Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day.

I remember Thanksgiving's from my childhood and the magic of the day.  Waking up to savory smells as Mama got an early start on the day's cooking.  Sitting in the floor in front of the TV watching parades.  Loading up the food and the family and heading to Grandmama and Granddaddy's.  The entire Dedmon clan gathering every year; an ever growing family and seemingly ever lasting tradition.

But, alas, life moves on. Some cousins (like me) scattered, making it harder to get home for Thanksgiving.  The Grandparents passed one by one, and the family stopped gathering for that day in November.  Mama never said, but I always suspected it made her sad.  Thanksgiving had been such an important holiday to Grandmama. I'm sure Mama missed her terribly when the day came and went without her mother.

Tomorrow will be my first Thanksgiving Day without my mother.

It's been almost nine months since Mama died.  Strange how much it hurts just to type those words.  Mama died.  But, she did.  Nine months ago.  I made it through Mother's Day without her to wish a happy day.  I made it through my birthday without her wishing me a happy day.  I'll make it through tomorrow, and I'll make it through Christmas and then New Year's, and then her birthday, and then it will be a year anniversary I never wanted to celebrate.  I'll make it through, but my god I miss her.

I've been thinking and reading about grief and dealing with loss, and there is one thing I've realized. There is no time limit on grieving.  It doesn't get easier as time goes on.  I guess it does become easier in the sense that it's no longer a raw gaping wound; once the shock wears off it's more of a dull ache -  unless you pick at it too much and find it's every bit as raw as it was 9 months ago.  The months following her passing, I was so busy that I told myself I didn't have time to give into grieving, and I still don't feel like I've actually fully grieved.  I'm not even sure what that means, or what I think I need.  Maybe to curl into a ball and cry for a week, a month, a year...?  But who has time for that?  I give in to tiny cries (usually when I'm driving) then tell myself to suck it up and dry it up.  I'm a busy lady, with things to do and people to see.  But, inside I'm a little girl who just misses her mama.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day and I will be thankful.

But, tonight I'm going to cry for my Grandparents. Tonight I'm going to cry for my cousin who chose to leave this world on a Thanksgiving Day.  Tonight I'm going to cry for the family ties that were once so much tighter.  Tonight I'm going to cry for my Mama.  Tonight I'm going to cry...

Tomorrow I will wake up and cook so there are savory smells to smell in the house.  Tomorrow I'll watch a parade. I'll talk to my Daddy and my brothers. I'll make my Happy Thanksgiving social media posts. I'll have dinner with friends. Tomorrow I'll smile. Tomorrow I'll be thankful for all of those family Thanksgiving memories.  Tomorrow I'll be thankful that I have loved and been loved enough to hurt for those I've lost. Tomorrow I will remember my Mama and be happy that I had her as long as I did.  Tomorrow I will be thankful.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day.

Une Journée Français avec Teresa

(A French Day with Teresa)

Scott and I had been living in the Keys for about a year when I received a phone call from Cousin Teresa saying she was coming to Miami and wanted to get together.  Teresa had been living overseas for several years, Germany and France.  I know she ended up living in Japan as well, but I’m not sure of the time line.  I’m pretty sure she was living in France at the time she visited us.

She was traveling with friends of hers; a French couple who had asked (hired?) her to travel with them and act as interpreter since they spoke no English.  Teresa was a language major.  A funny side story… when Teresa was very small, she had a serious speech impediment.  Her older brother, Tony, was the only one who could understand her and he would act as her interpreter.  I was always proud of her for not only overcoming her “handicap” but totally making it her bitch!  It’s a little bit ironic as well.

When she arrived in Miami, Teresa called me and we decided on a day to get together.  We lived 2+ hours from Miami, but they wanted to come down and see the Keys.  They came to our house and then we went to lunch at Hawk’s Cay, a resort nearby, on the ocean, with dolphins.  As mentioned, the couple she was traveling with spoke no English.  When introductions were made, we picked up the man’s name as Remi, but for the life of us, neither of us ever understood the woman’s name.  So, they have become forever dubbed Remi and Remi’s Wife in our memories. 

