Remembering the Saints

Remembering the Saints The Dover Church
November 1, 2009 – All Saints Scripture: Mark 12:28-34

“All Saints' Day is an occasion for remembering with gratitude those whose lives bear witness to the blessing of God.” This morning I am going to tell you about my favorite uncle, Harry Boissevain. Harry was not a saint in the conventional understanding of the word, as in particularly holy, without flaw, or even wholly devoted to God. He did, however, bear remarkable witness to the blessing of God wherever he went. When I remember him I come closer to God and I am deeply grateful for having known him.
The beauty of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and assorted other relatives is that they are not your parents. Parents cannot be fun all the time. These people, on the other hand, are not responsible for the nuts and bolts of raising a child. They may look like your parents, sound like your parents, agree with your parents about a lot of things, but, if you are lucky, they are people you have fun with, doing things your parents would not do with you, things your parents would not want you doing at all. They make you promise not to tell your parents what you did together and they take the heat when the truth comes out. I'm sure all of you had some of these people in your lives.
Every 4th of July, Harry would bring fireworks to our beach house on the Cape. Fireworks were illegal in Massachusetts in those days and the police were very serious about confiscation and fines. When Harry arrived, we children would all run out to watch him open his trunk, in which would be a big bag of illicit excitement: rockets, sparklers, and roman candles from down south somewhere. My father would panic. He hated fireworks and was terrified of how we might maim ourselves or how he might get arrested. Every June my father told us the story of a childhood friend who blew off some fingers with an M80, which was his way of telling us that we would not get to handle any of the fireworks. I have to admit that it was sort of amusing to watch my father trying to light these things and run away at the same time, with one eye down the beach in one directions, a second eye down the beach in the other direction, a third eye on the path coming through the dune, looking for the police, and a fourth eye out for all of us and the dog to make sure we didn't get too close. Obviously a physical impossibility. I know my father hated the spectacle, but Harry loved it. He enjoyed the pyrotechnics. He enjoyed our delight in the show. And he enjoyed my father's antics.
Fun. Harry loved fried clams, onion rings and vanilla milkshakes. So did I. My parents also loved them, but they did not think I should be eating them in enormous quantities in the middle of the afternoon, thereby ruining my supper. Harry knew this, so he would ask me if I would like to check out the book or Army Surplus stores in Orleans, which I knew was the signal for a clam orgy. Off we would go and sure enough, Harry would turn off route 6A and head towards the clam shack at Rock Harbor.
“You know, Max,” he would say, “I feel like having some fried clams, onion rings and maybe even a milk shake.”
“Me too, Uncle Harry.”
“Well, if I remember correctly, isn't there a clam shack down this road?” he would ask.
“Yes, I think there is,” I would answer, playing my part in the farce to perfection.
“Let's go and see if it’s still there. Your parents don't need to know.”
“No, they probably don't.”
And there we would be, getting the largest bucket of fried clams, the largest basket of onion rings, adult sized vanilla milk shakes, sitting on the dock in Rock Harbor, eating, talking, watching the water, and going through piles of napkins trying to wipe off all the grease. It was pure heaven to a 12 year old boy and his 40 something uncle, and it felt pretty good being treated like a grown up.
Being with Harry was like standing in front of an open window through which the entire world of possibilities, ideas and distant places was blowing. Harry was exotic. He spoke several languages fluently. Raised in Holland, his family had survived the Second World War living off table scraps in the basement of their own house with Germans officers living upstairs. Unathletic to look at, bald with a van Dyke beard, childhood polio had left him enormously tall with very skinny legs and arms, Harry had served in the 10th Mountain Brigade during the Korean War, “cross country skiing in Alaska” as he put it. Harry had worked for NATO in Paris, the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica California, and the US Congress in Washington, DC. He lived near the Watergate and had a Nixon daughter for a neighbor. He was always reading and wanting to discuss new ideas. He went to museums, concerts, lectures and birdwatching in the Amazon. But Harry also loved to poke around in tidal pools with us kids, looking for crabs and shells. While being quite serious about his tennis, he seemed to really enjoy taking all of us kids to the court to hit the ball around.
