• 16 •

Twenty Pounds of Brown Sugar and a Garden Rake

Well now, I’d rather have you than a dozen boys, Anne.

MATTHEW CUTHBERT, IN ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

I WASN’T LOOKING FOR MY MATTHEW CUTHBERT the day I traveled along snowy roads to hear a stranger give his eyewitness account of heaven.

To be honest, I didn’t think much would come of the night; I wasn’t a big fan of “heaven books” to begin with. But a former colleague of mine from a publishing house had asked me to come hear this elderly man’s story, to see if maybe there was a book in it somewhere. I went, merely because I try to walk through open doors when I can, and this one seemed to be opening the littlest bit.

There was something about Marv from the start. I sat with about one hundred other folks in the church that day; they were curious about heaven for their own reasons. Some of them had experienced the earth-cracking loss of loved ones; others were dying or their family members were. In a soft voice, Marv retold his experience of leaving his body and flying to heaven for a twenty-to-thirty-minute preview of glory. He spoke of the angels who grabbed one arm each and winged him into the bluest skies, where he saw colors like he had never seen on earth, in swirls of cotton candy and bursts of fireworks.

Somehow the outrageous things this man was saying rang commendable and true. And I found myself believing him more with every sequence of his celestial story. To say I fell under Marv’s spell would be to suggest he was casting one. And Marv Besteman, salt-of-the-earth, wholesome, Dutch, banker, golfer, grandpa, was not a spell caster, but a truth teller.

If you’d met him even once, you’d know he was true. You’d know he’d no sooner manipulate the truth about his heaven visit than he would don a tutu and dance down the streets of Sparta, the town where he had been president of the local bank at the time of his retirement. There was no magic, no smoke and mirrors to him or his story, but you couldn’t help but be enchanted by Marv. I couldn’t, anyway.

He was tall, fit for his age, sported white hair, and had laughter behind his eyes. The first time we met, we shook hands and cracked up about something—the Red Wings versus the Jets, probably. He loved to razz me about hockey. (“Oh, it’ll be a slaughter,” he’d mutter under his breath, when I mentioned the upcoming Jets-Wings game. “There will be blood all over the ice . . .”)

I decided to take a chance on him and his heaven story, just as he’d taken a chance on me. He hired me to write a book proposal for him, and I started coming over to his condo, where he lived with his wife, Ruth. I’d listen and take notes as his story unwrapped week after week. Their home was warm and sweet, filled with family photos and homemade pillows and crafts. Normally, Ruth would offer me a cup of coffee and a peanut cookie—Marv’s favorite. Then he and I would get down to business for about an hour, because that’s all Marv could handle at one time. Recounting his story, especially seeing loved ones on the other side, made him very emotional. We ended up with a book deal, and I was thrilled, because by then I was deeply invested in Marv’s story and wanted to get the chance to tell it. It also gave us lots of time to hang out, which was the best part of all.

I started to look forward most to the moment when I crossed the threshold of the house and entered the kitchen, where Marv would be waiting to greet me. His eyes would light up. “There’s my third daughter,” he would say, grinning. Or “There’s my kid.” Or “There’s my sweet girl.” Or “Hello, pretty lady.” My favorite greeting: “Here’s the other woman in my life; come for a peanut cookie, I suppose.”

He trusted me to tell his sacred story, a story that God had to kick him in his stubborn Hollander pants to tell, and this was a profound honor. Not only did Marv trust me, but he noticed my gifts and believed in them in a wholehearted way, praising me to everyone from his wife to the guy who came and fixed their thermostat one day.

At least two or three times I messed up the hour when we would be meeting (chalk it up to being featherbrained), but Marv quickly forgave me each time and pretended it didn’t matter, even though it did. He raved over the book as a whole and many of its pieces specifically. “You were meant to write my story—only you,” he said.

Marv showed me that the angels were closer than I knew, giving me a travelogue and a preview to the land where joy will never end. When it was all over—the book was done and Marv’s life was ebbing away—I realized what his biggest gifts to me had been: love with no conditions and devotion with no qualifiers. In this hard, disapproving world, here was a person who approved of me with his whole heart. Here was my Matthew Cuthbert—a kindred spirit, a father, a friend who overlooked my broken fences and saw only flowers.

Someone asked me why my own dad was not my Matthew Cuthbert, which got me to thinking. I loved my own dad dearly; he was and is forever my realest of real dads. But a real dad raises you to be responsible, capable, independent, and sovereign in your own grown-up life. It’s up to him to bust your chops when you don’t take out the garbage, when you’ve cheated on a math test, or when you’ve mown the lawn somewhat carelessly. He doesn’t usually have the luxury of overlooking your broken fences because it’s his job to make you fix them so you don’t live in his basement until the Lord comes back.

