Kindness and two cookies

A lot of people I know can’t seem to remember a thing about when they were growing up and circumstances that helped form belief systems held dear. It makes me think of the story about my Mom, cutting both ends off a roast before she would place it in the pan before cooking it to perfection. I asked her one time why she did that and she plainly told me it was because her mother did it. I asked my grandmother why she did it and she said her mother did it also. My Great-Great-Grandmother was still alive at the time and I asked her why she cut the ends off of her roasts and she said “Because I had a small pan, I cut the ends off so the juices wouldn’t make a mess of my oven”. See? That’s what I mean, you do something now because of an event or a circumstance from your past. My Mom and her Mom had no idea why they cut the ends off the roast. I never got around to telling either of them that particular fact and it probably wouldn’t have made a difference to them anyhow. I can tell you that finding out those types of habits and the reasoning behind them has helped me in some very different ways, one of which is to be aware of monumental and maybe some lesser monumental moments in my life, all of which impacted my life in some positive way.

I will share with you that I have always been keenly aware of my surroundings. I also have memories that most folk might not even conceive of having. I was born in 1960 in the early part of March. I missed being born on leap year by one day, and I  think it might have been cool to have been born on February 29th for different reasons. Having a birthday every four years is not an advantage and is down right disastrous as a kid, until that kid turns forty and he is celebrating his tenth birthday. Then on your sixtieth birthday you have your fifteenth birthday. If for no other reason, it would be a novelty, but that’s not what this particular story is about. I recollect when my parents lived in the now western end of the end of the runway at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, Georgia. Now this was in the early sixties, 1962 to be exact and I was two years old. You could see the planes taking off and landing from where we lived and a lot of times, me and my brother would just sit and drink Kool-Aid watching the big jets land and take off. Where that house was is now under a four-foot thick concrete slab that makes up that end of the landing strip in the busiest airport in the world.

I have had visions of my father setting me up on a table in a small room on the eastern side of an enormous back porch. The room was where my dad would go and practice his “schemes” as it’s called, learning how to throw mail into slots with speed and accuracy. It amounted to entry-level work at the United States Postal Service and it was difficult and tedious, timed for accuracy and very much hard learned memory work. He practiced every day after he did his job at the time, whatever it might have been, so he could do better for his family. I vividly remember how he’d sit me up on the table and put rubber thumb covers on his hands to help make the letters stick to his fingers so he could make the process go quicker, and occasionally he’d tickle my belly. He had a few of the rubber thumb gadgets and I’d play with one while he practiced his craft. He was surprised when I told him that fact, telling me I was only two at the time, and how in the world could I have possible remembered that. I also remember him and my mom playing badminton across the back fence with our then neighbors, the Breimers. They were friends of ours most of our lives, so that wasn’t something I had to recollect, just to make that clear. I also remember when John F. Kennedy was shot, all the neighbors gathering at our small house (it was a mansion to me, I was, after all, a kid) and the ladies crying and the men outside, all with stern looks on their faces and hearing words like war and assassination for the first time in my young life. It’s amazing what a mind can do and what it recalls. I guess every brain has rooms and closets and memories are stored there never to been seen again or like me, I can recall some things but not all. It doesn’t make me special and I ‘m certainly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I’m proud to say I’m not the dullest either. Of course, that depends on who you’d be asking.

I’ve learned over the years that you might want to be careful disclosing how skillful you might be when it comes to fixing a car or doing a brake job, or plumbing or preparing tax returns. Selective memory is an option, but I’m trying to live a better life, so selective memory might be the first cousin to flat out lying. My bones creak a lot more than I recall them creaking and I seem to have a lot more patience with kids now that mine are mostly gone. I have a two year old grandson right now and he can officially do no wrong in my eyes. I’m at a good point in my life, I have a bride that still loves me or does a righteous job of faking it after twenty-six years and I guess that’s adequate time for two people to figure each other out. If we can survive the next twenty-five together then it will have been a one to one proposition…one day of figuring each other out and one settled. I can live with those odds, seeings I am the reason we probably didn’t get along most of the time in the first place. At the times she’d get her fill of me, she’d tell me she never got her way and that really bugged her a lot. I could see her point to some degree, but one particular time when we were having a “discussion” and in sight of the “nitty-gritty” reasons we might not be compatible on any given day, I slipped up. Like a dumb ass I said, “You’ll never get a hundred percent of your way with me, I’m hanging on to ten percent even if you tell me you saw Elvis and I’m standing with you when he passed by”. Being married this long has taught me that trying to be “right” 100% of the time is better reserved for immature married folks and those hell bent on keeping score-thing is, no one wins. I know it’s all give and take, compromise and love each other more every day. I love her and would give up my life for her. She’s the greatest.

More on Wednesday!