JULY 27, 2021 – Yesterday, I visited our good friends Jack and Linda in their Japanese garden—a national treasure. They themselves are a national treasure. (See 7/27/2019 post, “It is Zen.”)
Two years later, the world has changed, but Jack and Linda’s Japanese garden still provides respite from that wild world. As we sat in the machiai (which Jack calls with a chuckle, “the bus stop shelter”), I was given an account of changes to “Lake Superior,” which forms the centerpiece of the main garden.
In observing the details of this refuge, I was transported to empyrean heights—possibly in Japan but more likely, in heaven itself.
From the “cathedral” formed by columnar maple towering over a spacious deck on the east side of the garden, we partook in a noon repast and feasted on the westward view. And we visited with a vengeance.
Jack and Linda live as vibrantly in the land of ideas as they do in a world of rolled-up-sleeves. Leading advocates of social justice, they’re an armchair liberal’s burr on the seat. They ask—and answer—hard questions of political iconoclasts. Actively encouraging financial literacy among children, they place money where others put words. Voracious readers, they believe the institution of highest learning is inquisitive travel. Their intellects and imaginations transcend religion. They worship life by celebrating earth’s bounty and embracing the highest forms of artistic expression.
After time with Jack and Linda in their paradise, you emerge from a work of art, a hall of ideas, a stage of action.
A highlight of yesterday’s conversation was Jack’s detailed account of operatic-scale; a story Linda first told me years ago. It was a personal tale involving the murder of Jack’s cousin, John Murray, on April 4, 1968—the date of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. The two murders were directly linked.
A live-as-he-talked liberal, former seminarian and graduate of Marquette University, the white Wisconsinite Murray had moved to North Minneapolis—the nearly all-Black part of town. Soon after King was gunned down in Memphis, Murray took the bus home from work in downtown Minneapolis.
During John’s ride, a Black man in Murray’s neighborhood heard the awful news out of Memphis. In a rage he shouted to his wife, “They’ve killed my King!” He grabbed his gun and yelled, “I’m gonna shoot the first white person I find.” The wife tried to stop him. He overpowered her and strode out the door.
The angry man approached a bus stop just as a city bus rolled to a stop. Jack’s cousin alighted—the first white person to enter the gunman’s time and zone of rage. Within seconds John Murray lay dead on the sidewalk.
That was merely the introduction to a story with intricate twists of coincidence and interwoven lives; a story of triumph and tragedy; a lesson in how interconnected we are, know it or not—like it or not. A story told and heard inside a “cathedral” with a view of paradise.
At the end I heard John Murray say, “Go in peace.”
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
