Mother, Granddaddy & Me, Circa 1986
Mother, Granddaddy and Nannie
http://youtu.be/7E88RUqyjts [Grandpa, Tell Me ‘Bout the Good Ole Days/The Judds]
The year was 1907. Theodore Roosevelt was President; the first [Maria] Montessori school opened in Rome; Royal Oil and Shell merged to form British Petroleum (BP); Congress was paid $7,500 a year [TAKE US BACK TO THOSE DAYS, PLEASE!!!!!]; Pink Star won the 33rd Kentucky Derby in 2:12.6; Tommy Burns was the heavyweight champion; the automatic washer and dryer were introduced; The St. Louis Cardinals Ed Karger pitched a perfect game against the Braves, 4-0 in 7 innings; the United Parcel Service began running service, in Seattle; the Plaza Hotel (5th Av and 59th Str, New York) opened; Ringling Brothers Greatest Show on Earth bought Barnum and Bailey circus; John Wayne, "the Duke" was born in Winterset, Iowa; Oklahoma became the 46th state in America; the 1st Christmas Seals were sold in the Wilmington Delaware post office; Ruyard Kipling received the Nobel prize for literature; the 1st all-steel passenger railroad coach was completed in Altoona, Pa; a ball dropped at Times Square to signal the new year for the first time; Julia Ward Howe became the first woman elected to the National Institute of Arts & Letters; Taxis began running in New York city; artist Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon/The Women of Avignon, which is one of the central works of 20th-century art; but the greatest thing to happen in 1907 was that my grandfather, Ryland Brown Whitlock was born on September 30th.
My grandfather was a character! He was a real dandy [my brother called him "Dandy" when he first was learning to speak and my mother, regretfully, corrected him and dropped that term of endearment] from what my great Aunt Viola, his sister, once said to me. [She was a real character herself - story for another day] His dance card was always full. He married my grandmother when he was 30, which was considered late to get married for that time. I always found it funny-ironic that his middle name was "Brown" because he was a farmer.
I knew him as the kind of man described in the following saying: "my grandfather had silver hair and a heart of gold". I came into his life when he was 56 years old. He left mine when I was 28. Neither of our lives were ever the same with my coming and his going. I think he would agree with that statement.
Today, my granddaddy would have turned 104 years old. I’ve been thinking of him all day - pulling my memories out and examining them all. Each one is like a precious pearl, and I’d like to share some of them with those of you who care to read about him:
My grandfather wasn’t by society’s standards considered an educated man, because he didn’t go to college, but he was smart in his own ways, which were just as impressive. For instance, he knew that you could yield about 183 bushels of corn per acre. He also knew that you shouldn’t plant soybeans until you were certain that the last frost of the winter season was over, because the ground needed to be warm for best growth. He knew that soybeans needed to be planted in the section of his farm that got the fullest sun . He also knew to use nitrogen rich fertilizer for this particular crop, because they grew better in soil with a higher nitrogen content, and the soil needed to be kept moist for optimum growth. He knew that growing tomatoes required patience, because they can take a long time to grow, and he knew exactly when to stake them and exactly how far apart that stake should be from the actual plant so that you didn’t damage the root system.
However, the most amazing thing my grandfather knew, in my opinion, was how to tell the ripeness of a watermelon simply by a thump. He didn’t have to thump it more than once either. He knew by the sound that his finger made against the rind of that melon whether it was ripe for the pickin’. It was a marvel, because when he sliced it open, it was always a deep, beautiful, melon-red and as sweet as sugar. He could do the same thing with a cantaloupe - one sniff from where the vine had been pulled away from the plant, was all he needed to know if you were going to get a sweet one or not. My granddaddy taught me the culinary taste of how much better cantaloupe tasted with a sprinkling of black pepper too. If you’ve never tried it, you don’t know what you’re missing!
There were other things he did which I found fascinating. He could play a mouth harp like nobody’s business, and I never knew that two spoons held together just so and rapped against one’s knee could make music - that was, until my granddaddy showed me that it was so. He could produce some toe-tapping music with those spoons too.
Demonstrative love in the form of words wasn’t something he was big on. He told you he loved you with his hug. His hugs were Goliath in strenght. He held you tight and for a few extra seconds than a normal hug.
He whittled stuff too. It might not sound like much, but my granddaddy was really good at it. Try it sometime. I guarantee you that it’s not as easy as it sounds or looks.
He was also a GREAT story teller. Lord, that man could make your seams bust with the yarns he spun. It’s a gift to be able to tell a good story. As a writer, I know the degree of difficulty it takes to accomplish that particular feat. His always brought you to laughter with his stories, to the point of almost wetting your pants. I’m not ashamed to say that. It’s the truth. That’s how funny his stories were. It’s good to laugh like that. More people need to laugh like that more often!
