Pastor eLetter

20 February 2010

Dear Friends,

The oldest member of our church, Jim Griswold, has been in the hospital with pneumonia, and has been told he doesn't have long to live. He's going back to Riverwoods with hospice care. Jim came to Exeter in 1950, to work at the Academy as the CFO. He recently published, with the help of Harry Thayer, and beautiful soft cover book of memories, called Exeter Remembered, 1950 - 1975. He wrote them down for his 100th birthday last June, and Harry has added beautiful drawings and photos, and pulled them together around some themes. The book is available at the Exeter Historical Society. Jim talks about a man who used to plow the sidewalks with a horse-drawn, wooden plow, and his two sons would walk along behind with shovels, to get any stray snow off the walk. He remembers stores on Water Street and the people who ran them, people who taught his four daughters arts and crafts and music, the old Courthouse that used to be next to the church, and how times were changing, then.

Jim's memory is prodigious, and also cheerful. Most of what he recalls was fun, interesting, sparkly, full of goodwill. It's lovely to have that spirit caught in words and pictures and put into a book. Exeter was, yes, a town of good-spirits and good neigbors. It's wonderful that a man who has lived so long, through terrible times, who has met many disappointments and is a widower, whose body aches and eyes are dim, has so much light and life in him. Joy, wrote the medieval theologians, is the ineffable sign of the presence of God. And ineffable means true, but not just in a left-brained factual sense. Joy is true in a deep, embedded, running-through-everything, current-that-moves-the-rivers-of-the-earth sense.

If you know Jim, he'd love to see you while he's able still to talk. So stop by the Historical Society and pick up a copy of his lovely book. And stop by the Lodge and say Well Done, Jim.

May peace be with us all.

Blessings,

Nancy