ETERNITY PASSES THROUGH YOU…
…YOUR PRESENCE WILL BE FELT
By now, it is clear, parents don’t know everything. That’s why God made you…that’s why God needs you!
Years ago, before you were born, my grandmother, your great-grandmother Grandma Sue, told your Dad and me, “Your future is in your children.” Thank goodness Dad was paying attention. He mentioned her words to me again that very day, and I couldn’t figure out what they meant. I am a slow learner, for sure!
Today, Grandma Sue spends most of her time in a rocking chair coming from her childhood home, holding a cat in her lap, looking out at the goats playing in the pen on the hillside. Her eyes still manage to read large print Reader’s Digest. Thank goodness for computers with large fonts. God must have allowed the invention of computers for the eyesight of grandmothers and grandfathers. Her ears still manage to hear Lawrence Welk Sunday night on her public television station. None of this will give you a the smallest hint about the years of memories I have with Grandma.
Back then, she didn’t know everything either, but she taught me most of what I know today. She loved to play the piano by ear, and we begged to hear her sing about the bear who chased the preacher up a tree. Boy, how we laughed…and then asked her to play it again!
She entertained us in Tennessee for long summer visits, feeding my sister and me juicy fresh bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches, capped with fresh peach ice cream purchased just for us from the small town’s drugstore. She didn’t even tell on us to Mother, who had sent us to Grandma’s house with instructions to vacuum and wash dishes. We didn’t, and Grandma didn’t tell. She just shooed us outside to play, and of course, we didn’t argue.
She told us how mean goats can be. She had proof. When a young girl, the family goat had butted her from behind, making her fall and break her arm. She pointed on her arm to the scars bearing witness to the event. With some justification, she didn’t have much love for goats.
Grandma Sue told me how she had had the strength to nurse her elderly mother and an older uncle in their last years. She said, “I wouldn’t do it if I thought about myself. But when I think about my children, I hope that someone will be there to take care of them if they ever need it. That makes me strong to take care of older folks. They’re someone’s children.”
Grandma sent me a box filled with four-leaf clovers; I’ve never managed to find even one on my own. She spent months in Arizona, and my fondest memories include daily walks with Grandma Sue, Grammy, and our dog Santa, going all around Earl Lake picking up unusual sticks and rocks, pointing out lizards and snakes, and laughing at Santa who leap-frogged through the shallow water, pouncing after frogs and fish.
She was the mother of Grammy, my mother, who spent years building a low lava rock wall encircling the cabin driveway. Grammy filled my home when I was a child with live plants, philodendrons. She pushed dirt and plants into 5-gallon bottles just like ships in a bottle, a trick she a had learned from Grandma Sue. Grammy taught me how to cut up a chicken, the method I still use today, a neat trick she was taught by her mother’s family housekeeper as a wedding gift when she got married in 1950.
Grammy loved to read. She tried to learn to play the piano, taking lessons and practicing everyday. But she never really quite “got it.” She never could play the song about the preacher and the bear. But she more than made up for it with her MEAN cinnamon rolls. I would fight to get the sticky gooey one in the middle, and I never tired as an adult in later years of having her bring a pan of rolls when she visited me.
Grammy lectured me as a child, “If you don’t have something good to say about someone, don’t say anything.” It would make me so made, cutting me off just in the middle of a complaint about someone. Her mother, Grandma Sue, told me, “Everything you say should be the truth, but all the truth doesn’t need to be spoken.”
Grandma Sue considered my dad Jack, your grandpa, as her own son. When she downsided from a huge country home to a single-wide country trailer, he went through her trailer when she moved, nailing, hooking, and attaching all sorts of things. She brags about the method he created to hang her toilet paper more conveniently in the small space.
Daddy, my dad Jack, could be irritating in his efforts to be “particular” about how things were done, but he was always there to fix a radio, to find the perfect size screw for a repair, and to help your own father install a new water line at the apartments. Daddy, your Grandpa, loved collecting just about everything: beer cans, coins, stamps, insulators. I thought he was crazy when he said he was going to write a book about insulators. Who would want a book about them! More people than I realized. And the detailed drawings in his book benefited immensely from his “effort to be particular about how things were done.”
When Grammy was selling things after Granpa died, I gave her an incredulous look and pulled out a small abacus created from soldered wires and Indian beads. Grandpa had made that when he was a child. Later that day, in another box of ‘junk,’ I retrieved a pair of custom-cut and ink-spotted wooden dice he had made. Today, we live in the cabin he and Grammy build and rescued, carrying the fully furnished cabin in two separate sections on two trucks to a new hillside home site, thirty miles down the road, safe from certain demolition.
From your own fathers’s side of the family, you inherit the world: a grandfather who immigrated to the United States from Colombia when he was just about your own age today. In a different time, when Hispanic people tried to pretend to be light-skinned, your Nana would proudly proclaim, “I’m Mexican. What’s wrong with that?” In fact, she delighted in teasing neighbor children that they couldn’t eat her tacos unless they were Mexican. Only Mexicans ate tacos. With their mouths watering, the kids would look at her and say, “Rebecca, I’m a Mexican.” “Eat up!” she would tell them.
Nana told us how challenging life had been in Puerto Rico where even the Mexican culture clashed with Puerto Rican customs, but she always told about the challenges with laughs and smiles. I never heard her say a mean thing about anyone.
In our tool shed, we have the pick that she used to dig out clump after clump after clump of bamboo roots that had flourished in a special paradise just made for bamboo…over the septic tank leech line. She enjoyed telling us about birthing a calf in the kitchen and protecting your Dad when his brother Donnie chased him into the house, threatening to “tear him apart” for not watering the cows. And today, after the death of Nana, we are able to celebrate life with your grandfather who lives in his own papaya paradise down in Mexico, continuing the love of travel that brought him here to the United States sixty years ago.
In all of this, I see Justin as he builds tiny wire, wood and rubber band catapults and as he builds bows and arrows with paper clips that I must confiscate. I see the generosity of Jamie who is able to find the perfect gift for the person who has everything and who will spend all of her hard-earned money to get the best for someone else. I see both of you handling jobs in high school, at the time of life when I was only playing. I enjoy listening to you practice your Spanish. I marvel at your ability to unravel complicated puzzles, and I am proud that you are eager to contribute time to serve meals at city shelters. I feel honored that God allowed me to be your parent.
Most important of all, God teaches us that we are all brothers and sisters. Our future is in our children…and in our brothers, sisters, friends, neighbors, everyone we touch. You are not just mine. You belong to God, and through Him, to the world. He has special places to lead you, special talents to nurture in you, and special gifts to ask from you.
Just two years ago, I sat in the living room of Grandma Sue’s trailer and heard her talk as she has down over so many years about her early life. She started reciting poetry and encouraged me to pull out a book of poems on her shelf by Charles McWhorter. He is not a famous poet that the world will know. But he is part of you because he is a part of her. I have asked Uncle Jimmie and Aunt Brenda to make sure to save this book for me on the day that Grandma Sue dies and passes on. Inside the book, I found letters that Grandma explained to me as we talked, and these letters between a grandmother and a poet tell as much about Grandma Sue and Mr. McWhorter as anything else.
As we wake in the morning, God asks us to live to the fullest of each day that he gives to us when we wake in the morning. I hope you will always feel the special privilege God also gives us in letting eternity pass through us, adding to the honor and glory gifted to us by the people who have come before and our responsibility for passing these gifts faithfully forward to those who will follow.
I love you!
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Charles C. McWhorter
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