As a farmer, he took on the hottest day of the year without a second thought, because his livelihood depended it. His families needs depended on it – on him being stronger and tougher than the elements. If it meant that he was out in the fields by 6 a.m. planting, that’s what he did. His days were long. They were rigorous. They were especially grueling during a time when he worked not only his fields during the day but worked a neighbor’s late into the night, because the man was unable to tend to his crops.
That was my grandfather’s Magnificent Obsession. For those of you who never saw the movie with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson [you missed a great movie], the underlying message of the film was this: practice doing good deeds secretly. Secretly was the key to the thought. You reap more spiritual benefit from doing something out of the goodness of your heart - never seeking praise for doing it, not wanting fortune or fame as a result.
The theme, from what I learned, was based on a passage from the Gospel of Matthew [6:1-4]
"Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father, which is in heaven.....That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly."
That’s what my grandfather did by that gesture. Outside of his family and the family of the friend on whose behalf he worked, I don’t know if anyone else was aware of his good deed. It wasn’t what motivated him. That’s what made him not only special, but a great man, in my opinion. Great men in history have done far less to earn that title.
My granddaddy was a big teddy bear. He could appear gruff, but he had a marshmallow heart. One of his tender spots was for his grandchildren. I remember the last year that we lived in Virginia, we went over to Nannie and Granddaddy’s on Easter Sunday for lunch and the Easter egg hunt.
The Easter egg hunt was as big a deal for my grandfather as it was for us. He was the one who hid the eggs, you see. I, being the baby of the grandchildren at the time, didn’t have the advantage that the other kids did, namely, being bigger and able to reason where good hiding places might be. So, my grandfather put an egg on top of the well, on the bench of the picnic table, on the stair of the front porch, at the base of the big tree that stood to the left of the farmhouse, in the grass beside the door of his small shed. When the hunt started, he took hold of my hand and took me over to each spot, saying "looka there, Shorty! Looka there!" [There’s a photograph of me standing on top of the picnic table counting all my eggs]
When I was four years old, my family moved to Jacksonville, Florida. It crushed my grandparents. My parents unintentionally were taking 3/5ths of their grandchildren away - four states away. It seemed like it was to the end of the earth. It wasn't off course, but that's how it felt to all of us. It was hard leaving them, but I think it was toughest on them. I remember we left our German Shepherd, Storm, with my grandfather. He loved that dog! I think it was kinda like him having a little bit of us there with him everyday – something tactile. That dog had been devoted to us, and he became devoted to my grandfather. My grandfather was devoted to him also in his own, private way, and round it went, that perfect circle of love. We couldn’t wait, every summer, to go to Virginia to visit with my grandparents and to see Storm.
It was during those visits that the wonder of the farm was impressed upon me. Granddaddy sat each of us in his lap on the tractor and tilled one row of the field that he was working on. He let us ride in the back of his truck too. It wasn’t a typical flatbed truck like a Ford Ranger. This was a big truck used to harvest produce. It had plywood attached to either side of it that was painted green, and he tied a rope across the back so the bigger kids could sit on the edge and hold onto the rope. It was a BIG deal. He only went under 5 m.p.h., but it was an adventure. I never got to sit on the edge. I wasn’t old enough or big enough, but so I wouldn’t feel left out, he always gave me one of whatever vegetable or fruit we’d picked and told me that my job was to hold onto it and make sure nothing happened to it. It was an important job for a little girl, and from where I sat, a bigger deal then sitting on the edge of the truck and holding onto a rope.
Then, there was the hen-house. Every afternoon at about three o’clock, he let me gather the eggs. They were the most amazing things I’d ever seen - they were big and brown and warm. I’d never seen brown eggs except on my grandparents' farm. I’d always thought eggs were white, and when I held them at home, they were cold. [Yeah, I noticed stuff like that.] He held my hand and led me into that hot little house filled with screen windows and rows of wooden troughs, like you’d feed a pig from. They were filled with hay, and the smell of the hay was heavy in the air because of the heat. I was afraid of the chickens pecking at my feet, so he’d throw a little feed into the center of the coop’s floor to distract them, while I gathered those eggs in the basket. I looked forward to that part of the day most of all, and took great pride when my grandmother made us breakfast the next day because I had been the one to collect those eggs, and they tasted so good.
