My granddad wanted to live to be one hundred years old. He never made it. Most of the family said he wouldn’t.
Ol’ C.A. Hutchinson came to Washington in 1899 at the age of fifteen, got his first job baking bread for dredge boats in the Everett slews and bought twenty acres on Whidbey Island. Sometime before the First World War, he started “Indian Joe’s Small and Haul,” a mountain guide service to take people to the top of Mt. Rainier. After the Great War Grandpa went to work for the YMCA, became a master chef and got a Master’s Degree in Chemistry from the University of Washington. In the ‘20’s he built his own house, dug a well and planted twenty acres of cherry trees where Northwest Hospital now stands.
At eighty-nine Grandpa came to my graduation from graduate school in Dallas, Texas climbing three long flights of stairs to stay in an empty dorm room next to mine. One year later, he attended our wedding in Santa Cruz, CA helping dad cook the rehearsal dinner – baked salmon - on the beach. In his mid-nineties Granddad drove a logging truck with my dad and rode along in a helicopter while dad was fighting forest fires in the Cascade Mountains. Later he and Dad hiked to some of his old mountain haunts up around Monte Cristo. That summer Granddad took a tumble while helping me paint his house. Horrified and helpless, I watched from my second-story scaffold. He got up, brushed himself off, and said, “Shoot! I fell off the roof.”
At ninety-nine, he visited our home in Cow Creek, Northern California, to celebrate his birthday. I remember how he took eighteen-month old Heather for a country walk. She used his cane. At the barn, he took me aside, “I want you to know and remember the verses I’ve memorized,” he said. Incredulous, I listened as he quoted several Psalms, verses from Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Isaiah concluding with passages from the Gospels and the Epistles. On Sunday Granddad proudly deposited ninety-nine pennies in the little birthday bank at our rural church. Afterward we went to Bridge Bay Resort on Lake Shasta. Grandpa ordered a steak dinner.
But...every time he took off on one of these adventures, the rest of his family was indignant. “Well,” they would huff, “he shouldn’t be doing these things. He ought to take care of himself. He might get hurt or have a heart attack and die.”
Well, sure enough, he did die. After lunch. In his easy chair. Missed his 100th birthday by six weeks.
But, what a life! Granddad lived the ideals he committed to memory:
“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning, nor knowledge, nor wisdom…Now that all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God
And keep His commandments
For this is the whole duty of man
For God will bring every deed into judgment
Including every hidden thing,
Whether it is good or evil. |
Solomon – Ecclesiastes 9:10; 12:13-14
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