Yankee Notebook: Grampa's example is always with us
Toolbox
By WILLEM LANGE - Published: January 4, 2009
Grampa Lange was a pharmacist. He was also a Gideon. He supported that organization's goal of placing a Bible by the side of the bed in every hotel room in the world.
In recent years, as hotels have become more sensitive to issues of religious and cultural diversity, the ubiquitous Gideon Bibles have become less so. But six decades ago they were a given, and as a kid I often marveled at the resources that must have been required to keep them stocked.
"Do people take them sometimes?" I once asked Grampa Lange.
"Oh, yes, fairly often."
"But don't you mind if they steal them?"
His gray eyes twinkled at me. "How in the world can anybody steal a Bible?"
He had a point there, and I was suitably impressed.
Then, on Sunday afternoons after dinner, he preached and volunteered at a place called the South End Settlement House down near the notorious Port of Albany in New York. The neighborhood was pretty run-down; the New York Central main line and the Hudson River were just a few blocks east.
I didn't know it till long afterward, but the house was part of the Settlement Movement, started about 100 years earlier in England. People suffering from hard times could go to settlement houses for shelter, meals, clothes and shoes, and even basic education in reading, money management and the virtues of temperance (Alcoholics Anonymous didn't get started until 1935).
Young as I was, it always seemed to me even then that a meal, some used duds and a pair of shoes were going to cost a mendicant the time needed to listen to a sermon and a homily about bad habits, and the effort of singing some old rousers along with Mrs. Booth, Mr. Cramatty and an out-of-tune piano: "Shall We Gather at the River?" and "Rock of Ages."
Grampa Lange had a 1936 Plymouth sedan that he drove as if it were made of glass. On the way home from the Settlement House late Sunday afternoon, he seemed very tranquil and happy. The charitable services he had just dispensed had done as much for him in one way as it had for their recipients in quite another.
If he ever judged any of the clientele, it certainly wasn't apparent to me. He seemed to appreciate that no secular per-son would willingly choose poverty, and that the reasons for its existence had at least as much to do with inequities in the distribution of wealth as with any deficiencies on the part of those who didn't have it, and never would. He often quoted from the Book of Matthew: "For ye have the poor always with you …"
That was almost 70 years ago. Grampa Lange is long gone, as is his old Plymouth and, I presume, the South End Settlement House. I see by the Internet there's a Salvation Army Hispanic mission church there now. Albany has changed so much during the intervening years that large chunks of it are unrecognizable to me. But the poor, as predicted, are still with us.
Mother and I spent the years between 1968 and 2007 at a large Episcopal church in Hanover, N.H. She was instrumental in persuading the vestry to tithe — even during tough financial years — 10 percent of the church's ingathering to charitable works.
We often trucked nonperishable food items and cash to area homeless shelters and food shelves. But none of them were in Hanover.
If the church had offered free meals for the poor in its parish hall, it would have had to charter a bus to travel to neighboring towns to pick up its guests.
On a recent Saturday evening, however, at Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Montpelier, I found myself doing a job at which I've always felt inadequate: carving turkeys. (Another legacy of Grampa Lange; he'd wanted to be a surgeon till lack of money kept him out of medical school, and he opted for pharmacy. He took out that frustration matchlessly every Sunday noon, on whatever roast meat Gramma had produced with her stone cooker.)
The turkey I was carving was too hot to hold, and the carving fork was poorly designed. The kitchen was hot, too, from the ovens full of more turkeys and the cauldrons of mashed potatoes and peas. Other volunteers were tending the ovens, chopping salad greens and tomatoes, washing dishes and pots, cutting portions of cake for dessert, and setting the tables for the crowd we knew would be there.
We don't have to send charter buses to pick up our clientele in Montpelier, or even put signs out on the sidewalk. Word gets around, especially at the end of the month when the money often runs out. People come weekly and on special occasions, and somehow and so far there have always seemed to be sufficient money and food and enough volunteers to pull off the dinners.
It's a principle as old as Deuteronomy, which instructs us not to reap our field right to the very edge, but to leave a strip for the poor; not to go through the vineyard a second time, but to leave the grapes missed on the first pass for gleaners with keener eyes because of their deeper need.
Most of all, we're not to judge or indulge in self-righteousness. An ancient Hebrew maxim reminds us how much chance or grace has predetermined our own success, and admonishes us to give unstintingly of our resources, because our descendants may someday have to rely on charity.
No matter how much I may dislike dismembering a red-hot turkey carcass, or opening a steaming dishwasher that fogs my specs, or feigning credulity when someone asks for another dinner to "take back to a friend," I know that on the way home I will, like Grampa Lange, feel better about the day just spent, which distributed gifts equally to the givers and to the receivers.
Willem Lange is a writer, storyteller and retired contractor who lives in East Montpelier. His column appears each week in the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus.
He can be reached through his Web site, willemlange.com.
25