We had a very nice lunch.  I hadn’t seen Teresa in many years at that time, so we enjoyed catching up and talking about the family and her adventures in Europe.  Scott entertained Remi and Remi’s Wife with his pigeon French.  I remember them getting a kick out of him saying “Mon crayon est orange.”  I don’t think they quite knew what to think of Scott.

Of course, as it turns out, they didn’t quite know what to think of either of us.  Scott and I both asked for “to go” boxes for our left over lunches.  As the server brought the containers and we started scooping food into them, we noticed Teresa in animated conversation, in French, with the couple.  They were obviously asking her questions and she was explaining something to them, but they remained confused.  Finally she said something and they both busted out laughing.  I mean they laughed hard!

Sheepishly, Teresa turned to us and explained what had transpired.  They had asked her the purpose of the cardboard containers we were given by our server.  Apparently, in Europe, they don’t do doggie bags.  In her attempt to explain it to them, Teresa used the term “doggie bag.”  At that point, they had seemed to understand…they had met our 4 cats when they stopped by our house, and assumed it was more of a “kitty bag” and that the food was for our cats.  When Teresa further explained that, no, we were actually going to eat the leftover food at a later time, they found that to be hysterical.  They kind of looked at us differently the rest of the day.

We finished lunch and they stopped back by our place for goodbyes, and then headed back to Miami.  I remember how much I enjoyed spending that day with Teresa.  We had spent so much time together as children, but hadn’t hung out much as adults.  My clearest memories of her were, and still are, playing Batman with her, Tony and Mark.  Batman and Robin were obviously taken, so I played Bat Girl and she was Bat Baby!  We had a lot of good times.  But, it was really nice to spend that day in the Keys with her, and so pleasantly unexpected.  I remember how pretty she looked.  She smiled that big smile of hers a lot and seemed genuinely happy.  It’s a great memory.

(We lost my cousin Teresa last week, the day before Thanksgiving.  RIP pretty girl. Bon Voyage.)

Where In The World Is My Mama?

Mom is not getting better.  If anything she is getting worse, according to Daddy.  Since being put under anesthesia for surgery on her wrist over a month ago, she has not been the same.  The theory seems to be that sometimes elderly people have trouble coming back from being put under, especially if there was any dementia at all prior to.  And she did have signs of slight dementia starting.  She imagined bugs and got some crazy notions in her head, but nothing serious.  I mean, she’s always been a little bit crazy, but I had noticed some slight slipping over the last year or two.  But, it’s like my brother Ken said, “On a scale from 1 to 10 of dementia, she went from a 1 or 2 to an 8 or 9 overnight.”  It is very frustrating because it’s now been 6 weeks since the surgery and she shows no signs of improvement. 

It seems like she cannot differentiate between her dreams and reality.  And she apparently has some doozy dreams…

She gets fixated on things and will not be convinced they are not true.  It’s almost like she’s in a waking dream…or series of recurring dreams.  One of the recurring ones is that the nursing home is shutting down and they are kicking her out.  One day Daddy arrived at her room and she kept talking about all the furniture out in the hall.  She said they were gutting all the furniture from all the rooms because the place was shutting down the next morning.  Of course Daddy tries to humor her by going back out into the hall and looking around.  He tells her there is no furniture out there, but she argues with him about it.  Then she tells him the nurses told her the power was being turned off later that day because the place didn't pay their electric bill.  She insists they are “putting her to the street in the morning.”  I know how badly she wants to go home, and I’m sure this is just her mind working out a way for that to happen.  In her mind, if the facility kicks her out, she’ll have to (get to) go home.

The nurses and staff bring all of her meals and drinks and manage her medications for her now.  For years she has been very meticulous about her pills; organizing them in her pill boxes and keeping charts of when she took what.  Now she is often convinced that the nurses are getting them all mixed up and giving her the wrong meds.  On those days she refuses to swallow the pills; one day she even spit a pill back out into the water glass.  Other times she is positive that they are trying to poison her and she won’t eat.

Another of her recurring fantasies involves money.  I’m sure her subconscious mind still holds onto all the worrying she did about their financial situation before the house was sold and most of the bills were paid off last spring.  She gets upset at Daddy, telling him that it’s his fault, he messed up something and now they owe thousands of dollars and everyone is mad at them and they are going to be homeless.  He tries to explain to her that they are ok and the bills are being paid, but she argues and won’t believe him.

