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Margaret's Angel


The old men say Jacob wrestled all night
at the river Jabbok with an angel.  
Maybe it was not really an angel:
maybe it was God; maybe with himself,
but that, ever after, Jacob walked with a limp,
having come to terms with himself.

Margaret Minke was born in Toledo, Ohio,
into a German Lutheran family.
She used to laugh kindly at her German-born grandmother,
for whom the English language was something like würst,
composed of loose parts and pressed together.
Margaret’s mother was confirmed in German, in Toledo,
forever remembering how to say 
the ordinaries of life as her mother did,
in the German Lutheran way.

Margaret moved to California, as her sister had,
and when other German Lutherans established
a theological seminary at the top of Marin Avenue
in Berkeley, she went there, perhaps for a job,
possibly for a vocation, and was convinced to stay.
She could not become a pastor:  that was for men.
She might, she was told, become a deaconess;
a kind of Protestant nun in stern clothing.  

Within a year, she and Conrad decided to marry.
“You will come to Toledo,” she said, “and stand with me
in the church where my grandmother lived,
where my mother was confirmed in German,
where my family will be.  And watch!”
she said.  “Somewhere in this church is the angel
I have wrestled with, all my life.”


Her own children came:  Paul, Kathryn, Gail, and Heidi.
It happened that the family lived a year in Germany,
and that Margaret’s mother came to see where her mother
had been born, and we found the house
in the low lands not far from The Netherlands; 
a large house-and-barn-together, easing down,
where a distant relative met them in the yard,
ashamed to let them see what used to be.

They stood there, speaking generations-old
and newfound German, two generations of women,
and a third generation still, gathering themselves,
defining themselves, and then turned toward town
and the Lutheran church were their mother and
grandmother’s name was written in the baptismal record.  

Margaret wrestled with an angel, or perhaps
it was God, or herself, long nights and days, 
until finally, at dusk, each let the other go.

Somewhere, today, there is an angel with a limp,
having come to terms with Margaret.  


___________________________________________
[Margaret and I were married, once ago, 
perhaps when we both were old-, but not wise-, enough.
I do not know how we managed to parent 
some of the best people I know, but we did.]

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