Circa 1988
"He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it that counted – and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone." ~Ellen Glasgow
http://youtu.be/khxx3sCVhtE [Oh Shenandoah/"Tennessee" Ernie Ford]
http://youtu.be/TFBpIsFdHH0 [Color My World Instrumental/Chicago]
My grandfather died 20 years ago today. It seems like forever since I felt the embrace of his big, strong hug. I was 28 years old when God called him back, and heaven took him away from us. It was the first time I’d experienced the death of someone with whom I was extremely close. I’d lost a couple of friends – one had been born with heart problems and passed when I was in 6th grade. Another was killed by a drunk driver the week after school let out when I was in the 9th grade. Those were sad occurrences for me, but this was different. When my grandfather died, it was the first time I truly understood the "Oh my God! I’m never going to see him again as long as I live!" sentiment. It was a hard loss because my grandfather was my "Granddaddy" and all that role entailed. He was the only grandfather I had left, and now, he too was gone. It didn’t matter that I was 28 years old. I wasn’t ready to lose him! It didn’t matter that people marveled that he was 85 and had lived a good, long life. That was of no comfort to me! I’ve never found any comfort in him being "up yonder", as he called it, and the rest of us being down here.
He was a character! I loved him to the moon and back and round and round out beyond infinity. I miss him more. He was born Ryland Brown Whitlock - September 30, 1907, and he left us on June 7, 1992. The irony of his middle name, "Brown", and the fact that he was a farmer doesn’t escape me.
I remember when I first learned of his middle name. He was taking me to the henhouse to gather the eggs for the day. It was one of the highlights of the farm chores that I got to do – going to the henhouse around three o’clock, taking the small basket that was hung outside the door, and going inside that sauna-esque wooden structure that smelled of hot hay and sweaty chickens. It was dense, musty inside there, but I loved it. Granddaddy would toss chicken feed on the floor away from me to divert the chickens’ attention, so that I could get to the nests and retrieve the warm, golden-brown eggs. He taught me how to carefully collect them and place them in the basket so that they didn’t crack or break.
On one particular summer day, before I got inside the enclosed exterior of the chicken coop - the place where they could come out and walk around, my grandfather noticed a nail that had come lose from the fence. It was sticking out from one of the posts just waiting to scratch someone who moved too fast beside it or stumbled upon it. It was slightly rusty, which spelled instant trouble.
"Martha Jhill!" he called, in his loud, sometimes gruff voice. "Move away from there and come on over here," he directed. He lifted me over the fence, before he unlocked it and walked through. He took hold of my hand, making sure I didn’t venture over to the danger spot.
He and my grandmother only called me by both of my names if they were fussing at me over something I had done that my parents would have spanked me for, or I had ventured into a danger zone that might wind up with me getting hurt. Even being a, sometimes, gruff, old farmer, he had panic moments when it came to his grandchildren and something unanticipated, like a rusty nail that had cropped up in our path, which could do us harm. He reminded me in many ways of my father: there was a soft, marshmallow center deep inside him.
After I had gathered the eggs, I looked up at him and asked him what his whole name was. He called me by mine periodically, but I didn’t know his. Suddenly, I was very curious to know that detail about my grandfather.
His hand fisted over mine, swallowing it up as we walked out of the henhouse to make our way back to the house. He made certain to steer me clear of the rusty nail, until he could tend to it. He took the handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow, as I held tightly to both his hand and the basket.
"Ryland Whitlock’s my name," he told me.
I made a silly face. "I know that Granddaddy!" I told him. "What’s your middle name?"
He trudged along, pulling me along with him. "Brown," he said.
I remember my face scrunching up. "Brown?" I repeated back in shocked disbelief, uncertain if he was pulling my leg. "What kind of name is Brown?"
"It’s my name," his voice rumbled as he claimed it.
I looked up at him, needing to see his eyes to make sure he wasn’t kidding me. "That’s a color not a name!" I said with emphatical skepticism.
"Well, it’s my name!" he repeated unwavering.
My brows came together letting my mouth engage before I thought about how the next comments would be received. [Kids and their brutal honesty!] "Wow!" I said, still surprised by the fact. "That’s really your name?"
He nodded that it was.
"That’s not even a good color!" I remember my tone inflected on the good as I mumbled it.
He looked down at me, slightly amused by my observation. "What’s a good color?"
"Purple!" I said without a thought.
"Ah," he grumbled in a tone that was comparable to a hand swatting at something.
It didn’t stop me from continuing. "Purple is the best color, then blue!" I enlightened him. "Pam would say pink first, but it’s purple!" I wanted to make sure he understood the hierarchy, in my world, of color importance with purple being at the top of the list. Brown and beige were down near the bottom close to black.
He was silent as I rambled on.
"I think I would rather have purple as my middle name over Brown," I told him.
"Mm hm," he replied, letting me know that he heard me regardless of whether he agreed or not.
We walked in silence for a bit more before I looked back up at him and asked in complete seriousness. "Why don’t you change it?"
"You don’t change your name, Shorty!" he replied with certainty, then amended his thought. "Unless you’re a girl, and you get married. Then, you can change your last name."
I thought about that for a minute. I didn’t think I’d like being named ‘Brown’. To me, Ryland was a funny enough name without having to attach the unappealing color of Brown to it. I truly felt sorry for him. I liked my name. I was named after my grandmother, then Daddy added the Jhill along with it. My mother stuck the silent "h" in there, making my name seem a little funny too. I wondered if he liked his? I asked him as much.
