couick_mike
On cold winter days in the York County of my childhood, it was fun for us kids to lace up our waterproof duck boots and walk the wet ditches, stomping on the ice that spewed up out of the red clay. Sooner or later, the cold would catch up with me, and I would make a bee line for the fireplace in the den or the buck stove in the basement.
I was rarely alone by the fire, as my parents, brother, grandparents, and other visiting relatives grabbed a chair, joined in the conversation, and enjoyed participatory snacks. I call them participatory because they required active eater engagement. The parched peanuts had to be shelled, the walnuts or pecans had to be cracked and picked, and—my favorite—the apple should be peeled so carefully that the peel was removed as a single continuous strip.
And we talked.
Folks recalled stories from their own childhoods. The recollections were generally uplifting, but occasionally a painful shared memory provided fresh insight into the power of childhood hurt. The bottom line was that we connected. Time seemed to slow down, and we stepped out of our hurriedness to embrace common experiences. There was power in those moments.
I had a moment like that at a recent electric cooperative gathering, as a friend recalled a childhood story. The power of the recollection hangs with me now.
My friend’s grandmother graduated from Winthrop College in 1906. Grace Edwards Buster was one of 14 graduating students studying to be teachers.
Grace’s father, a Batesburg doctor, had died two years earlier from the third most common cause of death at that time, tuberculosis, even as he treated patients for the disease. Half of the state lived below the poverty line. One third were illiterate. Education was seen as a cure for all three, and Grace wanted to make a difference.
She would later tell my friend, her grandson, that her most cherished memory was when Helen Keller gave the commencement address to that small class of young women. I immediately asked how Ms. Keller—who was blind, deaf and mostly mute—was able to speak to the audience. His grandmother had told him that Keller signed the speech to an assistant who then voiced the remarks. Drawing upon her vast reservoir of life experience, she assured them that “anything is possible.”
Then Hellen Keller, herself still a young adult of 26, made the most extraordinary request of the school’s dean.
“Could I touch the faces of the girls I just addressed?” she asked.
She touched each girl with her fingers, tracing their faces into her memory, and in the process touched Grace Buster’s heart. That was the nugget of truth Keller wanted Grace to feel. As Keller had said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched; they must be felt with the heart.”
Until her death in 1984, Grace was making a difference teaching school, leading the Women’s Missionary Society, organizing the Girl Scouts of America in Columbia or volunteering at the Baptist Medical Center. She was a force of nature. She was busy. But one day she gathered her grandchildren around her, slowed down and shared the memory of Ms. Keller touching her face and heart.
A half-century later, the story inspired one grandchild to repeat the famous woman’s belief that “anything is possible.”
As we start this new year, I hope you will join me in cracking some walnuts, peeling an apple and sharing a bit of ourselves with those we love.