The sound of rain on the tin roof of our back porch on Bernard Street in
Chicago, where we slept on summer evenings as a family in two double beds.

● The drawing of lines on our side street to establish in make-up ball games
whether one hit a single, double, triple, or home run that eluded the mitts of boyhood
friends like Joey Goldstein, Eddie Hibschman, and Don Hammarlund.

● Our family tradition on Saturday nights of rice mush, cold cuts, and cheese by
the fireplace in our living room, accompanied by radio regulars on the Barn Dance from
the Eighth Street Theater in Chicago like Lula Belle and Scotty, Homer and Jethro, and
the Barn Dance band.

● The regular rituals later that evening of getting ready for Sunday morning, white pants and summer shirts pressed, shoes shined, and baths taken.

● Trips to Bible camps all over the Covenant, accompanying my father and mother and coming to know Covenanters all over the country.

● Saying goodbye to my brother on his way to Ensign training in Mt. Pleasant Michigan in 1941, then again in 1943 as he left for war game training at Coronado Beach
in San Diego. We knew he was on his way to a dangerous tour of duty as an LST commander—and found out later that we was in the first wave invasions of both Iwo
Jima and Okinawa in the South Pacific. Impressed by how he had learned to spit-shine
his shoes and pack his duffle bag, I was later braced when he took me aside and charged
me to “take good care of the folks in case I don’t come back.”

● Receiving Christ at Shagbark Camp in Wisconsin as a 13-year-old in 1943 under
the ministry of Peter P. Person, later to be my North Park Seminary professor, who
spoke that week. His wife Florence was my eighth grade teacher at Peterson School in Chicago, under whom I offered that spring my first public solo accompanied by a choir of 8th grade classmates singing “The Bells of St. Mary’s” (Mush Ginsburg, a hefty classmate, tickling my back with his belly from behind).

● My first trip to Hembygden, our cabin in Wisconsin (idiomatically “a home
built on the edge of things”) as it was being constructed in 1949, in a car graciously
loaned me by my brother, arriving late at night to gaze on mother and dad through the
kitchen window reading by kerosene light and a warm, glowing fireplace. (Going home
the same weekend, full of joy and singing in the rain, I turned northwest at Route 73
instead of southeast until 50 miles later, not recognizing town names I stopped to ask
when I would get to Fort Atkinson, only to be told, “On the other side of China. You’re
going the wrong way!”).

● Meeting Alyce at North Park in 1951, our first date on November 3, our later
engagement in 1952, and our marriage by both our fathers in 1954. (On our first trip up
to Hembygden with my folks, while still dating, we stopped—already a tradition—at the
Old Log Cabin in Wausau for lunch, and when Alyce excused herself to wash her hands
my mother said to me, “She walks like a Thoroughbred!” Indeed she did and still does!)
July/August, 2009
James R Hawkinson
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Summers Gone and Summer Come
July finds us beginning a two-month leave of absence from our visitation responsibilities at Salem, New Brighton, Minnesota--time away from the normal daily round to enjoy each other entering our 56th year of married life, as well as hosting extended family at our cabin in Wisconsin.

This is a time to remember summers
gone, though far from lost. Ever a part of me are memories deeply rooted in the fibers of my being, memories from summers gone:
But what of summer now? There is no end to memory. I could go on and on, and will no doubt these months. But the deep roots out of which I have come are empty in themselves unless they propel me to a future not even they could have imagined.

“The woods are lovely, calm and deep,” Robert Frost once put it, “but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep….” No longer a child, and not yet an artifact, I must ponder as well in these days away what branches God yet intends me to sprout from the roots he has so richly supplied.

And so in quietness and confidence I will, hoping to embrace in all the days and years yet remaining for me the wind of God’s Spirit, that in the name of his Son, fully human and fully divine, I might extend the witness to him I so long to offer.