At 9 (2 years younger than snapshot) I picked up my pocket knife and headed out to immortalize myself. Elyria's Black River fell over a cliff behind my grandparents house. I walked down to a spot where it rushed past towering red oaks & around a limestone bolder.
The world populations was two billion. The bolder offered eternal distinction. It would be hard work to make my mark with a jack knife but a small price for permanence.
Two hours later, there it was: "Chip 1952." My blade & I were too worn down to write my last name. But I had left enough evidence for archeologists to discover, memorialize & rope off for public view Erie Degrasse "Chip" Chapman, III's ancient carving.
My child's eyes had not drunk in the warning in Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities. All is vanity." By the time I did read it I was already life-deep in the romantic search for the golden chalice &, ridiculously, have not stopped.
How could I know that only God's love is eternal. Romance is a season. Our markings fade.
Every cemetery offers literal proof of Ego's success in nudging even the most humble to etch stone. Analogies abound. They teach us what every Thanksgiving tries to reinforce. That gratitude for what we have now matters more than striving for what might be.
Shortly before before passing, my dear dad typed his autobiography. Since no resume captured how we loved him & he lacked Twain's gifts, his four children, sadly, ignored it. With rare exceptions, autobiographies please writers more than readers who wisely give themselves the chance to savor, gratefully, their recollections.
Two & a half thousand years ago Pericles warned us, “What you leave behind is not...engraved in stone...woven into the lives of others.”
Is not it fortunate that Love cares nothing for our names but only hopes we help others?
The world now struggles to support 8 billion. Every caregiver helps thousands. Too many others suffer & die alone.
Legacies live better in stories than on stone. One winter before World War I, dad almost drowned riding ice cakes down the same Black River on whose banks I sat carving forty years later. Like George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life" my dad helped others by living love; through the YMCA, his family & thousands who never knew his name but are better because he survived that icy river.
-Erie Chapman
Snapshot - Chip at 11 by Dad
