The church then had peace throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria, and it became stronger as the believers lived in the fear of the Lord. And with the encouragement of the Holy Spirit, it also grew in numbers.

Acts 9:31 NLT

The process was flawed.  Wires were crossed. The concept of an early warning system declaring impending doom for doctors had not yet been invented.  So nary a pal nor coworker spoke up to advise the obstetrician how terribly deficient his plan was when he chose to take his violin on a road trip up the mountain from Boulder to join the string section in the Estes Park orchestra just as my mother was embarking on labor pains back in the city from whence he had come.

 Oh my. That poor doc came to regret his travel decision when my father, having interrogated a frightened nurse as to the whereabouts of the guy and driven at absurd nighttime speeds over the winding highway, physically extracted the surprised medical practitioner from the orchestra pit, put him in the car, and careened  him back down to Memorial Hospital to attend my birth.  

 How humiliating. I’m glad I wasn’t there. 

My dear dad, whose “let’s take care of this right now” knee-jerk reactions were the stuff of legend, probably ended up rethinking the Obstetrician Extraction Scenario – and eventually felt a bit embarrassed – only the first of countless opportunities to feel as such, courtesy of Li’l Ol’ Me. He had no idea what was coming up for him over the next decades.  Poor guy.

Just as well we got started on Day Numero Uno. 

Certainly mine was an auspicious entrance to the world surrounded by tension from all sides and stories to be told around the hospital water cooler for weeks to come. I’m surprised Mr. Doctor didn’t sue. Maybe he did. Oooh. I’d like to hear that story. 

Anyway, Mom and Dad both swore they’d never do it again. Childbirth I mean. 

And the die was cast. 

Only child.

Cue the spotlight.

It would be years, lots of years, before I gained a basic understanding of the extreme contrast of my childhood compared to my mother’s and father’s. From a looking-back perspective it became clear that their intention for their daughter was just that – contrast – to provide something different. 

Better. Easy. Smooth. Perfect.

Dad, born in 1927,  liked to phrase it that they “blew out of the Dust Bowl” of Oklahoma when he was a boy, launching an existence of picking fruit up and down the west coast for the remainder of the Depression. Logging camps were intermittently called home when the work was there.  Finding work. Feeding children. Again and again the next day and the next. 

The family spirit managed to remain intact, curiously so, given their impoverished physical way of life. There was singing and storytelling in the evenings; humor being found all around them, especially in their interactions with another larger family they met while picking fruit who became lifelong friends and eventually family themselves when two of their brothers married two of Dad’s sisters.  Hellooo, double cousins . . . 

The reality of hardscrabble days stacked layer upon layer for my grandparents and their children as surely as the rising of the sun. Hard days. Hard work. Hard travel. Hard life.  Decades later, did my father focus on these severities when reminiscing? Not even close.  His stories were more tuned to how his mama made a home wherever they found a place to sleep at night, sweeping dirt floors and using flour sacks for curtains on glassless windows (holes in the walls). He painted a picture for me of his daddy, who, though not a tall man, had arms “strong as tree trunks,” muscles he used in the fields and the logging camps to keep his family fed and alive.

Every scene certainly wasn’t the stuff of a gentle children’s bedtime story – a few inclined precariously close to chapters straight out of Steinbeck –  but I was not privy to those tales. Grandpa, so it was whispered,  had some habits that could’ve used some fine tuning. Alcohol is a mighty strong magnet – an escape from unrelenting difficulty. He never failed, however, to labor faithfully for the family and Grandma took his provision and his presence, sewing together the sturdy seams of unity, not separation. This granddaughter is grateful.

Those grandparents of mine died young.  They raised four children in circumstances most of us do not remember firsthand, and ultimately the wretched Wrath of the Depression took its toll. I knew her as much as a three-year old can, shadowy images of her cotton dress walking past me toward the newspaper-lined drawers of her china cabinet that held waxy candles she would let me take out to breathe in their scent.  I never knew him. Nonetheless, they flow through my veins just as though I spent years walking and talking with them, working alongside the family by day, singing and laughing well into the night. Their legacy endures.

Joseph Isaac Keen and Gladys Emily Cone Keen were important to the world.

Mom’s family certainly didn’t have it easy by any stretch of the imagination when she came into the world in 1933, but the drama wasn’t nearly as Grapes-of-Wrath-y as my dad’s. They did move around a lot to find work for my grandpa and he sometimes landed  fairly respectable occupations, but the sudden moves, often at night,  were necessary for reasons he did not care to explain. Oh, doesn’t one’s imagination just take off running with this  delectable bit … in reality midnight moves most likely involved not being able to make the rent, but just go ahead with wherever the imagination road takes you … 

 My maternal grandfather, a tall, imposing frame of a man with a strong jaw and shock of thick hair, did not treat his family with gentle respect and guide them into a working knowledge of what “family” should look like. He brought to his second marriage (my grandmother) two little children, the third baby having died in his care after his first wife, pregnant with their fourth child, purposefully left this life. My Gram gave him four more babies, one being my mother, and raised them all six with loving kindness, a sweet demeanor, and what must’ve been a spine of steel to withstand the unpredictable atmosphere. And that, boys and girls, is the sugar-coated version. 

