Memorial Day

I thought of this last night and decided to put it up again.  I don't think an annual reminder would be too much.  I'm sure we all think of at least one of these folks from time to time.  When I look at the pictures I see people I knew almost all my life and some I didn't really know.  Even at this point in my life I still think Wayne was the best friend I've ever had, and Allen wasn't that far behind.   I knew Freddy, Pat Lowe, Larry, Mike and Betty Scott since the first grade.  Jimmy, Patty Hicks and Pat Rucker were people I met later, and the rest I didn't meet until high school.  Estes was a smoking buddy, Janie was always in the library and Bobby Jo never met a stranger.  Doyle was a nice guy, but I really didn't know him, Lynn or Sherry.

All of you are missed, and thankfully, we haven't added anybody else in the past year.

How Did You Do?

If you could peel back the layers to 40 years ago, what did you have in mind to do with your life? Get married and raise a family? College? Work at a specific job or place?


How close did you come to the dreams you had then?

I think most of us had a family in mind, or at least some sort of relationship. Heck, nobody wants to go through life alone. How about college? There are even more to choose from now; little, big and all sizes in between. How did that work out? Did you stick to your original major?

How about work? Did you think about Visking, the mill, the chair factory, the handle factory, Maramont, or how about the family business or farm? There wasn’t a lot to choose from back then, huh? I was lucky enough to get on at Maramont after scouring Loudon, Lenoir City and south Knoxville for everything I could think of. The only restriction was retail. I’ve never had the proper ‘demeanor’ to sell stuff. I couldn’t sell water in a desert.

Anyway, I know a few people who moved into their family business or farm, and I think with mixed results. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Given the opportunity, I would have jumped at it.

This all brings me down to my second question. How close did you get to what you wanted to do? Not counting family, mine turned out to be almost 100% different. I got really lucky and am blessed to have the family I have now, and the altered plans for my life made that happen, so all in all, I am very much okay with how it all turned out.

Are You Ready?

Have you got your plot yet? When are you “old enough” to start thinking about things like that? I guess it’s wise to be prudent about such things and get them settled quickly.


I’ve heard people say, “You’ve got plenty of time for that,” but nobody really knows how much time they have, so I think you should plan something, if even just a little.

I’m not even sure yet if I even want to be buried. I mean after all, I’m here and my kids all live elsewhere, so after I go who’s going to come see my grave. I mean they really wouldn’t be seeing me, just a plot of ground. I’m not trying to sound morbid or overly concerned about such stuff, but it is going to happen so you’ve got to think about it.

Sometimes I think it might even be best not to plan at all. When my Mom passed away, she hadn’t planned anything and all us kids had to get together and hastily put things together. The same thing happened with Sue’s Mom. Looking back, that actually helped deal with her passing. We didn’t have to wonder if she had covered everything or not, and it gave us something to think about besides how much we were going to miss her.

I plan on living until I’m a couple hundred years old anyway, so what does it matter?

Grandbabies

Grandkids put grandparents through a myriad of feelings. First, it’s our babies having babies, even if they have their first at 30. As my kids were growing up I could not imaging them as parents, but boom! Suddenly they are. And it is sudden. It’s as sudden as how quickly they went from 1 to 21; it’s almost like the blink of an eye.

Then, it’s the concern of how they will be as parents. I mean, it took them forever to learn how to tie their shoes or button their shirt or hit the potty. How in the world are they going to take care of a baby?

Then, what happens when they get tired of it? You know, like they did their Sega system or the TV they had to have in their room or that $80 pair of pants they wore exactly one time.

What happens when they have to change a messy diaper? They didn’t like anything green.

Plus we had to remind them to blow their nose, or change their clothes, or pick up after themselves, or that it was not okay to eat that donut after it fell on the floor.

And you know the baby is going to cry in the middle of the night, even if just a little, and these guys are used to not getting into bed until the middle of the night, so who’s going to be taking care of who?

Then finally, after all the worry, and with just a few questions, they are doing it. They aren’t all the bad as parents. They must have learned a lot from us, huh?

So the biggest worry ends up being how we can see the baby more often. The old joke about the best part of having grandkids is that they go home with their parents is not always true. I think that since they are the babies of our babies, we want to love them that much more.