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November 18, 2002
Dear Gabby,
My mid-twenties daughter was a wonderful Apostolic
Christian until she became a self-supporting professional living on her own.
Now she has quit going to church altogether and is hanging out with the
people with whom she attended college and works.
Life for her has become an endless pursuit of pleasure.
I have been dealing with the guilt of trying to figure out what I did
wrong to make her turn her back on God.
What is the best way I can help my prodigal daughter return
to God before she has so many consequences of sin and so much baggage that will
be with her the rest of her life? She
has put up such a barrier that I am afraid she will communicate even less with
us than she does now if I say too much.
Heartbroken in Honolulu
Dear Hearbroken,
I was so mad when I saw the ugly cottage my dear Harry
(with help from his grandmother) had reserved for our beach-front vacation early
in our 52 ½ year marriage. We’d
traveled for two hot days by train, “picnicking” from the food basket I’d
packed, and breathing the odor of the unwashed bodies around us to get to the
lovely little town in central Florida by Lake Okeechobee, the second largest
freshwater lake in the United States. Harry’s
grandmother (who lived there) was suffering from a weakened heart, so we were
heading down there to combine our first official vacation with helping her out
with some things she needed. Grandmother
Van Burden had arranged for us to borrow the home of her friend and former
next-door-neighbor, Mr. Lester Tomaseski.
Everything in Florida looked so different to my mid-western
eyes. The adorable pastel-colored,
clapboard houses we passed on the way were nothing like the stately whitewashed
houses in our home town, and I was really anxious to arrive at Mr. Tomaseski’s
house to discover whether it’d be light blue or yellow or pink or green.
“What color do you think our cottage will be?” I asked
my dear Harry, as we passed another yellow house.
“I have no idea,” he answered shortly, trying to
concentrate on driving the borrowed car, while reading the directions given to
us by the owner of the General Store. It
was obvious he didn’t have the patience to deal with my excited chatter.
With effort, I tamped down my eagerness and kept my
comments to myself. That is, until
we drove up in front of the ugliest log cabin I’d ever seen. The dark monstrosity was similar to the mountain cabins we
saw on a later vacation to Colorado – only not as charming as those.
This cabin wasn’t in the mountains, though.
It was situated on the north shore of the gigantic and gorgeous Lake
Okeechobee surrounded by pink and blue and yellow and green clapboard cottages.
It was definitely a fish out of water.
“This is it,” Harry announced, turning off the car’s
engine and stretching the kinks out of his shoulders.
“What do you mean, this is it?” I asked, a bit shrilly,
sure he was wrong and we were really going to stay in a pretty one like the pink
cottage next door with a light blue door, or the pale green and yellow one on
the other side.
Harry sighed.
Right then, before I really got started on my rant, Harry
and I noticed that light blue door opening and a young lady striding towards us.
Bubbly is the only way I can describe her.
She was bouncy and chatty and happy to welcome us to Old Mr.
Tomaseski’s house.
“I heard from Grandmother Van Burden that you were
coming. You don’t mind that we
call her ‘Grandmother’ too, do you? You
must be Harry and Gabby. May I call
you by your first names?” she said, before taking her first breath.
We nodded.
“We’re so excited to have you. You’re planning to stay for two weeks, right?”
We nodded again, wondering about a stranger who knew all our plans.
“It’s too bad you have to stay in Old Mr. Tomaseski’s house.
It’s so ugly. At least
it’s right between Grandmother Van Burden’s house and ours.
We’ll have fun anyway. Do
you swim?”
This time she didn’t wait for an answer.
“My husband Tom and I, oh, I’m Dolly, by the way, we’d like to cook
dinner for you and Grandmother Van Burden tonight out back by the lake.
Would you like that? We’re
really hoping you’ll come!” And
so we found ourselves agreeing to eat dinner with these strangers after we
settled into the ugly, dark cabin and visited with Grandmother.
That evening, on the north shore of Lake Okeechobee, eating
barbecued chicken and swatting at the bugs flying around our heads, Grandmother
Van Burden, Tom and Dolly (mostly Dolly) told us about Old Mr. Tomaseski and how
he built the ugly log cabin. He had
moved to Florida because his wife (whose health was fragile) wanted to live in a
mild climate, but he refused to live in any of the ready-made homes there.
He’d come from the cold north and could only imagine himself living in
heavy, well-built log houses like they’d had up there.
