The pastor said a prayer about remembering our everyday blessings Sunday morning, and I flashed back to the first hour I spent in Wisconsin 53 years ago.
I lived in New Jersey for the first 18 years of my life, and I wanted to go to college somewhere far away, but not as far as my older brother, who went to the University of North Dakota and sometimes sounded lonely out there.
It was for the adventure of it, by the way. New Jersey gets the proverbial bum rap. It was a fun place to grow up, even if it has twice the population of Wisconsin crammed into a fraction of the the land area. I enrolled in Ripon College sight unseen so that I could take a long journey, not to get away from my starting point.
Still, Newark International Airport probably does play a role in this story. It was a dreary August day in Newark — in my memory it was overcast but I can’t remember if it was actually raining — and my last breaths before boarding the plane were tainted with jet fuel and smog.
The flight to Milwaukee was above the clouds, of course, and the next leg of the trip was on a wonderful old North Central Airlines prop jet from Milwaukee to Wittman Field in Oshkosh. There, two intensely cheerful Ripon upperclassmen met several of us new freshmen to shuttle us the last 20 miles to the campus in a charming little town.
It was on that last stretch of state Highway 44 that I fell in love with Wisconsin. In contrast to where my travels had started, the air was clear as we drove through a bright sunny day under a huge impossibly blue sky, and everything was green. In my mind’s eye all I see are green cornstalks as high as an elephant’s, and a pretty big elephant at that.
I like to tell people I decided during that 20-mile drive that I would spend the rest of my days in Wisconsin. I’m sure it wasn’t quite that immediate, but I can say it’s still my favorite first impression of all the places I’ve seen. And certainly four years later, when I didn’t have a job a week before graduation and faced moving home to New Jersey, I was panicked because the words “home” and “New Jersey” didn’t seem to fit in the same sentence anymore.
So when the pastor prayed that we be grateful for everyday blessings, I thought back to that first day, because after living under that huge impossibly blue sky for 53 years, even that sort of beauty fades into the background. The prayer pulled it back into the foreground, and I spent the rest of the day paying attention.
In fact, I stopped by my car and looked up in the church parking lot, because Sunday was a bright sunny day just like that first one, and the sky was just as big and just as impossibly blue. “Everyday blessings,” I said out loud. “Thanks, Lord.”
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