The kind of comical one is the imaginary party going on at the hotel across the street.  She claims there is a hotel across the road from the nursing home, and people are always having big loud parties.  Apparently, they come and get her from her room in the middle of the night and make her go to the party even though she tells them she doesn't want to go.  We think she imagines the hallway outside her room is the “road” and when she hears people talking or laughing in the hall, she imagines they are having a party.

 

She constantly sees people who aren't there.  She thinks people spend the night in her room.  One day there was a cat that got into everything and ended up hurt but nobody would help it and it was running around crying.  Her ongoing bug/insect hallucination has just gotten worse.  The bugs from the house in the valley that had followed them to the mobile home have now followed her to the nursing home and the place is infected.  The other day she asked Daddy if he saw those firemen come through the wall.  She said there was a smoke in her room and a hair dryer caught on fire so the firemen came through the wall and took care of it…no, they didn't tear down the wall, they just came through it.  It would be almost funny if it wasn't so disturbing.

 

The one that hurts is that she imagines I am there a lot, sometimes there in her room, sometimes I’m at the party, and I either ignore her or I am outright rude or mean to her.  Daddy tries to tell her that I wasn't there, and she says she knows I’m in Florida, but then she will still insist that I was there the night before and was mean to her.  When I got to visit her last month, she asked me why I wouldn't speak to her at the party the night before.  I explained to her that I had just gotten to town and wasn't even there the night before, and she said maybe she had dreamed it.  I agreed that she must have dreamed it.  I told her how much I loved her and tried to tell that the next time she thought I was there and being rude or mean, she should tell herself that she must be dreaming because Suzi wouldn't treat her like that.  But I spoke with Daddy yesterday and it seems I had spent the night with her the night before and had been “plumb ugly” to her.

I know I shouldn't take it personally.  Poor Ken had her look him right in the eye and say “I hate you” because he wouldn't take the cast off her broken wrist.  And I know Daddy puts up with it every day and is able to let it roll off.  I know it’s not really what she thinks or feels, it’s just the disease or whatever it is that has gone wrong with her wiring.  In a lucid moment she will tell me that she loves me so much and doesn't know what they would do without me.  I know that she loves me and that she is proud of me and that she realizes how much I have been there for them and how much I've done for them.  But, I can’t help but wonder what is it in her subconscious mind that defaults to making me the bad guy.

Maybe it’s because I took charge of their financial situation last year and told them straight up how things were and what they had to do.  Perhaps somewhere in her poor mind she resents or even blames me somehow for having to move.  I know she feels like we forced them into the mobile home, even though we tried to make them understand they really didn't have a lot of choices.  Again, I know that in a lucid moment she fully understands what happened and realizes that we more or less saved them from a very scary financial future.  But, if she is currently acting out her subconscious and her dreams, it seems obvious that she is still working through all of that, worrying about money and housing.  Perhaps her worried mind has somehow put me in the role of the authority figure, the parent so to speak.  That doesn't really explain why she would imagine me ignoring her…I know I’m stretching.  Maybe it’s simply because I haven’t been to visit in a while.  Perhaps she simply got used to me being there so much over the last few years and now her confused mind doesn't understand why I haven’t been around lately.

 

I know I shouldn't take it personally.  But that is easier said than done.  As of today, it seems she is having trouble remembering how many children she has.  When Daddy told her she had three, she argued and said she thought maybe she only had two.  Of course Daddy said it broke his heart to hear her ask that.  I've tried to brace him for the day he shows up and she doesn't know him.  He says he knows it might be coming.  We talked a little bit longer, and something was said again about her not remembering her kids.  I laughingly said that I didn't even want to know which one of us she didn't remember.  Daddy didn't volunteer an answer, just laughed and changed the subject.  So, hmmm … but don’t take it personally, right?

We have decided to go home for Christmas because I can’t stand the thought of Daddy alone his first holiday in the new place, and I want to see Mama.  I’m really worried that she is giving up.  Daddy said she has made several comments about it not being worth it, and how maybe her time is over and she should just give it up.  When he questions her further on the subject she waves it off, but I can tell it worries him.  And I know it has to be so frustrating to her in her more lucid moments, because she does realize that she gets confused.  And now Dad said she has stopped talking about going home.  That worries me.

