It was just a dress.
The memories associated with it weren’t that great. The way it flopped around on my frame justified the “2 x 4” nickname greasy 7th grade boys bestowed on me. The year, 1975, had been a bit rough: first year back in the States from Africa. New school. The junior high formal. No date. The (non) hair-do. The unibrow marching across my forehead.
But this dress recently jumped out of the past. Thanks to Facebook, this dress has singularly managed to take me back 35 years — to Congo, to Rethy Academy, to friends I thought I had lost forever.
Mary was one of those friends, though my memory of her was hazy. While other Rethy Academy friends and I had started and progressed through school together, she and I had known each other only in third grade. When she “friended” me a couple of years ago, it was her 8-yr-old bright blue eyes that pierced through my memory first. It took awhile longer to remember that, with her gigantic-flowered dresses and tricked out hair bands, she had been instrumental in introducing the 70’s to a mission station forever stuck in the 50’s. It was her bright red patent leather shoes which gave me the courage to wear the blue and white sandals with huge buttons my mother had bought for me in Nairobi, when everyone else seemed stuck in their practical African Bata shoe store browns. But I had known her only that year, no big surprise. Some missionary families went just as quickly as they came, due to short-term status or to fleeing President Mobutu’s disintegrating economy. We boarding school kids were always saying hello and goodbye.
But her note when I posted photos from those days surprised me. “You have given me such a gift by posting those old Rethy pictures. Where before I had only sad memories of Rethy, you have reminded me of the happy times I spent there. Thank you so much!”
Sad memories? What sad memories? Was this some missionary kid boarding school thing?
I racked my brain and out of the recesses of my memory finally emerged an article I’d read on the web when I’d searched for “Rethy” in Google’s early days. Among the mentions of the “Princess du Rethy” and Belgium’s province known for its aviaries were some articles that I now realized were about Mary’s family. They had been a confusing read at the time because the years didn’t jive with my Rethy memories, and believe you me, I remember a lot. It can be a curse. One of the articles headlines cried, “Death on a Mountain.”
Death? What death? I certainly would have remembered a death. The missionary community was small, and news like that would have certainly made it to me. I looked at the year: 1973. The spring. Well now my confusion lined up into sense. My family had been on furlough in the US that year, the year after Mary and I had been in school together. I guess I was dealing with my own stress – that of my widowed mother remarrying. This “Death on a Mountain” business had not reached me.
I looked up and read the article again. Mary’s father, a medical missionary working in the large mission hospital in Nyankunde, had taken a break from grueling work to climb with some buddies in the Ruwenzori mountains, a snow-capped range bordering Uganda. He had slipped and fallen to his death on a glacier, and was buried there.
Mary filled me in on the details. One day the principal came and took her and her brothers from their classrooms to one of the dorms where the station’s missionaries were all assembled. Mary thought that perhaps her mother had died because she had been sick in a hospital in the States for many months. In the dorm living area, the principal announced that “David Mason was dead, that he had been killed in a mountain climb.” Mary and her brothers sat in shock. They were whisked away within hours, taken with a missionary chaperone to Kinshasa and then put on a plane alone to the U.S., to join their mother who had just been let out of the hospital.
”We did not even recognize her because she had lost weight from being sick and had different glasses, hairdo, and clothes – we went running right past her to the mission director who had driven her to the airport.”
Mary's favorite photo of her father's resting place
After reading and rereading the article, I spent the whole evening in a daze in front of my computer, trying to line up and give full inspection to the million thoughts jostling for dominance in my head. Of seemingly unsympathetic principals. Of how I assumed as a girl that because of my parents’ work in Africa, God would allow no trouble to touch us. Of how I’ve come to know since that trouble comes to all – that I am broken, my friends are broken, the world is broken and so in need of a Savior. The Choice is eventually forced upon us: will we choose Faith? Will we falter? My own yearning for Congo and that life heaved within me once again. I felt both the loss and richness of experience intertwined together in the lives of cross-cultural families. I reread Mary’s posts, felt the brunt of her burden. I tried to put myself in her shoes — I, who had also lost my father, but at three years of age leaving me with little memory of him. I paced through Mary’s photos again and again – of her family before the accident, and of the Ruwenzori climb – retrieved from the battered camera found near her father’s body.
But hold on there.My introspection came to a screeching halt. How on earth could I go from Congo in one picture to Johnny Cash in the next?! It seemed so – randomly out of place.
Mary’s mother had written an article to explain:
When Mary and her brothers came home [from Africa] they had a strange request. They wanted to see Johnny Cash, their dad’s favorite singer.
In the fall of ’73 I took them to Nanuet, NY. But after the show, instead of grins, I noted tears. Why? They didn’t get to shake his hand!
