We are here to remember the life of Oris Alfred Cushman. He meant something different to each of us. For some, he was a brother or a father or a fellow church member. Some of you knew him as “Lightening.” For me he was Grandpa. My profession is public relations and despite that, I shall endeavor to be straight forward and honest with you today.
Grandpa was born on July 8, 1921 in Herman, Nebraska, 13 pounds of bouncing baby boy. He grew up on the farm and enjoyed the distractions of small-town life.
In 1943, Grandpa went to war. Like so many who return from war, he did not like to talk about this part of his life. Once, after I had returned from Poland and when he was first showing signs of memory loss, he told me more about the war than he had ever told his sons. He described flying from Texas to Brazil and the humidity when they got off the plane. He told of flying next to dry North Africa where they waited for the invasion of Sicily and Italy. Of the invasion itself, he simply said they “drove straight up the boot,” providing no descriptions of cathedrals, vineyards, local resistance or even the weather. He made it sound more like a car race than anything else, and perhaps that was how he wanted to remember it.
Sometime after he returned home but before he stopped wearing his uniform to the dance halls, he met Betty Ann Moyer of Fremont, Nebraska. He was handsome in his uniform and light on his feet. Before they even really got to know each other, they drove to Marysville, Kansas, just across the state line, and got married on Dec. 21, 1946.
They were very different people. She was a school teacher who prided herself on her intelligence. He had always struggled in school. She detested sports, he would plan his life around ball games. He spent most of his adult life working in meat processing plants. She became a vegetarian. Somehow they made it work.
Their first son, Robert, was born almost exactly nine months after their wedding. Their second son, Dennis, my dad, was born in 1948.
One day, a lady stopped by their home selling religious books. Grandma didn’t have the money to spend on anything extra, but showed interest. The colporteur gave her an issue of Signs of the Times for free. Grandma read it from cover to cover and mailed a response card inside asking for more information about the Seventh-day Adventist church. In 1952, when she was six months pregnant with Bruce, Grandma was baptized in the Omaha Memorial Seventh-day Adventist Church. On December 27th of that same year, Grandpa followed her example.
Grandpa found the lifestyle restrictions of the Seventh-day Adventist culture were not for him. He wanted smoking breaks at work. I’m not sure if he really valued smoking, but he definitely wanted smoking breaks. He wanted to watch ball games on Saturdays. These habits became points of contention between my grandparents and eventually an agreement to disagree. Largely because of Grandma, Grandpa was disfellowshipped from the Adventist church. When he gave up smoking and was re-baptized on Aug. 25, 1984, Grandma was elated.
In many ways, Grandma had been the leader in their relationship. When she started losing her memory in the late ‘90s, Grandpa became her care giver, a role she’d never let him fill before. To the end, she wanted him near her and he wanted her close to him. On good days, they acted more in love than I’d ever seen them before. The horrible disease that has now taken them both from us gave them an opportunity to discover true love together.
Grandma died in May 2005 and we stoic Cushmans mourned her loss in our own ways. Grandpa’s decline accelerated after her death.
This brief sketch of a life does not have the makings of a New York Times bestseller. Grandpa was neither famous nor infamous. Neither a saint nor a notable sinner. Not a philanthropist, Nobel laureate, political visionary or military mastermind. When histories of his generation are written, his name will not even be a footnote. And that would be O.K. with him. He never sought that sort of success.
At times like these, we are tempted to evaluate the life that has passed. It is only natural. However, the standards we employ in such an evaluation say more about us than about the departed. How can we measure someone like my grandfather?
A couple years ago I had a creative writing professor who approached grading from a very post-modern prospective. Rather than using any received notions of what good writing is or isn’t, she graded based on how well her students achieved the goals they set for themselves. If we examine the life of Oris Alfred Cushman based on his own values system rather than any received notions of success, we find that Grandpa was indeed an accomplished man.
As I’ve spoken with our family over the last few days, four themes from Grandpa’s life have emerged:
1. His sweet tooth.
2. His love of spectacle.
3. His craving for social outlet
4. His wish for his sons to be comfortable with their lives.
The first item, his love affair with sugar, is almost legendary in our family. He was not a man who accepted an ice cream truck was only for children. The first story my mom remembers my dad telling her about Grandpa was the disastrous baking of a purple cake (not purple frosting, mind you, a purple cake). Even on his death bed last Tuesday, as Mom handed out candy to the gathered family, the mention of the word and sound of wrappers opened his eyes and revived him slightly.
The second characteristic, his love of spectacle, earned him his nickname of “Lightening.” If a carnival or baseball game was going on in town, he would disappear from his chores as fast as lightening. In later years, he enjoyed watching televangelists, not because he had a burning religious fire for them to feed, but because of the circus-like spectacle they created.
His love of spectacle was inextricably linked with his yearning for social contact. He always wanted to see people and be among them. He was known for always getting to work early … not because he had any wish to work more than an eight-hour day, but because he wanted to have morning coffee with his coworkers. When he retired, he continued waking up early to have coffee with his cronies, walking daily to Crossroads Mall food court. I believe he watched sports not because he cared who won, but because he wanted to have something to talk about. He loved watering the lawn with a hose rather than a sprinkler so he could watch the cars and greet passersby. When the Omaha Memorial church was constructing their school building, he walked there nearly every day and worked hard—again, not because he had a particularly strong work ethic, but because that was where Al Workman and his other friends were.
And finally, his relationship with his sons was not contingent upon their successes and failures. He may not have won awards for being the best father, but at least he never assigned his sons notions of what is and isn’t valuable achievement. I can respect that legacy and can see echoes of that in the way my father has supported my brother and my sometimes hair-brained ideas of achievement.
If we remember Grandpa’s life in terms of these values, it was a good life. Thoreau wrote that “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” That was not my grandfather. His life was quiet, he was, after all, Lightening and not thunder. A quiet life, surrounded by friends, family, charming spectacles and sweet food, in his estimation, was quite enough.
We here today are a testament to his particular brand of success.