Ken took this picture a few weeks ago.  She doesn't even look like the same woman I've always known.  The way she holds her mouth and the set of her eyes are completely different.  I just wish we knew what has happened.  Where in the world is my Mama and is she coming back?

I Dreamed It Snowed Like Buffalo

If you have turned on a tv, listened to a radio, read a newspaper or simply logged onto Facebook lately, you probably know that Buffalo NY suffered a record early snow fall this week.  Not just a little light early November snow, but feet and feet of snow, thunder snow even!  Of course, watching the weather channel from the comfort of my home in the fabulous warm Florida Keys, my first thought is "How do people live like that?!"

It's interesting for me watching the news footage of cars and portions of houses nearly covered in snow drifts.  To be honest it is how I always think of Buffalo, New York.  When I was a child I remember hearing about a big snow storm in Buffalo.  I think now that it must have been the blizzard of '77 which left Buffalo frozen under for days.  I just remember hearing about the cars buried in drifts, people trapped inside their homes because of snow drifts over their doors, and I was both fascinated and terrified at the same time.  I would try and imagine snow that deep but at that point I had never seen more than 2 or 3 inches of snow in my life.  The thought of snow deeper than I was tall stretched even my pretty vivid imagination.  That's when the dreams began.

It was a recurring dream theme for a while afterwards.  Usually it began with my brothers and me opening our front door to find a solid wall of snow packed against it.  We would dig a tunnel out into the yard, then start digging upward so we could get above the snow line.  Since we were just children, and in my dreams the snow was a good 12 feet deep, we had to make a ladder of our bodies and would send Mark up to pop through the top since he was the smallest.  Once Mark confirmed that he could get through the top crust, we would make stair steps in the vertical tunnel so we could all climb up and have a look around.  Of course Ken designed the tunnels and figured out how to get rid of the extra snow with a special process he came up with (the engineer even then!)  Yes, I had very vivid dreams as a child.  I can still remember the feel of the cold smooth snow tunnel, the cold air in my face when I stuck my head out the top; and the look of the world, all still and white and undisturbed, dotted with nothing but roofs and treetops poking through.  We would try to crawl out onto the top surface and see how long it took to start sinking.  My dream snow was very hard packed.

I swear I dreamed it so often that it almost feels like a memory instead.  As a teenager I met some girls who had lived in South Dakota for a winter as children.  They told stories of a snow stack in their yard that stayed all winter long, and how they had tunnels dug all through it and played in it all season.  It was funny how their stories brought back "memories" of my dream adventures.  And now, after all these years, hearing that Buffalo is snowed under brings to mind my dreams of snow tunnels.

The Murder Of The Dolls

Tonight I'm going to share a funny story.  Well, morbidly funny.  In fact, it's kind of a horrific story, but I bet you laugh.

Several months ago, my parents sold the house they had lived in for 40 years.  My brothers, sisters-in-law and I did all the packing and moving, and in the process, we came across some treasures from childhood. Among the loot, there was Ken's 4-H trophy, Mark's Star Wars figures and Commodore 64, and my dolls. Years ago I had asked Daddy to get my dolls out of the attic so they wouldn't melt and ruin.  I'm not sure what I thought I was saving them for.  I knew they weren't collector items.  I played with my dolls.  Maybe I was still holding on to the idea that I would pass them on to someone one day.  So, on packing day, I found the box in the hall closet, carried it to the living room, sat down in the floor, opened the box and prepared for a walk down memory lane.

As I pulled each doll from the box, I realized that they were in pretty bad shape.  Like I said, I played with my dolls.  Not only were they not collector items, they weren't even something to be passed on to the most wide eyed little girl.  Their hair was matted and tangled, or missing all together.  As I removed each doll, I would say her name and state her special ability, such as, "Oh, it's Cathy Quick Curl.  She had hair you could curl with a little curling wand.  And, it's Peaches the Puppet Girl.  She had little puppets you stuck in her hand and when you pulled her string she made the different puppets talk.  This is Me Too Baby.  I think I named her that because she looked like the baby sister in a book I had called Me Too.  When you laid her on her back she made a little cooing sound and her eyes closed, and when you sat her up, her eyes opened. Oh, and look, it's Baby Tender Love. I loved her.  This was my third one.  She drank a bottle and peed." But, I noticed that not only was Cathy Quick Curl's hair mostly gone; all of Peaches puppets were missing and when you pulled her string, she did a sort of Darth Vader impression; Me Too baby's eyes were stuck closed; and Baby Tender Love, whose mouth used to make nursing motions when she drank her bottle, had a split lip showing metal like a little Terminator baby. When I pulled out the one legged Ken doll, my brother Mark exclaimed, with a look somewhere between horror and disgust, "Dolls are so creepy!"