Matthew, you’ll notice, allowed Marilla to do all the heavy lifting in the parenting of young Anne. If there was busting of chops to be done—and whoa Nelly! was there ever—it fell to Marilla to bust away.

Normally, not always, but normally, a mom and dad share busting duties, so categorical adoration is usually not an option. But when you’re lucky enough, like Anne, me, and Phoebe, to find a Matthew Cuthbert in your life, his love changes you for all time.

On that sacred January day when the ground was petrified with ice and Marv’s departure from this earth was precious in the sight of the Lord, I cried in Doyle’s arms.

On a day like that, when you know what you have lost, life is diminished, true, but also magnified with thanks. How lucky I was to be loved like that, for just a little while.

When someone loves you like Matthew Cuthbert, you can’t help but bloom, unfold, increase, and gain color in your face and your days. When someone looks at you through those eyes, there’s nothing you can’t do.

One of the things I love about Matthew—taken from a long list—is the way he noticed Anne; her well-being was at the center of his heart. In the vignette in which Matthew watched Anne and her friends go through lines from “The Fairy Queen,” the old farmer noticed a scarcity in the life of the one he adored. It finally dawned on him: Anne, though she sparkled like Orion, appeared drab and colorless next to her friends, all adorned in red, blue, pink, and white. Why must his sister, Marilla, keep her “so plainly and soberly gowned”?[112] A girl who shone like Anne should not be gowned so.

“Christmas was only a fortnight off,”[113] and Matthew Cuthbert decided to act on Anne’s behalf and buy her something that would make her feel as beautiful as she was. A new dress with the puffiest of sleeves was just the thing. (By the way, isn’t the word fortnight delicious? Why have we in North America watered it down to “two weeks”?)

But he would have to sacrifice his comfort to make provision for it, and therein lay the rub.

Two problems stood in his way: (1) Matthew was terrified of women in general and would have strongly preferred not to deal with any female at the counter of a store, and (2) in 1879, one could not buy a ready-made dress, no matter how intimidated one was by strange women. He would not be able to grab a frock and plunk it down without comment as he would a bag of hay seed. No, Matthew Cuthbert, potato farmer, bachelor, pipe smoker, father, would have to speak and tell a strange woman exactly what he wanted. This worried the dilly out of him.

But Anne was worth overcoming his fears, or dying in the attempt. It was that simple. In the end, Matthew plotted to go to a store with a surefire man behind the counter, so he was quite unstrung when a female salesclerk with “big, rolling brown eyes, and a most extensive and bewildering smile”[114] offered to wait on him. (Could Marie Osmond have been time traveling? Also, why were this lady’s eyes “rolling”? Was she unwell?)

Adding to Matthew’s distress, the clerk wore a stack of bangles that “glittered and rattled and tinkled with every movement of her hands.”[115] His wits were wrecked by the ordeal.

Though “Marie” did nothing outside the bounds of her job and good taste—she did not, say, lunge across the counter and begin chewing on his arm—her femininity and bangles conspired to tie Matthew’s tongue to where he could not ask for something so crazy, freaky, scary as a dress—even for Anne. So he asked for several things he didn’t need at all and came home with a garden rake and twenty pounds of brown sugar. (This confused Marilla thoroughly, although on the bright side, this would keep them all in black fruitcake and porridge topping until the sun should burn out in the sky.)

Love like Matthew’s does not give up easily, however. He engaged a willing Mrs. Rachel to sew this dress, asking only that it be made “in the new way.”[116] He hadn’t gone a million miles outside his comfort zone only to present another drab dress to Anne. This dress should adorn and make her gleam like the opal-tinted horizon she had once described to him in that dreamy way of hers.

“Puffs? Of course,” was Mrs. Rachel’s reply.[117] She was on the job, and Matthew needn’t worry a speck more about it. That good lady procured some silky brown gloria (a glossy silk and cotton or silk and wool, used in dresses and umbrella coverings) from the general store and went about spinning a gown so shirred, ruffled, pin-tucked, and puffed it would exceed Anne’s golden dreams. As she spun this wonder, Mrs. Rachel marveled at the fact that Matthew noticed Anne’s drab clothing at all. To think—“That man is waking up after being asleep for over sixty years.”[118] But we’re not surprised. Matthew Cuthbert was born to be a father.

