I was ten and my family was living in southern Michigan. Two years before, we had moved from the South of India, where I was born and where Mom and Dad had served as missionaries, teaching at a boarding school in the town of Kodaikanal. For me Kodaikanal had been nearly perfect. It was set in one of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet--the high green hills called the Palnis, full of waterfalls and forest and orchids and birds. More than that though the school community to which my family belonged had been built for and around children; it fed our hunger for enchantment and surrounded us with love. We kids called nearly every adult at the school Uncle or Auntie. Sometimes when Mom and Dad traveled down to the plains together for breaks or for medical appointments, my brothers and sister and I stayed for days with uncles and aunties. I don't remember feeling worried, doing this, or even noticing the difference much.
On the campus were playgrounds and gardens and at least one place where the playground WAS a garden, and here I mean the garden at the school house where I attended first and second grade. In this garden were meticulously manicured hedges and mossy grottoes ideal for hide and seek, as well as a pond with frogs and polliwogs; also a miniature waterfall featuring at the base of the cascade a metal waterwheel that really turned, attached to a dollhouse-sized mill house made of stone. Sometimes after school I would sit for a long time next to the waterfall and watch the water wheel go. Turning, turning, it would put me into a kind of sweet mechanical dream.
One day in this garden I found, lying right on the stone pathway where I was walking, a honeycomb with real honey still in the comb--so mysterious, I wondered how it had gotten there, but I didn't wonder if I should eat it. I picked it up off the walk and thumbed it into my mouth and chewed every bit of sticky sweetness out of it like flavor from a stick of gum. I chewed it all the way to the lakeside where I was headed that afternoon--the lake where on the weekends Mom and Dad would take us kids boating in a rowboat rented from the public boathouse. Sometimes we picnicked on the lake. Dad would row us out among the lily pads and lily flowers and Mom would open the picnic basket and we'd all eat the Indian food she made so artfully and lovingly: egg biryani maybe with crispy pumperdums, or her best fluffy rice cakes called idli with coconut chutney and curds.
But now--wham! Everything was different here in this new place, this town of five hundred souls between Saginaw and Flint in the South of Michigan. Here I certainly didn't call anyone Uncle or Auntie. Here there was no lake or even any hill higher than a pitcher's mound. Here instead of a garden, our playground at school consisted of a few monkey-bars and then some hard, weedy earth. Here the air was so polluted that before we could hang out the wash on the line on Saturdays, we had to run wet wash rags down the lines in order to clean the soot from them; otherwise the shoulders of our shirts and the waistbands of our pants would be smudged black where we hung them from the pins. I was lonely. I was sad. I was disturbed to learn just how unfriendly people could be to each other, even in places where they knew each other pretty well. Why did people who lived in the same place not try to take better care of each other, make each other laugh, enjoy each other? Weren't they bored, the way they were living?
I played hooky from school. I also stole food. I would go down to the basement into our larder and take a jar of applesauce down from the shelf and twist off the lid and take a long slow swig of the stuff. I would revisit the jar of pickles I had opened maybe the day before and fish out another pickle and eat that. Or shake some ketchup from a glass bottle into my palm and lick it from my palm like blood from a wound. I felt guilty about doing all this. I was stealing after all, taking more than my fair share, which in public circumstances (such as when my siblings and I fought over which piece of cake or fried chicken was right for which one of us) wouldn't have been a problem, but which seemed much more nefarious and murky in morality when I was taking that extra for myself in secret.
Over the weeks and months in which I engaged in pilfering, my feelings of guilt built up and mixed themselves in with my feelings of sadness, and built and built and mixed and mixed until one day--I remember it was a Wednesday because I was sitting in church at midweek school (Christ Lutheran church, Birch Run, Michigan) and all of us kids in my catechism class were singing:
Wind wind blow on me,
Wind wind set me free,
Wind wind the Father sent, the blessed Holy Spirit
I started to cry. I was remember a windy night in Kodaikanal when I had gone out with my brother Kris to play in the field behind our house. The wind, the mountain wind, was blowing fresh and clean as Kris and I in our windbreakers ran in circles round the field holding our arms out like birds flying flying...
That night--that Wednesday night in Michigan--I climbed the stairs of our house up to my Mom's bedroom and knocked at the door.
"Come in."
She was sitting up in bed with the comforter over her, reading a book. I liked it that Mom liked to read. I liked to read too. She set aside the book (pages down) on her nightstand. I closed the door.
"I've been stealing food," I said.
"I know," she answered. She patted the space beside her on the bed. So I settled in with her in her bed with the comforter over me too, and since it seemed she already knew quite a bit, I decided she might as well know the rest. So I told her pretty much everything that was on my heart that night. How sad I was. How much I missed India. How homesick I was for it. How I wasn't even sure if I believed in God anymore, or at least in God's leadership skills. Why had he led us to Birch Run, the way that she and Dad kept saying he had? And if he had led us to Birch Run, why couldn't he just admit to his mistake so that we could go back? By the time I was done talking, a lot of my tears had soaked into the comforter.
I can't say what Mom said in reply to all this. I don't remember specific words. What I do remember though is leaving her room that night feeling somehow released. I was lightened of my load of sin, and my sorrow too was eased. I had received forgiveness, comfort, encouragement, and cheer. I had been calmly guided in the truth. With my larder confessions behind me, I really could feel free.
Of course I still had my deep gnawing hunger for a place I'd always miss. I still had, on wash days, the clotheslines to wipe off, and on Wednesdays that song about the wind somehow to sing through. But the point was this: Someone was on my side, someone who would listen, someone who was smart and liked to read, someone who would probably forgive me even if I stole another pickle, or two. As I descended the stairs, I felt almost five years old again, out on the windy field. This time maybe, with just a little extra jump, I'd fly.
HB
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