Monthly Archives: June 2019

Spike’s Legacy

27 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Death of a parent, Grandparenting, Parenting, Relationships

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This June my father-in-law would have turned 96.

One of the worst parts of not having him around any more is that my kids never got to really know him. My oldest son was not quite a year and a half when Spike died. I was pregnant with my older daughter when he got what he thought was the flu, and days later died from a massive bacterial infection and heart failure.

So for all their lives my kids have heard about Grandpa Spike. They see pictures of him, hear stories, see his name on Dad’s work truck, as Spike named his business after himself, and it has been our livelihood and his legacy.

I knew my father-in-law, beyond just a name or to recognize his face, longer than I’ve known my husband. Which was a good thing, because he could be very intimidating.

He was a big man, a presence you had to notice. He could also be loud, startling even, when he wanted to make sure you knew he was there.

But for all his blustering, he often was content to just sit and not say much.

I knew him initially as a customer in the restaurant where I had my first “real” job. I had become a waitress and worked some weekend mornings when Spike and his wife would come in for breakfast. I recall the other waitresses would grumble, “there’s that grouch again”, and I would look at it as a challenge.

“He’s just a teddy bear,” I’d say, and march off to serve him his coffee with a handful of creamers (he preferred it black), just to make him yell. But it would soon turn into a chuckle when he realized I was egging him on to get a reaction from him.

It didn’t take long for him to become one of my regulars, and I liked it that way. I wasn’t easily intimidated, and he wasn’t easily won over, so it was a challenge for us both.

So fast-forward about seven years to the second date I went on with my not-yet-husband. After dessert we went to his parent’s house where he lived so that I could balance his checkbook and roll his change, things I loved to do and he never did. And meet his parents.

He warned me that his dad might be a little scary at first, but I assured him I wasn’t worried. I knew what I was in for.

I don’t know if he remembered me from the restaurant, but I had no trouble getting reacquainted with my future father-in-law. We went for cheap dates, so I spent lots of time in their living room. And once we were engaged we were down the road where our house was being built every spare minute, so we often dropped in to eat dinner with them.

Even after we were married and moved into our house, we didn’t have a phone for a few years, so I made a habit of stopping by their house most afternoons to make calls and chat with them. And see if they’d invite us to dinner.

Then when our first son came along, we broke down and got a phone, but the habit of stopping in almost daily stayed with me. Especially since the summer I was pregnant it broke records for the most days over 90 degrees, and I’d sit in front of a fan until I couldn’t stand it, then drive three miles to sit in delicious, cold air.

And since my mother-in-law was not a big talker, and my new husband took after his mom, Spike and I carried the conversations. I loved his stories and jokes and pronouncements on the latest happenings in our world.

One of my absolutely proudest moments came when he showed me how much attention he’d been paying to the things that were important to me. We were out to dinner with them, and walking through the restaurant I was behind him carrying our one-year old son. Spike pointed at the baby and told everyone along the way, “Look at this kid. Look how healthy he is. He hasn’t had a drop of anything but mother’s milk his whole life. Not a drop of water, no juice, no cow’s milk, just mother’s milk. Isn’t that something?”

I never asked him why he was so impressed by this, but he was, and it was the most empowering thing I think anyone had ever said about me to my face.

He’ll never know how, when our second child was born a few months after he died, and I would breastfeed her, I would picture him standing over me, bragging about how healthy she was, and by association what a good mom I was.

It was the same for our other children as they came along, for all the years I nursed them I had Spike’s voice in my head cheering me on.

Some of my children look like him in ways. Others have some of his personality traits. Or maybe I just like to imagine they do, because I got such a kick out of knowing him that I want them to be a little like their ornery grandpa.

And when they did seem to act like him, I’d just say what he always said to his grandkids, “Go outside and get the stink blown off you!”

Spike was a hard worker, proud of a job well done, but also a man who liked to kick back in his recliner and chuckle over a corny joke, especially if he could goad you into laughing with him.

So when my kids are horsing around or lazing after a long day, I like to think that Spike would have loved to sit with them, maybe holler to get their attention, have them pull his finger, or just lean back and smile at the parts of himself he would see in each one.

And that’s the real legacy.

Lost

20 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Childhood

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(This is a little something for my younger sister. Of course I couldn’t really know the dialogue and the details, but from the stories my parents told ever after, this event could have happened something like this. I hope you enjoy this story from a long-ago summer.)

The breeze through the screen door chased a chill across the sweat on the back of my neck. The rooms at the motor court had no air conditioning. Not in 1970, even in Nashville.

About twenty people from Toledo had returned from a busy morning in sessions at our denomination’s annual convention. Dad had let us kids jump in the pool to cool off and tire us out. He needed a rest. And Mom and some of the women wanted to go shopping, while Dad got my baby brother and little sister down for naps.

