Our lives overlapped by twenty years and as of today, our combined lives span 135 years. I spent the night with him before he died the next morning. A cousin and I took him to the bathroom once, rubbed his feet several times, and listened as he moaned and groaned his way to his mid-morning meeting with his Maker.
The world outside the family called him Mr. Walter. Inside the family we called him Grandpa, Papa, and Daddy. Everybody called him a saint for having the ability to live with my grandma all those years. My love for the old man is the reason that I ask that my grandchildren call me Grandpa. Mrs. Sue was a hellion who never really learned how to live at peace with the rest of the world. Her's in another story.
There is not a day that goes by that I do not meet someone who would have benefited by knowing my grandpa. When I would stand in front of classes years ago and tell them that they did not realize how much knowledge is lost as we adopt new ways of doing things, I was most often thinking of the things that my Grandpa knew about and how to do.
Grandpa could read and write very well, but he was far from an educated man if you are talking about "book learning," except for the Good Book, as it was called back then. He did not own his own land until he was in his seventies. Until then he had sharecropped and rented since leaving his dad's home just outside Pineville as a young man.
I live in an ocean of false bravado, ignorance parading as everything from patriotism to toughness of spirit, "me-ism" parading as honest conservatism and enlightened liberalism, and insecurity so deep that the ownership and display of guns, guns, and more guns substitutes for the security of knowing one's self and one's proper relationship to all of God's gifts. My Grandpa would not fit in this world today.
There is little doubt that different ones of those of us who knew Grandpa walked away with different lessons. He was a complicated man and could speak to a variety of people with a variety of needs. To my oldest brother, he imparted a proper working relationship with God. To me he imparted the need to know how to do many things well. To our brother between us, he imparted frugality and saving.
You see, Grandpa was not a teacher, in his own mind. He just went through his days doing what he had to do and what he wanted to do in a way that you could call efficiently, purposefully, skillfully, reasonably, thrift driven, humbly, and charitably. He let the world see what it wanted to see, and we saw that which we most needed to see, or wanted to see.
I loved and respected my grandpa too much to give him as the reason for my religious or political leanings. I will not borrow from his well of good sense to justify what may turn out to be my own failings or misunderstandings. My views are mine, not his. He was a part of the world that gave me the freedom to be who I think that I should be.
I have no idea how Grandpa would fall on the healthcare bill in Congress. I have no idea what he would think of modern day church experiences. Would he have registered Republican or stayed Democrat in the seventies or eighties? Again, I have no idea. If he and I diverged one hundred and eighty degrees on those questions, it would be of no concern to me. I do not worry about letting him down so long as I stand strong for those things in which I believe, treat my fellow man with respect, and always keep a charitable heart.
I try to carry the essence of the man in my mind and heart and attempt to reflect that essence in my own life. That is what a good teacher leaves his student. The student, in the end, will educate himself or herself. They will ask their own questions and find the answers where they believe the answers lie. It is up to us adults to give the examples of honesty, strength, charity, efficiency, humility, frugality, and a host of other character building qualities that will made their paths fruitful.
Grandpa was no saint. He could give a mule a lesson in foul language that even the mule would never forget. But, he knew that he was working to become the equal of a saint someday, and he pursued that path with every ounce of his energy. In doing so, he became the teacher of life that I needed, the teacher the schools could not provide.
And thus, no recounting of my early education would be even close to complete without telling of this special man and his influence on my life.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
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