| Walter Wangerin Jr. & Outspoken |
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Dispatch # 16 Yesterday began well enough. The crew left me in my rig to finish that day's dispatch before I took to the bike in order to ride ten miles from Lake Mary into Alexandria. A bit of a wind. They went for breakfast, my gentle crew of four. I had taken off within the hour and cycled the ten miles easily. But just as I was pulling out of a mall entrance and making a large left hand turn with traffic and with the light, something seized my rear wheel and shut it tight. Speed: 20 mph. I had the flash of a moment in which to consider that perhaps I'd crunched through a large gas can, or a rusted muffler. Down I went hard, fast--and giving myself a smart whack on the left hip, skidding. Straightway all my human attention was on the hip; there was nothing left in the world save pain. + + + I punked out on that dispatch. I've been through more experience here than I had anticipated. So I'm picking up the dispatch on Thursday, 12, still in the hospital with one more day before my release. + + + Immediately (after my fall) several drivers came up to me--peered down on me with concern: "Are you all right?" I tried with their help to stand. And failed. Something was desperately wrong in the hip. There will be no standing today boys. Someone called an ambulance. The Alexandria police arrived in several cars--during which time I sat on the ground. Suddenly my team appeared on the other side of the street and came rushing over, the police raising their hands in a warning gesture. Susan said the police were saying, "He's all right." I think they were suddenly worried for Susan's safety--and that of the other members of the team, Brenda and Myra and Gene. The medical emergency personnel were gentle and cordial. They asked if I had pain, and did I want medication. Yes, I had pain. No, let's wait on medication until we know what we're dealing with. (This latter notion sent me into much greater pain than I had anticipated.) The emergency room doctor knew the Lutheran Vespers program and was very kind to me. In time my hip was X-rayed, and the cruel pain of the whole business got worse and worse until--as I was meeting the orthopedic surgeon here, a wry Dr. Hurley--I began to cry. And here was the news: I had broken my hip. The present strength of my muscles, however, persuaded the doctor that I would not need a new ball joint; could keep my own; that was the good news. The news bad was that even with the three screws he intended to insert between the halves of the break, I will have to keep all weight off my left leg for six weeks. Six weeks the bone required to heal again. Six weeks before I can think of strengthening the musculature. Six weeks, which embraces the rest of this tour! Even before I went in for surgery, I made my team leader (Susan, the director and producer of Lutheran Vespers) promise that this most important journey should not be canceled. I agreed right then that I could not make the rallies in Fergus Falls or again in Fargo-Moorhead. But we left the Grand Forks rally stand open a while yet.... And then I vanished. There was a passage of time when I was in my room, but I didn't remember getting there and I do remember the leaving there for pre-op, but hazily. The Anesthesiologist met me to talk about the spinal block and to assure me that, no, I would not be awake during the surgery itself. And then I vanished. + + + This has been a remarkably watchful hospital, careful, inquiring, skillful. You must believe that I do not exaggerate. Douglas County Hospital has a solid reputation for its bone surgery. I could not have broken my hip in a likelier, more accommodating place (for which God receives that gratitude). It too is a teaching institution, so that I've had student nurses, student therapists, doctors with an evident sense of humor and patience. + + + Well, and you have already figured by the dateline of this dispatch, I think, what our decision was regarding Grand Forks. With genuine sorrow I will be missing the city and the rally. It has been a long time since I've seen the city in which I did some significant growing up. 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades I experienced there. First love came then. A sense of the presence of God, as well as of the plains weather, windy, extreme, savage, sweet, a spring of mother's breathings, an autumn of transfiguration. Dear people of Grand Forks, I grieve our not meeting! I hope that we have been communicating with you as these decisions have been made. My brother Greg (just retired from the UN-HCR, the UN's High Commission on Refugees) had thought he would meet me there, the city where he was born, but which he can scarcely remember. I would have shown him the places of our house and of Immanuel Lutheran Church, where Dad was pastor. The church itself is gone now. The house took tremendous hits during the floods, but