romance – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

October 12, 2023October 11, 2023

A Mirror Dimly

With our first two children now college age and our youngest sprinting toward adolescence, a number of pivotal shifts – threshold moments – lay ahead. Leaving Africa felt surreal. Life as we knew it was soon to radically change.

On some days we felt a faint sense of adventure for some veiled assignment the Lord may have in store. In large part though, truth be told, my bride and I felt like hapless passengers on a rudderless ship bobbing on fog-laden seas. Paul’s words to the faithful at Corinth had become quote-worthy, “We see in a mirror dimly”*.

My flight route out of Tanzania brought me via Europe to the U.S. and on to Oklahoma. On the long journey a string of uncertainties played at my imagination like a gathered company of aircraft hovering above a big airport, each waiting its turn to land. One set of musings circled around again and again.

How grave is my dad’s condition. . . will the radiation protocol rise to the occasion? What actually Is Mesothelioma?

By degrees, March of ’92 chipped away at my emotional reserves. My foremost objective was to accompany Dad to his treatment appointments several days each week.

But then my brief snatches of times with our lovely firstborn brought precious and welcome reprieves. A Tex-Mex luncheon together disclosed news of a romance story underway, and I would meet Julie’s special beau before my trip back home (Tanzania).

In a particularly sacred kind of moment, my aged father tenderly granted a request I gently presented him. In keeping with an ancient biblical practice, he invoked a father to son blessing, leaning forward from his hospital bed. I am forever grateful.

Through our few weeks together, Dad’s treatments appeared to indicate some modest gains in the cancer battle. When we hugged farewell, we each donned a hopeful smile at the prospect of seeing one another in a few months, when the plane bearing my family would again touch down in the United States.

Back in East Africa our weeks and months streamed by. Tying together loose ends, sharing at farewell functions, celebrating our son’s graduation. A myriad body of tasks met us that are common to households transitioning yet again to other locations.

As the days for leaving the beloved continent neared, a moment of past reflection surfaced. The ad that had caught my eye a short while before – I.S.I.

Was International Students, Inc. to factor in as we bridge the coming divide – our next threshold?

September 15, 2015August 28, 2017

Musings

Did you hear the president’s been shot?

During several high school summers – when not bailing hay with him – I helped Dad as senior gopher in his small business. At City Plumbing my duties featured grunts, grime and unmentionable substances. Dodging spiders in under-house crawl-spaces I soaped fitting joints of gas lines. Bubbling up of liquid detergent applied by paintbrush around the galvanized joints revealed any leaks. I, otherwise, threaded galvanized pipe and maneuvered flat steel rods (snakes) along clogged-up restaurant sewer lines. My before-dinner hand scrubbing redefined the term, ferocity.

My Preston High years behind me, a construction firm hired both my father and me in late Summer. As plumber’s apprentice I shadowed my journeyman dad, gaining experience in the trade. We were on a team renovating Okmulgee’s Post Office building. I sniffed the bunker-like quarters. Blended smells of concrete, sawdust and dankness indicated our basement environment. Carpenters, electricians, plumbers, playing their roles in a tradesmen’s symphony.

November 22, 1963

The basement elevator door opened to my dad and me. It was midday. We would surface to first floor and take to our charcoal-black lunch pails. The kind with contoured lids harboring a thermos drinks canister. Dad responded to the terse question about the president.

No, what about it?

I dusted my work cap. Dad waited for a punch line to the man’s unsavory joke. It didn’t come.

It’s not a joke, Clyde.

That Friday our lunch pails lost their appeal as our transport hauled us upward. The elevator scene found permanent residence in a newly-fashioned file in my brain.

Years later the writings of a gifted Oxford professor captured my imagination. I would rate the Irishman – who died the same day as President Kennedy – among my favorite authors. C. S. Lewis.

I believe we all have a limp, perhaps more than one. What manner of crippling could so wreck a person’s mind to make of him a murderer. Of America’s thirty-fifth president?

I worked with dad throughout the post office project. Over time I knew. The plumbing trade isn’t for me. I just wasn’t suited for it. Dad’s work was an honorable vocation. For me, the sensation of typewriter keys clicking under my fingertips felt more at home than the imprint of a pipe wrench on my palm.

Preston High had provided me time in the company of names like Royal and Underwood. I loved the forming of words. . . of thoughts transmitted to paper – loved the clicking beneath my fingertips.

I wondered. What if words, sentences, communication could lead to something? Excitement stirred – if only mildly.

