Goodbye, Mr Cook

The serendipitous path

I learned to appreciate nature when in college.
Yesterday on the way home from school,
I crawled under the bridge next to the Penfield gas station
and released two tadpoles into Bennett Branch.
The day before there were over a hundred.
We found them in the Black Moshannon while wading,
then took the hot dogs out of the cooler
and filled it with tadpoles.
The next morning
there were only a handful still swimming;
I must have shocked them when changing their water.
Sadly accepting my tadpole mass murderer status,
I justified it
by thinking that fish would have eaten most of them anyway
and they were fascinating
for my first graders to examine with a hand lens.

Last night for our after-dinner entertainment,
a groundhog scurried to the barn
when Den talked to him,
the first groundhog we've seen in the decades
since the coyotes moved in.
A half hour later
a cheeky red fox
was hopping
and digging
and sniffing the groundhog's trail.

Today after school
Den was out for supper
so there was no reason to hurry home.
My serendipitous path
looked like the dotted lines
that Charles Schulz drew behind Woodstock.
I stopped on the Dubec Road
to pray for Den,
our kids,
my friends,
and the two people that don't like me much.
I zigged down another back road
to look for interesting rocks,
then zagged into the woods
acquiring some "Pennsylvania pinstriping"
by scraping a few branches,
then built a rock stack at the township line.

As I re-entered the jeep I noticed a stand of blue-eyed grass,
Sisyrinchium.
(I have trouble remembering why I entered the room,
but I can remember Latin names learned forty years ago.
Go figure.)
I love plants
and took every botany class Elizabeth Cook offered.
Professor Cook taught me to notice details in flowers,
in foliage,
in seasons,
while her Business Department husband Arnold
drove us on many of our field trips.

Den took a class from Mr Cook,
Educational Media,
and learned to make a colored overhead transparency
when that was the cutting edge of technology.
Mr Cook was perhaps the most patient man on the planet.
He sat with a twinkle in his eye
as the border patrol made us unload
Every Single Thing
en route to a botany class
in Ontario's Bruce Peninsula.
"Plan well
and then be flexible."
We have used the phrase
"I'm being Mr Cook"
many times
when we are struggling to be patient.
He modeled how to persevere with a smile,
hiking trails on painful feet.
He taught us to identify birds
and to find the best restaurants
by checking the parking lots for local license plates.
He went out of his way to take us to Niagara Falls
when he found out we had never been there.
He loved traveling
and sharing destinations with others.
He also could come up with a pun every six seconds.

Upon the Cooks' retirement from Houghton College,
they moved back
to their beloved Cascade Mountains
and continued to travel
as their health allowed.
We visited them a few years ago
in their assisted living apartment
and noticed that,
now in his nineties,
the twinkle was still in Arnold's eye
and puns still sprinkled every topic.

Yesterday we received a letter with a Washington postmark.
"This can't be good,"
I said.
A letter from Mrs Cook confirmed what we had guessed;
Mr Arnold Cook died on May 7.

He will live on when I celebrate our mutual birthday
or when we make a pun,
see a meadowlark,
stub our toes,
find a great breakfast spot,
drive a mountain pass,
remember a Latin name,
...and he also lives on in heaven.

Therefore since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, 
let us throw off everything that hinders 
and the sin that so easily entangles 
and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.
Hebrews 12:1 

Blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium spp.