Happy Summer, and safe (and grateful) travels …
My parents had the one thing money can’t buy.
Poverty.
Well, that’s a stretch. We weren’t ever going to be confused with the Vanderbilts, but we weren’t The Beverly Hillbillies pre-oil either. We had all we needed.
I can never remember going without or being hungry or not having clothes to wear. A small-town preacher’s family always would be supplied. Bushels of corn and peas and beans showed up at our side door, fresh cucumbers, tomatoes. We had a garden like everyone else, but we didn’t really need one; we got the surplus from others. Our deep-freeze was always full.
But cash money, we didn’t have a lot of that. I didn’t know that at the time, but I do now.
Ignorance was bliss — but it wasn’t as grateful as it should have been. I didn’t understand how much my parents and their friends did for us kids. None of us knew.
When summer rolls around every year, I think of our vacations back then and wonder how they did it, how my parents came up with the money. We’d drive from South Carolina to see my grandparents in Louisiana. Not always, but sometimes, we stayed at a hotel . . . almost always ate at a Howard Johnsons, so we could have pancakes. Or “pigs in a blanket.” Spaghetti. No restaurants in my hometown. This was a huge deal, eating out.
And not every summer, but three times, we stopped on the way home at “Six Flags Over Georgia” in Atlanta.
Bigtime. Just saying. Two words: log ride.
It is not easy these days to scrape up money for a few days at the beach or “Six Flags Over Anywhere.” Even “One Flag” can be tough. But it was even harder for my parents, and probably for yours. Somehow, they managed it, and memories of those times are priceless, even though travel with five in a two-door Impala was far from luxury.
Ignorance is thinking the window rolled down and your sister’s elbow in your ribs was bliss. And it was.
My parents did practical day-to-day things to get us over the hump, plus some more. It is another reason to honor a couple who did things for me I couldn’t do for myself. There is an illustration of selflessness in their actions and purpose that I need always to remember.
“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right,” Paul writes in Ephesians. “‘Honor your father and mother’”—the first commandment with a promise— “so that it may go well with you…”
They did so much to make it “go well” with us. Summer vacation? Probably wasn’t much of a vacation for them, corralling kids and scraping some dollar bills together. Just a small reason, of many, to honor them, more than a half-century of summers later.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu
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