They were next to the room my older sister and I shared with a grandmotherly woman willing to chaperone two preteen girls. The dark cave-like space the drawn shades created lulled us into sleep, while tree-shaded air off the pool rocked the screen door in and out to the limits of the hook high on the doorframe.

But Dad hadn’t secured the screen door where he, the toddler and the five year-old rested up for the evening’s activities.

As a busy pastor’s wife, Mom didn’t get much free time with other women. After driving past many unique stores on the busy streets of Nashville she was eager to window-shop, free from little hands to hold, tired bodies to carry. When they returned an hour later, leaving the traffic behind on the main street beyond our drive-up motel, the inviting shade around the pool and courtyard welcomed them for a mini-siesta before dinner.

Until Mom saw a police officer talking to Dad, baby in his arms. But where was my five-year-old sister?

A year or two before, my older sister and I had flown to St. Louis with Dad for this annual convention, staying in a downtown hotel suite in blistering July with no pool, but at least there was air conditioning. And while Dad had his afternoon nap, we girls and a friend staying in the same hotel grabbed swimsuits and “swam” in the biggest shower we had ever seen for hours.

A year or two after this convention in Nashville we’d attend one in Macon, Georgia, older and wiser. But this was my little sister’s first time.

Coming just weeks before she would step onto the school bus and ride a half mile down the road to kindergarten.

About a mile down the congested street from the motor court, a used-car salesman stood in the open doorway of a glass-enclosed sales hut, waiting for the next customer. In the middle of the afternoon, in the music capital of the world, there was always the chance of someone famous passing on the sidewalk.

More unlikely was seeing a barefoot child wandering aimlessly.

“Little girl, where are your mommy and daddy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you lost?” he asked as he knelt down to her level.

“My mommy went down the street,” my sister answered, looking around her on the sidewalk.

“Down this street? It’s a pretty busy one. Do you live around here?” he asked, though the whole street for miles was lined with businesses of all kinds, and the neighborhoods were a few blocks down the side streets.

Where had this child come from?

“I live in the country with the barns.”

The salesman didn’t hear a hint of a drawl in her voice. He doubted she was a local. “Are you staying in a hotel?”

“We have a pool. And my baby and my daddy are sleeping.”

“How big is your pool? Is it a little bitty wading pool?”

“It’s blue. My daddy threw me in. Where’s my mommy?”

“I don’t know, honey, but let me see if I can help you.”

Our church group gathered under the trees in front of the line of train-car-like rooms planted side by side, some praying, others whispering about how much trouble Preacher was in for letting his daughter walk right out the door, and now who knows where she is?

The policeman had voiced assurances that she would be found, but this was a strange city and it didn’t keep my mom from crying helplessly.

Several of the adults spread out walking away from the motel, while my mom and dad stayed where they could be found easily. With no phones inside our rooms, just a pay phone outside the office cubicle, we were decades away from instant information. We could only wait.

So when the police radio squawked to life, we held our breaths while the officer turned his back and picked up his receiver.

Six blocks down a squad car pulled up, lights still, siren silent, scared child shaking on the sidewalk.

Lost.

“I can’t get much information out of her, officer, but I think her parents may be staying at a motel nearby. She says there’s a pool, and that she just walked out the door. Maybe one of those pull-up places?” The salesman had tried to get names and descriptions, but nothing my sister added helped identify where she had come from.

“Let me get on the radio and see if there are any lost child reports coming in to dispatch,” the officer said to the man, and to the little girl, “Don’t you cry now, we’ll find your momma and daddy.”

Long before Code Adam and Amber Alerts, my sister got lost in the heart of Nashville, Tennessee. Bad things did happen to little kids in the 70’s, but thankfully there was a sense of community at that time that went beyond the neighbor you knew to the person in need who walks down your sidewalk.

It’s something we’ve lost, people looking to the people around them to find answers instead of an anonymous screen in their hands.

Shortly after the officer at the motor court put his radio back into its mounting, the second cruiser pulled into the oval drive. The patrolman parked, turned to my sister and said, “Is this your momma?”

And she was found.

26 years less than I wanted

13 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Death of a parent, Relationships

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Tomorrow, June 14, 2019, will be 26 years since my dad died.

I think about him every single day.

I remember when his life began to end.

It was actually a comment he made that my mind goes back to when I think of his final illness. It was his birthday in February. He turned 61, and after he opened my card, he looked up and said, “Well, I probably won’t live another year. My dad died when he was 61, and I guess I will, too.”

