|
a.
|
Continued: He was a small curmudgeon of a man..never more than about 5'6" tall. His hair had been coal black, but was snow white from my earliest memory and thick. When I was young, I was forbidden on pain of death to go near his workshop. When he was working out there, I used to hang around outside the door. After a time, I would hear him say "I sure do need something that weighs about 30 pounds to sit on this board while I saw it. Say, Mickey, how much do you weigh these days". My heart would nearly stop and I would say exactly the weight he had specified. I thought I was in Heaven when I got through that door. He made beautiful things in that shop. He built furniture for everybody in the family and built kitchen cabinets in everybody's houses. As a source of extra income, he also made handles for hoes, shovels, axes, etc., and left them in an old churn outside the shop door. Neighbors who had broken tools would come up, chose what they needed and drop into the churn whatever they thought it was worth. I never knew him to go to Church, but he was a deeply religious man. He may have prayed privately, but he talked to God all the time. "Lord, we thank you for the rain. We sure needed it. But we have had about enough now, why don't you give the rest to somebody else who is having a drought?" He admonished us that we should not ask God for anything which we could handle on our own. He would say that we should ask God to look after the souls of the widow and her children but we should go ourselves and chop her some firewood. He had a lot of "old sayings", i.e., "Most of us are about as happy as we make up our minds to be." "I felt sorry for myself because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet". I really thought they were original to him. Now I know that most can be attributed to Abe Lincoln, a man for whom the average Southerner of the period had little use. He had little patience with worriers. He used to tell us that we should judge the seriousness of a situation by whether we would be able to sit around the table and laugh when remembering it five years down the road. He had a dry subtle wit. Sometimes it was hours before you realized how funny some of his remarks were. About a year before his death we learned he had cancer. He took it in stride saying that after he passed 80 he had known he was on borrowed time. We took him home from the hospital, at his insistence, and for the last few months the family took turns staying with him and Mama. I enjoyed those months immensely. He would lay propped up in his hospital bed and talk to me for hours about his family and childhood, complete with ghosts, goblins and headless men walking down roads. Even when I knew he was exaggerating, I loved listening. Before his death he told me that while he had never lied to me there had been times when he had "run out of truth and kept talking".
|