I reluctantly packed the poor misfit dolls back into the box, and looked sadly at my mother who had been watching me closely through this whole process.  I really think she was seeing the little girl Suzi who dearly loved every one of those dolls and played with them constantly.  When I announced that I didn't think any of them were worth saving and were probably just trash, mom said, "But you can't just throw them away.  That would be like murder!"  She had me there.  So, I promptly carried the box out and loaded it into my car, with the intention of taking them home to throw in the garbage in order to save my mother the trauma of murdering my childhood babies.

Upon arriving back home, I carried the box of dolls into the house while Scott looked on in disapproval. While I had made a virtual pinkie swear to resist the urge to load up my car with lost treasures, here I was unloading a box of beat up babies, along with a big bag of my great-grandmother's needle point, a couple of children's books (including the above mentioned "Me Too" book which I loved so much as a little girl) and some clothes and shoes dating back to Mom's shop-a-holic days that I rescued from her closet.  Over all, I thought I held up my end of the bargain pretty well.

The box of dolls sat stacked in my guest room for several weeks.  Finally, on a ruthless cleaning day, I announced that the dolls just needed to go. But, I was still having trouble with simply throwing them in the trash, remembering my mother's use of the word murder.  Then I had the bright idea to just put the whole box up by the road and see if anybody took them. I guess it's a fact of life most places, that if you want to get rid of something you simply place it at the road and it will disappear.  So, we carried the box out and set it between the driveway and the road.  Scott even opened the lid to the box so passing cars or pedestrians could get a good look at the merchandise.  That's when it really got creepy.  There was a beat up cardboard box, with the lid thrown back, and all those nappy headed dolls staring vacantly at passersby.  Upon leaving and returning in the car at one point during the day, I noticed that the Me Too baby now had both eyes wide open, but one of them had bleached out white so she had one brown eye and one glowing white eye.  I realized at the moment that nobody was going to take that box of misfit toys.  I had to admit that they truly were bound for the trash.

Being the nice guy and good husband that he is, Scott volunteered to dispose of the pitiful collection for me, thus saving me the heartache.  He didn't even announce when he was going to take care of it, only promised me that they would go away and I wouldn't have to watch.  Much later that day, I was working, when I heard Scott come in from outside and exclaim loudly, "Well, that was horrific!"

Since I had last taken a peek at the box of horrors terrorizing the neighborhood, it had rained.  It seems that at that point, the dolls were all water logged, what hair that remained was plastered down to their little plastic heads, the ratty frills on their dresses made thin and even more threadbare by the soaking.  The poor stuffed Raggedy Ann doll was bloated with water.  And through it all, the Me Too baby with her big blind white eye was staring accusingly at the cruel world that had left her as no more than a pile of wet garbage on the side of the road.

Scott dragged the box back to the trash can, and Me Too baby was the first one thrown in.  As she hit the bottom of the can and landed on her back, she made her little signature cooing sound, and the eyes, which should have closed for the last time, remained wide open, one brown and one glowing white, staring up from the depths of the trash can.  Poor Scott.  The plaintive little cry coming from the bottom of the can was just the creepy finishing touch he needed on the whole macabre scene.  But, then it got worse.  As each and every water logged doll followed Me Too into the trash can and landed on her soft upturned belly, they caused her to make the coo or crying sound...every single doll, every single time.

The trash can is waiting by the road for trash pick up day, and I try not to think too much about its contents.  I admit that I'm afraid to get too close to the can for fear I will hear that little cooing cry coming from inside.  I hope the garbage men don't hear it and attempt a rescue only to find the creepy valley of the misfit dolls inside.  That is truly the stuff of nightmares.

