Mysteries and secrets

By JoAnne Young

The dinner plate was made in China, dishwasher safe, but not safe from the harm that came from the smashing it got when it hit the parking lot pavement. 

It broke into more than a dozen shards, scattered over multiple spaces in that lot at Holmes Lake. 

A white dinner plate, maybe more than one, that had taken on greater significance than holding food to nourish a body. It had become a receptacle to feed someone’s soul -- with words -- written in blue marker and red ink. 

 

By the time I came upon it, it had been used to channel relief of someone’s anger or frustration or sadness. 

 

Those words had been broken apart, some smudged. I could read only a few: victim, because, fake, happy, never, good, stop, harming. And one phrase: “But it’s so hard.” 

 

I spent many steps on that walk after viewing the refuse letting my imagination form a story of the journey of that plate to that parking lot, and the emotions that accompanied it. 

 

It’s why I love Lincoln’s urban lake, where people of all ages and stages, all backgrounds and purposes, go to walk, fish, bird, photograph, talk, play, share space with wildlife and water and earth. 

 

To scatter shiny stars or confetti in some kind of celebration. To tailgate on a cool evening. 

 

To leave messages. 

 

On one early December day I found one of those, wrapped in clear plastic and fastened to a bridge. It said:

 

“Think good thoughts

Words become actions

Actions become habits

Habits become character

Character becomes destiny”

 

It was signed with a heart and the names of two boys and their “proud daddy.” 

 

I’ve also found notes of despair written on rocks on the water’s edge. 

 

The stories of the lake can be profound. And sad. In early January I came across the leg of a large waterbird surrounded by icy gray and white feathers lying on the side of a hill. 

 

The mysteries and secrets of grief and healing are frequent visitors to the lake. 

 

There is a favorite spot of mine, on the southeast side across from Hyde Observatory where I watch and photograph the sunset. A perfect place for a bench, I had thought for years. 

 

Then one fall day in 2020 I walked to the spot and there it was … a bench. I had manifested a bench. But no, of course not. The story of that bench became clearer within a short time when a plaque was placed on it. 

 

It reads:

Gene’s Point 

A place for all. 

Eugene J. LeDuc 

1985 – 2020

There are so many reasons that this has become Gene’s Point. It’s a place to rest under the pines, where the sun puts on a show every evening as it bids farewell and ushers in the twilight, the time between dog and wolf, when the light is such that it becomes difficult to distinguish between a dog and a wolf, between friend and foe, the known and the unknown. 

Gene's parents, Joe and Margaret LeDuc, were walking at the lake when they got the call that changed their lives, that created in their souls a perfect place for raw emotion. 

Their 34-year-old, kind-hearted son Gene had died suddenly and unexpectedly on that Sunday in mid-April. 

 

Gene had a calling in his work in Lincoln, to help adults with disabilities, to offer them support, to serve them. Many of those he worked with didn’t get out much, and he became that surrogate to bring them to the lake and other parks, to let them breathe in the outside air and get a different view. 

Joe and Margaret’s son loved the outdoors and nature, and would take walks at the lake, to work out his stress, as many of us do. So with the memorial money that friends and family had generously donated, the LeDucs proposed an idea to Lincoln Parks Foundation Executive Director Maggie Stuckey to place the bench in his memory on that tall grass hill with a view of a connecting bridge across a narrow passage of the lake. 

 

And there will be more. With additional donations they hope to get, it will become a place where even those with mobility challenges can park close by and have a pathway to the bench, and space for those who use wheelchairs to share the beautiful view. 

 

“As the inscription says on there, we want it to be a place for all. We want it to be a place for people to reflect and pray and just be,” Joe said. 

 

Life and death and everything in between are mysteries, as we have been reminded so often in 2020. They are filled with secrets. 

 

Like smashed plates and notes on rocks and a seat at sunset at Gene LeDuc’s Point. 

 

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