Time and Patience

“With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes the silk gown.” -Asian proverb

The Saturday after my eleventh birthday was warm for late October. Though my brothers and I were several weeks into the new school year, Autumn weekends had always remained available for fishing—at least until the first early storm arrived or first quarter report cards were mailed home. Either way, being at the beach was a welcomed birthday present for me. There were gifts still to come, and changes afoot. Unknown to us at the time, the coming winter of 86-87 would bring a strong El Nino event that would erode the Newport Beach sand beneath our feet and damage several piers along the coastline.
But sufficient for a day was its own evil, and ours was nothing of the kind. June gloom fog was a distant and fading memory of the summer passed, and the sun, plotting a lower path across the cloudless cerulean sky worked in vain against our summer tans. Dan and I waded in waist-deep water, lifting our fishing rods overhead with each passing wave wash, and braving the eventuality of getting poked in the foot by a rock that had drifted away from the nearby jetty—or by a stingray hiding in the lee of it. Tommy, Matt, and Zach busied themselves with “digging to China” near the water’s edge, groaning every ten minutes that a large set would flood their excavation site. Jonny lay on a blanket under Mom’s red beach umbrella and more to the point, her watchful eye…his own eyelid barely betrayed the twin-pinhole scars of his run-in with a low-dangling hook a few months before. Needless to say, Jonny wouldn’t be anywhere near a fishhook for several more years.
Dad stood high on the beach, as he always did, to avoid soaking his shoes and jeans. I don’t recall whether or not he owned a pair of shorts; he always wore jeans and a solid-color polo shirt to the beach. His yellow Eagle Claw rod (one of two prized possessions, the other being a Martin D28 guitar he bought with paper route and dish-washing money in 1962) held attentively in his left hand, and the handle of the Penn spinning reel gripped lightly between the thumb and index finger on the right, Dad relaxed in the sun as we did, but for his own quiet reasons.
Bill Acker was the second of four children, and the only son of an accountant and a housewife transplanted from Pottsville, PA to Pasadena, CA, who started a family in their forties. When Dad was 15 years old, his father suffered a debilitating stroke, and much of the burden of supporting aging parents and three sisters partially fell to him. He worked several jobs throughout high school and junior college, foregoing his interest in astronomy that might have taken him to some distant university or universe, to stay in Pasadena, and hand-over his paychecks to his parents. Dad traded his home-made telescopes—complete with hand-ground lenses-- for two years of lithography and printing classes at Pasadena City College that blued his collar, but not his spirits. For as long as I’ve known him, Dad has always been defined by his tireless work; and that, in turn, was marked by his selflessness and sacrifice. One of his only recreations was fishing, and then, only when his sons could join him.
Yet all of that was prologue for this day, it seemed. I watched my dad standing there far from the water, a slight bend in the tip of his rod that flexed and gave with each wave that washed over his line. There was an air of jocularity around his otherwise stoic frame; a long summer as a Cub Scout Master and Little League President had come to a quiet end, and this bonus weekend was savored like a fine meal. Despite the slow bite for a few hand-sized barred surf perch and a small corbina, Dad loved fishing with his family, and it showed in his posture: A proud, magnanimous man, regarding Creation on a fine Indian summer day, as well as his six contributions to it.
The slow fishing failed to keep my interest, however, and I wound-in my line and trudged out of the surf. As I walked towards my Dad to put my rod in the sand-spike and go help my brothers with their international tunnel project, I saw my dad silently mouth, “I love you” to Mom, sitting several feet away in her beach chair. They smiled at each other for a brief moment, and I felt an interestingly bashful shame (the shame eleven year old boys experience right about the time they demystify the girls-have-cooties notion) for having witnessed their amorous exchange.
Instead of running over to the considerable hole my brothers had now dug in the sand, something drew me to my dad’s side that afternoon, some new question that up until that moment, I didn’t know I had in my brain, or maybe my heart.
“Dad,” I asked, “How do you know who to marry?” His eyes didn’t move from his rod-tip, as it seems I had posed my important query at the same time as one of the few perch in the waves was tapping at his razor clam bait offering, but his wide smile informed me that he had heard me.
“Why, you gotta girlfriend?” he asked through his smile.
“No!” I barked, half-embarrassed, and half-proud that my dad would think me so worthy…and at eleven years old! “No, I mean, I’m not getting married ever, but, how do you know who you should marry?”
The pitch of my not-yet-changed voice—and the fact that no more twitches in his rod tip meant whatever was eating his bait had finished and moved-on—caused him to look down at my face, this time with a knowing smile, his lips pressed together beneath his moustache in a wry but understanding grin.
It was in that moment—one of my father's more tender—that Dad gave me an answer his father had probably given him. "You'll meet a lot of women, Ben. Some you'll love, some you'll hate. And there will be a lot of things about each of them that you love, and some things you won’t. Find a girl whose loveables outnumber her hateables, and hold-on to her. Respect her. Protect her. Celebrate her. Honor her. Cherish her. Just love her. She's the one that will make your dreams come true.”