Thanksgiving

This is from my old Myspace blog, written in November of 2008.  I woke up this morning thinking about my grandparents and all my family and remembered writing this the year we lost Grandmother.  Thought I would share.  Embrace, enjoy and appreciate your family today and every single day.

 

Thanksgiving

Current mood:nostalgic

Another Thanksgiving holiday has come and gone, and now we begin the countdown to yet another Christmas and another new year. I have been thinking a lot about my family...thinking about the distances that separate us and the inevitablity of change.

If you have followed my blogs, you have already heard about my grandparents who lived in the country in rural north Georgia and opened their home to their hordes of grandchildren each summer. That same home was also the Thanksgiving gathering place for about as long as I can remember. My mother was one of 5 siblings, and between them all they produced 13 children of their own. We were quite a large clan!

For most of my life, none of the family lived more than a 3 hour drive from the grandparents house. And so it was that every single Thanksgiving Day, bar none, the entire family gathered for the day at the old home place. Grandmother would cook the turkey and dressing and everyone else would bring food. We would have so much food! There would be stories and jokes (my uncles were not called the kings of corn for nothing!) The afternoon would usually devolve into the annual football game (or the Turkey bowl as we called it) which was my least favorite part of the day....partly because I just never liked sports much, but mostly because it usually ended up with somebody fighting or crying (not always the kids!) Granddaddy would end up napping in his recliner pretending to watch football on the tv while the ladies drank coffee and cleaned the kitchen, and the kids played and hoped the day would never end.

I moved away from that area 11 years ago this month. Over those years, Scott and I have only made it back up for Thanksgiving twice. But, even though I wasn't there each year, there was something about knowing that my family had something special that most families don't share these days. We lost Granddaddy about 8 years ago, but still the family gathered for Thanksgiving. Grandmother was bed-ridden for the last 3 years, but still they gathered. Again, if you have followed my blogs, you know that we lost Grandmother in July of this year. And, it seems that finally, with the passing of the matriarch, so also came the passing of the family tradition.

This year, the family did not gather. A tradition has ended.

I worried about my mom and her first Thanksgiving with no living parents and no tradition to fall back on. We tried very hard to get Mom & Dad to come down here for a tropical Thanksgiving Day. I thought that if things were changing anyway, perhaps it would be easier for her if it was something totally different. But, they didn't come. Mom is still coming to terms with her Parkinson's diagnosis and just wasn't up to travelling. And, we made so many trips up there last year, we just couldn't justify going up. At least my parents were able to spend the day with my brother Ken and his family there in Chattanooga. We spoke with them all on the phone, wished them a happy holiday, exchanged loving words and, so, life goes on.

I know that the next generation will never gather in the same way. I realized that fact at my grandmothers funeral. I looked around at all of the cousins I was once so close to and it hit me that we might not ever be all together that way again. The ties that bound have started to loosen and fray.
I'm not so much sad, just wanted to acknowledge the passing of something special. I didn't write this poem, but it does seem appropriate.

The Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving

(Edgar Albert Guest, 1881-1959)

It may be I am getting old and like too much to dwell
Upon the days of bygone years, the days I loved so well;
But thinking of them now I wish somehow that I could know
A simple old Thanksgiving Day, like those of long ago,
When all the family gathered round a table richly spread,
With little Jamie at the foot and grandpa at the head,
The youngest of us all to greet the oldest with a smile,
With mother running in and out and laughing all the while.


It may be I'm old-fashioned, but it seems to me to-day
We're too much bent on having fun to take the time to pray;
Each little family grows up with fashions of its own;
It lives within a world itself and wants to be alone.

It has its special pleasures, its circle, too, of friends;
There are no get-together days; each one his journey wends,
Pursuing what he likes the best in his particular way,
Letting the others do the same upon Thanksgiving Day.


I like the olden way the best, when relatives were glad
To meet the way they used to do when I was but a lad;
The old home was a rendezvous for all our kith and kin,
And whether living far or near they all came trooping in
With shouts of "Hello, daddy!" as they fairly stormed the place
And made a rush for mother, who would stop to wipe her face
Upon her gingham apron before she kissed them all,
Hugging them proudly to her breast, the grownups and the small.


