PASSPORT TO FAITH

On that bright, clear January morning I sprang into consciousness and to the window as though an earthquake had shattered my dreams.  The noise was the most nerve-scraping, rasping sound I had ever heard.  AW...eee...AWWW...eee...AWWW-- Out there beyond the school, a giant rusty hinge was swinging back and forth in the wind.

Leaning from the window, I tried to focus my eyes on early-morning reality.  The “hinge”, I discovered, was a fuzzy, brown burro hitched to a wooden cart jammed full of milk cans.  Tied to the mother's side was a young colt, and busily ladling out milk to some customers was the short, plump milk lady.

Fully awake now, I gazed from the window and hardly believed what was splashed in brilliant colors before me...the clean lines of a statue of some Chilean hero in startling contrast to a sky that was so blue that it looked unreal.  Palm trees waved in the sea breeze.  The Pacific Ocean seemed close enough to hit with a well-hurled stone.  It roared like the wind in the Vermont woods.  Perhaps, if I closed my eyes, I might be back there instead of thousands of miles away.  Although sad and a little scared, I was excited about what lay ahead.  I still wondered if we had made a mistake, even though we had decided two years ago to become missionaries.

Edward Barber and I were seniors at the University of Vermont and almost engaged in March 1949, when we were walking back to my dorm after a date.  Like the numerous stars overhead that evening, infinite possibilities for an exciting future stretched ahead of us.

“I've had a secret dream to become a missionary,” I said, and then wished I could retract my words.  What an impractical idea, and what would Ed think?

He stopped walking and turned toward me, looking thoughtful.  “That's funny,” he said.  “I've always wanted to be a missionary too.”

During our months of dating we learned that both of us had been interested in church from childhood.

Born in 1926, I was an only child.  My father, Nathaniel Clapp, headed his growing business as a building contractor in Kenmore, a suburb of Buffalo, New York.  Of English ancestry, he was born in north central Pennsylvania and was also an only child.  He was tall, blond and blue-eyed with a happy disposition, and liked to whistle and play a little baseball and golf.  As an electrician in the Signal Corps during World War I, he had served on the battlefield in France.  He died from a ruptured appendix when I was almost three.  I remember little about him.

My mother, Martha Graser Clapp, was an elementary school teacher.  Small, with dark, curly hair, and intelligent and business-minded, she was the youngest of nine children of German immigrants.  In a state of shock, she poured out her broken heart in poetry and found a job teaching third grade in a school several miles outside of town.  She left me in care of a dour housekeeper.

After losing my father, I felt different from friends and relatives who had fathers.  “When will Daddy come home?” I asked my mother.

Her eyes were sad as she tried to help me understand.  “Your daddy died,” she answered.  “He won’t come home anymore.  He is gone forever and ever.”

Forever and ever--  How many times I tried to ponder those words during my young years.  Sometimes, if I thought hard enough about it, the understanding would hit me for a moment, but then I would lose it again.  I harbored a terrible fear that my mother would also leave me forever and ever.

The worst came to pass five years later in 1934, when... soon after earning her BA degree in education from Buffalo State Teachers College...she died of cancer.