This article was originally published by Mennonite World Review

King: A girl and her giraffe

Not to take sides but to reflect the conversation, a nation argues over whether to name its presidential candidates crooks, fascists, or worse.

Michael A. King
King

At lunch with a denomination’s representatives, talk turns to ways the polities of two denominations to which many Eastern Mennonite Seminary students belong are unraveling. Just in pondering almost idly the effects, we find the conversation eddying across the many seminaries we personally know to be in crisis.

Terror strikes. Walls are breached or threatened. Police shoot away lives that matter and sometimes are shot. Temperatures hit constant global records while floods ravage Louisiana, fires burn across California’s Interstate 15, and zillow.com projects nearly a trillion dollars worth of real estate possibly under coastal waters in our grandchildren’s lifetimes.

Fear stalks the land. Will we survive? I believe yes; here we are after millennia of catastrophes. But will our lives, communities, institutions, structures, countries, planet be recognizable?

Amid such questions my mother-in-law, Mildred, died of surgery complications after breaking a femur. The intensities, sorrows and sometimes grace-filled moments of her final days unfolded as four family units scattered across the country had been scheduled to arrive for vacation in Maine by plane and car. Instead we kept vigil as she died. Now to get from her funeral in western New York to our remaining time in Maine, we added a rented SUV to family cars.

After lunch, that three-car, three-generational caravan of lacerated souls headed across 600 miles through hauntingly pastoral New York and New England landscapes as the sun faded hour by hour into the west and into late-afternoon sweet light. At a chaotic, crowded truck stop a rumpled man pestered us. So many disrupted days and nights and feelings had left us all shot. We didn’t want to talk. He wouldn’t stop.

Finally, out of no sense of mission but hoping he’d then shut up, I engaged him. He launched into his story. He was a trucker from Las Vegas — where his wife with stage-4 cancer might, he’d just learned, be in her final hours. From the truck stop he’d try to drive straight to Vegas without pausing except for catnaps. Soon he left.

Then he was back — with gifts of stuffed animals and candy for our grandchildren. Weeks later came a photo of my granddaughter reading books with her new giraffe snuggled beside her.

Across the under-maintained infrastructure of interstate highways, across an America at risk of apocalypse — if we define it as the unraveling of stabilities and communal compassions as we’ve known them — an ordinary man, even a wearisomely intrusive man, races to say goodbye to his dying wife.

But in that liminal space between earth and Beyond, souls reach for each other through frailties and unravelings and sorrow. And amid all the anguishes of the era, the images leap from the photo: a little girl sitting on a rocker has swaddled a stuffed giraffe, then tucked it in beside her. She sits with her picture books. The pages she’s focused on include an apple, a sippy cup, sneakers, a tractor, a boy on a toy car, an orange, a teddy bear, and much more. Her gaze shows that she is learning — even in these times — about the magic of the world she has been both cursed and blessed to be born into.

Michael A. King is dean of Eastern Mennonite Seminary (in whose recent convocation this column has roots) and of the Eastern Mennonite University Graduate School. He is publisher of Cascadia Publishing House and blogger and editor of Kingsview & Co.

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