Audrey Haynes, has no brains...

Audrey Haynes, has no brains The Dover Church
October 31, 2010 – All Saints
Scripture: Exodus 3:1-6, 13-15, Revelation 7: 9-17, John 11: 17-27

Grandparents can be unique windows into eternity for children. If you sit and listen to your grandparents stories as I did, you gain an awareness that all of us live in a story which is much larger than ourselves. We are all part of someone else’s stories, as they are part of ours. We are who we are due in large measure to those who have gone before us, all the way back to Adam and Eve in the garden. That realization has made me more reverent of the past, more conscientious towards the future, and more aware of the holiness of everyday life.
One of my earliest memories of my grandmother, Audrey Elizabeth Haynes, is her singing to me: “Audrey Haynes has no brains. Don’t know enough to come in when it rains.” It’s more than 45 years now since I first heard it, but I can still see her face, hear her voice, and smell the cedar closet smell she always had about her. When I was 5 or so and kids at school started teasing me about my name as kids will, Gram’s way of comforting me was to first sing me that little ditty again for the hundredth time and then tell me how the neighborhood kids in South Boston had teased her with that more than 100 years ago now. As she sang that little rhyme for me yet again, she burst into chuckles and then full laughter. All those years later she was still laughing at herself. Being able and willing to laugh at oneself is a healthy and potentially transformative tonic to the challenges of living a life.
The truth is that my grandmother really didn’t know enough to come in when it rained. Gram was not a very good driver. In fact she was a very bad driver. She had always driven Buicks, which were automatics. When VW Beetle appeared, she liked the look of it and bought herself a red one, figuring she’d get the hang of the stick shift. Well, before she got that far crashed her beautiful, brand new VW into a hedge, flipping it over and leaving herself upside down and apparently unconscious inside when the firemen arrived. This was before seat belts were the norm. The story goes that the first fireman poked his head through the shattered window, took a look, and then told his colleagues over his shoulder, “I think the old lady's dead.” At which point, my grandmother opened her eyes and said with great indignity, “I am neither dead nor an old lady, young man. Stop fooling around and get me out of here.” They got her out and to the hospital. When my mother arrived, there was my grandmother, still in a wheelchair in the middle of the emergency room, sitting bruised and bleeding with extensive facial swelling. Gram was appalled. Not planning to get into an accident, Gram had gone out in, of all things, her housecoat, with a kerchief covering her hair, which were in curler. Her housecoat, kerchief and curlers in public! Her first words to my mother were, “Get me out of here, behind a curtain or into one of those examination rooms. Someone will see me.” In the months and years to come we would pass by that hedge, which never fully recovered from my Gram and was eventually torn up and replaced with a stone wall (probably in case my grandmother was still out there somewhere driving). Every time we passed by, one of us would yell out from the back seat, “Tell us the story of your red Volkswagen and the hedge, the fireman and Mum at the hospital.” She would always oblige and we would all laugh together, Gram perhaps loudest of all. That story never lost its appeal on any of us.
No, Gram walked in a lot of rainstorms during her life. After a challenging childhood in which she had a brother in an iron lung in the parlor who died in childhood, among many other things, Gram went on to marry a sea captain, my grandfather, who was away for months at a time. They had four children together, the raising of whom she did alone as he was at sea. When the only work my grandfather could find during the Depression was lighthouse duty, which meant even longer absences, Gram said that they were happy to have it as she and the children had a roof over their heads, food on the table, new clothes to wear, and heat in the furnace during the winter. My grandfather was gone again for four years during the Second World War. In the forty odd years of their married life, they only lived together the last ten or so as far as I can tell. My grandfather came down with melanoma shortly after retirement and they had to leave the beach and move to Jamaica Plain for his treatment. It wasn’t all that long before he was in the hospital for good where he died at 63, leaving her alone yet again.
You would think that so much loneliness and hardship would have broken Gram’s spirit, and maybe it did a bit where I couldn’t see, but I only knew her as a woman who loved life and was determined to enjoy it by getting the most out of every day. Gram took very long walks every day. She loved to sing. That was probably her original attraction to my grandfather who was a gifted musician and had played the piano at the silent movie as his first job before running away to sea. Gram loved to dance, teaching me the jitterbug, rhumba, waltz and fox trot as a young boy. In Plymouth, where the water is really cold even in August, Gram was always the first one swimming, usually before Memorial Day. Her grandfather was an L Street Brownie, so maybe it was genetic. She was always the last one out in the fall, usually on Columbus Day, but sometimes later. Gram swam a very elegant side stroke, always keeping her head, adorned in a succession of bathing caps with plastic scallops or flowers attached, above the water. She loved the ocean and told us we could really feel close to God just sitting there, watching and listening. She taught me that spiritual practice as a little boy and it has remained a touchstone throughout my life.