whether it is there to be seen (619 Reeves Drive) or not, I do not know. But the towns in which we were young have deep familiarity, since they are the shape our characters have kept, the mold that molded us when we were unconscious of the process. For example I love deeply a genuinely cold winter. North Dakota cold preceded, for my family, the Edmonton cold where Dad became president of a Concordia College there. When a Chicago winter begins to reach toward coldness, I get excited. I yearn to walk outside on an ice-cold, crystalline night. But once I am outside I suffer disappointment. For these are not colds that stay, growing stronger into the winter. These rise up and down, and the snow is too often false--for it doth not linger months. In Grand Forks, spring gurgles, because the ice is melting from underneath. In Canada, spring can be blinding sunshine on a slickening snow. But Chicago, by that measure, has spring time tri-weekly, December, January, and February. On the other hand, all the rest of our itinerary I plan to honor. Oh, yes: this tour is altogether too important for the future of Lutheran Vespers for me to quit it in the middle. Some of some authority have suggested our retreat; and I do fully understand their concerns. But Lutheran Vespers absolutely must have a foundation of listeners who are more than listeners! I desire that you should be my partners too; for if we are all sharing in a ministry of true missionary outreach, if we are sharing in a ministry of the Gospel which finds folk who otherwise would never find a church that did not distress them; if, I say, you are sharing this good work with me, then it will and it can and it must continue. This is how much I need you: as much commitment as it still takes me to get to you. My healing body will symbolize the program's need of you. So: we will conduct our next rally in Marshall and then in Sioux Falls. And all the places where we promised to meet folks for sessions of questions and answers will be honored too. I am very sorry not to be cycling. That portion of this tour was food and drink to me, strength and endurance. Now I have to give it up and redesign my progress. I'll be coming to you, my dear friends, on crutches now and in motorized vehicles, not through the sweat of my brow. I am sorry to be losing a physical fitness not usual in this 58 year old body; but surely if I put my mind to this regimen of shoulder-and-arm support on crutches, I ought to be able to maintain a level of fitness, no? Surely yes. Still, I greatly look forward to seeing you! Please come and meet me. And if you can't because you don't live near enough to the places of my rallies, then call up your friends and relatives in those places and ask them to come and meet me. This ELCA website (which right now shows my 16th dispatch) can give you the information: click on the OUTSPOKEN website itinerary; it will tell you the where's and the when's of our meetings together. For I have nearly half the course yet to run, and with your help we can make each rally broader, larger and livelier than the last one. Come and swell our crowds. + + + And how dear is this: all four of our children have called to wish me well, each with a different kind of urgency, yearning, love in his and her voice. There are times when, raising our children, we worry about how well we are doing the job. I did, at any rate. I worried deeply that I was shoveling too much guilt upon them, or was myself too harsh and unkind to them. And then comes this accident, and all four call. And all four talk. And I can scarce get over what solace their words give me--solace for a lifetime. Since it is a lifetime's labor, this parenting thing; and if now they carry personal concern to me, why, then I am forgiven my mistakes when they were young, and I am fully as much father as ever before, not any longer to direct their lives, but to receive from their lives the blessing of the generations. Because all is well between myself and my children, then right now at this moment all was well as well. Time collapses into their expressions of present concern, and the old man smiles and bows his head in gratitude: it is more than my deserving, that they love me; but it is mine anyway, to conjure with and to comforted by: that they love me. Peace, all my children, all my grandchildren. You surely have breathed upon my soul peace as well. Be safe. Go slow. Make wise decisions. Remember your author with every decision, since he began the book you are each writing now, each book entitled by your name. Give it back to him, our author and our finisher. Give it back to him with every choice, every desiring, every hunger and that hunger's satisfaction. Give it back to God who will receive not just your history (the book) but yourself (the life written in his book). Peace, all you that have children. And all you that are children, peace. Walt
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