Then laughter rang throughout the home, and, Oh, the jokes they told;
From Boston, Frank brought new ones, but father sprang the old;
All afternoon we chatted, telling what we hoped to do,
The struggles we were making and the hardships we'd gone through;
We gathered round the fireside.
How fast the hours would fly--
It seemed before we'd settled down 'twas time to say good-bye.

Those were the glad Thanksgivings, the old-time families knew
When relatives could still be friends and every heart was true.

A Sweetwater Christmas

~(Written December, 2007... As told to me by my Uncle Charles when I was a child. This story took place when he was 10 years old. Uncle Charlie will be 80 next spring, so the setting is Sweetwater, Tennessee in December of 1938.)~

I was asleep in my bed when I heard someone banging on the front door. I figured it was about midnight. Pretty late for company. I laid there in my bed with the covers pulled up almost over my face to keep my nose warm, but made sure to leave my ears uncovered so I could hear what was going on.

I heard Daddy cussing then heard his heavy limp across the front room, then heard him open the door. Daddy had been laid up with his foot for a while, and had trouble getting around. All I could hear were muffled mens voices, then the sounds of several people coming into the house and the door shutting. I was dying to know what was going on, but I couldn't hear anything that was being said and after a while I started to drift back to sleep.

My Uncle Bug woke me up shaking my shoulder and saying "Get up and get dressed boy. Then grab the coal bucket and come on out front." I don't know how long I had been asleep but it didn't seem like long. I jumped out of bed, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and started getting dressed. As I made my way to the front room I couldn't help wonder what was going on and what it had to do with me. I tiptoed past Momma's room. I knew she was awake but she had baby Claude in bed with her and I didn't want to wake him.

(Interjection here...baby Claude is my father. He was born 2 1/2 months premature. In 1938 there wasn't much they could do for a baby born that early. I'm told he was so small that a man could hold him on the palm of his hand. The hospital sent him home telling the family not to get too attached to him because he probably wouldn't live a year. Baby Claude will be 70 next spring.)

I went out to the kitchen and grabbed the coal bucket. As I did, I noticed how low the coal in the bin was getting. It had been a cold winter already. And with Daddy out of work with his hurt foot there wasn't much money to buy more any time soon.

When I walked into the front room the men stopped talking. There was Daddy in his chair with his foot propped up, Uncle Bug was standing by the door, and Granddaddy was sitting on the couch with some other guy I had seen but didn't know his name. Daddy saw me walk in and said, "Come over here son." I walked over and him and Granddaddy just looked at me till I started feeling kind of funny. Uncle Bug made a little cough noise and then Granddaddy stood up. Daddy said, "You need to go help the men tonight. I can't go anywhere with this foot so you have to go in my place. Get your coat and go on now."

I still had no idea what was going on but I could tell it was important and I knew I had to be a man. Bundling up in my coat and hat, and carrying my empty coal bucket, I followed the other men out the door. I turned and looked back at Daddy and I could tell by the look on his face that he didn't like it one bit that he wasn't the one going. But there was nothing to do about it so he just waved at me and I closed the door behind me.

We walked all the way across town to where the railroad first came into the town proper. I had been listening as they talked on the walk over and I was starting to get an idea what was happening. As the trains approached Sweetwater they slowed down and went real slow through town, then picked back up speed as they exited on the other side. I could hear a train whistle in the distance and looked up at my Granddaddy. He gave me a grim little smile and said, "Get ready boy."

As the lights of the train came into view, I saw Uncle Bug start running down the tracks away from the rest of the men, toward the oncoming train. Everybody knew that he had spent time hobo'ing and nobody in town knew more about hopping trains than Bug Alexander. When the train got close and slow enough, Uncle Bug jumped on the train and proceeded to climb up on top of the cars and walked back to the coal car. There he was standing up on top of that big pile of coal that was coming slowly closer to us and I knew for sure what I was there to do.

Uncle Bug started kicking that coal as fast as he could and as it came falling down beside the tracks I picked it up and put it in the bucket. I looked down the tracks and couldn't believe I hadn't noticed that people were lined up all the way through town filling up their bags, buckets or whatever else they could find to hold coal. I filled my bucket as quick as I could. There was Bug up there just kicking coal like a madman, and he kept it up all the way to the other side of town where he finally jumped off as the train started to speed back up.

