The Remarkable Ordinary by Frederick Buechner

Author:Frederick Buechner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2017-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Part 3

Telling the Truth

Chapter 5

A Long Way to Go

The twentieth century comprised three worlds. There was the world before the Second World War, which nobody there was a who didn’t live there, I think, can even imagine—there was a kind of innocence abroad, where this country was somehow unquestionably a great country, a powerful and rich country. Then there was the Second World War—if ever there’s been a war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, it seemed to be that one. There was in that world a kind of hopefulness and a kind of innocence, which is the best word I can give it. Then the war ended and lots of terrible things happened. The Cold War happened—cold as death, terrifying, the possibility of annihilation, the atomic bomb. And then with the coming down of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union this new world emerged—whatever in heaven’s name it will become—with wonderful possibilities for good, sort of steering in the direction of tolerance, sanity, and concern for the environment, and yet terrible, terrible possibilities for ill. Our own nation, as I see it, is really coming apart at the seams in countless ways, a sort of outgrowth of nationalism in Europe. This third world, a question-mark world.

I was born of that first pre–World War II world in New York City during the Depression. My mother’s family had a good deal of money, and so did my father’s. But as the depression deepened, things got tight financially. My father kept moving from job to job, trying always to find one that would make him a little more money to enable him to live in the manner that he had before. My mother, I think, was a good wife in many ways but was an increasingly discontented wife as the years went by. I can remember as a child hearing her say, “In my wildest dreams I never thought I’d have to live in a house with no servants.” My father took that hard and kept trying to better himself one way or the other. We moved around from place to place all through my childhood. I think I went to a different school every year of my life until I went away to boarding school at the age of fourteen. There was no fixed point. Home was not for me a place. There was no house that was my house. Home was my parents, they were the one constant. When we moved, they always moved, of course, along with us. When there were fights—which there were, terrible fights as I remember, I can’t remember the nature of what they were fighting about, but I remember the anger, the accusations from my mother about what she’d been reduced to by my father’s not having the kind of job he should have, and my father’s defenses—it was a matter of not just hearing two people fight, but I think as a child my terror was that if something blew them up, I would have no place to be.

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