Must You Keep Your Heart in Cold Storage?
Must You Keep Your Heart in Cold Storage?
We were a group of friends in the midst of an after-dinner conversation. Because Thanksgiving was just around the corner and prosperity wasn’t, we fell to talking about what we had to be thankful for. As I look back, it seems to me the conversation was rather cynical.
One member of the group, a minister, described the outline for his sermon on the theme “Thankful for What, This Depression Year?” His approach was so negative that the rest of us began a barrage of criticism.
“All right, I’m a realist and I intend to be honest about it,” he replied. “If you don’t like what you call my negative approach to Thanksgiving, then give me something to talk about that is affirmative.”
That started us to thinking about what we had to be thankful for. One of us said: “Well I, for one, am grateful to Mrs. Wendt, an old schoolteacher who, thirty years ago in a little West Virginia town, went out of her way to introduce me to Tennyson.”
Then he launched into a colorful description of Mrs. Wendt, a lovely little old lady who had been his high-school teacher and who evidently made a deep impression on his life. She had gone out of her way to awaken his literary interest and develop his gifts for expression. His was a dramatic and vivid description of a simple and natural small-town schoolteacher who had taken her work seriously.
“And does this Mrs. Wendt know that she made that contribution to your life?” someone put in.
“I’m afraid she doesn’t I have been careless and have never, in all of these years, told her either face-to-face or by letter.”
“Then why don’t you write her? It would make her happy if she is still living, and it might make you happier, too. The thing that most of us ought to do is to learn to develop the attitude of gratitude.”
Now, all this is very poignant to me, because Mrs. Wendt was my teacher, and I was the fellow who hadn’t written. That friend’s challenge made me see that I had accepted something very precious and hadn’t bothered to say thanks.
That very evening, I tried to atone. On the chance that Mrs. Wendt might still be living, I sat down and wrote her what I called a Thanksgiving letter. I reminded her that it was she who had introduced my young mind to Tennyson and Browning and others.
It took about a week for the Post Office Department to search for Mrs. Wendt with my letter. It was forwarded from town to town. Finally it reached her, and this is the note I had in return, handwritten in the feeble scrawl of an old woman. It began:
“My Dear Willie -”
That introduction itself was quite enough to warm my heart. Here was a man of fifty, fat and bald, addressed as “Willie.” I had to smile over that, and then I read on:
“I remember well your enthusiasm for Tennyson and the Idylls of the King when I read them to you, for you were so beautifully responsive. My reward for telling you about Tennyson did not have to wait until your belated note of thanks came to me in my old age. I received my best reward in your eager response to the lyrical beauty and the idealism of Tennyson. I shall never forget the way you read aloud to me:
‘My strength is as the strength of ten/ Because my heart is pure!’
“But in spite of the fact that I got much of my reward at that time, I want you to know what your note meant to me. I am now an old lady in my eighties, living alone in a small room, cooking my own meals, lonely and seemingly like the last leaf left behind; or, as the old song used to put it, “The last rose of summer.”
“You will be interested to know, Willie, that I have taught school for fifty years and, in all that time, yours is the first note of appreciation I ever received. It came on a blue, cold morning, and it cheered my lonely old heart as nothing has cheered me in many years.”
I wept over that simple, sincere note from my teacher of long ago. I read it to a dozen friends. One of them said; “I believe I’m going to write Miss Mary Scott a letter. She did something similar to that for my boyhood!”
That first Thanksgiving letter was so successful and satisfying that I mad a list of people who had contributed something definite and lasting to my life and planned to write at least one Thanksgiving letter every day in November. On my list were my father and mother, my brother and sisters, my grammar-school. high-school, and college teachers, some fellow ministers, and friends who had come to my side in hours of trouble and had helped me to see light through darkness. There were more than a hundred names on the list, and I hadn’t thanked one of them! I could hardly wait to write my second letter.
It went to a college friend names Louis Sherwin, now a Presbyterian minister in Chicago.
One day he arrived at Moundsville, West Virginia. I was midsummer and I had recently been graduated from high-school. I was lying in an old barrel-stave hammock, which I had made. He sat on one of the steps of our porch and talked to me about going to Allegheny College. I remember that he talked enthusiastically about the football team, the beautiful campus, and the professors who did the teaching, of course. Then and there I decided to go to his college, whereupon he dropped the matter and pulled out from his pocket a small leather-bound copy of Robert Louis Stevenson, read it to me for half and hour and then, just as he departed, gave that book to me. I still have it.
There was a Thanksgiving letter for Louis, asking him if he remembered that hot summer afternoon and the gift he had left behind. And in a week I had his letter back. He was then in Oil City, Pennsylvania. The last line of his letter read: “I have not had such an easy time, Bill, and I cannot tell you how your letter has really helped me.”
The next summer I received from Edinburgh, Scotland, a leather-bound copy of another Stevenson book from Stevenson’s own city. Louis was so grateful for my letter of thanks that, while traveling from Scotland, he had thought of me again.
The list of Thanksgiving letters sent out that November numbered fifty. All but two brought answers immediately, and those two returned by relatives with the information that the addressees were dead. Even those letters expressed thanks for the little bit of thoughtfulness.
For ten years, I have kept up this exciting game of writing Thanksgiving-month letters. I have a special file for answers, and I now have more than five hundred of the most beautiful letters anyone has ever received. I never dreamed the response would be so satisfying. I had merely thought of building up in myself an attitude of gratitude such as my friend suggested that night.
One of the most beautiful and touching letters came from the late Bishop William F. McDowell, in whose Washington home I had found some needed rest before a speaking engagement. Seeing that I was tired out, Mrs. McDowell put me to bed to rest, and I was so grateful for that motherly thoughtfulness that I never forgot it. And yet I had never written her a letter of thanks.
When I started in on my Thanksgiving letters I remembered her, and, knowing that she was gone, I wrote my thank-you letter to the bishop, going over the memory and telling him all about it. I received this in response:
“My Dear Will:
“Your Thanksgiving letter, as you called it, was so beautiful, so real, that as I sat reading it in my study the tears fell from my eyes, tears of gratitude. Then, before I realized what I was doing I arose from my chair, called her name and started to show it to her - for the moment forgetting that she was gone. You will never know how much your letter has warmed my spirit. I have been walking about in the glow of it all day long.”
A Thanksgiving letter isn’t much. Only a few lines are necessary, and a stamp to mail it. But the rewards are so great that eternity alone can estimate them. Even now, in dark moments of discouragement, I go over these responses to my Thanksgiving letters, and drive away any darkness by reading a few selected at random. Thanks to the rebuke of a friend, I have learned a little, at least, of gratitude.
I found this precious old story in a volume entitled “The Gold Star Family Album,” compiled and edited by Arthur and Nancy DeMoss, and published by the Fleming H. Revell Company.
Text: “Must You Keep Your Heart in Cold Storage?” written by William L Stidger.
Photographs: Fall Leaves. Copyright information unknown.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007