I checked a few years later in death records online and found my Papaw actually lived a couple years longer than that, but for whatever reason Dad had it in his head, and it was almost like he was resigned to a way-too-early death.

Because 61 is not old. I’m 57 as I write this, and though I have a few health issues, I don’t feel like I’m anywhere near death. Not a natural one at least. Everything else is up to God’s timing.

I held my breath for the year my husband was 61, not because I’m superstitious but just because I was struck with how young and healthy my husband is, and how tired and worn out Dad seemed by that age.

Dad grew up knowing hunger and need, but also love and compassion. His hard childhood, decades of smoking, and about twenty years of addiction to painkillers took a physical toll on his body.

So on March 4 that year he was out chopping up and shoveling snow on top of ice in their driveway when he had his first heart attack.

One of the neighbors who was helping ran in to call an ambulance, and from then on life was never the same.

I was in the emergency room with him when he coded.

He had just given me our special look, the one that meant I would get what he was going to say next, and then pointed up to a corner of the ceiling and said, “Look! I see an angel!”

And the steady alert started.

They rushed me out of the room as they worked on him, closing the blinds because I had my nose pressed to the glass watching his face as they worked on his heart.

They didn’t know I had been looking tragedies and injuries in the face for almost all my life. I still can’t understand why, when someone could be dying, they try to send the ones who love them away.

There is a time to every season under heaven. Even death.

But not that day.

Dad stayed in the hospital for a few weeks. He had procedures and tests, drugs and therapies, and came home to wait for the date of his scheduled bypass surgery.

Five days before that date, on April 14, he had his second heart attack.

I got the call and rushed to the hospital. On the way, there was a song that played on YES-FM that got me through that frantic drive. “Carry Me” by Legend 7.

“The love of the Father is always guaranteed, the hands of the Father will always…carry me.”

I didn’t know at the time how prophetic that song was. I counted on Dad’s faith to guide my life. I was lazy about developing my own. And while that night my thoughts were on Dad’s love, Dad’s hands, in the 26 years since, I have experienced God’s love and care in deeper ways than I could have imagined back then.

But I still long for the physical hands and arms of my dad.

They did a triple bypass, but the second heart attack had done too much damage. He wasn’t up and walking the next day, he stayed weeks in the step down unit, and most of that time he was sedated.

He reached a point where the medical staff wanted to invoke his signed living will, indicating he didn’t want to be kept alive on machines. He’d seen it too many times as a pastor.

I for one wasn’t ready to unplug and wait to see what happened, not when Dad was just a little beyond consciousness. So we decided to bring him out of sedation and ask what he wanted to do.

Food and water? Yes.

Medicine for a kidney infection? Yes

Oxygen to help you breathe easier? Yes

If your heart stops, should they try to resuscitate? Another nod yes.

Hmmm. Everyone is entitled to change their mind.

So we asked them to wean him off the i.v.’s, give us pill versions of his meds, and oxygen, and instructions so we could take him home.

We had two weeks more.

Two weeks of living, with his wife and mother, kids and grandkids, fussing over him not eating enough, late nights spent talking with one of us kids while Mom slept so she could work during the days.

And that last day and night.

All the family had been over. Dad sat in his wheelchair cleaning out the garage, handing things that would explode to my husband and telling him to throw them in the burning barrel. The kids climbed on him and pushed his chair around. He ate a big bowl of fresh strawberries with sugar and milk, and later bargained with me to reduce his tube feeding by half because of those extra calories.

When everyone else had gone home I helped him down on his sleeping bag on the floor, where he had preferred to sleep for years, and tried to make him comfortable on that hot June night. After hours of sleeplessness and sporadic conversation, he agreed to let me help him up on the couch.

So we sat side by side, my arm around his shoulders as he leaned into me.

It occurred to me that I kind of liked being the strong one for once.

The sun was coming up and the air had finally cooled. Dad turned his head a little to look at me, and he gave me our look again. He raised his eyebrows, wiggled them a little, and laid his head down on my shoulder with a long sigh.

Finally. I sat still, wanting to make sure he was really asleep before laying him down and covering him with a light blanket, adjusting the oxygen canula on his nose. His blood sugar tested high, so I called my older sister to come give him a shot of insulin on her way to work.

I lay back down in Dad’s sleeping bag, and I felt like he was hugging me. My oldest son, four at the time, was staying the night, and when he came down the stairs I had him crawl in the bag with me. He felt Dad’s hug as well.

And though I didn’t realize it until my older sister came in and knew right away he was gone, Dad had died in my arms.

Every day since, I have looked at my life through a different lens. What would Dad think of…my kids, my life, my calling, this meal, this newly mowed lawn?

Ordinary things take on significance when I am saving them up to tell to someone I love.

