Sunbonnet Soliloquy

By Jewell Ellen Smith

A Tribute to My Brother Clyde

“Brighten the corner where you are,

Brighten the corner where you are;

Someone far from harbour,

You may guide across the bar.

Brighten the corner where you are.”

This refrain from an old song, a hymn now long forgotten and left out of modern songbooks, came back to me the other day. I was reading the newest Census Bureau figures on how many people there are in this world: 4,721,887,000 -- as of mid-June. And that is 82 million more than there were one year ago.

As I read the report a second time, I thought, “My goodness, four billion, seven hundred twenty-one million, eight hundred and eighty-seven thousand people is a lot of people.”

And I’m just one ot them. One in four billion -- about like one grain of sand lying on the shore of the sea. What difference do I make? I am about as important as one of those little dim, pin-point stars flickering high in the heavens, far, far away and surrounded by billions of other faint little flickering specks of light.

What difference can any one person make among so many? No difference. I’ll just let those four billion people run the world. What I do -- or don’t do -- doesn’t count.

Then, the lines of the old song came back -- “Brighten the corner where you are” -- and I was a child again, singing at Sunday School in a little country church, and thinking how when I got big I would be like a tall bright coal-oil lamp sitting on the table in a dark corner. And I would make the darkness go away, the grownups there would be able to see and the little children would not be afraid ... And with my own hands I would trim the lamp wick every day and put in lots of oil and keep the chimney polished, spotless ... I didn’t know what a harbour was, nor a bar. But that didn’t matter.

The same day the Census Bureau figures came out, one of those four billion people, one close and dear to me, died. He was Clyde Ellen, my older brother.

We buried him in the country graveyard, near the place where our old church stood. Years before, he too had gone there and had sung the “Brighten the corner where you are” song.

And he knew the meaning of the song and how to use his hands to make the words come true.

Clyde’s hands were big, rough, strong -- the hands of a man who once was a soldier who went away to war and then came home and planted and ploughed fields, and raised horses and cattle and turkeys and donkeys and good things to eat and lovely flowers -- the hands of a man who helped the sick and those down-and-out and young people just getting a start -- the hands of a man who worked hard and yet found time to hunt and fish and play, and time to guide his children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, and time to be a deacon in his church.

I remember seeing Clyde’s hands holding the rifle he carried during World War I, and seeing him wrap on the khaki leggings that were part of his Army uniform.

I remember seeing Clyde’s hands wiping away tears, the tears that streamed down his face when he learned that his firstborn son, Harold, had been killed. Harold would not come home from World War II, to plant and plough the fields. The telegram said he had been buried at sea, far out in the Pacific, where Japanese suicide planes had attacked his ship, The Intrepid.

I remember seeing Clyde’s hands folded in prayer -- years later. He thanked Almighty God that his grandson had come home from the Viet Nam War -- to plant and plough fields, or to do whatever seemed best.

In peacetime and in wartime, day by day for 84 years -- during hard times and illnesses and pain and sorrows that would have broken many a man -- my brother did what he could to make his corner of the world bright. Once he was severely burned. Another time his back was broken. Death came to his home again. In it all he never wavered -- he held to what was honest and upright. To him, what was right was right. Thus, his influence was considerable.

As one of four billion people, this man made a difference.

So can each one of us.

Let us strengthen our hands, trim our lamps and “brighten the corner where we are.”

And let us be careful that our children sing the right songs so that, in time, they too will know to make their light shine in dark corners.

Published October 1983. Click your browser’s “Back” button to return.