The Bridge to Moses

It is in the wee hours of the morning, and I have tried and failed to achieve a state of slumber.  Illumined by a single lamp, I now sit on my couch, glaring grumpily at my coffee table and listening to the ambient sounds of my sleeping household.  From the neighboring kitchen, a clock’s tick, normally lost in the hubbub of life, chronicles the steady march of sleepless time.  The refrigerator compressor kicks on for a few minutes, then yields to the mournful sound of a distant train, penetrating the glass of a window behind my head.

I am bored, and so I eventually rise and make my way to my empty guest bedroom where there awaits me a large bookcase filled with a wide selection of literature.  Before this structure I plant myself and begin, somewhat absently, to scan the familiar, and somewhat musty rows of fact and fiction found thereupon. 

It is not with a great deal of hope that I stand upon this spot, for within these shelves dwells a collection of books very much picked over by me.  Many a time have I stood before these very shelves to search in vain for a gem as yet unread.  Many a time have I walked away empty handed, concluding that everything housed there has either been comprehensively read or adjudicated unworthy to entertain.  So it is not hope but the habitual wanderings of a sometimes insomniac that has brought me once more to gaze upon my library.

Starting with the top shelf and working my way down, I scan, one by one, the familiar titles.  I finish the top shelf and move down to the second shelf, walking in front of the bookcase at the same speed as my wandering gaze.  A couple times I pause, briefly considering this or that title, and on one occasion I even pull a small paperback from its place, only to quickly return it.

I am on the third shelf now, and having admonished myself for a fool’s errand, I am moving more quickly when, to my surprise, something unexpected catches my eye.  Several books once belonging to my father have made their way into my house and, awaiting proper integration to my shelves, have been cast somewhat haphazardly across the tops of the vertically shelved literature.  In the months since my father’s death, a number of artifacts of value or intrigue have surfaced as we work through the disposition of his worldly goods, and one such find is here amongst these books.  I have seen it once before, when I was a child, but then it disappeared, not to be encountered again until now.  It is my father’s yearbook from his senior year at Concord High School in Concord, Massachusetts. 

I retrieve the book from the shelf and turn it over in my hands.  Despite its age, it remains in excellent condition.  Its cover is soft, leather-bound, maroon.  The Bridge 1954 is embossed in gold on its front cover, along with an image of the famous Concord Bridge.  I return with it to the couch in my living room and, in typical left-handed fashion, thumb through it from back to front.  

There are the usual sorts of amusements one might expect in a time capsule like this.  For instance, among the advertisements at the end of the book, I learn that if I wish Fred R. Jones to be my milkman, he can be reached at his telephone number, which is 604.  I am also surprised to find a large number of advertisers with no telephones whatsoever.

A few more pages and something else catches my eye.  I see my grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley G. Julin, listed on the yearbook’s patrons and patronesses page.  For a brief moment, I try to reconcile my grandparents’ patronage with my father’s recollection of such poverty that his mother made peanut butter sandwiches by spreading peanut butter onto the bread, then scraping it off again.  I smile at the thought and flip pages toward the front of the book.

Upon reaching the honored pages reserved for the senior class, I am surprised by how old most of the students appear.  After staring at the images for a while, I realize the reason for this phenomenon is that, unlike the teenagers of future decades, my father’s generation maintained the same hairstyles throughout their whole lives[1], and as a consequence, the young faces I see here are crowned with hairdos I am accustomed to seeing atop older citizens.

Still, I am struck by the passage of time as I look upon those faces staring back at me, for I realize that those people were then the same age as my son is now.  They then stood on the threshold of their adult lives, and how great the promise of the future must have seemed.  In fact, it is clear that the future was then foremost in everyone’s minds.  The yearbook was signed by about three quarters of the 136 students in this senior class.  Many of these messages are now illegible due to faded ink, poor penmanship or both, but almost all of those still legible mention the future.

“…May your future be full of happiness.”

– Virginia Woodruff

“Best of luck and happiness for a wonderful future.”

– Virginia Wilkie

“…I seriously want to wish you all the success in the future.”

– Dean Soule

“Keep up your hard work and you will be a success.”

– Robert McWalter

“May you succeed in all you strive to do.  May your future be full of happiness and may all your dreams come true.”

– Laura Larsen

I only find two handwritten notes from fellow students that do not mention the future.  “Knowledge is there whether or not it is heard,” wrote Coburn Benson.  

The less serious Wally Driscoll wrote only, “Remember Mr. Salter’s geometry class and the time you set the bomb off on the windowsill?”  I instantly like Wally and hope that his healthy appreciation of tomfoolery served him as well as mine has me.  I smile at his remembrance, for I recall my father recounting to me how, by painstaking effort, he constructed an unusually large firecracker from gunpowder carefully scraped out of cap-gun caps.  With a bemused smile, my dad told me that the endeavor had been successful beyond anything he could have anticipated.

My father’s senior picture decorates the upper left corner of page twenty-two.  The picture is instantly recognizable, for the seventeen-year-old Stan Julin, or “Sonny” as he was then known, did not look very different from the seventy-four-year-old who, only a few months ago was shuffling around my house.  The personality too is recognizable, for the caption next to his picture begins with the words, “Sonny doesn’t say too much but he seldom misses a word that is spoken.”  This quiet nature is also mentioned in a brief note fellow student John Reed wrote across the upper left corner of my father’s picture.  “My silent friend.  Good Luck  John”  

At the upper right corner, there appears the only handwritten note from someone not then a student or teacher at Concord High.  It reads, “My Son Love forever Mama.”

The most striking note of all was written by a student named John Keith, whose picture appears directly below that of my father.  It is striking because it alone makes mention of God.  “Best of luck to a fellow Bedfordite,” he wrote.  “May the good Lord Bless you in years to come.” 

Thank you for writing that, John Keith of Bedford Massachusetts (if you yet survive, and if, through the miracles of our interconnected world, this message makes its way to you).  I do not know how much luck my father had, but the good Lord did, indeed, bless him in the years to come…really, really blessed him.

A few weeks hence, my son will graduate high school.  His childhood a memory and his entire adulthood stretched out before him, it would be easy to think of his time yet remaining upon this earth as endless, but my father’s fresh young face, smiling from the upper left corner of page twenty-two, says otherwise.

“…for it is soon cut off and we fly away.”  These words come to my mind; so I put the yearbook on the coffee table, retrieve my Bible from across the room, and open it to Psalm 90.  Here, in the predawn quiet of my living room, the words of Moses are clearly audible across the thousands of years that separate us.  “Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep:  in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.  In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down and withereth.”

Tick…tick…tick goes the clock.  From outside, the 12:30 train has been replaced by the 3:30 train, which is then drowned out when my air conditioning kicks to life.  Eventually, the air conditioner cedes to the distant barking of a dog; then, another dog joins the chorus.  So goes the night, and as these things mark the passage of time, a prayer emerges, a prayer inspired by a yearbook but crafted with the words of Moses, a prayer for my son:

Teach my son, O Lord, to number his days, that he may apply his heart unto wisdom.  O satisfy him early with your mercy, that he may rejoice and be glad all his days.  Let your work and glory appear unto him, and let the beauty of his God be upon him.  Establish the work of his hands.  For before the mountains or earth, you are God and you have been our dwelling place in all generations.

Best of Luck, my son.  May the good Lord bless you in years to come.

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[1] Except for a brief and ill advised foray into beehive hairdos for women in the early 60s.