HERE'S A QUESTION FOR YOU . . . .

By Beverly G. Merrick

"What have you learned today?"

That question was addressed to me nearly every time I stepped through the door home from school.

I had better have an answer.

Before me in the battered chair sat my mother, whose swollen feet were propped up on the aging footstool. She had earned long ago that it is exhausting to stand on her feet all day as a cook for less than $1 an hour.

She had wanted to be a teacher, but could not pass her final history exam at St. Paul High School.

"And, so goes life," Mother said. She was determined that my brothers and I should make something of ourselves: that we would never be left short without an answer when it truly counted.

Brother Les and I got so we would have an answer every day; if for nothing else, to allay our guilty feelings that we had only to go to school while she was laboring over a hot stove.
We would go through the encyclopedia, hunting for obscure answers to obscure questions, such as, "How high is high?"

For a while we memorized a word a day out of the dictionary so that we would have a ready answer. The extent of our creative quest for words revealed itself in such phrases as, "Mother, I just met someone who is an addlepated zootsuiter."

As time passed, she suggested to us that all the answers in life could not be found in books. Her question extended itself to, "What have you learned from someone else today?"

Our mother believed, and still does, that you can learn "something" from everybody. With that knowledge, one can make a choice: apply what you have learned from that other person -- amazingly enough, even a parent -- or discard it.

It was a wonderfully "freeing" notion, to be encouraged to think for one's self while learning about the hopes, dreams and lives of others.

It is humbling as well to me to discover that any number of people have come up with better answers to perplexing problems than I could have.

From the interview with 88-year-old Effie McFarland, published when I was the editor of The Custer County Chief, I learned there is always something in life that is "unfinished." She has pursued genealogy research to the extent of having 40 volumes tracing back McFarlands to six generations, a quest started by her mother.

Yet Effie says, when pressed for the interview, "I don't have all the answers yet. I am still working on it. I'll tell you when I get done."

Why is Effie on this lifelong quest? Perhaps the answer can be found in the saying one of her children has framed for her, and placed in the living room. The inscribed picture reads:

"Our family is a circle of strength and of love. With every birth and every union, the circle grows. Every job shared adds more love. Every crisis faced together makes the circle stronger."

Surrounding the plaque are the pictures of 13 grandchildren and many more great grandchildren.

Her familial display reminded me that we all belong to circles of knowing. We continue to learn from others all of our lives concerning questions both great and small.

Some questions go unanswered for the longest time because we cannot figure out the answer.
I want to share with you several painful questions that are puzzling me.

In the case of Iraq, for instance, I wonder why we have to burn down the barn and everything in it because someone is a mad bull.

I see circles of grandchildren and many more great grandchildren in Iraq who have done nothing to help them face such a fire.

I wonder if anyone is going to start wanting to check out our American barn for weapons of mass destruction.

I am hoping they will not remind us that we have destroyed at least two other barns already with weapons of mass destruction.

Surely, we are not saying, "Do as I say, not as I do."

In any case, how does one deal with a post 9-11 world in view of all this?

I would rather go to a barn-raising, where everyone is talking about solving the problems of building a sound post 9-11 structure to serve the global community; it seems like more is accomplished with goodwill construction built into the mortar joints.

Don't press me for any final answers yet. Like Effie, I am still working on it.