THOUGHTS ABOUT MY FATHER |
| By Thomas Ediger |
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| Before the vehicle days |
When I was born, my dad was 38 years old. By the time my first memories kicked in, Don Lorenzo, as my father was called by the Mexican people he knew, had lived almost half his life.
There is a scene in the movie “Field of Dreams” when Kevin Costner’s character gets to meet a younger version of his father than he had ever known. Sometimes when I look back at photos of my dad when he was in his twenties, I wish that I could have known him then as well.
My earliest impressions of my dad were~ one, that he was a large man. He is only 5’ 8” but he towered over all the village people in the small Aztec village that I grew up in, Cuautempan, Puebla, Mexico.
I also remember thinking how fast a runner he was. The one and only time that I saw my dad run was when he was trying to catch another missionary who was leaving our village in the pre-cell phone era. I saw him take off running after that man who had a 10 minutes head start on the trail. I was running after my dad and he totally left me in the dust and I had to turn around and go home. I remember a sense of awe, thinking to myself, “man, he is fast”. I didn’t even know he could run!
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| Our house in Cuautempan- overlooking the valley below and the road across on the other side. The two far right buildings, the girls home lodging. |
To be fair, my dad’s walking pace was faster than most peoples and was more like a run anyways. Walking is one of the habits that dad kept up until late in his life and I’m sure has factored into his longevity.
The truth is that my dad was a big man. Perhaps not in size, but in character, in who he was.
He was big not in the stereotypical way, the macho-man. Make no mistake, the legacy my dad has left is substantial and effective. After my father and mother had retired from the missionary work in Mexico, my wife, Patty, and I traveled down to Mexico in the early 1980’s to visit the village I had grown up in. We hiked from Cuautempan to another village called Zongozotla which was around 4 hours walking distance deeper into the isolated jungle region of Puebla.
Within an hour of arriving, the pastor of the local church had rung the town bell, gathering a crowd of about 500 people for an impromptu service. These village people showed up to greet and honor us on behalf of my father Don Lorenzo.
In village after village from that region there are pockets of faithful believers that are STILL vital in their faith and commitment to the Lord long after my parents left this mission field.
My father and mother along with many other missionaries gave the greater portion of their lives to bring the gospel into these isolated villages. The fruit of their labor endures and has grown.
Local people were given the responsibility of pastoring very early on. The thing I remember most about my dad’s ministry was his DEVOTION TO RELATIONSHIP. Most of his time was spent traveling by foot or horseback to the neighboring villages to meet with individuals in their homes. I have countless memories of walking with my dad towards someone’s home unannounced…always unannounced, hearing the dog’s begin to bark, observing the excited scattering of small children and then the warm invitation into a home.
At this point, I remember hearing consistently a warning by the parents to their children “Si no te comportas, te va ha comer, Don Lorenzo”, which translated means, Behave yourselves or else Don Lorenzo will eat you. To which my dad could not respond with, “No thank you, I just ate”.
Our hosts would already be off scrambling to get us something to eat. (I would like to add a foot note here, rather an observation I have made through my life…that is that humor is a weird thing.
American humor and Mexican humor are not necessarily compatible.
A joke in English doesn’t translate well into Spanish. A Spanish story usually lacks a punch line that most Americans require. Somehow I have found the combination of being from one world while observing another to be funny beyond words. In regards to the above mentioned “disciplinary technique”, I have never heard of such a thing in any book that offers advice on child rearing).
Going back to my descriptions of our impromptu visits, let me add that it was never a short visit. You see, HOSPITALITY is the Mexican “LOVE LANGUAGE” and my dad also spoke it fluently. Our hosts would go all out to prepare a “feast” for their unexpected guests. (I am sure the chickens happily clucking about the place would have thought it was going to be a normal day).
Each visit was at least a 3 hour minimum affair and one would think that these folks had had no other plans that day, they were so happy to see us. None of these people had many resources. They would be considered quite poor by American standards. But they always gave us their best.
