I hope you will take a few minutes to view the video that follows in the next post.
(pause the music player so as to hear it)
I haven't talked much about my Dad lately, his physical condition is about the same as it has been for the past 7 or 8 months, but his mental capacities seem to be diminishing more.
He has been prone for that past two or three years to tell the same stories over and over; now however, he will finish a familiar account - pause to clarify something about the story - and launch right into telling the story over again.
One of the stories he tells ( and I've heard this one throughout my life) is about a particular day when it was too wet to work in the garden. For family members who read this, some of the details may not be accurate since the nuances of the story change with each re-telling.
My Dad was one of ten children. Their family farmed vegetables and cotton and their father - my Granddad - was a preacher. Like the Methodist Circuit Riders of old, my grandfather seldom Pastored a single church; instead he traveled the countryside throughout the southeastern United States, preaching where ever he could get a hearing and staying in the homes of people that were moved with kindness.
This meant that he was away from home a great deal and the children were expected to keep the farm going in his absence.
One summer day, it was too wet to plow or otherwise work the garden. The boys were sent out to hoe the weeds in the cotton. They struggled awhile and finally Howard said it was too wet - he was going home. With that, one of the elder brothers, Finney, replied that if Howard - or "Hy-Bo" as they called him- wasn't going to work, they would all quit.
On that day, their father (who happened to be home) declared a holiday of sorts. According to Dad, he borrowed Arthur Johnson's stake-bodied truck (a "stake-bodied" truck has tall sides that allow one to stack up more cargo), and loaded everyone up for a trip to Grant Park in Atlanta.
Dad says that they packed buttered biscuits in a flour sack and his father stopped and bought some coconut bon-bon's - that was their lunch.
They had a grand time.
I wondered: why would a day like that stick with a man for 65 to 70 years?
What would be so compelling about that experience, that it would stay in his mind when so many other significant events had become cloudy?
My mother-in-law passed along to me something this week that she had heard a preached talk about. Now in his twilight years, the minister had thought about what he would do differently with his children - if he had it to do over again.
He said he would be silly more. He would do more crazy things.
This summer, our children seem to be more than capable of supplying their own silliness in excessive amounts. While I have noticed myself responding more and more in a grumpy fashion. I have thought about that little anecdote my mother-in-law passed along many times.
I suspect that halting the work on a farm and buying coconut bon-bons in the 1930's or early 1940's would have been considered a silly thing to do. But for some reason, my Granddad chose to spend that time in such a manner.
And the legacy of the love from that one day still lives on in the stories and memories of a old man.
Am I making memories today with my family that will last anywhere near that long?
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