“But how do you find a girl like that?” I asked, feeling not-quite as embarrassed as a moment before.
“It takes time. You have to be patient. And when it happens, you’ll just know. The way I just knew with Mom,” he said simply, looking at his rod tip again. “But you gotta work at it once you find her,” Dad cautioned. And then, in demonstration of a trait he would eventually pass on to me, my dad synthesized his comments by pulling a random quotation from the complex recesses of his mind: “With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes the silk gown.”
“What’s a gown?” I asked. After all, I had five brothers, and mom was never really the gown-wearing type.
“It’s like a fancy dress,” he answered unimportantly, realizing the moment had passed. “Remember the silk worms in Mrs. Wheeler’s class?”
I remembered them: In just a few weeks, their collective insatiable appetite had practically denuded the mulberry tree outside my fifth grade classroom. Quivering, pallid gray caterpillars whose life story written for them by Nature, it seemed, was to eat, change into flightless moths, and make baby silkworms. And I remembered the cocoons they spun were made into silk. Whatever that was. The closest thing I had to silk was the smooth nylon trim sewn around the edge of the blanket on my bunk bed.
“Oh yeah,” I said, with unimportance to match my dad’s, looking over at Tommy and Matt, who had given up on digging, and had Zach buried up to his neck precariously close to the surf line. I glanced at my dad’s face without saying anything, and without looking away from his rod tip, nudged his head towards Zach. “Go dig your brother out before they drown him.”
For an eleven year old boy, Dad’s answer was sufficient, but full of questions. Girls need to have more good stuff than bad stuff, I remember thinking as I knelt in the sand, digging frantically as Zach coughed and sputtered, taking another wave in the face. Although dating was still a few years away, I mulled Dad’s words over and over in my head, considering each of his directives on its own merit.
Respect her. Protect her. Celebrate her. Honor her. Cherish her. In other words, Love her. It wouldn’t be for many years that I came to a more complete understanding of the profound wisdom Dad had shared with me that day. It was a birthday gift unlike any other I had received from my parents. It was the first present I got from my Dad that signaled he realized I was growing up, he didn’t see me as a little kid all of the time, he didn’t think that I was incapable of comprehending some of life’s deeper truths (even though at eleven years old, I had no idea how to “celebrate” a person, or even what “cherish” meant.)
When I think about what Dad meant that day on the beach, when I think about what love really is, I sometimes like to think of those slow, steady, and purposeful silkworms systematically devouring their leafy meal. Their fate is inevitable—after a life of incessant eating and growing, each caterpillar spins a cocoon that will never open to reveal the moth inside. Instead, most of the cocoons are boiled to kill the pupae within, unwound into long thin strands of silk, and woven into luxurious, delicate fabric. Only a fraction of each generation is allowed to crawl from their cocoons as moths, breed, lay eggs, and die within a few days. And whether they go out in the hot bath or in the throes of post-reproductive bliss, each of their lives is sacrificed to create something beautiful, something that is celebrated and cherished, something that is protected and honored, something that is respected and loved—long after the changing seasons bring new leaves to the mulberry tree, and new caterpillars to their ultimate destinies.
Like them, we are called to sacrifice our work, our effort, our time, our energy, to grow something greater than ourselves, to search for loveables in another person. We are called to love another by giving of ourselves, by sharing freely without reservation. Our hopeful reward for such efforts is that our selfless giving is reciprocated, that we might reap what we sow…so long as we are careful in our selection, cognizant of the grand design, and patient for the results of our love.
Unlike silk worms, we like to believe we have a choice in the matter. There is no pot of boiling water in most of our futures, but there is always the possibility that our sacrifice, our gift to another, will not be returned to us. The hateables strike again, and it is in that patience that we will come to understand that.
As for me, I think I finally understand what my dad was talking about all those years ago on the beach. For a man whose life had largely been sacrifice, that day—that glorious autumn day with the sand beneath his shoes and the sun on his face, with his loving wife and six sons—was his silk gown. Granted, that is a laughable visual image in the literal sense. But figuratively speaking, that day, like so many others since, was his achievement for having the patience to see the greater purpose of his actions, and to have the foresight to accept the possibility that two seemingly independent examples of selfless love could connect in a powerful way. So many years ago, Dad fell into the truth that by giving of himself and his time to his sisters and parents, he would ultimately achieve his goal of having a family of his own. By being patient, he would meet the woman who would give back what she had been given, and when he met her, he would “just know it.” Together, nothing could stop them from fulfilling their purpose: creating their own personal Heaven to share with a family. He lost nothing. He gained everything.
No selfless act of love is ever wasted; it holds the potential to make our dreams come true.