They say a new father’s brain chemistry, like a new mother’s, changes when a baby is born. Some primal alchemy in Matthew started to alter from the moment he met Anne. At this point in the story, two-plus years after adopting her, Matthew, once half-awake, was moved and inspired by love in his life. No one saw this change coming, least of all himself. But we are not surprised: Matthew Cuthbert was born to love.

Whenever I read the story of that Christmas morning and the dress reveal, I get a little giddy thinking of Anne, about to receive the gift of her dreams. Sure, the puffs caused some commotion at Green Gables: Marilla called them “ridiculous.” How could anyone, she demanded to know, even fit through a doorway with those sleeves?[119]

(I tend to agree with Marilla that those sleeves are nutty puffy. In replica frocks, the sleeves appear as if a good gust of wind might blow the wearer clear to Nova Scotia. But on the bright side, Anne would not be in any danger of being submerged in water.)

We watch for the look on Anne’s face, and we know it’s worth all accusations of wastefulness. Her face was filled with awe; her eyes welled with tears, and not just because she now had the pretty, stylish dress she had longed for. Another dream had come true, the same dream fulfilled whenever a giver connects a gift with his recipient like a bat and a ball.

Gift giving is undervalued, but a present well given can be an oracle of love. It says, I am crazy about you. I know you. I understand you. We all dream of being known and understood. And if our hearts are long starved like Anne’s was, a gift like this is a feast.

For me, some of the most humble gifts stand the tallest. One long-ago Christmas when I had come home to Winnipeg from college in Chicago, my dad laid a boxed VHS set of the Anne of Green Gables movies under the tree. Though they are now obsolete, I will keep them forever. Just try to take those tapes from me. You’d have to rip them out of my cold, dead hands first. Dad also gave me a pink, Anne-themed address book. I used it to tatters, and it still sits nestled in a basket of treasures.

My mum gave me the other gift just a few years ago. It was a framed photo of Debbie, the polar bear I used to love to visit at the zoo in Winnipeg. Debbie sits behind me in my office, high atop a tall antique dresser. Sometimes when I’m a little lost or stuck, I swivel around and make eye contact with her. Boy, those were the days, huh? You and me at the zoo, stale popcorn and that zoo-y smell of rocks and grass and algae and wet fur and polar bear pies. . . . More often than you might think, that link with my past is enough to blow the dust off my present. I’m found again, unstuck and back to work. I am crazy about you. I know you. I understand you. These gifts remind me that those things were and are true, even across the curtain that separates earth from heaven.

And then there are the countless gifts from Phoebe’s own Matthew Cuthbert, Grandpa George. He isn’t related to any of us through blood, marriage, or adoption, but he is our dad and our grandpa in every way that counts. When Doyle and I moved to Grand Rapids twenty-one years ago, he and Grandma Pat tucked us under their wing, and we’ve remained there ever since. We have so many stories of Grandpa’s care for us, but here’s a real chestnut: Last year Grandpa spent January 2 with me at a laundromat, carrying in groaning loads of asbestos-spewed towels and blankets from the van and feeding quarters into machines.

Let me back up a mite. . . . At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day, our old, clanging water pipes burst wide open, and out gushed hot, nasty water all over our clean and dirty laundry. The cats got agitated and peed over the whole thing, and Doyle uncharacteristically got the flu. (This time, he really was sick, unlike that one Valentine’s Day when I had to review a Barry Manilow concert for the Press.)

While we waited for the asbestos removal people to come remove the junk, someone had to deal with that mountain of dirty, wet laundry. Doyle was lying on the couch, moaning, and so it fell to me and wonderful Grandpa. I will never forget the gratitude that welled up in me that day for this modest man, who may be overlooked by some, but to us is a knight and a chief. I was not alone in my time of need, the best offering of all.

Grandpa’s gift is showing up, attending every possible musical concert; hockey, soccer, or lacrosse game; track meet; and gymnastics exhibition, sacrificing his comfort in all elements. He is always there for my kids, and they know it, especially Phoebe, who is an apple of his eye. From the time they met, Grandpa could calm her down in a way not even Grandma, a baby whisperer, could do. The two of them have played roughly one hundred games of Sorry and gone for countless ice cream runs in his vintage 1972 white Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible.

