of stomach cancer, he was appreciative of my visits, but embarrassed by his loss of dignity. Our conversations were superficial, but behind the words was a strong bond. The night Lucas died, I had been working on a project at the Boy’s Club. I was using a band saw to cut a piece of wood, being extremely careful with this tool. In the midst of my concentration I felt as if someone was standing alongside of me, and a chill came over me. It was enough of a distraction to cause me to nick my finger with the blade of the saw. The sight of the sudden loss of blood was enough to bring on an ebbing of consciousness through which Lucas’ presence became very strong. After my wound was bound, I walked the long mile home anxious for my mother’s healing words and some rest.
The apartment was empty. Rose came up from her first floor apartment and told me that Lucas had died and that Mom had gone to Marne Street. I sat at the kitchen table and waited, staring in silence at the spot where Lucas often had his cup of coffee. A few hours later, Mom came home and told me that her father had died. It was precisely the time I had felt his presence at the Boy’s Club. To this day, whenever I look at the scar on my ring finger, I remember Lucas and wish that he had chosen a better time to make his final appearance.
Lucas’ wisdom was more mechanical than it was intellectual. When Uncle Richie returned from the Navy, he and Lucas decided to go into the tool and die business. They constructed a small three-room factory in the backyard. It seemed that everything in the city was done in miniature. There just wasn’t enough room. But the tool and die shop appeared big at the time, and I helped build it, though I was only seven years old.
In those days, with memories of the Great Depression less than a decade old, one made do with what one had or could obtain for free. Richie kept his eye open for used building materials. When an old factory was torn down in another part of the city, he and Lucas and I got into his old Ford pickup and went for the bricks. The shop went up in one summer.
Dreams do not die; they evolve into something else. In a few years the shop was closed and Richie was humming “California, Here I Come.” He had found his spiritual rainbow with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and sought his pot of gold on the opposite coast.
There never is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, because rainbows are seen from one’s own particular perspective. You see it when you are in a mist, and should you travel to where you think the rainbow ends, you find that there is no end, just another beginning. The treasure of the rainbow is in the beauty of its vision, its hopes, its dreams. It’s good to follow one’s dreams as long as they keep receding into the future and you recognize that you are continually in a state of becoming.
Richie settled in California and worked at an assortment of odd jobs. He and his wife, Barbara, held positions as butler and housekeeper for the actor James Cagney. He thought it unusual that the Cagneys saw their children only by appointment, and only at certain times of the day. What other stories they could have told. Richie was also a horticulturist, and then he began dabbling in real estate in the Los Angeles area. Those were boom times for land development and he made a fortune. He later moved to Oregon where he also continued to sell real estate before he died of a heart attack.
Richard and Barbara Wertz crossed the country several times in the fifties, but the only stories I heard were of Jehovah’s Witness theology, of how blood transfusions, Christmas, and aluminum pots were bad for you. It didn’t bother me about the transfusions or cooking in aluminum pots, but not celebrating Christmas was an entirely different matter. I felt sorry for their kids who seemed to proliferate in biblical proportions with every trip east. Nevertheless, I delighted in sending them a religious card every Christmas.
The trips east were not so much for family reunions as they were for the Jehovah’s Witness conventions. There was a particularly big one at Yankee Stadium one year. Campgrounds were set up in New Jersey and New York where Witnesses from all over the world could pitch their tents and park their campers. In the fifties, American highways were wide open and people were on the move. I was impressed with the huge numbers of people attending the religious gathering. When you can show the world how many people you can pack into Yankee Stadium, you create the thought that if so many thousands of people believe their doctrines, there might be some truth to it. Numbers may work in politics and business, but religious truth shouldn’t be determined by how many adherents it has or how many converts it makes.
When Charles Russell founded his sect in the nineteenth century, he had the revelation that only 144,000 would make it into heaven. When his group grew to a few million worldwide, some were getting short-changed. Richie couldn’t persuade me to join a religion that had limited occupancy in the hereafter.
I was also bothered by their constant predictions of the end of the world, which they seemed to make with regularity every other decade. Originally known as the Millennial Dawnists, the group was founded with the expectation that the cosmic curtain would be drawn in 1874. And then it was 1914. And then 1918. And then 1925. I don’t know how many times since then, but Richie was now pushing for 1975. I suppose if you keep making these predictions, you will eventually get it right. But who was going to be around to say “I told you so”?
Richie sold his home in San Diego, bought another one in Tujunga, and realized the fortune that could be made in the burgeoning real estate market. Years later, he cashed in and moved to the Rogue River area of Oregon where he was not so successful. His wealth was not compatible with his religion, however, and eventually he drifted from his church, although his family continued in the faith. Richie’s faith journey has raised the question of whether a person’s life experiences determine what his spiritual expression will be, or does a person’s faith shape and mold his character and experience?
Of course it is both. That’s why it is called a “spiritual journey.” Everyone is on such a journey. We are continually in a state of becoming as faith shapes life and life speaks to faith.
I wish I had had the opportunity to discuss this with Richie, and with Lucas. I can only guess that Lucas’ spirituality was traditional and deep. I was too young to have deep philosophical and theological discussions with this simple man of simple tastes and rigid ways.
Lucas lived by the clock and by the calendar. Five days a week he worked at the weaver’s trade, coming home on schedule and demanding that his dinner be served exactly at 6:00 p.m. Soup was required at every meal, usually chicken. Dinner had to be eaten in silence—even a slurp was met with a stare.
After dinner, Lucas would go upstairs and take down a wooden cigar box in which he kept his tobacco and cigarette papers. He used a rolling machine by which he made his cigarettes in a very precise manner. After listening to the radio and his favorite programs, “The Lone Ranger” and “The Shadow” among them, he would retire. It was a pattern from which he seldom deviated.
Today our lives are seldom routine and are filled with overcrowded calendars and multitasking. We have lost the freedom that comes from a disciplined life that provides space for family, for simple joys and special graces, and for interior maintenance of one’s soul. It is in remembering this plain farmer from Saratov that my heart longs for his wisdom that was lost because I never recognized it as such at the time, but now that I have reached his age I have come to value.
THE MAD MONK
Natalia Grauberger stood with her monogrammed leather luggage in front of Castle Clinton at the foot of Manhattan. She had completed an arduous sea voyage that began in the Black Sea port of Sebastopol after leaving her native Czaritzyn. Across the New York Bay, many of her co-voyagers were being processed through immigration at Ellis Island, but Natalie had traveled first class, enjoyed conversation with the captain, and dined at his table. She stood alone with the bags her father had crafted for her in his leather factory, waiting to begin a new life in a new world. A proud woman, she was grateful that she did not have to undergo the often demeaning process that awaited the steerage passengers on
