Dr. Griffitt and the ginkgo tree

These days my desk is covered with odd bits and pieces from the past, as my youngest brother keeps methodically scanning old family papers into the computer, making mysterious attachments, and sending them to me, just a few a day. He began this months ago with the love letters of our grandparents, and as that saga came to its end--arrangments to meet in San Francisco, my grandmother carefully packing her cedar chest and shipping it to the new home her finance had bought for $5,000 in a suburb of Los Angeles back there in 1923--I grew a little wistful. No more escapes to the past. But my brother hadn't told me how much the same cedar chest, now in his home, held.

When my grandmother sent it west it contained the linens she'd embroidered, and some pretty china, and her most important contribution to the new household: a complete set of the works of Mark Twain, plus a lot of other books. "You can have a house without much furniture, but not without books" she said, and my grandfather agreed.

And it was a close thing. After months of delicate and ardent correspondence, after gifts of flowers, after a dutiful letter to her family, asking for her hand in marriage--though my grandfather wrote privately "your family had better agree, because I'm marrying you one way or another", my grandmother, a week before she was to board the train to San Francisco, suddenly had doubts. She was always the one who seemed to hold back a little--he'd be saying how happy they'd be together, how much he loved her--and she'd be writing that spring hadn't come to the mountains yet, and did he ever go to church? The week before that, my grandfather had written daily. And then there was a gap of 4 days. And then she wrote that unless she received a letter from him she was unpacking her bags and not going. She just wasn't certain. Did he really love her?
True, said she, there would not be time for him to write after he received this letter. But at least, if he was waiting in the train station, and if he hadn't sent her a letter--well, he need not wait for her. She wasn't going to be there.

He'd written, of course, and off she went, to a city she'd never seen, and they were married on July 18, 1923 by a minister they'd never known, with two witnesses drawn from the streets. And yes, mostly, as the years went by, I think they were happy.

So, reading these last letters, I sighed. "Too bad they didn't write from kitchen to living room later" I emailed my brother. He said nothing, but sent on another odd group of attachments to download and read.

And so I read today a letter from...let me count back--my Great-great grandfather. Or maybe three greats back. Written in the 1868 in a fine hand, to his young granddaughter, Mary, also called Molly by her friends. She was traveling away from home, and her grandfather wrote to her that he was deeply pleased by her demeanor, her modesty, her attention to the treasures of heaven, not the temptations of this world. He bids her be quiet and hopeful, and seek for the beauty in all things. He promises that she will thus live a long life, and assures her that a modest and comely woman, though not wealthy in possessions, will yet be cherished and find her way with excellent good success. And he will always hold her lovingly in his heart and mind and prayers as she journeys.

The modest young Molly would be courted and wed, and bear 11 children, of whom the youngest was my grandfather. She lived to be nearly 100 years old, and died surrounded by many of her children, and their children.

I turn the copy of this letter about in my hands, thinking of the man who wrote it. He was a doctor and a surgeon. I have a photograph of him, given me by my father, and the intelligence and compassion in the eyes of the bearded middle aged man staring out at me always touched me. They were eyes that saw a great deal. During the Civil War, in the 1860's, he served on the Union side (in my family there were brothers who took arms up to fight on opposite sides; there were also men who fled west to avoid the fighting).Doc Griffitt went with the Union Army, tending the wounded and the sick.

He was captured, and taken to Andersonville, the southern prison that many horror stories have come out of. Now we might shrug: we've learned of Abu Ghraib; we have prisons and horrors and wars all over the planet. But for those times, Andersonville was the name of tragedy and death. There were two doctors there, for the hundreds and hundreds of men. There was little food, no comfort, no medicine, little water, little hope.
He tended the men he was with, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.
He found a tiny stream of clear water flowing at the edge of the compound, and from this he brought pure water to his patients.

And there he looked at the green trees.

Long after the war ended--in 1908-- he was asked to go back to Andersonville to identify the graves of the soldiers he'd failed to save, the ones he held and talked with as they died, the ones he helped bury. And he did. And he was asked to help design a monument for the dead of Andersonville prison. He took a little seedling of one of the trees by the pure stream, and had it planted as a memorial. As far as I know the tree is still alive, spreading green leaves and comfort.

There's something in that story that captures my heart. I return to his good wishes for his granddaughter, and realize that this letter was written not all that long after he came out of the hell hole that was that prison. "Pay attention to the beautiful and true things" he writes her. And perhaps he was thinking of the light through green leaves, and pure water.