I woke up yesterday morning with two words on my mind—profundity and serendipitous—which was a little odd, because I wasn’t even sure what each of them meant. I blamed their rolling around in my mind on the fact that I had gotten up at 2 AM and eaten four Ghirardelli Sea Salt Soirée chocolates. And a banana. And two additional squares of the chocolate. Then I drank a glass of Corliss Raspberry wine and crawled back into bed until 4:30. Actions like that tend to bring about large…thoughts. Anyway, we had to get an early start on the day because the University of MN--Morris was holding its annual Scholarship Jubilee, where scholarship donors have the opportunity to meet scholarship recipients. We didn’t choose the receiver of Logan’s scholarship, the university did that for us; we just determined the eligibility criteria. Our only stipulation was that the money goes to someone from a farming background, preferably dairy. The scholarship is renewable for three additional years, provided the student attends Morris and maintains a passing GPA. The school chose Thomas Herren. Yesterday was the third time we’d met up with Thomas through the jubilee. As we waited for him to arrive, I told Steve, “Can you imagine what it must have been like for Thomas to meet us for the first time? We were the biggest sad sacks in the room. Where does an 18-year-old kid find the grace and courage to sit beside a pair of grieving parents, much less engage us in meaningful conversation? I’m not sure I could do it at almost-50.” Steve said he would have given someone from the theater department a hundred bucks to pretend they were him. I said I’d probably have called the Chancellor’s office, pretending to be my mother, explaining that my grandfather was having an emergency lung transplant in Texas and we needed to drive down there to be with my grandmother and couldn’t possibly make it to the scholarship jubilee, even though we really, really wanted to meet the Hoehnes. The following year, I’d have gone to the library and put my hand into the paper folding machine. But Thomas Herren isn’t like us. He’s the real deal. He’s a guy who works hard at school while making long-range plans for his life. He’s practical enough to know that the reason he’s at Morris to begin with is to become employable, but he’s also wise enough to understand the value of investing in his other interests, too; he’s a member of the choir, both at the college and at church, and he’s taught himself to play guitar in his spare time. He’s the kind of guy we’re incredibly proud to know, and we think Logan would be, too. I wonder if Thomas has any idea that the fact that he “didn’t turn out to be a half bad kid”, has worked wonders in easing our sadness. On our way home from Morris, we stopped at Logan’s accident site. The cross that my brother put up there 3 years ago had fallen over, and Steve built a new one to replace it. Every single time I reach that intersection driving north, it takes my breath away to understand how easy it would have been to miss the stop sign and sail into cross traffic. And, every single time I think that, it breaks my heart a little bit to know how little we can appreciate what we have until we no longer have it. There was snow in the ditch and, as a result, I thought that I would probably not find a single trace of Logan there, except for the cross that was pitched over and half buried. Every other time we had stopped, I found little reminders of my boy there. We found insulation and hoses from the car, his Nicaragua key ring, rubber from the tires, skid marks across the tar, and ruts in the ditch where his car landed. I even found a U of M can koozy in the grass. But, if there was anything left there, yesterday the snow covered it up, and for some reason, that made me sad. I loaded the old cross in the car as Steve pounded the new one into the ground. A truck pulled off State Highway 79 onto County Road 10, and slowed to a stopped in front of where I stood. A man wearing a camouflage coat and cap got out and walked toward me. Fudgical, I thought, it’s the farmer who owns this field and he’s stopping to ask us to take the cross home. As he approached me, he said, “You must have known the young man who died here.” I said I had. “Are you his mother?” I said I was. He extended his hand and said, “I’m the Grant County Sheriff… (and he gave me his name, but I can’t remember it because I was thinking Double Fudgical! He’s probably going to fine us besides!) …and I’m sorry for your loss,” he finished. The Grant County Sheriff stood in the cold wind on his day off and he asked us questions about our Logan. He remembered that Logan had been going to school in Morris. He talked about how hard it is to knock on someone’s door and give them the news that will turn their lives upside down forever. He spoke of the other driver in the accident, about the farmer who owned the field our cross was planted in, and of the lighted stop signs at the intersection. He talked about another man who had died at the same crossing about 12 years ago, and he told us about his son who was recently in a motorcycle accident. Then he said, “My office is right up the road in Elbow Lake. If I can ever help you out, you call me or stop in. When I saw you here, I just thought I should stop to let you know that we watch over your memorial and we think about you folks a lot.” Serendipitous, it turns out, means “occurring or discovered by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” Profundity means “great depth or intensity of a state, quality, or emotion.” At the intersection of Serendipitous and Profundity lies days like yesterday.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 21:58:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015