The following is a speech, presented by Eugenie Bostrom at the 2014 International Moose Convention in Las Vegas, NV. The author owes much to the fraternal order, having grown up in a residential childcare facility founded and supported by the generosity of Moose members.
Good Evening Men and Women of the Moose. First I want to say how honored I am to be addressing you this evening. Honored doesn’t seem like a word that has enough impact to express how I feel. I hope that in the next few minutes, I can express how much the Moose has meant to me, and how I would not be the person I am today without everything that the Moose is and does.
Last week I was interviewed for an article in the Moose Magazine. I was asked, how I would advise people to follow their passion; as I have been very lucky to find work and to actually get paid to do what I am passionate about. But I realized that I’ve never actually followed my passion, rather, I’ve followed my gratitude, and that has lead me to a life filled with passion every day. What I mean by “following my gratitude” is that each step in my life, since I left Mooseheart has been in effort to give back on the opportunities that I have been afforded. I walk each day in gratitude, for everything, and especially for, everything the Moose has done for me. I personally feel a special bond with the Moose because I have close ties to another former Moose program as well: The Youth Conservation Corps at Yellowstone National Park. While it was Mooseheart that gave me a home that I needed, and shaped me in my formative years, it was that stability in combination with my experiences in the Conservation Corps that gave me the confidence, the insight and the platform from which to launch. I want to take this opportunity to tell all of you how important, no vital, the Moose is - how important all of you are, to me personally. To express this I could go into detail about how important Mooseheart was to me or how important the Conservation Corps program has been, but rather, I want to take this time to tell you about just one Moose member.
Evelyn Payne, from Front Royal Virginia Moose started writing to me when I was 11 years old. It was my first year living at Mooseheart… You see, I had been born to a single mother, and although she loved my brother and I dearly, she did not have the capacity to fully care for us. But I don’t want to discredit the power of love here – my mother’s love is what carried us, though she was sick and we were poor, I never felt it. Though we hopped from place to place, school to school, not knowing where we were going to live, or where we were going to get our next meal, I felt stability in our mothers love. My mother must’ve known that she did not have much longer to live, and I think she feared that we might be taken from her by the Department of Children and Family Services, either way she made the decision to give up custody and place us in a home that provided that physical stability that had been missing. It was the ultimate act of a mother’s love – giving us up so that we might live better lives; she sent us to Mooseheart. She passed away a year later, at the same time that Ms Evelyn from Front Royal began her letters.
Front Royal, had been the lodge that sponsored my and my brothers' admission into Mooseheart, and as we were the only youth that the Front Royal Lodge ever sponsored - I was fortunate to be to the recipient of many many letters from the lodge’s secretary at the time: Mrs Evelyn Payne. She would write to me about the most mundane things, and her letters took such a conversational tone; she would write out things like “Oh the tea kettle is boiling, hold on”… and then on the next line “I'm back!”, as if I would have known in reading this letter that she had briefly walked away from it. Even in my adolescence, I loved her letters and replied to every one - telling Evelyn about my recent basketball game or sharing with her my odd - youthful, political ambitions. She was my pen-pal until I graduated High School and left Mooseheart. In my early twenties I tended to move around a lot, as people in their twenties often do, I was spending every summer working with the Yellowstone YCC, and spending my winters in college, and then in Chicago, in Portland, OR, in Ventura, California... you get the picture. As my addresses were inconsistent – I, without meaning to, lost touch with Evelyn. I thought of her every now and then, but I was leading a new life – “finding myself,” as cliche as that is. As the years added up, my interest in re-engaging with the Moose grew stronger. My life and career were blossoming and I felt an even stronger pull to deliberately follow my gratitude. In 2009, after almost 10 years of seasonally returning to Yellowstone, I took a job with the US Department of Interior in Washington DC. Prior to this, I had never really spent time on the East Coast at all, and I had little understanding of the geography of the Mid-Atlantics. I figured that Front Royal, Virginia had to be within a day’s drive of DC, and resolved to at some point - seek out my sponsoring lodge when the time was right.