I glibly said something like, “If God had wanted you to meet him, he would have worked it out, … and he still could.” I guess in my own way I was saying, “Give me a break, kids. I did everything I could to please you.” Or, maybe I was trying to let them down gently. Whatever, as kids often do, they took me seriously and literally. They prayed all the way back to the hotel that God would work it out.
The next morning, while Mary, Davy, and Gerry were wading and swimming in the pool, I went to the coffee shop overlooking the pool area to figure out how to handle their disappointment when they would realize that their prayer was not going to be answered.
Had I not spent hours the evening before telephoning New York City hotels trying to locate Johnny Cash — to no avail? As if any hotel would reveal the presence of a celebrity to a complete stranger? What won’t a parent do to bring a smile to a child’s face — let alone three children in the midst of bereavement?
I soon found out. Only the parent in this case was our heavenly Father. Once I stopped staring into the cup of coffee and looked around my immediate surroundings, I saw Johnny Cash’s manager and accompanists right there in the coffee shop, seated at a nearby table. Who couldn’t recognize Carl Perkins after watching him perform “Blue Suede Shoes” the night before?
I knew what I had to do. I had to muster up the courage, be willing to appear to be a “groupy,” and walk over to their table to explain the situation to them. I did, and the men were touched by the story. Together, we made arrangements for the kids to be introduced to Johnny that night. Of all things, he was planning to come to our hotel to eat supper anyway!
Not only did the kids get to shake his hand, but Johnny talked with them for about fifteen minutes, and we got to eat supper at a small table right next to Johnny’s!
To be sure, this was no life-or-death issue, but apparently God delighted in answering the kids’ believing prayer — and in demonstrating to me what he says in Psalm 34:10: Those of us who reverence the Lord will never lack any good thing. (From “Coffee Shop Miracle”, FINDING GOD BETWEEN A ROCK & A HARD PLACE: Stories of GRATITUDE & GRACE compiled by Lil Copan & Elisa Fryling, Harold Shaw Publishers, Wheaton, IL, 1999, pp 169-171)
Wow. What an awesome, God-fill surprise. I scoured the photo, studying the sad smiles and even the clothes, smiling to myself at the way Johnny had his shirt buttoned down to there. And then I noticed Mary Ellen’s dress. It looked kind of familiar. I pulled out the junior high photo. It fit Mary a lot better than it fit me, but it was the same dress.
I sent her the picture. “You do not know how happy I am to see that sweet little dress and to know who got to wear it next!” Mary replied. “My mother put it into the missionary barrel at mission headquarters after I grew out of it!”
Now, just about every missionary kid has had a run in with the missionary barrel, full of second hand clothes sent to us poor kids in Africa who generally cared not that we wore polyester. A missionary barrel, with its moth-eaten mink stoles and other perplexities, not only contributed heavily to Rethy’s Halloween costume closet, but was once even the catalyst for a “January Jamboree” party, organized due to mittens, scarves and hats sent to the tropics by some well meaning church. There was an occasional prize here and there: a Lord & Taylor dress, or the bathing suit my mother found when I begged for something “just like I saw in the Sears catalog.”
But how had I gotten that dress?
“I think my memory of you is clearer than your memory of me,” she wrote. “More than just that year in third grade. We lived at the mission headquarters for awhile when we first came home, and if you came back to the US in ’75, our paths must have crossed. Didn’t we check out that basement at Headquarters together?
Now the bells were ringing! Returning missionary families usually spent time at headquarters where we were subjected to cruel and unusual appointments with specialized tropical medicine doctors and where parents met with mission staff. Mary, a couple of other girls and I had spent evenings exploring the basement — a health spa in earlier days — featuring medieval looking “butt jigglers” which supposedly vibrated fat off one’s rear (remember, this was 1975.) Eventually some adult ruined our fun. At some point my mother had rifled through the missionary barrel. Mary stayed on; my family moved on and bought a house in South Jersey, and I took up the worries of junior high, my memories of Mary gradually disintegrating.
Until Facebook reconnected us, in addition to about 50 others from those Rethy days. Conversations with these old friends mean the world to me. Friendships have become deeper, grander. Many of us, holed up now in suburban America, marvel at that life, often in wonder of our parents’ faith – faith that we often took for granted as we hung on to their coattails. Life has twisted and turned and taken us all in so many directions, but there is a magic that binds us to Congo.
Mary has not had it easy. But what strikes me every time I talk with her are her tender and poignant comments in the face of life, due obviously – to me, anyway – to her being seasoned with grace – a grace which, in turn, enriches my days. Serendipity found us after thirty years. Now I have, four hours north of me, an old and new friend with whom I have a bond – a bond that extends all the way from Congo, to grace, and to that pink and white gown that touched Johnny Cash.
Though it was really just a dress.
From Congo to Colonie 