My simple musings proved momentous. Leading me to broader worlds. Toward adventure.

Even romance.

May 18, 2018

To Tie A Knot

“Do you take this woman to be your wedded wife. . this man to be your wedded husband?”

What steps lead to that happy/solemn phrase, ‘I take this person to be. . ‘?

Life outside the U.S. stretched my thinking on several fronts. This was one. Musings stirred about cultural traditions, about courtship and marriage – some fun and romantic-like, others less so but interesting the same. Musings on how such things play out mong a people different from my own.

“Well, you know”, the dark-skinned gentleman whose head often wagged slightly sideways to signal agreement, offered, “it is like this. . .”

The pleasant sing-song introduction came from an Indian gent I was getting to know. I nodded, coaxing him on in his response to my question.

“You know, we in India and other places come to marriage differently than is done in the West. And, though modern times bring some change, customs to do with the marital union – we hold them quite dear.”

Interesting.

“Can I ask you, Vinay, did your grandparents decide how your own mother and father were to meet and marry? Your father’s parents, for instance, was it they who selected who the girl would be for him?”

And so the visit went.

Before my chat with Vinay, I had already been hearing that much of the world – most of the world – goes about romance and marriage in ways I could think are very weird. Like everyone else, I interpreted most all things through my own American-tinted cultural lens.

“They played a big role, yes”, Vinay replied. “And so did my mother’s family – with long visits over tea and step-by-step discussions – continuing forward right up to their marriage union.

“After all, marrying is not about falling in love. It is about giving thought to life as a whole, which usually does include marrying someone. “

I nodded, implying I understood. But I didn’t really, not quite.

“Young people in the West follow feelings, they go with their senses. A couple “fall in love”, and they marry. In our tradition we find it better to wed a person the family determines – in their best judgment – to be a decent match. The process moves forward. Eventually, the couple marry. The two then “grow into loving” one another. . . Yes, it usually comes. The pair grow to love each other over time. It is the way with our people.

I wondered. These worlds of romance and courtship and marriage. West and East. Could there be a middle ground?

I still wonder.

May 19, 2015August 28, 2017

Commonality

The Plymouth sedan rolled to a stop in the parking lot of our little house of worship. The left door opened and a metallic glitter caught my eye as the driver began the process of exiting her car. It was a process. She swiveled slowly so both her legs, framed in stainless steel braces, dangled to the outside.

What caught my eye next was her face. Angelic? The adjective wasn’t in my word-store then but, yes. A quality beamed from the young woman’s face. Almost like a glow. Opaline’s smile overtook me. It has never left.

Falling in love with Opaline was more enchantment than romance. An unlikely combination of hardware and disposition fueled the attraction. Full limb braces on both legs combined with her smile. My meeting her at roughly age five spawned a long journey of regard. And affection. How can full-length leg braces and this kind of smile converge? My gaze dropped. I surveyed my malformed shoe fashioned so by pressure from an equally malformed foot. I smiled just as the reason for the smile caught up with the action itself. I shared a common affliction. . with an angel!

What could a flooded pasture and a paralyzing disease have in common? Perhaps nothing.

My father, Clyde Lout, was a living testament to a rural adage. Dust bowl issues succeeded in taking the boy out of the country and on to California urban centers. Nothing prevailed however at taking the country out of the boy. Oklahoma soil, long recovered from the droughts of the 1930’s, beckoned.

We moved to a small acreage outside town. Twin pear trees in the pasture – limbs heavy with their treasures most summers – supplied Tim and me with climbing and feasting pleasures. Don’t eat them when they’re green! was our mother’s (sometimes-heeded) admonition.

Our sister Betty exercised more wisdom than her young siblings. Tim and I first learned to swim near the same pear trees in the pasture. Not in a pond or in a stream running through the pasture. We set in motion our first-ever strokes in the pasture itself.

A red-brown waterway called the Deep Fork River snaked through the countryside west of our place. During a late spring season in the mid-1950s continued rains flooded the Deep Fork. Ongoing downpours overflowed every creek and stream.

Rising waters flooded lowlands, submerging much of our five acres. Once the rain stopped my brother and I splashed about in the chest-deep mix of water and floating debris. Discovering buoyancy we propelled our way through tree bark, sticks and limbs, assorted leaves and hollowed pecan shells. And here and there – given it was the habitat of farm animals – other matter as well.

My second bout with the polio virus far exceeded the first in its severity. Whether my pastureland swim factored into the soon approaching paralysis is unresolved.

I was nine years old. My legs simply stopped working.