Inaugural Post

My wife and children are always saying, “You never told me that!” They have claimed, through the years, not to have known that I knew four murderers, or that I was friends with a Secret Service agent, before I mentioned these things in public. The number of things they don't know about me is simply staggering, especially when you consider that my wife has known me since I was 13 years old. In spite of talking too much, I apparently don't say anything. This bugs them all a lot because, for some reason, they think that they should know what has happened to me during my life before I start talking about it from the pulpit.

I thought that this was an unusual state of affairs until I thought about my mother's parents. How much did I really know about them? I assumed it must be a lot, since I spent time on their farm growing up. Then I realized that I didn't know how they met, where they lived before the farm, or how they lived. My time on their farm had produced many memories that included them, but weren't really about them. I was self-centered as a child, in the way that all children believe that the world exists for them. I was confident that the world would never change, because I could not imagine it being any other way. It never occurred to me that parents and grandparents were really people in the way that I was, because they were godlike creatures. They had no beginning that I could remember, and I could imagine no ending for them. They didn't come from anywhere - they simply were. A teenaged Papaw or a child Grandmaw were thoughts that the child never imagined thinkable. At any rate, I never learned who they were before they were gone.

In the last year of her life, my Grandmaw Luke began writing down some of her memories; but she became too ill to continue. She finished four pages of her memories. Four pages. That is all that I have left that is not corrupted by the years since her death. It occurs to me that I want my children and grandchildren to know my stories as I have lived them. There are a few things that I want to set the record straight about. To wit:

• I didn't burn the campground down.
• Nothing happened to my Grandmother Parker's 70^th birthday cake. Nothing at all.
• My uncle's head didn't even need stitches.
• I did break that girl's finger, though. 

This won't be Tolstoy's “Childhood”; but I'll tell my stories in more or less chronological order, and I'll be more or less honest.

Blessings!

Jack

Dad

Grandpaw

JP