Today three of my children are at a mission in Mexico. Our boys Timmy and Danny are to be helping replace a roof for one of the main buildings, and Carrie is to help the ladies with a Vacation Bible School, cooking, and whatever else.
My sister-in-law, wife of my brother Fain who is heading up the team, sent us this picture of treating the team of cousins to Mexican tacos after they had all arrived in Mexico.
And then today I sat down to continue editing stories for my next book Henny Penny Disappears and Other Lucas Family Adventures. In looking for another document, I ran across this story that I had written for an assignment for a writer's course I took about 18 years ago. I was supposed to write a fiction story, but I just couldn't seem to do it. I had tweaked this story with a couple details to make it fiction, but today I tweaked it back again to be as true as I can remember, except for maybe one detail.
Timid Timmy, age three, starred in this story--a quiet sort of star, but I still can't read this story without being touched almost to tears. And to think that Timid Timmy is now driving logging trucks and making an international trip in mission work is kind of hard to believe!
But anyway, here is the story!
Timid
Timmy and the Monster
Excavator
“Honey,”
Dad called, “are you still planning to bring the children to watch
the ‘demolition derby’ at Minnehaha today?”
Demolition
derby? Oh, that’s right. This was about the house on
Minnehaha Avenue in
Manitou
Springs
that Dad
had bought to remodel and then discovered that what it really needed
was demolished. The ceilings harbored mold, the trusses were charred
from a former fire, the windows were broken, the porches were
rickety, the foundation was insufficient for an upgraded addition,
and nothing was up to city code. An excavator was coming now
that very day
to bash, smash and trash the place.
Mom
usually liked a fairly steady routine for home school, but this would
be a sort of field trip, she decided. The children would do a little
schoolwork on the way, and then the rest of the day they would learn
about excavators, house demolition, and who knew what!
Mom
whisked a suddenly choking baby over her shoulder and pounded his
back. Three wheezing, glurping gasps later he was back to normal.
“Flip
the pancakes!” she hollered to seven-year-old Carrie as the smell
of charred pancakes filtered through the house, and “Finish
clearing the silverware from the dishdrainer!” she reminded another
of the children who had neglected to finish the job.
Then,
“Yes, honey! What time should I plan to be there?” Finally she
was getting around to answering Dad.
Dad
had almost given up getting an answer and was on his way to the front
door to head off to town. “I’ll give you a call from town when I
found out for sure when the excavator will be starting work,” he
answered. “Do you have my lunch ready?”
“I’ll
bring a picnic lunch with me for everybody,” Mom
told
him. She
did not have the slightest idea yet what to take, but churned out a
decision in thirty seconds. A loaf of bread, sandwich meat, cheese,
lettuce, oatmeal cookies, and apples. And paper plates and a knife
for spreading sandwiches. And wipes and napkins for cleaning up
messes. She
would just throw them all into a basket and make lunch in town.
“That
didn’t even take any brains,” she
told herself. She often
told herself
that nothing
much
does when you are a home schooling mom. You don’t need brains, just
senses. You just do effortless things like have babies and nurse them
and burp them; simplistic things like wipe spills, noses, and babies’
bottoms; and slavish things like wash dishes, check school work
without teacher’s manuals, and read three-letter-word stories to
toddlers over and over and over and over.
Exactly
one hour and twenty-seven minutes later, the lunch in the basket, the
baby scrunched in his car seat, and all the youngsters strapped into
various seats or car seats, (thanks to all the safety laws) the
family was
finally on their
way to town. The
fifty-two minute trip was
spent with
Mom
listening to her
first-grader sound
out her reading lesson,
explaining
multiplication of triple digits to her
fifth-grader, and trying not to have an accident while reading
spelling words for her
third-grader’s spelling
test.
It
might have been safer to leave the school books at home, but by hook
or by crook, the family did indeed arrive safely to Minnehaha Avenue
in Manitou Springs where Mom had
explained they
were going to watch a house-razing today.
“Kind
of the opposite of house-raising,” Mom told the children
enthusiastically. “The words sound alike but have different
spellings and exactly opposite meanings. ‘Raising,’ spelled
r-a-i-s-i-n-g means to lift up. That’s what happens when Amish or
Mennonite folk get together to build a whole house in one day. But
‘razing,’ spelled r-a-z-i-n-g, means to tear down. That’s what
we’re going to see happen today. Words like that are homonyms and
antonyms all at the same time.”
Eleven-year-old
Crystal gulped twice and rolled her eyes. Eight-year-old Sam didn’t
look up from the book he was reading, and seven-year-old Carrie
asked, “What?”
