When did being gentle go out of vogue?

In the summer as a young child, I remember watching grasshoppers fly from one part of my lawn to another, hearing their wings making their familiar clattering sound. They sounded like my bicycle wheel spokes after I stole one of my mother’s clothes pins to use to attach one of my father’s playing cards onto my bike’s wheel brace. I loved riding up and down my neighborhood street, clattering, clattering, and clattering. I sounded just like a grasshopper. (And while my mother never knew I’d stolen one of her clothes pins, my father always wondered every summer why he could no longer win Solitaire. One summer evening he asked out loud, “Where is my Ten of Hearts? I can’t win Solitaire if I don’t have a full deck!” Being too young to know anything about cards, I easily played dumb. From my child’s perspective, his deck held a lot of cards. Why did he worry about missing just one of them?)

Not being old enough to attend school, I snuck up on grasshoppers all day long. When I got within a foot of one, it took off from the grass, flying ten or more feet away from me. After it landed, I snuck up on it again; and, it would fly another 10 feet. I chased grasshoppers for hours. Why? When I was a child, few families owned those new fangled inventions called “televisions.” If you watched television too much, it would blow a tube and not work until dad bought another tube, which could take weeks. Plus, going to movie theaters cost too much, around ten to fifteen cents per person; and so, we children had to find ways to entertain ourselves, like chasing grasshoppers for hours on end.

It never occurred to me to do what my neighbor Steve did one day. One time he chased grasshoppers with me. After a grasshopper flew ten feet away from him and landed, Steve ran at the grasshopper as fast as he could. He leapt up into the air and landed on the grasshopper, smashing it to bits. Then he pulled the unfortunate grasshopper off the sole of his P.F. Flyer’s tennis shoe (you know the shoes that made us all run faster and jump higher) and laughed. I didn’t get it. Why kill grasshoppers? I thought, “If you step on all the grasshoppers in our neighborhood, what will we do for fun this summer?” So, I asked him, “What did you do that for?” Steve said, “Because it’s fun, and grasshoppers damage crops.” I knew as much about “crops” as I knew about a deck of playing cards; and, what he said to me made no sense to me. After that, I chased grasshoppers by myself.

Not until I grew older did I realize that Steve, along with many of my childhood acquaintances, recognized that I suffered from a disability called “Gentleness.” In time, I learned in Junior High and High School that all my friends, male or female, disliked being gentle. They liked being intellectually tough (“I read Machiavelli’s The Art of War and Frederick Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Don’t mess with me or I will verbally annihilate you.”). They liked being emotionally tough, too (“I read all about Transactional Analysis, and your just a child and so immature! I’m the parent. Do what I tell you.”). And, they liked being physically tough (“Did you see Jimmie rip off that guy’s ear in the wrestling tournament. That was cool!”) No one I met at school thought that chasing and killing grasshoppers mattered; and so, I never told anyone that even as old as a High School student, I continued to sneak up on grasshoppers to hear them clatter and watch them fly away.

My gentleness malady got worse in college. One college freshman told me, “My father owns and runs a multi-million dollar steel mill in Iowa. He brings home $100,000 a year. What does your father make as a measly editor?” And by the time I went to graduate school, I was quite overwhelmed by the toughness of my peers. One evening a graduate student peer yelled at me in the library, saying, “Someone ripped off and stole the only article in the library about dating Middle Easter pottery, and there’s a test tomorrow. Who has it? You did it, didn’t you?”

All my life, I never understood my “tough” peers. I always liked gentle stuff, not only grasshoppers flying around my lawn, but, also, I liked crawdads swimming backwards in the ditch behind my house. I enjoyed having a peanut butter sandwich with my bowl of chili prepared by my school cafeteria. I even read the school lunch menu, looking ahead to what day of the month when they served peanut butter sandwiches and chili. For years every night I enjoyed listening to Shubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” (one of my few vinyl records) even though the timpanist on that particular recording tuned one of his timpani too sharp, always bringing me right out of my bed. For me, life was great, though, as it was, and I never caught on to why my peers acted so tough, intimidating, and mean to each other.

I must confess that up until I became ordained, I often thought there was something wrong with me, because being a gentle soul always felt right. I would ask myself, “Where did I go wrong in life? Should I have been tougher?”

But now, when I look back on my life, reflecting on the stressful lives of my tough peers, I ask a different question, “Why couldn’t they have been stronger?”



Pastor Tom Towns recently came from Christ United Methodist Church in Salt Lake City, Utah to Cortez, where he pastors First United Methodist Church. He’s a graduate of Eden Theological Seminary and Johns Hopkins University.