Chapter Three: All in the Family

A few months ago, Eileen Moore died (Kathy’s Mom) and so did Gilbert Vaillancourt (Dan’s Dad).  Near the end of their lives, they were bound to wheelchairs, and yet they both dreamed of coming to Mineral Point and the Walker House to help us fix the House so that we could welcome people from all over the world.  We, too, dreamed of their “homecoming,” and we worked hard so that they could wheel themselves throughout the House.  It will never happen.

But that’s not the end of the story.  A 20^th century French philosopher Gabriel Marcel explained through his concept of creative fidelity that when persons cannot be physically next to us, their presence—a combination of memories, values, character, stories—can engage and influence us.  It simply requires us to be creatively faithful to them.  In other words, we can choose through remembering them to let them be near us, to engage them, and to find creative ways to let them influence us.  This creative fidelity is powerful stuff and a wonderful way to keep living with the people we love so much when they are away from us.

When you come to the Walker House, we welcome you into our home, exactly as our Mom and Dad would have done.  We are genuinely happy to see you, we want to hear about your day, and we want to share everything we have with you.  And, like Mom and Dad, we function with modest financial goals: food and drink prices remain low because we want you to come back (we just want to pay the bills and build an endowment—more about the endowment in a subsequent chapter); the price you see is the price you pay (as to the sales tax and gratuity, we’ll pay them); and we drive our resources into purchasing real food, grown organically and naturally by us and our neighbors, and always homemade before we serve it to you.  We’re proud to say that, though Mom and Dad won’t be at the Walker House, you’ll definitely “see” them.

It’s all in the family.

To Be Continued…