Even when Phoebe at age five accidentally jeopardized another of Grandpa’s “apples”—somehow taking the clutch out and rolling the convertible backward down their hilled driveway until it hit a stone wall across the street—Grandpa didn’t blame her a bit. (By the way, nothing strikes cold, icy dread more efficiently into the heart of a mother than the sight of your daughter and two other small children rolling backward straight into the road.) God preserved us all that day, even the convertible, which sustained a dented fender and a couple of scratches. Really, Grandpa probably blamed himself for not knowing she was strong enough to pull out the clutch, but who could have predicted that? The kid is bionic. She will probably be a human cannonball in the circus when she grows up.

Grandpa George’s humble gifts have saved us over and over, and he loves us like his own. We don’t deserve him, but somehow he claims us anyway. Like Matthew Cuthbert, and like Jesus, he keeps us—lucky us!—as the apples of his eye, and covers us with his love and protection. We are all changed by a father’s good gifts.

Anne was a new girl on that Christmas morning, broken on a white, beautiful world. As we read about her gift from Matthew, we are renewed ourselves. Anne became braver as a result, as if love breathed nerve and pluck into her fearful places. Somehow, we too are braver, nervier, less fearful—puffed up.

“I knew that I must live up to those sleeves,”[120] she told Diana. She rose to her puffs, and Matthew’s faith in her, exceeding her expectations of what she could do. And we gain courage as well, hoping to exceed our Father’s high view of us.

Rising above and living well loved, Anne followed every academic rainbow, fueled by the hope of seeing Matthew’s kind eyes gleam with pride at her achievement. When Anne discovered she and Gilbert Blythe had tied for first on the island in the Queen’s entrance exam, her first thought was to share her joy with Matthew. He was uppermost in her mind, just as she was always uppermost in his.

It’s at this point that repeat readers start to get a little sad. We know that dear Matthew will not get the chance to exult in many more of Anne’s victories. Oh, there would be her recital performance at the White Sands Hotel and a few more scholarly peaks, but the reaper whose name was death was marching toward Green Gables. On the night Anne once again shared good news with Matthew—that she had won the Avery scholarship—he was thrilled to the gills.

And then he uttered the line that every orphan of every stripe wants to hear: He told her that she was “my girl—my girl that I’m proud of.”[121] I imagine his eyes tender and his buttons popping.

This father and daughter didn’t know it, but their time together was almost over. “It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it.”[122] When I read Anne for the third time, after my dad’s death, I choked up. I, too, had been touched by that hand, and I knew that when you lose someone as essential as a father, your life is never quite the same.

It’s hard to believe Matthew and Anne had only four years together. I could start howling right now, couldn’t you? Each time I read the story, I know his death is coming—it’s not like later editions of the book feature alternate endings—but Matthew’s death always breaks me right down to the ground.

So there’s the inevitable part where I am predestined to cry, but right before, there’s Anne, realizing a truth that will hold her through her grief:

“I’m quite content to be Anne of Green Gables,”[123] she said. She’s content to belong, a daughter of simple folk and a meek, small town. No diamonds can compare to the value of pearl beads given to her by Matthew with love.

I can relate.

No New York Times chart topper can rival the value of being entrusted to tell Marv’s heaven story, to be his “third daughter” for just two and a half years.

No inheritance can compare to being “the Reimer girl from the bookstore,” daughter of the late, great craftsman of bookselling. Because of my dad’s influence, I write, I read, and I stack teetering piles of books by my bed (and along the wall, for half the length of the room). On account of my dad, who suffered as a child of war and then as a refugee in a new land, I have a lifelong soft spot for outcasts, underdogs, and strangers. I aspire to his humility and kindness for all people. These are my heirlooms, not because of biology, but because one man opened his heart to love another man’s child.

Phoebe, who never got the chance to really know her doting opa, has been blessed with her own Matthew Cuthbert. No horse-drawn carriage ride could be more wonderful than cruising in Grandpa’s white convertible; no banquet could be more delicious than sharing cookie dough ice cream on a summer’s evening.

Anne, Phoebe, and I—we are the lucky ones, loved by fathers who were not obliged by blood to care but did anyway. Above all, Matthew Cuthbert cared. Overlooked all his life by others, Matthew did not speak in the tongues of men or angels—he hardly spoke at all. He was patient and kind. He had no ego. He did not dishonor others, was not self-seeking or easily angered. Though his girl was often in the wrong, Matthew kept no record. He always protected, always trusted, always hoped, and always persevered. His love never failed her.[124]

Matthew Cuthbert reminds me of another adoptive father, one who gives good and perfect gifts and tells each one of us, “You’re My girl—My girl I’m proud of.”

When Someone loves you like that, you can’t help but bloom, unfold, increase, and gain color in your face and in your days. When Someone looks at you through those eyes, there’s nothing you can’t do.