May 30, 2009





The trees have to be loving this rain. So do the cool weather garden vegetable...onions, peas, lettuce and the brassica family.

I think it must have been 1961, the year of the Cuban missile crisis. Was it '62? I'm not sure.
Anyway, I can remember with intense vividness my father listening to the radio during the day and tuning into Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News on the televison at 6pm. for the latest updates. I was 9 or 10 at the time and into a world of play and imagination. I could tell something was bothering dad but I figured he could take care of it. It wasn't until a Sunday afternoon when he led the family out of the house and onto a trail that led to the base of a magnificent gigantic oak tree and there, on the grass in the mottled shade, shared his concern about a potential nuclear war, that the seriousness of the moment began to wedge into my childhood conciousness. I can't remember what he said but I do remember that oak tree. It is still there. I can see it when I drive to my house....way out in the middle of a field. Every time I see it I think of my dad, and that moment in history.

That oak tree is an incredible testimony to endurance. I don't know how old it must be. I would say at least 100 years. I don't know why it wasn't removed so that tractors wouldn't have to drive around it as they worked the field. It hasn't moved an inch since that day in '61 and all the years before. Was it planted there as a seedling or did an acorn simply fall in that particular place, sprout, take root, and grow?

The bible tells us that Abraham sat under the oaks of Mamre. That deserves our attention.
Why would the writer include that detail (the oaks of Mamre)? Why wouldn't he leave that detail out and just get on with what was going on with Abraham? After all, isn't the 'story' more concerned with Abraham than an oak tree?

I'm not so sure.



My dad has been dead for 42 years. That oak tree is still there.