Maybe it happened when I climbed a plum tree in the backyard in San Leandro, the parsonage below me, the church on the other side of the fence, a neighborhood or even a life farther away and myself standing on a limb, taking some risk, and then seeing.
Maybe this was the place where I became fully conscious of myself as an observer of the world and, what’s more, a collector of my observations. I was nine, and I wanted to remember.
In the language of the church on the other side of the fence, I was a witness. My dad, the pastor, had a meaning in mind when he preached: witness is to share the good news of Jesus Christ so that others accept him as their Lord and Savior. But the stories of his youth, like the one about teaching a pet rat to stand on a sidewalk to scare the girls who passed by — stories recounted at my request and my brothers’ request and to his obvious delight — suggested another meaning: witness is to observe, and further, witness is to be overwhelmed by what is seen, so that one is compelled to share the observation with another. In the words of Jesus’ apostles, “We cannot help but speak of what we have seen and heard.”
That kind of witness spoke to me then and still does today. Looking back on where I came from and wondering about where I’m going in my 56th year, I want to climb the tree again and I want to take in once more all that I saw. I think there are clues.
At nine or 10 I started keeping scrapbooks, bits and pieces of my existence that I wanted to recall. Ribbons for track and field, certificates for participation and attendance, snapshots, batting summaries (always disappointing to review, but held onto nevertheless), a hand-drawn map of Baptist camp to plot a raid on the girls’ cabins.
I became a paperboy, delivering the Hayward Daily Review in the neighborhood just over the highway that cut through our city. As I folded the papers with the shopping inserts and stretched a rubber band to hold it all together, I read the headlines, sometimes the stories. There was the energy crisis. The hostages in Iran. The boycott of the Moscow Olympics. Stories of Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and Lech Walesa. I began to clip out articles that I thought were important to save, either for posterity or my own education, and I placed them in files.
I was observing and collecting. And I started to imagine a vocation for myself: journalist. I wrote my first story and got a byline in the San Leandran at the age of 11.
While I took in all the world from the tree and on my bike and in my hands, I could not see then that the Little Church on the Corner had anything to do with it except to be a contrast or a counterpoint or another world, all of which on some level was true, so my intuition was also being cultivated. But I could not claim the vocation of witness until years later.
And here I am now. Observing and collecting, and also reporting. I can see the place I am going to. It’s a memory to be formed by my longing.