Once we were settled in the nation’s capitol - the 1st weekend that my boyfriend at the time and I had free, we decided to go camping in Shenandoah National Park. I had heard from co-workers how relatively close it was and that it was an easy drive; a straight shot out Route 66. So we packed up and just hopped on 66 west. We were leaving about 3 hours later than we had planned, so we didn't have time to look at a map, and we’d just planned to drive until we saw signs for Shenandoah. At some point it started raining - heavily. It was raining so hard that I had to pull off of the highway at the closest exit. We pulled into a gas station and waited until the rain died down. At the gas station we saw a sign telling us how many miles to Shenandoah National Park. We followed the signs. We passed a sign letting us know that we had just entered Front Royal, Virginia… it was so out-of-context that I was trying to piece together in my head why Front Royal was so recognizable, when my boyfriend absent-mindedly said “Oh look there’s a Moose lodge”. And it hit me; I screamed “Thats my sponsoring lodge!”. My boyfriend, a little startled by my outburst, pulled over and asked if we should go check it out. I said yes, but thinking that it would probably be empty… It was 6:30pm on a Friday evening after all. As we pulled up to the lodge we saw that the parking lot was empty. I thought that I might just leave a note. Then as we crested a little hill pulling into the lodge we saw that the parking lot in the back was packed indeed. “Well somebody’s here” my boyfriend said. As we parked and walked towards the lodge I thought to myself “Who do I ask for? What do I say? How likely is it that they will remember who I am, or care even.” This happened to be an evening when the Moose lodge was hosting one of the area’s most popular bands. So the place was packed. As I showed my Moose membership card at the entrance I leaned over to tell the woman checking the card that Front Royal was my sponsoring lodge, that I was from Mooseheart. She said “Oh, check with those ladies behind me”. Behind her were three of the most vibrant women I have ever had the benefit of knowing. Each of them old enough to be my great-grandmother. I leaned down to the woman in the middle of the three and explained myself again. I said, I was from Mooseheart and that Front Royal was my sponsoring lodge. She asked me my name, and when I replied “Eugenie Bostrom” she grasped my hands in hers and shouted “Its the Bostrom girl! Its the Bostrom girl!”, and when she told me her name I recognized her immediately as my long lost pen-pal. My boyfriend watched in utter shock as the magic of the scene unfolded. That was undeniably one of the most amazing nights of my entire life, as the copious love that was poured into me that evening by the entirety of the Front Royal moose still astounds me. Not only did they remember me,;hundreds of people came up to me telling me how proud they were of me, asking me if I still played basketball etc., telling Matt, my boyfriend that he better be “taking care of our girl”. They still considered me their girl. They still had pictures of adolescent me hanging up in the lodge. To say it was surreal would be an understatement.
That evening, one of the original 3 women who I had met, interrupted the very popular band, and told them to take 5 while she ushered me in front of the microphone. That evening I cried in appreciation to the wonderful people filling the lodge. That evening I reacquainted myself with a dear friend: Evelyn. It wasn’t just the letter’s of course, it was the amazing love that Evelyn radiated that made me feel close to her. At the same time it wasn’t just the love that she radiated, it was the love that she spoke and that she acted out every day. Evelyn told me, every time that I spoke to her, how much she loved me and how proud she was of me. This woman, who I had never met in person, until a happen-chance upon a Moose Lodge 5 years ago, expressed a love for me that I couldn’t imagine, and that I returned in-kind.
She lived a life full of love… and prior to her passing last year, I never got to tell her how much her love meant to me. I don't know that in a lifetime, I could express my appreciation for everything that she was for me, how in the simplest ways, she comforted, inspired and enlivened me.
This quote from Dr. Zhivago best describes Evelyn’s moving on:
“You in others-this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life-your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you-the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.”
Evelyn embodied the essence of living… and now that essence lives on in those that she loved. And how blessed am I to be one of those.
She meant so much to me, and though I never told her outright, the best way I can express that is by living her legacy.
I know that there are some members of Front Royal Moose here with us, and any of them will tell you that the Moose was everything to Evelyn. She was a Moose through and through – and so by living her legacy, I am really living the legacy of the Moose
– a life of service to others – following my gratitude.
Thank you.