Harry's priorities were not society's priorities. One time, I “accidentally done-on-purpose” flew a wind-up balsa wood plane over the fence into the Nixon-Eisenhower property, only to have Secret Service men pop up out of the wood work. He thought this was highly amusing. He loved to feed birds and would have literally hundreds at his feeders, the result of which was unbelievable piles of bird droppings on his patio, which he would laugh about when you pointed them out to him. Harry had original Rembrandt paintings and other Dutch Masters on his walls which he had inherited, but he didn't believe in insurance. “I didn't pay for them,” he would say. “Why should I pay to insure them?” He said this, living in a dangerous part of Washington. He was shot once on his doorstep by a 14 year old boy who wanted his wallet. “Why should I give you my wallet?” he told me he had asked the boy, laughing as he told me, right before the boy shot him. On another occasion, he was severely beaten and had his jaw broken by two men who stole his car. I only learned later that his assailants had been black. Their race was beside the point to Harry, who continued to live in his neighborhood, walk in his neighborhood, and go to a black church in his neighborhood where he loved the music and helping out in the soup kitchen. If it was nice weather, Harry would always choose tennis over yard work or house repair. A good book and opera records on the stereo were how he spent his evenings.
Harry was generous. He loved to eat out, on the Cape at Thompson's Clam Bar in Harwichport and in Washington at all kinds of exotic restaurants. His pleasure was in treating all of us to something he enjoyed. Our pleasure was his pleasure. Our presence was his present. He never even let another adult see the bill, for fear that the amount would ruin their pleasure.
Harry was merciful and compassionate. People's faults, including his own, were never a cause for finger pointing, blame or censure. When someone was behaving particularly badly, his response was a smile and a chuckle, as if to say, “while you are this way and it's not very pretty, it's also not the end of the world and I still like you.”
He laughed at himself, at others, at just about everything. One Christmas Eve we came back from church to find that the cats had climbed up the Christmas tree and pulled it down and that the dog had chewed up all the gingerbread men, candy canes, assorted gifts, and then proceeded to regurgitate the whole mess all over the oriental carpets in our living room. Hysteria is not too strong a word to describe everyone's reaction to this catastrophe, except Harry. He thought this was one of the funniest things he had ever seen.
When my youngest sister decided to paint her hair purple, wear only black clothes, do poorly in school, lock herself in her room and respond through the door with sullen monosyllables, everyone in the family was pulling their hair out about what to do. Harry sent my sister a poster of a parrot on roller skates wearing a Walkman with a note saying, “I know you'll find your own level and be just fine.”
The last time I saw Harry was in 1992. We were celebrating my mother's new house on the Cape and it was sort of like old times, with lots of relatives doing things we had not done together in fifteen years or so, except it wasn't like old times in that everyone was a lot older and some of the people were no longer with us. Harry had aged, thinned out a lot, and couldn't eat fried clams or onion rings anymore. They upset his stomach he said. I remember his warm smile, his sense of pure joy in watching my cousin's son learning how to walk. We took a funny picture of Harry, myself, and my cousin Cliff sitting on a couch together, Harry with his hand over his mouth, me with my hands over my eyes, and Cliff with his hands over his ears. Three monkeys: speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil. Harry was excited for me as I was about to go out to Berkeley to start my Ph.D. I kissed and hugged him goodbye, not knowing that this was really “Goodbye.”
You see, no one told us kids, now in our twenties and thirties, that Harry had AIDS. On my way out to California and then Iceland at the time, I missed the ravages of AIDS and Harry's dying. I missed Harry's funeral as well. I can't remember where I was when I got the call, but I do remember thinking after I hung up, “Wow. AIDS. My poor uncle Harry. My poor family.” AIDS is a conversation stopper, just like suicide, infidelity, alcoholism, friendly fire, childhood death, mental illness, domestic violence, sexual abuse, drunken drivers. The inexplicable things. The things that just don't fit. The things that leave open wounds. The things that cause families enormous shame and embarrassment, both of which feed on themselves, making people even more ashamed and embarrassed at themselves for feeling ashamed and embarrassed in the first place.
And as I felt sorry for everyone involved, I received the blessing of God. I suddenly realized that none of it really mattered. All of that was neither here nor there, when I got right down to it. The important thing was that I loved Harry and he loved me.
“All Saints' Day is an occasion for remembering with gratitude those whose lives bear witness to the blessing of God.” The people we remember do not bear witness to the blessing of God because they were perfect. They bear witness to the blessing of God because we loved them and they loved us. That what God is all about, after all – LOVE. Obviously, there was a lot about Harry I never knew and will never know, but I thank God regularly that I knew Harry Boissevain, fun and funny, compassionate and merciful, generous and gentle, exciting and interesting, that he loved me and I loved him. That is enough for me. Is there really anything more?