by Michael Corthell
In the Summer of 1962, I was 9 years old. We lived in Boise Idaho. On a sunny, warm day in June. I was playing in the sideyard and two police officers came to our front door. They spoke to my mother. After they left I went to see why they were there. My mother was crying. She said the policemen came to tell her that my grandfather had died. We didn't have a phone. I don't remember how long I sat with my Mom but after a while, I went back out to play in the yard thinking about my grandfather and his death. I had just seen him a few months before when we took a trip back east to visit him and my grandmother on their farm in New Hampshire. As I sat on the dusty lawn I noticed a dead dried grasshopper. I picked it up and like I do now marveled at the workmanship that went into the creation of its body. As I was doing that, a very much alive 'Hopper' landed on my knee. I keenly watched its movements. It jumped off. I still had the dried lifeless insect in my hand. I continued to wonder about its construction. I then began to ask myself questions. What makes this one not move? What makes it move? There must be something in it, some machine? No, I was taught that animals are not machines, they are living things. What is living? I asked myself to continue my internal Q&A. More questions. I started to reason that since God made all things and nothing that was made was made without God or God's influence it must be God. The Creator is the thing inside that animates all life forms. Two months later in the month that Marilyn Monroe died, my mother gathered up my little sister and me, left our abusive stepfather, and moved to the farmhouse in New Hampshire. That Fall I started Sunday school at our local Baptist church. I learned many things there as a young boy; about the animating spirit of God, forgiveness, mercy, Salvation, and a lot of other things, but my experience with my friend the dehydrated Hopper taught me all I needed to know.
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