"Never really thought about it," he mumbled, as we reached the farm house, and he opened the door for me.
The opening of the door and his comment ended further discussion on the matter, as my grandmother came to collect the eggs, and the conversation turned to the cobbler she was about to make using them. I, however, have thought a lot about it over the years.
Shakespeare said that "a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet." I get that. My grandfather by any other name would have still been my grandfather: big and tough, non-talkative, loyal, dependable, honorable, and good. He would have still been a husband, a father, and grandfather. He would have still risen at the same time every morning - long before dawn – dressed and ready to begin his many daily chores by six a.m. He would have still been a farmer.
He worked hard, but he didn’t play much. Occasionally, he’d take his pole and go fishing. Once in a while, he’d take his shotgun and go hunting. There were a few television shows that met with his approval. Fame and wealth didn’t impress him. He reserved his admiration for a good harvest and a fair price for it. He was impressed by a new Ford car. He admired a country singer who could carry a fine tune. Ernie Ford was one of those. Don’t think for one minute that I didn’t notice his favorite vehicle and one of his favorite singers both carried the name "Ford".
There were things about him that impressed me however. I was in awe that he could tell simply by thumping a melon whether or not it was a ripe one. I don’t recall ever tasting anything other than a sweet one that came from his picking. He could whittle too. But, one thing that impressed me the most was late on a Sunday afternoon, long after the supper dishes had been cleaned and before we headed back to evening church service, as we sat on the porch amidst the buckets of shelled peas and shucked corn on the cob, he would pull out his mouth harp, cup his one hand around it and begin strumming it with his thumb. The music he produced from it was incredible. I’d never heard a sound such as that, and my grandfather could play the heck out of that thing! He wasn’t a college graduate, but he was smart. He knew the land. He knew how to work it and how to yield from it. He understood weather, and how to make the most of whatever came–how to plan around it. He understood seeds – when to plant them, how to plant them and what he could expect from them. It sounds easy, but it wasn’t. It was hard, back-breaking work. It wasn’t a job that paid well, but it was vital for the survival of our society, much like teachers.
I don’t think he would have considered himself a teacher, but he was. His lessons involved instructing when to pick a crop and when to leave it on the vine a little while longer. He could peel a tomato in one motion, then turn the skin around until he’d made a rose. I found it an amazing trick because I could never make my peel look like a rose. He could have you take a card from an unmarked deck, then tell you what it was you drew. [Years later, I learned how he did it, but it was a "wow" moment when I was a little kid.] The biggest lesson he taught me was from playing checkers. He always let whichever grandchild was playing against him win the first game to prove to each of us that we were winners. After that first game though, he wiped the floor with us, which made us try harder to be better and smarter at how we played the game with him. It’s amazing the life lessons that are offered in the simplest ways, unbeknownst to you at the time.
He called me "Shorty" because I was no bigger than a minute, as he use to say.
There was nothing any better than sitting in his lap as he drove the tractor - his one, strong arm around my waist, securing me to him while his other steered that humming machine that plowed the land in which we planted those seeds he knew so much about. He truly was a master at what he did. At the end of the day, all of his buckets and pails were lined up to get ready for market, and there was nothing more beautiful than the rainbow he had made with rows of food. There was deep yellow squash; ripe, red tomatoes; bright green bell peppers, watermelons, cucumbers, peas and sugar snap beans; pale yellow ears of Silver Queen corn; dark, violet blue eggplant and the list went on and on. Then, the rows repeated in another rainbow using all the same colors but with fruits as the star attraction. At the end of it all, after he’d removed what he needed for his family, was the basket of those delicious, golden-brown eggs.
His idea of success differed from the vast majority of people. If he had a roof over his head, food on his table, clothes on his back and had provided the same for his family, he was a successful man. He was.
When he died, I asked for three things that belonged to him. I received one of his mouth harps, I got the old, worn checkerboard with the plastic red and black disks, and I got one of his favorite ties that he wore to church. I placed his tie on the quilt rack alongside the quilt that my grandmother had made for me years ago. Upon clearer inspection of it, I noticed a small speck of gravy, no doubt, from the lunch he’d eaten shortly after whichever service he’d been to. A friend had mentioned to me a solution I could put on it to remove the stain, but I wasn’t inclined to do that. It meant more to me in the state that it was in: brightly colored with its slight imperfection. That was my grandfather.
He left us 20 years ago, and I can still feel the pain in my heart as if it was yesterday. I’ve thought about him a lot today – had a few laughs and shed a couple of tears.
The last words I ever said to him were, "I love you, Granddaddy!", and the last words I ever heard him say to me were, "I love you too, Shorty!"
Everyone who knew him though thought the same as I did: that he was a very colorful character. I know that he colored my world with so many shades of the rainbow - from his artful way of saying things to his beautiful array of fruits and vegetables that he spent his adult life growing, cultivating, and harvesting, which I happily got to partake of even when we weren’t visiting the farm. He changed my opinion about the color brown. It’s a great color: understated yet strong, like him. What can I say, it grew on me.
In the 20 years that he’s been gone, I’ve found that some things have not changed as it pertains to him. I still love him to the moon and back, round and round out beyond infinity. I still miss him more...
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