Because I know when I get to heaven, I can spend as long as I want filling him in.

Twenty-six years. Lots of things to talk about.

66 years

06 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Childhood, Relationships

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Today, June 6, 2019, would have been my parents 66th wedding anniversary.

Over the years there were lots of stories told about their lives as children and teens, school and chores and their families.  Dad was a storyteller and Mom was a talker.  So we grew up knowing a lot about their lives.

I especially loved hearing the story of their wedding.

It was June 6, 1953.  Both 21, Dad had served in the Air Force in Korea during the Korean War, and after he got home to Marion, North Carolina he moved up to Toledo, Ohio to work with his uncle, Wayne Lovingood.  Dad had trained as a boiler engineer and also worked on radar in the Air Force, and he found a job working for Toledo Public Schools as a boiler engineer.

So like every other Friday, he worked his hours that week and then headed down to Marion to marry Mom.  He made it there by Saturday morning, where I hope he at least had a chance to clean up and put on a suit.  The ceremony was early in the day, followed by a cake and punch reception in the church fellowship hall.  They changed clothes and packed Mom’s bags into Dad’s car and headed north.

This was long before I-75 was built, before there were chain restaurants in every town and along every highway.  And in the mountains, the roads wound and twisted and were built for the purpose of getting from one place to another.  Being fed and entertained weren’t high priorities.  Even gas stations were few and far between.  It was a time when they didn’t think to call long distance to make a reservation for the night, and the kind of drive-up roadside motels they would come across didn’t need them.

So Dad’s mom, my Mamaw, packed them up ham biscuits wrapped up in a paper bag.  They hit the old Route 25, and by evening they stopped at a roadside stand for milkshakes to drink with their sandwiches.  That was their wedding supper.  They stayed the night at a motel on Saturday night, and Sunday they finished the trip to Toledo, where Dad went right back to work on Monday.

They lived in a couple different apartments, then bought their first house before my older sister was born.  A younger sister was born there also, and the summer Mom was pregnant with our younger brother we moved out to the country.  I remember driving on the highway, I-75 had been built south of us by then, but the bypass I-475 was just being built as we drove around town looking at all kinds of houses.

They settled on one that the radio station Dad worked at part time had bought to convert into a recording studio, and then decided it was too big  a project.  I remember visiting it several times before we moved, Mom up on ladders painting, us kids rummaging through boxes of treasures in the basement and attic, workmen knocking back out an archway they had filled it to make the studio in what was really the dining room of the house.

We moved into that house in July, and my brother was born in August, and I lived there until I got married.   

It was many years before us kids realized what a wedding anniversary was, much less knew the date our parents got married.  Eventually we caught on and started buying them a card and urging them to take us all out to dinner to celebrate.  

But really the day was theirs to mark however they wanted.

When I was growing up it really was a different world.  It was a rare thing for anyone I knew to be divorced.  Marriage was something I looked at as a lifelong commitment, and through the sixties, in my community, it was.

Then things started to change in society and relationships.  I won’t go into my ideas on what started the ball rolling, but roll it did, and in the seventies things changed in the world, and divorce became more and more accepted.

So every year when we celebrated Mom and Dad, I was more thankful that their marriage was still something I could count on.

Not that they didn’t have their disagreements, times of distance and preoccupation with all the details of life.  I remember there was a popular song playing on the radio one day that I liked, and I was surprised to see my mom trying not to cry listening to it.  It was “Torn Between Two Lovers”.  

As you might think, the song is about a woman who loved two different men.  So my mind went wild trying to figure out which of my parents’ friends my mom might possibly be interested in.

Thankfully she was just touched by the song, maybe an old memory, though she never explained it.  And even though I wondered for years, there was never any reason to believe there were any serious problems in their marriage.

After seeing a number of people around me go through divorces, especially young couples, I resolved that I wouldn’t get married unless I would be willing to commit to never walking away.

That could be a very naive thing to do.  From the perspective of my early 20’s I couldn’t foresee what kind of man I might get involved with.  And I wouldn’t be in control of the things he may choose to do that could harm me, things I might need to walk away from.  

I could, however, choose to be careful and thoughtful about who I would get involved with.  And after I failed miserably in my choices time and time again, I turned the whole thing over to God, and he did a great job of bringing the right man into my life, the one I could stay married to for as many years as we live.

So this year, this day, would have been Mom and Dad’s 66th, and last fall my husband and I celebrated our 33rd.  And Dad died a week after their 40th anniversary, Mom a few weeks after their 63rd.  She never remarried.

All those numbers.  Big ones.  Significant ones.  Because it is possible for love to not only last, but to grow and nourish us, even after the ones we love are gone from this earth.  

And especially while we’re walking through this life together.