Nothing had changed when my wife and I visited later on, that June of 1984. In fact, during this trip, a villager from Cuautempan said to me “Since your family left, many missionaries have come and gone, but there has been no one like Don Lorenzo”.
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| 1984 |
My dad and mother gave over 30 years of their prime years to the people of Puebla. It was their willingness to stay and raise their family, TO INTEGRATE for all those years that made the MOST DIFFERENCE.
My dad was unusually single minded about what he wanted to do with his life. During the 1920’s when my dad was still very young he heard a speaker talk about how much missionaries were needed in Mexico. He decided that day, as a kid, that he would go.
As far as I can see, he has always been free of ego or self-aggrandizement in anything he has undertaken. He has been free of selfish motive, a man with a guileless and pure heart. Soft-spoken, a good listener, he has freely given all he is and all he has to the Lord and to those around him.
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| Dad showing off the new Land Rover |
Among the many examples I could give…I have a memory of a late rainy night when my dad and I made a trip in my dad’s Land Rover to take a man with a machete injury to the hospital. The man had been brought over to our house and I remember overhearing the conversation between my dad and the local villagers. My dad did more listening than talking.
My dad agreed to take this man in as we were the only people in the village with a vehicle. The roads were muddy and slippery from the wet clay, and very treacherous as they went along the steep mountain terrain. There were no paved roads, no guard rails, just this primitive road used by the horses, mules, foot traffic, etc. Normally, my dad would never travel under such conditions but because of the severity of this man’s wounds my dad decided it was necessary to risk driving this road.
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| The Road From Tetela to Cuautempan |
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| Tommy a top the Land Rover |
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| TOMMY |
My dad has also been a generous person. He hasn’t had much financially because of the years spent as a missionary but he has always had enough to get by with and to share. For years he gave every grandchild a birthday card with a monetary gift in cash dollars equal to their age out of his limited resources. This attention to details is not an attribute I ended up with. I know for a fact that with the number of grandchildren he has, this was a major budgetary consideration. Somehow, dad was always able to make even the smallest amount of money last. My parent’s income as missionaries in the field was very meager. I even remember when they received a notice from the new mission they had joined, Unevangelized Field Missions, telling them that they owed so many mission fees, that the mission was willing to just take it all out of their monthly support rather than my parents being obligated to send them a check. Pretty absurd. Yet dad and mom always managed.
Much of my dad and mom’s life in Mexico has been well documented through their own journals and letters and accounts they both have written. Also, other missionaries who were like family have written books corroborating accounts of the experiences and chronological timelines they shared.
However, my recollections are more random and taken from sporadic childhood memories. I have regaled friends and my spouse and sons with the many stories and memories of my life in Mexico. I have desired and been encouraged to put these memories and stories down on paper. This is just a beginning and I hope to spend a lot more time getting them documented. For now I want to tell of a just few more things about my parents and life in Cuautempan.
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| Cooking in the outer kitchen of the girls home |
Our water came from a spring in a cave that was located uphill from our house. My dad was not mechanical but he had linked together pipe that allowed water to run from this spring to our house. I would like to clarify that this was more like “walking water” rather than “running water”. We had no pressure other than gravity feed.
Until we left Mexico, my only bathing experience in this village was a large round tin tub, like that used in the early 1900’s, filled with a large bucket of water heated on the cook stove and mixed with one cold bucket of water. My dad got first dibs on the bath and we took turns after him. He claimed he wasn’t very dirty. I can say I was probably dirtier than him. He wouldn’t even let the water get that hot on the stove. We would purposefully try to distract him so that the water would get really hot, hoping our baths would be more bearable. Needless to say, bathing wasn’t very enjoyable.
Years later, when my wife and I visited, we observed that the current missionaries in the house my dad had built had installed a water heater and a shower. “Wow”, I thought. “What stopped us from having this luxury? After all it was the 1970’s! Not exactly ‘cutting edge’ technology.”
