Picking Sunflowers

Once upon a time, my Dad told me a story on the way home from work.

I have the good fortune of being able to carpool with my dad to work. This is fortunate for me, because it means I don’t have to spend much of my hard-earned cash for gas, and it gives me time to read books instead of paying attention to traffic for an hour and a half every day. Plus, it gives me the opportunity for quality conversation with Dad when I feel so inclined, although most of our trips are relatively silent.

Today, however, he began telling me about his day at work, and after awhile, asked “Have I ever told you about picking sunflowers?”

“No,” I said, so he told me.

“Well, it was when I was about six or eight. My dad was a member of the Jaycees, which means Junior Chamber of Commerce, which was a group of young men, under thirty-five, and they worked for the improvement of the community. They put up the shelter in the park. I remember a bunch of them put on their hats and tool belts and got together and built it. I thought it was a church group or something to do with church, because they always met there, but I was little.

“Sometimes they would do projects to put some money in their coffers to fund these things that they did. One time a farmer called them and said he had this cornfield that he wanted to combine, but it was full of sunflowers, and he couldn’t combine it with all those sunflowers in it, because they would contaminate the corn and he wouldn’t get a good price at the elevator. So Dad and the other men went out to walk that cornfield. [Cousin about the same age] was visiting at the time, so he and I got to come along.

“The sunflowers were all different sizes. Some were big and some were little, and they were cutting them out with corn hooks, because that was the way you did it.  Dad could reach six rows, with me and my cousin on either side, because you could reach more rows than you could see, and you could do more rows at once as long as you noticed all the sunflowers. So he had us on either side of him and he could do six or eight rows that way instead of just three.

“Well we started out, and then all of a sudden I noticed that everyone else was getting way ahead of me. I was pulling up all kinds of little sunflowers, and they were missing them. My cousin was keeping right up, and I was getting further and further behind. I was quite worked up about it, because I was doing it right and they were all doing it wrong.

“I called out to them that they were missing all these sunflowers, and my dad came back and explained to me that we didn’t need to worry about the little sunflowers. They wouldn’t get big enough by harvest-time to cause any problems. What we needed to worry about was the big ones with the heads on that had seeds, and the ones that would form heads by the time the combine came through. ‘The ones about as big as you,’ he said.

“Well I hadn’t known that. I had got so caught up in picking all  the sunflowers, and hadn’t thought about which ones were going to cause problems and which weren’t. I was like that when I was little. I tended to get caught up in the details.

 

“I have never forgotten that, because life is like that sometimes too. Sometimes you don’t need to pick all the sunflowers, just the ones that are going to cause you problems. It doesn’t pay to get worked up about things that aren’t going to matter in the long run anyway.”

You Never Grow Up…

Some kids never want to grow up. Others spend their entire childhood looking forward to the day when they will be considered grown-ups, and in their long-awaited early twenties are disappointed to discover that “being grown-up” is not as clear-cut a line as they thought it was.

That was me. I’m still looking forward to being grown up. But now I’m not as sure just how much longer that will take.

Once upon a time, my mother in her wisdom (I’m convinced God gives mothers a particular motherly grace that manifests itself as wisdom. They know things just by virtue of being mothers) said that when you are a little child, you think the world revolves around you, and everyone else is there to take care of you or amuse you. As you get older you come to realize this is not the case, and that there are other people in the world that are possibly of more importance than yourself. But the true mark of being grown up is learning to put others first and yourself last, giving yourself to the service of others.

Hearing that, I was afraid I’d never make it. My fantasies of magically being grown-up at eighteen or twenty-one were now completely shattered. “How old were you when you learned that?” I asked.

“I’m still learning it,” she replied.

I cannot describe how simultaneously reassuring and disappointing that revelation was to me. If my mother, having had roughly thirty more years than I in which to grow up, had not yet made it, I would probably be very old and gray before I could ever claim to be completely grown up. On the other hand, I didn’t have to.

If being grown up is, as in my mother’s definition, a perfection in selflessness, it is something none of us can attain in this life. I am not asked to be perfect. I am simply asked to strive for perfection. In that same way, I am not asked to reach a point where I can consider myself grown up. All I am asked to do is to continue to grow up, to continue striving, all my life.

Beginning the Journey

Once upon a time (for thus begins all journeys), as I was driving down the winding, wooded roads to Mankato for another week of college classes, a song began forming itself in the back of my mind. I don't remember how it went, for I had no way of writing it down or recording it, but I remember that it somehow wove into words the strange thing that was happening to me; that somehow, when I was at home, I felt (and acted, I am afraid) like a little girl, but as soon as I went back to my apartment at college, I was a woman again.

College is reputed to be, beyond a place of learning, a place where teens grow up into respectable citizens, and I think to some extent this is true. When you live out on your own, you are forced to pay your own bills, buy your own groceries, form and maintain your own friendships and fulfill your own commitments, and all these things foster the sense of responsibility that distinguishes the stereotypical teenagers from the grownups.

But what happens after college? Most of us nowadays move back home, at least for a while. Not, as the culture assumes, because we are lazy, but because it is the most financially responsible thing to do while we are paying off the debt we accumulated in college. However, the feeling of being a little girl when I went home for a weekend didn't go away when I moved home for good, and it became very easy to let the responsible woman that had developed in college give way to the immature girl.

The question was this: If I couldn't be a woman around my family, had I really become a woman at all? Or was it just an illusion? Or was it that I had set out on my journey of becoming a woman, and climbed the foothills easily, but was now being faced with the high and daunting mountain?

Having decided upon the latter answer, I decided that no matter how high the mountain looked, I was going to tackle it.

"Be who you are meant to be, and you will set the world on fire."
--Saint Catherine of Siena
 

This blog is the story of my journey. In it I will talk a lot about family, quite a bit about friends, somewhat about vocations, relationships as the subject proves relevant, a bit about music, work, general happenings and probably a multitude of other stuff that I can't foresee, all with a general undercurrent of the good old Catholic faith. For the goal of this journey, ultimately, is heaven.

I am writing for myself, for I cannot claim to be an expert of any kind, but I am also writing for anyone else who might want to come with me. Perhaps we can help each other.

For the title of this blog, a subject over which I have deliberated long without success, I have to thank two philosophy majors from NDSU; the first (who also happens to be my cousin) for suggesting the title, and the second for kindly translating it into Latin for me. Benigne dicis.

Once upon a time there was a girl...