I looked around and saw the faces of all those people and I knew what that coal meant to them, just like I knew what it meant to my family. The poor people of Sweetwater would stay warm that winter thanks to the efforts of one man, my Uncle Bug.

"Dad-gum, It's a Bass!"

When I was growing up, my family lived out in the country. My grandparents lived nearby and owned a lot of the property all around where we lived. Summers were spent roaming the woods and pastures picking blackberries, playing fort or explorers, wiling the days away, catching June bugs by day and lightening bugs at night. Most summers there were several cousins staying with the grandparents, so between my two brothers and visiting cousins, there were always plenty of play mates.

I remember one summer in particular that was a lot of fun. I was probably about 10 years old. For some reason or other, my older brother Kenneth and I had become keenly interested in fishing. We had dug out two or three old fishing rods from Granddaddy's tool shed that hadn't been used in years. We cleaned them up and got them in working order. We even found an old tool box that we used as a tackle box. Then we had to convince our parents to give us money for hooks, floats, line, artificial lures and various and sundry items imperative to our new hobby.

And, so, we became fishermen. Every morning, fairly early, the two of us would set off for the pond for a full day of fishing. If memory serves, I don't think I caught more than 3 fish all summer, and those were too small to keep. But, I was just so thrilled that Ken was including me and so happy to be spending time with my big brother that I didn't even really care if I caught anything or not. Well, I cared a little. Ken actually became pretty good at it and usually caught something. He even caught enough occasionally for Grandmother to fry up for dinner.

We had been absorbed in our new interest for about a month when two of our cousins came to stay for the rest of the summer. Gwen was 14 and Steve was about 12. We quickly got them interested in fishing too and after finding a couple more rods and reels in the tool shed, we set down for some serious fishing the rest of the summer.

I suppose I should give a short description of the pond where we spent so much of our time. It was a good size man-made pond, stocked with bass and bream. There were some old trailers off to one side where some people had lived once but had since left them deserted. The pond was filled by a branch flowing into it. At the spot where the branch flowed in, there was a make-shift bridge over the gap so you could walk all the way around the pond without getting your feet wet. The bridge was a strange sort of contraption. It consisted of two long metal poles laid across the gap with board planks placed at uneven intervals across it to step on. You had to take pretty big steps to make it from plank to plank, and a lot of times folks ended up with more than wet feet if their steps weren't big enough…or their balance wasn't good enough. There was no hand rail of any kind. Well, like I said, the bridge was a little tricky to cross it you weren't careful. None of us seemed to have problems with it except for Stevie. It seemed like every time the poor boy tried to cross that bridge he fell in! Hardly a fishing day passed without him getting at least one foot, if not his whole body, wet from slipping on the bridge.

One day we were all fishing, as usual, but that day we were all frustrated because it was the third or fourth day in a row that nobody had caught a single fish. And before that, we had all been on a run of catching only bream too small to keep. On this particular day, everybody had sat down in various spots around the pond and we were just lazily casting off and reeling in, not really expecting a bite. Gwen and I had each pulled a concrete block up to the edge of the water to sit on. Kenneth was sitting on an overturned cooler near the little bridge. And Steve, wonder of wonders, had crawled out to the center of the bridge, without getting wet, and lounged out there with his line in the water.

The day was hot and muggy. It was quiet except for the normal sounds of flies buzzing, cicadas chirping and bull frogs croaking. We had been sitting that way, nearly dozing, for a couple of hours when suddenly Steve jumped up, began pulling and reeling in his line, and dancing around on the bridge that he usually couldn't even walk on. We all got up and ran over to where he was to see what the commotion was all about. He was pulling in a largemouth bass nearly big enough to pull him in! All this time, he had been pulling and jumping, with his mouth hanging open, too shocked and excited to say anything. When he finally saw the size of the fish coming up out of the water on the end of his line, the only speech he could even manage was to shout over and over, "Dad-gum, it's a bass! Dad-gum it's a bass!"

For a long time after that, any time the four of us were together, somebody would tell that story. And for years, it became kind of a tag line in our family. If there was a lull in conversation, somebody would yell, "Dad-gum, it's a bass!" We would all laugh and see, once again, little Stevie jumping up and down on that bridge and try to recapture, just for a moment, some of the magic of that summer.