homemade beer hidden in the attic blew their tops, soaking the house and home with the sticky, smelly aroma of yeast and hops.

So much for cover and concealment, gramps. Idiot. No wonder my grandmother kicked him out.

It didn’t matter; Toad was doing a fine job raising his brothers and sisters all by himself: John, Buck (Charles, my dad), Ann (Ann-a-Mary to us kids), Elsie, and Don.

We traveled as a family from Jamestown, NY to Lewistown, PA in dad’s Mercury Comet to take part in mourning Aunt Thelma’s death. Family time in the car. Nothing like it. There is a whole culture, faith, ethnicity, gender, family thing about death and grief.

Pennsylvania Dutch, we proudly self-identified. We were German, descendant Lutherans. Stoic. Hard working. Honest. I was a first-grader, a sponge, my developing brain soaking it all in.

Our family didn’t soften the blow. No sugar coating. Aunt Thelma was dead. Not passing over. Not just passed. Dead as the woodchuck bloating on the side of the road.

I’d heard about corpses but had never seen one. There she was, dressed nicely with more makeup than an amateur’s attempt to decorate a cake. Fingers, gaunt, pale, drawn. Eyes and mouth closed. I looked carefully from behind my mother’s skirt to see if there was any evidence of breathing. Nothing. Everything appeared as if Aunt Thelma was sleeping; except, she was in a box! A highly polished, very expensive looking box, with a hinged double door. (Did I mention she wasn’t breathing?) What in the?

Now, there’s something you don’t see everyday.

That night, right before going to bed, a guest in the home of a family friend, I spied the doorknob to the unseen attic, watching for the first sign of movement. Aunt Thelma was right behind that door; I just knew it. Aunt Thelma was gone, but not quite; absent, yet remembered; mortal, yet eternal, home with God.

Uncle Toad wept at her grave, his whole body rhythmically convulsing, hands rubbing his bald head. I cried, too; hurt for my father’s brother, his pain, suffering, and uncertainty about the future. Shared pain. Family love. Assurance of eternal life, spoken by the Lutheran pastor. That is what got us through.

Values matter.

I didn’t want to swim this morning. I stayed up too late. I near-napped through my morning meeting, eyes heavy, the coffee not nearly strong enough for my liking. The pool was quiet, the water cool. The Beatles played for the water aerobic class in the adjacent outdoor pool. One of the overhead lights flickered, apparent to only those of us swimmers choosing some variation of backstroke. Good thing I don’t have a seizure condition. The final lap brought relief, and a smile from Abe in the next lane over.

As my arms pulled through the water, I thought of death, or near-death experience from Harding Avenue.

My sister, Cindy, played the flute. At least, that was the instrument she was learning to play at Lincoln Junior High. An end-of-the-year, outdoor, band concert was scheduled and families and music boosters were invited to attend. Dad wheeled the Mercury Comet into a parking spot on the brick paved street, and we, as a family, headed out to the chairs the school district had set up for us. A perfect, or near-perfect, June day. 1967.  

The sun was bright.

Wait. I had a pair of sunglasses in the car, in the glovebox. Without asking permission, more like a first-grader’s spasm, I ran across the lawn back to the car, paused at the street, remember looking left, then right. Thinking to myself the car, stage right, was sufficiently distant to facilitate my crossing, I bound into its path. Thirty miles an hour of bumper and grill slammed me into the curb. My world went black.

Nothing. No time. No space. Nothing. Like the plug had been pulled and the TV abruptly turns silent and black. All that was missing was a box.

Concussion separated me from time and space. I heard the quiet beating of my heart in my ear. An eye opened, just enough to jumpstart another of my missing senses. The world was silent and white, blurry with a smell of sterility, glass paneled, metal cabinets overtop a stainless-steel counter. Where was I? What happened? How long have I been out?

In walked man and woman, each focused on their own agenda, their own task at hand. White. His face was covered, her face was not. Murmurs. A glance. A smile, warm and kind. Look! He is alive! My mother appeared, held my hand, gathered me into her arms. Before I knew it, I was home in my own bed. Fifty-seven years later, the bump on the back of my head is a daily reminder of my own mortality, the closeness of sudden death, the seemingly inconsequential, random acts of life.  

The moment matters. This moment matters. Death. Nothing. Followed by life, a gift, a welcome into a divine abode, abundant love, amazing grace.

God wasn’t done with me. Heck, I hadn’t hardly finished the first grade. God had plans.