It was just as adventurous driving down to the pig pen. Granddaddy let us go down there with him when it was time to feed them too. He and my brother’d pour slop from five gallon buckets into the troughs, then he'd let my sister and I scoop water from the pail and fill the troughs designated for water. Once that was done, then he’d call "Soo-ee"! There’s an art to calling pigs. Let me tell you, if you don’t do it right, they don’t come. Some may disagree on this point, but I’m telling you what I saw. You have to make the call in a loud voice, then raise the pitch a bit to make pigs come to you. When they came over, Granddaddy would point out the pigs the sows and the hogs. One might thing the terms are interchangeable to describe all pigs, but they aren’t. A pig is a young swine that is not yet sexually mature. Now, my grandfather wasn’t that explicit with us, he just told us that the boys were called pigs. [No wisecracks.] He didn’t bog us down with the technical "swine" part of the terminology, because he knew that little brains could only absorb so much technical stuff. The females were hogs and adult hogs became sows. He explained it something like this: "that little gal right here is a hog, and that big gal over there, has all the babies. She is one of my prized sows. This little fella just turned from a piglet into pig..." That’s how he explained it. He was especially excited, as were we, if he got to show us a piglet.
I remember one time after I’d seen the movie Charlotte’s Web, asking my granddaddy if I could have one of his piglets. I wanted a boy piglet to name Wilbur. It put him in a terrible quandary because he didn’t like to tell us "no", unless it involved something that might hurt us.
"You can’t take a pig back on the train," he said. "Besides, I don’t think your Mama would like that too much. You need a pig pen to put him in anyway, and ya’ll don’t have one of those at your house. You just leave him right here, and you can visit him when you come up." That ended the discussion on the piglet. My mother was grateful.
My brother was his favorite grandchild. I say this with no envy in my heart. It didn’t bother any of the rest of the grandkids either, because he didn’t treat us any different except for taking my brother off alone to do "boy things". I don’t know what those boy things were, and that’s a secret that my brother still holds private to this day. I suspect it was fishing or something like that or maybe taking him out into the woods and teaching him how to shoot a rifle...boy stuff. That didn’t sound like fun to me anyway, so I never minded. And, he use to let my brother go to the market with him when he sold his produce.
Jeff, you see, was the first grandchild, and the first boy at that - the son that my grandfather never had. Aside from that fact, my brother, along with my parents, lived with my grandparents for the first couple of years of Jeff’s life. It was a bonding experience that the rest of the grandchildren didn’t share with him. But, the love he had for all of us was the same. Case in point. I believe I’ve alluded to this in another post: my brother was a good "picker". What I mean by that is that he could pick on my sister and I until he drove us to distraction and/or to a level of frustration that was maddening! When he did that, my granddaddy would say to him, "you better knock it off, or I’ll pop you upside your head!" Never, in a million years, would he have laid a hand on any of us, but to a kid, it sounded like a big, tough, threat. My brother knocked it off, and my grandfather was my hero.
The other thing he didn’t tolerate amongst us kids was bickering back and forth. Usually, this occurred because of my brother’s picking. You wouldn’t believe the squabbles he could start or the ruckus he could create. I think it’s a badge of honor among boys when they can do that. My brother, as I’ve indicated before, was a master at it. Still, my grandfather would have none of it. Any adult knows that nothing grates the nerves more than a bunch of kids bickering back and forth incessantly. He could shut us down with a stern, "shut that fuss up!" He never needed to say it twice nor did he need to say another thing. Nothing settled us down anymore than that command coming from my grandfather, just like our father’s "you better settle down or I’ll take you outside" could. We knew what it meant. It was very effective.
We listened too. We had respect for our elders, and if we mouthed off to them or didn’t mind them, we were straightened out real quick. It’s a dying art these days. I couldn’t imagine talking to my grandparents or my parents the way I hear some kids nowadays speak to theirs. First of all, I wouldn’t have made it to the ripe ole age of 48 had I done it. Secondly, it wasn’t tolerated either. Lessons. That’s what he taught us in his own, grand-fatherly way - valuable life lessons. They were just as important and just as necessary to our overall ability to get along in the world as what my parents taught.
He wasn’t an overly demonstrative man with words, as I previously mentioned. There weren’t a lot of "I love you’s" when we were little, but we knew how much he loved us by the strength of his hug. He gave Goliath hugs as mentioned! And, when we were little, he loved for us to take turns sitting in his chair and watching television with him. His chair rocked, and he always rocked it a bit when we sat with him. It was soothing. You were the envy of the other kids if you got to sit in the chair with my grandfather. I remember the extra treat we got after supper too. Beside his chair, on the end table that had the white lamp with the light blue dot patterns on it, was his candy dish. It was filled with hard candies - all colors, shapes, sizes and flavors. He’d reached over and open the lid of that carnival glass bowl to the grand kids during television time, but the one who was in his lap got to pick first.
On Saturday nights, we watched Hee Haw. Outside of All in the Family, I think it was his favorite show. I remember one time, Tennessee Ernie Ford was on. I remember him pointing to the t.v. and saying sternly to my brother, sister and I.
"You need to pay close attention to this. This man can sing! This is music, not that racket you listen to!"
I paid attention. Ernie Ford was a great singer. I never hear "Shenandoah" that I don’t think of that night and my grandfather. [It’s what he sang that night.] Yeah, I have always paid attention to something, when my elders advised me to. I wish more kids today would listen to their elders. But, I digress...
