Papa's Birthday

Today would have been my "Pop's" birthday. I think he would have been 105.


I thought I would jot down a few thoughts about him here. He was my Mom's father and passed away in the mid-90's.


He was quiet and humble. He seemed very different from my paternal grandfather who was considered a great man in some small circles and he seemed to carry himself with a certain dignity while Pop's visage was one of meekness.


Pop didn't have a great deal of education and he grew up hard. It was a large family, I don't know much about his father except that he was cruel at times.


Pop had a great deal of influence on me as I think of it. He retired from the one of the Dundee Cotton Mills in Griffin, Georgia when I was very young. By the time I came along he had already been through about two crops of grandchildren so he had mellowed. He had played the role of disciplinarian with my old brother and his crew, but by the time I came along he was more like a grandpa.

I spent quite a bit of time at their home in that quiet East Griffin Mill Village. I stayed with Pop and Granny, one - maybe two weeks out of the year, we tended to spend the better part of one vacation there each year, and there were countless weekends.

There home was the closest thing to a country farm that I knew, Pop had chickens. He raised them for the eggs and for food.

He also bore a latent "entrepreneurial" gene that was came to surface in things like his fish bait endeavour. After he retired, Pop decided to start a bait farm. He raised Grade "A" Red Wigglers and sold them to local bait shops.

I have thought about this a lot lately as I felt inspired to launch our family into a composting lifestyle. Pop put "anything that will rot" into his worm beds. These beds were a gardener's dream. They were made of cinder blocks, 2 1/2 to 3 feet deep, about five feet wide and 20 to 50 feet long - filled to the brim with cotton waste, assorted manures, food scraps, clippings, leaves, newspapers . . . and millions of fat worms.

This appealed to my own penchant for the unique and unusual; it was also the subject of more than one school report. Since Pop would let me help harvest the worms and would pay me a portion of the profits I spent a good bit of time with him there on some trips.

He and I would don this filthy, smelly Playtex gloves, and sit on milk crates, turning compost and plucking the joyful little invertebrates from their warm and moist surroundings.

I think if we had avoided the gloves, my nail-biting habit would have ended much earlier in life.

Only recently have I realized the great value of that time. We just talked. I don't even remember what we talked about - but we were spending time together.

Others would come by. Small children that lived in the neighborhood were drawn to Pop and they would stop in to visit or maybe even help a little. Little kids just took to him. Pop had a brother and a sister that lived on the same street and they would usually happen by on the way to their garden spot or just to check in - they might pull up a crate and talk as we worked. I remember at least one occasion when my aunt was working nearby and she spent her lunch break talking with Pop about her older children.

The very process of this work was such that it eliminated most distractions (except for mosquitoes and gnats) and its amazing what you can sort out when you are elbow deep in muck.

He and Granny survived on a very small pension from the mill and Social Security. Pop made very little profits from his bait sales, but they produced a good bit of what they ate, chicken, eggs, and piles and piles of garden vegetables. But I thought they were rich, because I knew for a fact that Pop kept a $100 bill folded and tucked away in his wallet and at one time he had fruit jars filled with half dollars locked in his trunk in one of the back bedrooms.

As I look back their lifestyle was very meager. I always remember Pop telling me how that when Mom was a child, one night they ran out of food - ran out! He told me that he had gone out in the night to try and buy a little something to eat because he "couldn't stand the thoughts of his babies waking up hungry with no food in the house".

Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth"

That was Pop. And he spent a great portion of his lifetime working with his hands, right there in his earthy inheritance.