Sand-Between-The-Toes

When our son was two years old, we paid a visit to to beloved teachers of ours. The couple, retired after decades of service had been very influential in our lives. Ross was the professor of Christian Education at our Seminary. Martha was the director of the Chicago Theological Seminary Preschool. We were fortunate to go to seminary in the waning days of traditional Christian Education in Theological Seminaries. At that time, seminaries had laboratory schools, which were real schools with real children where students could learn first-hand the skills of teaching and learning faith with children. Ross and Martha were instrumental in our graduate education, teaching us many skills that we have used all of our lives.

For two years of the time we lived in Chicago, Susan had worked daily with Martha as the assistant director of the preschool. Martha was working on her book, “The Young Child as Person,” at that time. I was assisting by taking pictures in the preschool for illustrations in the book. It was the practice for students who were working and learning in the school to join the Snyders for lunch each day to discuss what had occurred in the school. Those lunches became places of deep learning for us, and it continues to amaze us how much about the ministry we learned from our conversations about the lives of three- and four-year-old children.

We were eager, now five years out of seminary, to visit Ross and Martha. We were equally eager to introduce them to our two-year-old son, and to have him meet our teachers. It was a wonderful visit and a reminder both of how much we had learned from our teachers and how much we had yet to learn in the adventure of being parents and pastors.

Martha, always the teacher, had prepared gifts for our son. We came away from that visit with copies of two books by A. A. Milne. One was a combination of two books of poetry: “When We Were Very Young” and “Now We are Six.”

I suppose, were you to ask our son today what poems his father read to him, he might mention the poems of Shel Silverstein. We did so enjoy those poems and the delightful drawings that accompanied them. I’m pretty sure “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” would come to his mind as one of the poems we read as he was growing up. I think, however, if we were to ask him to identify a single poem that we read the most in his growing up years, he might come up with one, whose lines I quote often when I am around him and our grandchildren: The A. A. Milne poem Sand-Between-The-Toes.

“I went down to the shouting sea,
Taking Christopher down with me,
For Nurse had given us sixpence each-
And down we went to the beach.

“We had sand in the eyes and the ears and the nose,
And sand in the hair, and sand-between-the-toes.
Whenever a good nor'wester blows,
Christopher is certain of
Sand-between-the-toes”

The thing is, although I loved that poem and read it often, we didn’t raise our children anywhere near the sea. They were born in North Dakota, went to elementary school in Idaho, and moved back to South Dakota with us where they graduated from High School. We did visit the ocean as often as we were able. Many a family vacation found us heading to the coasts of Oregon or Washington. And each time our children went to the beach well through their teenage years they had to bear with a father who recited the refrain of that poem:

“We had sand in the eyes and the ears and the nose,
And sand in the hair, and sand-between-the-toes.
Whenever a good nor'wester blows,
Christopher is certain of
Sand-between-the-toes”

Now I have retired, well mostly, from my career as a pastor, and we have moved from South Dakota to our new home here in Northwest Washington. We are in this place because the luxury we most wanted in our retirement was to be able to live near our family. That, however, proved to be an enormous challenge because we have two children who are educated and creative and adventurous. At the time we retired, our son and his family lived here in Washington and our Daughter and her family lived in Japan. Since we retired our daughter has moved from Japan to South Carolina. She’s on the same continent as we these days, but it isn’t exactly close.

Our son and his children, however, live just down the road from our new home. And, for the first times in our lives, we have found ourselves living where we live close enough to go “down to the shouting sea.” The beach is a fifteen minute walk from our house. Yesterday, when we went down to the sea, it wasn’t shouting. The tide was out and the clam diggers were splashing about in their boots. The sun was bright and our jackets were unzipped, and we didn’t have time to walk very far along the shore before it was time to head back to our house. After all, there was a ham in the oven and our family were coming for Easter dinner at our house.

We’ve learned to take a short walk to the beach and return without sand in our eyes and ears and nose. We didn’t have sand in our hair or sand-between-the-toes. And yesterday, the sea wasn’t “galloping grey and white.” All the same the poem came to my mind. I guess I will always make the association between that poem and our teachers and their amazing capacity to make gifts of wisdom that endures for generations.

I know there are thousands of ways to talk about resurrection in this Easter Season, but one sign that life and love are eternal comes to me in the gift of poems we received from teachers who were 50 years older than we. Those poems, and the spirit of those teachers is one of the gifts we make to our grandchildren. They have already traveled more than the span of our lives.

As I walk along the beach, one of the gifts of this phase of my life is knowing that when our grandchildren have become grandparents, they might take them to the beach and recite the poem-become-family-legacy:

“We had sand in the eyes and the ears and the nose,
And sand in the hair, and sand-between-the-toes.
Whenever a good nor'wester blows,
Christopher is certain of
Sand-between-the-toes”

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