We didn’t get electricity until I was about 15, which I helped the village men put in by running wires across the canyon. The wire was brought in from the city on huge spools. A friend and I helped by pulling the wire down the 1000 ft into the valley and then we would tug it, with the help of the people at the other end pushing, up the other side, bushwhacking our way to the top.
Before this we were the first ones to bring in a propane refrigerator. It was carried up to our house in a rectangle box that looked a little bit like a coffin. A rumor went out through the village that the Edigers were burying President Kennedy up on our property. These Aztec villagers knew no other Americans so of course they assumed that the Edigers must know the Kennedy’s. They at least had heard that the American President had been shot. They just put two and two together.
In a way, we were living in such a way as to fit in. We weren’t there to bring these Indian villagers into the 20th century. We actually took on a lot of their lifestyle. I, more than my siblings, wore their guaraches, (homemade sandals), learned to carry loads with a mecapal around my head, wield a machete, though I did incur the wrath of one of our neighbors by practicing my cutting techniques on his “elites” saplings!
I learned to blast rock with dynamite to open up roads and make gravel. In fact, I can say that my work ethic was established by watching and helping the village men.
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| TORTILLAS |
Yet, Dad, being a farm boy, loved the many fruit trees and conifers from the Oregon area where he had come from and even brought some Douglas Fir seedlings from Oregon on one of our furlows to plant in our yard. They are huge now and Patty and I saw them when we visited and again in 2000 when we visited the village with my dad for the 50 year anniversary of the church he started there in Cuau.
Another of the impressive things that my parents did was to start a quasi- orphanage at our house. The reason I call it quasi is that not all the children living with us were parentless.
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| The Boys Home Boys |
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| The Boys Home |
So as I was relating before, I have many recollections and I have told and retold some stories to friends here in the states that have taken on almost a legendary quality to them. Most of them are just stories that are mundane enough, but seen through a different lens, take on a whole new life. Since I spent so much of my childhood waiting, ie for buses, for planes that never arrived in remote areas, etc. I had time to observe many things that amused me at the time but didn’t find necessarily humorous to others until years later. For instance, one day while walking through the market I observed a man trimming his toe nails with a rock. I remember thinking “Why is he using a rock? They have machetes for that?”
Another gem is from when I was around 10 years old. Our village had a volunteer militia that met every Sunday afternoon to train for 3 hours. On their Independence day that year they put on a show for the town to demonstrate their “readiness” for war. All 30 of the volunteers were outfitted with one boxing glove and a blindfold. Unleashed in the basketball court in the middle of the village, at the whistle and after being spun around a few times like when hitting a piñata, all 30 began swinging blindly at one another. After a half hour of mayhem, there were just 2 men left standing on opposite sides of the court & who could not find each to save their life. They declared 2 winners that day. I remember thinking to myself how I had never seen such a thing in America! I have many more of such anecdotes to share but that will be for another day.
In an interview I saw with David Holbrooke, the son of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, David talked about his father whom he said he got to know better after his death in 2010. His father had been involved in brokering peace in the Balkans and many other difficult negotiations. David said about his father, quote “Parenting was not my father’s strong suit but there are a lot of people alive today that wouldn’t be without his involvement. That is a trade I am willing to make.”
My siblings and I were sent away as children to the Mission boarding schools, some earlier than others. I can in some ways relate to David Holbrooke’s assessment. My father is now 94, soon to be 95. He is still as healthy as can be expected for a man his age, still active physically-walking, stretching, mind still sharp and memory pretty darn clear. My dad’s heart is still all about RELATIONSHIPS and loving one another. If there is one thing I know it is that I am blessed to have a father like Loren Ediger.
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| Tom & Patty |
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| Dad with David & Michelle, Tom's 2nd Son |
MAP OF WRINKLES CLICK HERE
My-fathers-folder-mysterious-ways CLICK HERE FOR ANOTHER STORY
TOMMY & A BROKEN LEG STORY CLICK HERE
