Old Records, Books, and a Paper
So, yesterday, on their penultimate trip from Virginia to Florida, my brother and his wife stopped by our house in Atlanta. They stayed only long enough to leave three cases of things for me to sort through. Two of them were a second load of his lp record collection, dating as far back as the late 1950s. He'd brought me a case of his records on an earlier trip to Florida. It's a long outdated technology and a storage problem, I know, but he'd also given me a beautiful Crosley reproduction of a vintage radio/record player that can also handle tapes and cd's. So, I'm equipped to handle 1920-2000 audio technology and, as soon as I filter out what needs to be got rid of, integrate his record collection with my own, and figure out where to put all the records, I'm good to go.
The third case of stuff that he left was mostly books of shared interest, most of them by or about the faculty at Drew University where we both studied theology and church history. But tucked away in that box were three other items: a huge 19th century German family bible, a devotional book given to my dad when he was confirmed in 1920, and a term paper. The German family bible is a bit of a puzzle. My brother refers to it as the"Luker family bible" and I think I recall it having been among my Grandmother Luker's possessions. But it is odd because: a) it is a Catholic bible; and b) because there are no records of births, confirmations, marriages, and deaths in it at all. My grandmother had been born and raised in a German Catholic family, but she became a Protestant when she married my grandfather. When she did so, she became somewhat alienated from her family, so it's hard to imagine that she had inherited this bible from her parents or siblings. It is also in German gothic script, which I'm quite sure she could not read. Unlike the family bible from my mother's family, there are no names inscribed anywhere in this bible. From appearances at least, it might have been owned by anyone. I don't know whether I'll keep it. 19th century family bibles are enormous – a big storage problem. I will treasure the book inscribed to my father at his confirmation in 1920. In part, I love it because his Lutheran Sunday School teacher signed it to"Morris Luker." My grandmother's folks were from Alsace-Lorraine. As a result, his name had a German pronunciation, but a French spelling. Right after World War I, his teacher got it all German.
It's the term paper, though, that looped me. In the first semester of my senior year at Drew, I'd taken two excellent courses: one on Second Isaiah and one on the problem of theodicy in western literature. I negotiated an agreement with the two professors that I would write a single term paper of twice their required length on"The Suffering Servant Songs and the Problem of Theodicy in Second Isaiah." It got an A from my Old Testament prof and a B+ from the religion and lit prof. The latter wrote a note on it telling me that the paper"trembled on the brink of brilliance and originality." I think that I've been trembling ever since then.
Shortly after I graduated from seminary, my brother asked to borrow my Second Isaiah term paper. I wouldn't say that I asked for its return every time I've seen him since then, but often enough. After 40 years, he's given it back to me! Truth to tell, I'm pretty sure that it trembled well shy of brilliance and originality. When we were doing the rather damaging research on Martin Luther King's academic papers fifteen years ago, I kept things in some perspective by going back to read some of my own term papers. It was a humbling experience.