People, including his wife, tried to tell him about the lovely weather
they had in Florida and how they didn’t need that much protection from the
elements, but he wouldn’t have any of it.
His new house was going to be as similar as possible to the one up north.
And so, the townspeople were amused as they began to notice
the arrival of the heavy logs being shipped there. Some of the young ladies were interested in the muscular
loggers hired to accompany the wood, Dolly told us, and one young man stayed and
married a young lady named Ida. But
mostly, people talked about the odd Mr. Tomaseski and how he was going to all
that unnecessary work. Unfortunately,
Mrs. Tomaseski’s health began to fail, and, before the log house was even
finished, she died. Mr. Tomaseski
stayed in Florida only long enough to finish the building and then, moved back
up north where he came from, leaving the cottage there, unpainted, undecorated,
and unlived in. He’d given the
keys to Grandmother Van Burden (who’d sat with his wife while she was dying)
and told her she was welcome to do with the house what she wanted.
That’s how Harry and I had the use of it for those two
September weeks.
The next morning, I awoke to the itchiness of several
mosquito bites and the sound of rain and howling wind outside the windows.
Harry was already awake, standing by the window with a worried look on
his face.
“What is it?” I asked him.
It was very dark. “What
time is it?”
“It’s midmorning,” he answered me, “and I’m
worried about this weather. It
looks really bad.”
“Midmorning?” I
rubbed my eyes. “Why is it still
so dark?”
“It’s this storm,” he answered, reaching for his
shirt.
“What are you going to do?” I asked him.
“Right now, I’m going to go get Grandmother Van Burden
so we’ll know she’s okay.”
“Be careful,” I replied, getting up out of bed to hug
him.
I watched Harry from the window, fighting against the wind
as he went around the corner of our borrowed house toward the yellow and green
one next door. A half hour later, I
had the tea on and biscuits in the oven when he returned with Grandmother.
“We’re in for a hurricane,” she announced to me, unwinding the
scarf from her hair and setting her handbag by the door.
Her orange cat, Scat, jumped out of the handbag and streaked to the wall
behind the sofa.
“A what?” I
knew about blizzards and tornadoes and regular old thunderstorms, being from the
Midwest, but I didn’t know anything at all about hurricanes.
“The wind is going to scream like nothing you’ve ever
heard before and it’ll rain and rain. Probably
flood, too.” She sounded so matter-of-fact.
I looked at Harry. “Maybe
you should go see if Tom and Dolly want to be here with us, too,” I suggested.
“They won’t come,” Grandmother said.
“They don’t have good sense.”
“I’m going to invite them anyway,” Harry said as he
went back out the door.
The rain, by then, was pouring down so hard it was like God
was dumping his dishwater out right on top of us. I’d never seen rain like this.
The wind, too, was blowing through the trees until they were almost bent
over. It scared me.
Grandmother put me to work stoking the wood stove, pumping
water into every available container and mixing up the batter for her
traditional Hurricane Oatmeal Cake. “It
can be eaten any time of day or night.” She
informed me. “I always bake this
cake when we have storms, just in case I’m unable to cook when the storm gets
really bad.”
“Really bad?” I
gulped, glancing toward the dark windows. “It’s already really bad!”
“Now, now,” Grandmother soothed, obviously realizing I
was feeling more and more frightened. “Don’t you worry about the storm.
You just deal with the here and now, okay?
Is the cake batter ready yet?”
The kitchen door slammed open just as I was putting the
cake into the oven. It was a
windblown, soaked Harry. He was
alone. I ran to fetch him a towel.
“They wouldn’t come,” he told Grandmother and me.
“They want to stay home near their possessions, where they’re
comfortable, they said.”
“I knew it,” Grandmother answered. “Foolish children.”
At the beginning, Grandmother kept Harry and me running
around, doing everything we could to assure our safety while the sounds outside
got worse and worse. Harry covered
the windows as best he could with supplies he’d found in the cellar.
I collected blankets and pillows and food and the water, carrying them up
to the loft – just in case of flooding.
Then, once we’d done everything we could, the three of us
huddled together in the center of the house.
For the next several hours, we tried to stay busy eating cake and playing
games and singing and talking and reading aloud – anything to try to keep our
minds off the maelstrom happening outside. We prayed a lot, too, for our own safety and for the safety
of our new friends Dolly and Tom. Grandmother
knitted. Harry and I winced every
time we heard another crash outside. And that was happening more and more. The house shook. The
earth shook, it seemed.