Then, always, when the vacation drew to a close, and it was time for us to go back home, he’d hand each of us a shiny, silver half dollar. That was a BIG deal back then. Fifty cents was a huge chunk of change. Thinking back on it, given the times and inflation, it was a generous gift for a farmer to give to his grandchildren, but that’s the kind of man he was.
My grandparents couldn’t wait for just the summer visits though. Each year, they drove down for Thanksgiving. We couldn’t wait to see them anymore than they could wait to be seen. Their car was loaded down with jams, jellies, pickles, canned green beans, canned greens, canned tomatoes, pear relish and always a Smithfield ham. I still remember the giddy feeling of knowing they were coming, and counting the minutes down from when they expected them to arrive – standing at the window and staring out, waiting for the first glimpse of their Ford. It was the same feeling being on the train, waiting for it to pull into the station, then searching the crowd as quickly as we could to find them. And, always, always, always, it makes me get a little teary thinking about it --- hearing them call to us, each of our names and running to them, arms wide open and feeling those big, strong arms of my grandfather wrap around me. I love you. It was loud and clear. There was nothing mistaken in its conveyance.
It was the same when they came to our house. Out the door we’d fly, arms wide open, running like we were in a P.E. class race to see who could reach them first, happily calling out to them. The hug was always the same: big, strong, full of love.
And, I can hear in my mind’s eye, my grandfather saying, "Come here, Shorty!" That was his term of endearment for me, because I was big on opinion but not height. [Some things haven’t changed]
When they left us to go back home, he’d say in a tone of cautionary love to his child’s child, "Behave and mind your manners!"
After we moved to Maryland, we drove down once a month to see them. The times had changed but the visits stayed the same. There was always the offering of a piece of hard candy. There were always the recollections of a story here and there during the visits. We continued to go out with him in the fields and work [He farmed his land up until six weeks before he passed.] and watching his old, worn hands masterfully slide over a plant, picking beans or whatever he was working on, like he’d barely touched it. There was the occasional concert featuring his mouth harp or the dueling spoons. Sometimes, we’d just sit on the front porch and talk about the happenings of this family and that....getting caught up with the news of the town: births, deaths, marriages, divorces, kid’s graduating from this or that, changes in the church and so forth, as the crickets chirped and the night fell as the stars came out. In those moments, there was nothing any better than that togetherness–that conversation.
I remember the last words he ever said to me as he walked me out to my car after a late-winter visit. In his later years, he began to tell us he loved us when we left him after, he gave us the big hug that evidenced that fact.
Then, he put my overnight bag in the backseat, and palmed me a $20. Next, he held the driver’s door open for me.
"Check those tires when you get home, ya hear. They’re looking a little balled."
I nodded. "I will, Granddaddy."
"You mind your manners."
Another nod of assurance. "I will, Granddaddy."
Then, he closed the door.
I looked up to him. [I didn’t need to be sitting in the front seat of my car to do that, mind you.] Still, un-abashed, I looked up at him and said. "I love you, Granddaddy!"
He cleared his throat. "I love you too, Shorty!"
Then, he said as I started the car. "You be careful now, ya hear! Don't drive too fast! They’re a lot of fools out there who don’t pay attention to nothin’! Watch yourself."
I nodded. I didn’t say anything else, because it didn’t matter how old I got, I was always a little overcome with emotion and tears when I left him and my grandmother.
By the time I had slowly pulled my car around the circular, gravel drive of their house that led out to the main road, he’d made his way around to the other side of the house so that he could watch me pull out. He always waved and never turned to go back inside the house until the car was out of sight. I know this because I always looked back in my rearview mirror and saw him standing there watching me leave.
That’s the last image I have of him: standing beside the house with his hand in the air, waving goodbye as he watched me drive off. It’s a treasured memory.
I heard once, years ago, someone ask on a talk show, [which one right now, escapes me], but the interviewer asked, "if you could go back to one moment in time, where would you go?"
I’d go back to when I was young – on the farm with my grandparents. It’s like a Rockwell painting, those times – warm and heartfelt. I loved them. I didn’t know how much until they were both gone. I don’t need the question to make me wish, sometimes, that I could go back and spend just one more day with them. I’d appreciate it so much more. I know that now. Age and hindsight are wonderful things at times...
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt his big, strong hug, and I miss it - like I miss his laughter and his voice, especially when it was saying something to Shorty.
Today, I drove over to the cemetery to pay my respects. I kissed the etched stone of his name and touched his dates, and I told him this: "Happy Birthday, Granddaddy! I’m minding my manners, and I’m being as careful as I can be. But, most of all, I miss you and greater than that, I love you! Shorty loves you so very, very much..."
http://youtu.be/khxx3sCVhtE [Shenandoah/Tennessee Ernie Ford]
No comments:
Post a Comment