The promise of a path

I've been here at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for the past three days as a guest of the Festival of Faith and Writing.  It's been a wonderful visit. The staff is welcoming and effortlessly competent, the students are enthusiastic and promising, and the attendees are somehow not only willing, but actually excited to show up at the crack of dawn on a weekend to hear some non-celebrity former TV critic from the boonies talk about theology and stuff.

It's a a beautiful campus, besides, dotted with low, rambling buildings whose unotrusiveness -- none are over a couple of stories high, all are the color of earth or sand -- seems to reflect the stated ethos of the college. I heard a faculty member mention that Calvin is a place where "we compete to be the most humble."

But what I love most about a college campus -- any campus, really, from corporate to clerical -- are the pathways. Curving through trees, skirting green spaces, circling fields, edging buildings.  When I set out on such a path, I always get a jolt of memory at some particular point, perhaps when the path crests a rise or veers away from structures. I remember vacations with my family, the campgrounds where we parked our rented RV, and the paths that my brothers and I immediately set off to explore.  I remember church camps, with the paths that led from cabins to dining halls to campfire pits to circles of benches out in the woods. At the end of the week, treading the now-familiar paths, I felt like a newly-minted expert in the ways of the place, a veteran ceding the ground to the next group like Charlie Brown: "I've done my hitch."

I'm not an adventurer. I don't strike out into the unknown. I like a path because a path says "this goes somewhere." I can never resist finding out where. But the greatest pleasure of a path isn't finding out for the first time where it leads.  It's knowing where it leads, the next time.

The street where I live

Part I: Growing Up

I don't remember the first house I lived in. My folks refer to it as the "Lakeshore House," somewhere in the Lakeshore Estates development in an unincorporated part of Hamilton County, Tennessee. It was the first place my parents lived after they were married. Even photos of this house's interiors or exteriors don't bring back any memories for me, although I'm sure my brother, three and a half years old than I, remembers it. This picture is my father's birthday in 1966 -- I'm about eight months old. That's my paternal grandmother's famous homemade caramel icing on a yellow layer cake. We moved out of this house when I was two or three years old.

What I'll always think of as my childhood home is this stucco Tudor on Glendon Drive in the Brainerd neighborhood. That's my older brother in the Tennessee Vols sweatshirt, riding his sweet banana-seat, high-handlebar bike on our quiet street, sometime around 1970. You can see the fake half-timbering that needed to be repainted by a friendly guy named Roy every five years or so. There was a full finished basement, four bedrooms and two full baths on the second floor, and an entirely inadequate kitchen from back in the day when homebuilders and homemakers thought it was more important to have a huge formal living room than a functional place to make jello molds. My favorite room in the house was the massive cube stuck on the back -- two car garage below, den/TV room above, complete with a flat concrete roof that comprised the view from my bedroom window.

When I was fourteen years old, we built a house on a clearing atop a hill on our farm property, twenty miles away in the miniscule crossroad town of Apison. Here's how it looked in one of the snowstorms that periodically prevented us from making our way down the steep blacktop that connected us to McGhee Road. Separate garage doors for each car -- that must have been our dream. You can just make out the basketball goal we put up on the slight upslant of the driveway, the area where cars backing out of the garage were supposed to make a Y turn. This picture must have been taken in 1979 , because we hadn't yet built the tennis court that took up the entire foreground, surrounded by chain link fence. It was a 45 minute commute to high school, carpooling with my dad whose office was just across the river downtown. Once the nest was empty, while I was in graduate school at Georgia, my parents pulled up stakes and moved to St. Simons Island, Georgia. It's hard for me to imagine other people living in this house, which we designed and built, on this land that I visited every weekend with my dad to tend to the dwarf fruit trees we planted and the dozen or so head of cattle we raised. But the nature of houses is that they change hands, and the current owners, whoever they are, would probably find it just as odd that anyone else might feel proprietary about it.

Stay tuned for Part II: On My Own.