The word saint brings to mind images of a particularly holy person, certainly not someone who drank, smoked, or laughed at profanity. On those counts, my grandmother was no saint. She loved a dirty joke, smoked when smoking was the fashion and stopped when it wasn't, and liked to have a Manhattan before supper. Yet, for all that, my grandmother taught me a lot about living a spiritual life and about being in relationship with God.
“We're all lower than angels, Max,” she would tell me when I would come home in righteous indignation at something someone had done. Jesus would have said, “judge not, lest ye be judged,” or “remove the beam out of your own eye before you take the sliver out of mine.” Christianity 101, according to Gram.
“What is sin, Gram?” I asked her one day after having some Catholic friends tell me what they had learned in catechism. To be honest, I was more than a little nervous, as the 1st Congregational Church of Shrewsbury was more an “unconditional love of God in Jesus Christ church” than an “unconditional sinfulness of humanity as found in the life of 12 year old Max Olmstead church.” Maybe my altar boy friends knew something I didn't but should. “Well Max,” she said, offering me a box of Russel Stover chocolates which she always had on hand, “now that you're getting older, you’re going to do things which you won’t want to tell your mother or me that you did. Those are probably sins. But more importantly, if you ever feel like you don’t like what see when you take a good, honest look at yourself in the mirror, then you’re probably sinning.” Maybe Augustine or Aquinas said it better, and there are certainly holes in her logic (she left out the enormous capacity we humans have for self deception when looking in the mirror), but that explanation has helped me be pretty honest with myself before God.
My friends and I played basketball every day after school in my backyard. Just the summer before she died, I remember my Gram coming out and asking us if she could join in. Having heard the story of the red VW and the fireman enough, I knew better than to tell her that she was too old to play and my friends were too polite to do so, so I suggested we play a shooting game rather than continuing with 2 on 2, a game like HORSE where the point is to shoot a certain number of baskets in a certain way from a certain place which the others miss, every miss being a letter in the word HORSE.
“Age before beauty?” she asked. “Either way I go first.” Up she stepped and tossed an underhand swish from the foul line. Mine clanked off the front of the rim. “That would be an “H” for you, right Max?” John Taylor's rolled in and out. Same for Richard Houlihan. Chris Rapp's wasn't even close. Then she moved to the corner and dropped another underhand swish. We missed. “That's an “O” now, right?” And so it went, R and then S, until our final miss, E, HORSE, at which point we frankly just stood there with open mouths, wondering what we had just seen. She took the ball from my hands, went back to the foul line and dropped one last underhand swish, smiled and said over her shoulder as she walked back to the house, “South Boston High girls basketball, class of 1920.” I had never known, had had no idea.
I remember the last time I saw my grandmother. She was in the hospital. I was sitting on her bed, holding her hand. My Mum had stepped out of the room as we were talking when I suddenly realized that Gram thought I was her husband. Those of you who know our family will know that some of us look a lot alike. And there she was, Gram, a young woman inside a dying body, talking to her husband as if it were 1920 or 1930. I don’t know why I thought what I thought at the time, but it occurred to me that Gram was crossing over from this life into eternity, going to be with the husband she had missed so much. I didn’t contradict her or interrupt her. I even called her Audrey for the only time in my life, just so that she could enjoy being with my grandfather and I could enjoy being with both of them, if that makes any sense.
She died a couple of days later. It was a Saturday night and I had a basketball game. I wanted to go with my Mum to the hospital, but my mother was her mother’s daughter and said, “you go have a great game, Max. Gram would want that.” So I went. I can’t remember if we won or lost, if I played well or badly, but when I got home my mother was there to tell me that Gram had died in her sleep.
There is much more I could tell you about my grandmother. Even as a little boy I knew that she wasn't perfect, but as a grown man and as a minister of the Church of Jesus Christ, I know that she possessed all the qualities we pray for every child at every baptism, the qualities we prayed for Allie Hefter last Sunday: she was filled with joy, never ashamed to confess her faith in God, strong in her life's journey, courageous in her times of suffering, faithful, loving, and hopeful. She also had a great laugh and sense of humor, a sense of humility and proportion before God and neighbor, a firm understanding of the realities of life and how to relate to God in real life, love and commitment to her family and friends, warmth, understanding, compassion, good chocolates, and a great underhand basketball shot. “Audrey Haynes, had no brains, didn't know enough to come in when it rains,” a gift from God. My Gram comes to me both in moments of great joy and possibility and in moments of doubt and fear, and that makes her a saint in my book. Thanks be to God.