Water began to leak inside, under the doorway.
We moved to the loft.
The noise and the wind and the rain went on and on and on.
For the better part of the day, it continued.
Would it ever end?
Suddenly, it was silent.
Totally silent. The
suddenness of the silence frightened me even more than the noise had.
“Is it the end of the world?” I asked, looking at Grandmother, who
was still calmly knitting. My voice
sounded funny in the silence.
“It’s the eye of the storm,” she told us.
“In a short while, the other half will come.”
“The eye? What
do you mean, the other half?”
So she explained to us how hurricanes were always split in
half, with calmness in the middle. That’s
how they knew for sure the storm was a hurricane in those days.
Harry took a moment to head down the stairs to look out the door to
assess the damage. Right when he reached the door, a loud banging sound reached
us. It was a shirtless and bruised
Tom, carrying Dolly, bleeding and limp in his arms.
It seems that their house had blown down around them, and a
large piece of wood had hit Dolly in the head and shoulder, knocking her to the
floor and breaking her arm. Tom had
managed to move them into a closet that was still standing, where he worked to
staunch the flow of Dolly’s blood with his shirt. Afterwards, he bound up her arm the best he could with the
same, bloody shirt. He had held her
there, in the dark of the closet, trying to keep her conscious and praying for
safety. And, as soon as the eye of
the storm arrived, Tom gathered Dolly up in his arms and sloshed across the
flooded land to Mr. Tomaseski’s house.
“I knew if any house was standing, it’d be this one,”
he told us, laying Dolly on the sofa. “And,
if you don’t mind, we’d like to stay here with you until the second half of
the storm is over.
Actually, Dolly and Tom and Grandmother and Scat the Cat,
stayed with us for the rest of the time we were in Florida.
Their colorful clapboard homes were gone.
It was a good while before we found out the rest of the havoc the
hurricane had wreaked. Not only
were we fortunate to be staying in Mr. Tomaseski’s well-built house – one of
the only ones left standing – but, since we were on the north shore of Lake
Okeechobee, our flooding was minimal. Over
1,000 people on the south side of the lake drowned from the nine-foot water
surge.
Mrs. Honolulu, I know the situation with your daughter is
feeling much like a storm. And
she’s out there without shelter from that storm, rather like our friends Tom
and Dolly. They really thought
they’d be okay. Your daughter
probably thinks she will be, too. Only
God knows the severity of the storm. And
only God can keep her from permanent damage.
So, what is your responsibility regarding your adult
daughter? First, you must take care
of yourself. You must stay safely
in the shelter of the church, where you can ride out the storm safely.
Your daughter knows where you are and that you’re safe.
At some point, when God allows the storm to touch her life, she needs to
be able to run back to safety. Sometimes
that can be difficult for those inside the shelter.
I was annoyed with my new friends, Dolly and Tom, when I saw what they
had suffered. They could have been
safe the whole time – just like we were.
But they didn’t choose that. And
we couldn’t force them. Our
prayers may have saved their lives, who knows?
I’m sorry to say that, like Dolly and Tom, your daughter
will probably retain some scars from her time in the storm, and there’s no way
you can protect her from them, but if you keep the doors to the shelter
unlocked, she’ll know it’s there and God can help her find her way back.
Sincerely Sincere,
Gabby
Grandmother’s Hurricane Oatmeal Cake
1 cup oatmeal
1¼ cups boiling cider (or water)
2 eggs
1 cup white sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
½ cup melted butter or margarine (or oil)
1½ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Combine oatmeal and boiling cider in a small bowl.
Set aside. Beat together
eggs, sugars and melted butter until blended.
Add sifted flour, soda, salt and cinnamon.
Mix in oatmeal mixture.
Pour into a greased and floured 13” x 9” x 2” baking pan.
Bake at 350° oven for 30-35 minutes.
Topping
1 cup coconut
1 cup brown sugar
6 Tablespoons melted butter
½ cup chopped pecans
¼ cup evaporated milk
Mix together until moist.
Spread over cake. Broil
until tipping is light brown and crunchy; about two minutes.
Cool. Enjoy during the
storm!
ninetyandnine.com
© 2002, ninetyandnine.com
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Gabrigail VanBurden has been offering advice for
longer than most of you have been alive. Email your practical Apostolic life
questions to Gabby@ninetyandnine.com
and be prepared for some straight answers!
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