Of all the siblings in that household, I have consistently believed my mother was treated the best by “Daddy.” It may have been her unquenchable, chin-in-the-air spirit that, from underneath her long dark braids, standing tall in her required black stockings and perpetual simple dress,  just radiated a silent, “I dare you.” Makes me shudder to imagine it, but also a little proud. Honestly, there couldn’t have been too much pushback from her, given the tyranny.

 I think it was because of her music. 

Almost unimaginably there was access to a piano most places the family lived, and in quick-thinking fashion, Mom avoided performing many of the domestic duties required of her sisters because she had genius in her little fingers at the keyboard. She taught herself to play. Or maybe the piano just cowered in her presence. 

All the children eventually grew up, each with their own weight of an upbringing around their necks.  Some spoke of it. Most did not.

My precious Gram, my mother’s mother, lived with us a couple of different times during my childhood.  Those memories of her presence are highly treasured as she eventually became a pattern for my life, though during years that I was blowing around as an unfettered tumbleweed, thoughts of her were gone with the wind.  I never ever forgot  her loving care for me though, and the immovable faith that forged her steel spine. She died too young. 

Her husband, my grandfather who, in his way, loved his wife and children, but early on had given himself over to dark controlling influences from his own family history (all in a twisted interpretation of  Christianity passed down to him as a child), eventually walked away when Gram still had two children at home and no way to support them.  He lived to be the oldest of my grandparents. Figures.

C.W. Mitchell and Evelyn Westmoreland Mitchell were undeniable forces, opposite forces, in their significant impact on each and every day of my life. Still are. I fight one. Embrace the other. Legacies.

Funneling down through all these lives, their tragedies and triumphs, finally swirling into a generation to come, a squalling baby grand daughter was delivered by a haggard violin-playing obstetrician on a hot August afternoon in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. 

Little me lacked for nothing. We three, father, mother, child, had strong connections with friend groups; our cozy Nazarene church was just down the street; and all was well. My folks had rewarding careers in which they both excelled, especially my father, who upon completion of a Ph.D., continued on a trajectory of academic accomplishment – a barefoot kid out of the fruit orchards of the Depression. Powerful mother, undeterred by anyone or anything since successfully navigating the “Daddy” years, was ahead of her time and developed programs for single mothers at the local Vo-Tech college.

The Star of Bethlehem, a Boulder, Colorado tradition which shone its brightly lit bulbs during December from the mountainside to the west, seemed to cast its glow especially upon our little trio.  In retrospect it seems that both my parents overcame those portions of their childhoods that needed overcoming and were succeeding at virtually everything they touched. Golden boy. Golden girl. Golden baby.

There was peace. They lived in the fear (reverence) of the Lord. They had increased in numbers – me! Downright biblical ( Acts 9:31 NLT).  I know, I know . . . look at her taking scripture out of context . . . but hear me out. The Holy Spirit was at work in an encouraging and beautiful way in my parents’ young lives, not in the same way as it looked in the early Church when huge events were taking place after Saul, chief persecutor of Christians, became Jesus’ most ardent follower himself, but most definitely noticeable within the framework of their small reality. Acts Chapter 9 is just chock full of the greatness and the goodness of God, His mighty work among people, and the character of the Holy Spirit throughout it all. So out of context or not, I rest my case. Goodness was happening in Judea, Galilee, Samaria, and Boulder.  We had a star shining on us from the mountain to prove it.

Too young to be able to articulate the stability and “rootedness” and comfort I felt, I thrived without knowing why. Too young to look around and notice that my little day-to-day existence played out differently from others my age, I just lived it.  It mattered not. 

As though it were yesterday and not more decades ago than I care to confess,  a memory I often visit features my pudgy little two-year old legs dressed in white lacy anklets and black patent shoes marching around the basement Sunday School classroom with other toddlers as “Onward! Christian Soldiers” is played on a portable record player. Those few seconds are stuck in my brain when much else has failed. Geometry never stuck …  both times I took it …  sorry, dear parents for that little humiliation. There never was any hope about remembering basic physics or how to conjugate German. The French Revolution from sophomore history? Nope. It was that church basement classroom and that Christian soldier song and those pudgy little knees (no comments about today’s knees, thank you very much) that embedded permanently into my brain.  And it’s a good thing. I needed that wispy memory because I wouldn’t always be rock solid or rooted or stable. But I could hang onto that marching song.  And somehow continue marching. Onward.

Fun Fact: An executive editor for whom I worked and whom I deeply respected, strongly forbade “Onward! Christian Soldiers” and “I’m in the Lord’s Army” to be written into our curriculum for Sunday School children. Too militaristic. Not the “Jesus Loves the Little Children” we wanted to project. I understood that and saw his point. But in my spirit I still marched around in my black patent shoes and hummed a little.

It played in my head randomly over the years without being summoned, especially as my personal roots would start to loosen, the high transom windows of that musty basement classroom letting in light straining to nourish weakening branches of my young life. I didn’t recognize this loosening and weakening for what it was until retrospect became my friend, but without that church basement, its solid foundation, light-giving windows, and portable record player keeping me steady, it would only be a matter of time. I had  tumbleweed tendencies in my future.