Following is a rerun from Spring 2014:
When I returned home a few nights ago, I was delighted to hear my first whippoorwill of the year, a sure sign that the cold is mostly behind us and that we can forge ahead with our warm weather rituals. The call of the whippoorwill is among my favorite sounds and brings back many fond memories of younger days and special times spent with my daughter when she was a child.
In my college days, I had discovered a beautiful poem written by Stephen Vincent Benet, called "The Mountain Whippoorwill". I was captivated by the exquisite language and imagery of mountain fog and woods and trees and cockleburs and whippoorwills and mountain laurel and "frogs a chuggin' jug a rum, jug a rum", and"God sleeping in his big white beard". I could just close my eyes and SEE and HEAR the wonderful scenes that the poet described.
At some point, post college, I decided to memorize this rather lengthy poem, but the irony was that once I finally mastered it, I realized that the journey was over, but there was no real destination. I was 27 years old, I had memorized this cool poem, and then what in the rip was I supposed to do with it!!? Once I was asked to recite it for a couple of my young nieces and another time, a teacher friend invited me to recite it to her 3rd grade class.
That was about it. Until Beth comes on the scene...
The answer finally came to me after 1986, when Beth was born. One of the joys of my life was the privilege of tucking her in at night and telling her bedtime stories. I made up stories about Buck The Deer who lived way, way back, deep, deep in the woods, and about Bull The Frog, who lived in the creek behind our house, and then voila', The Mountain Whippoorwill! Finally, I found the reason that I had learned that poem so many years before; it was for my incredible daughter who had not even been born at the time I learned it. Funny, how God works those things out for us.
So one night when Beth was about 3 years old, I carried her upstairs to bed, and was just about to launch into our story time, when suddenly the house alarm goes off, and the horn on the roof directly over Beth's room, starts BLARING out these blood curdling, pulsating, amplified shrieks!
Beth screams and jumps back into my arms and I walk her back downstairs to help calm her and assure her that Mom had just accidentally tripped the alarm.
After a few minutes of quiet and calmness, I start back upstairs with her, and as we reach the landing just outside her room, I sense her apprehension again, as she holds me tighter and looks at me and asks, "Is it still up here?" And I answer with a question,
"Is what still up here, Beth?"
And she replies, "The BIG WHIPPOORWILL!"