Having
arrived safely at their
destination, it
was easy to see the
enormous excavator already
digging up sidewalk and concrete slabs. For being a twenty-first
century machine, that excavator looked, sounded, smelled, felt, and
probably tasted like a prehistoric dinosaur. Still in the driver’s
seat, Mom
sank back to rest while the children catapulted out of the van and
disappeared behind the smoke of that prehistoric beast to
find Dad.
All, that is, except Timmy. He wouldn’t budge from the van.
“He’s
going to pick me up!” he whimpered. Obviously he thought the
machine was alive. Mom pulled him close to sit on her lap. Together,
they watched the belching beast with its yawning jaws. As soon as it
was done dropping concrete chunks into the gigantic dumpster, it tore
into the house. Crunch, smash, crash! The jaws reached into the
window and took a bite out of the house, catching siding, window
frames and gutter all at the same time, and swung them through the
air to the dumpster. Bite after bite, crunch after crunch–little by
little, the house disappeared while little eyes and ears watched and
listened, and little bare feet climbed on the dirt piles all around.
Mom
got out of the van and watched, too, little Timmy standing close. She
wondered what the excavator operator thought of all these children
parading around the property during school hours, and of their mom
gawking nearby in a denim jumper and sweater, hair windblown, arms
hanging tightly onto a tiny, sleeping baby.
At
lunch time, the operator of the excavator said his name was Bob. He
was probably around sixty, wearing jeans and a cowboy hat. He grew up
on a dairy farm, he said, in a family of six children like ours. But
his youngest sister had died at the age of eleven of a brain tumor.
That was the age our oldest daughter was now. He looked at her
wistfully. Her long hair blew in the breeze, and her pink cheeks
glowed. There was no sign of a brain tumor as she munched a second
huge sandwich.
“You
have a beautiful family,” Bob said. “You must home school.”
“Yes,”
Mom
smiled proudly. “Today was a field trip to learn about
‘house-razing.’”
A
wide grin spread across Bob’s face. “You Amish? Mennonite?
Yiddish?”
Neither
Dad nor Mom had ever quite figured out a pat answer to a question
like this.
“Not
Yiddish. Not Amish. Not Mennonish,” Dad grinned. “About the
closest you could come is old fashioned Methodish!”
“Methodish!”
Bob chuckled at my husband’s teasing. “I was raised Methodist.”
He took another long look around at the family, evidently trying to
assimilate what constituted the differences between Methodist and
“old fashioned” Methodist.
“We
just try to follow Christ and the teachings of the Bible,” Dad went
on. “Name tags don’t mean a whole lot to us. You said you were
raised Methodist. Is that what you still consider yourself?”
“Well,
sort of,” Bob said. “I guess I kind of quit going to church a
while back,” he admitted. “ I need to start going again.”
His
eyes grew misty as he watched Mom holding six-week-old baby Danny.
“You are so blessed,” he said. He had four children of his own,
he went on, but his youngest son was born without a hand. He looked
at the sleeping baby’s hands–those tiny, clinging hands, so
common and ordinary.
“I
kind of lost my faith when that happened,” Bob confessed. “It
felt like God didn’t care. But my son–he is making it through
life.”
Dad
and Mom were lost for words. What would it be like to go through life
without one of your hands?
Bob
swallowed, pulling out a great blue handkerchief and blowing his nose
hard.
Then
he looked at the three-year-old little boy. “Timid Timmy!” he
grinned. “Are you still afraid of me and my monster?”
“Timmy’s
afraid of just about everything!” Mom laughed.
“You
mean his name really is Timmy?” Bob gasped. “I thought it was
your nickname for him today. I just–well--” he admitted, “It
was my youngest son’s name, too.”
After
that, Bob and Timmy were inseparable. Bob persuaded Timmy to get up
on his lap in the excavator. And there Timmy sat, the rest of the
afternoon, his hands on the controls, Bob’s big hands over his.
When the work was done, Bob opened the door of the excavator and
called Dad to come get his little boy. He had fallen asleep, his head
leaning on Bob’s arm, his hands still under Bob’s big ones.
“I
used to let my boy ride with me when he was little, too,” Bob said
huskily.
Dad
reached for Timmy with one arm, and with the other he grasped Bob’s
hand . “Thank you, Bob,” he said huskily.
Had
Bob been asking God if it was okay to get out of the driver’s seat
and just let Him put His hands over his to do the controlling of his
life again?
Dad
went to the
van and gently placed his
sleeping
three-year-old in his car seat. Then he closed the doors and kissed
Mom
goodbye so she
could go on home. With a wave to Bob, Mom
backed out the drive for the long trip home. The tired children one
by one fell asleep, heads sinking clear down to their chests.
It
had been a full day. The older children had learned the meanings of
“raise” and “raze.” The
family
had watched a house disappear into a dinosaur’s jaws. The
three-year-old had learned to operate an excavator. And a restless
Bob had felt
God’s hands again.
