Reminiscences

My grandmother Maggie was a wonderful, proper Southern lady of the old school – a Methodist preacher’s wife and well suited for the position. The only time I ever heard her curse was when she used the word damn and then only in reference to Yankees (not the ball club). She had a great sense of humor.

I and my brother, sister and cousins spent a lot of time at Granny’s house when we were growing up. I remember her saying, “Ya’ll go take your baths – and be sure to wash possible.” I never really thought about what she meant by possible – I just knew she meant to scrub everything real good.

That got to be sort of a family saying, then – be sure to wash possible. Later, when I was older, I asked her what that meant and she told me.

She said that she and my grandfather Raymond had known a doctor in one of the towns where they had been appointed by the Methodist Conference. He was a member of their church and he told them about a patient that had visited his office one day for a checkup. He pointed out that she was not the cleanest patient he had ever examined.

After the examination was over he told her that everything looked OK, but that she should be more attentive to her personal hygiene.

She said, “Well, I wash up as far as possible and down as far as possible.”

He replied, “That’s very good – but don’t neglect to wash possible.”

Well, there you have it. Granny got a big kick out of that and it’s been quite a joke and a saying in the family ever since.

Oh, and don’t forget to wash – well, you get it.

When I was about six years old I loved to walk on sidewalks. I would walk with my back straight and with purposeful strides, planting each step down firmly on the center of the heel and turning square corners, the way I had seen the Marines at Parris Island do. I would imagine that I wore a suit with pockets inside the coat for my wallet, notebook and pen: a blue seersucker suit and black and white shoes. My job was to walk around in my suit and go in and out of buildings and look sharp and talk to people. I think I fancied myself a detective. I wish I could accurately describe the incredible feeling that I would get walking around with my imagination. It was good and right and sometimes I still get that feeling walking on sidewalks, turning square corners, feet straight and true. And somehow it makes me think of my Dad.

My father was a Navy chaplain. Some Sundays he would go to the other side of the island, to the Navy base at Pearl Harbor, to hold services and I would go with him. We would travel in a jeep, he and I and a driver, across the mountain that divided the island of Oahu. The mountain was high and the road through the pass narrow and sometimes treacherous. One time I remember the wind was so strong that it caught under the canvas top of the jeep and lifted us off the road for a moment. They called this pass the Pali.

The buildings on the base were old and red-bricked and important-looking and it is walking these sidewalks among these buildings that I remember. After chapel we would eat at the mess hall or maybe we would go to the Waikiki Sands hotel for lunch and eat and watch the brown-skinned hula girls dance. These beautiful, limber, smiling girls in their swishing grass skirts made quite a favorable impression on me.

I miss my Dad and many others from my life that have passed on. But sometimes, walking on sidewalks, I think of him and remember those happy days in Hawaii.

My Grandmother Hammond’s back porch was cool and smelled of old flowers and long-ago summers and ripe fruit. I could usually find a box of peppermint sticks in there somewhere. The soft kind.

There were windows all around and a sink and cabinets and cupboards and an enamel-painted metal table in the middle: white enamel with a red edge and Mason jars and lids and another door that led into the kitchen.

From out the windows I could see the kitchen garden and the garden wall and pastures beyond and the well house with the big dinner bell and the drive curving down between white fences to Highway 29.

My grandparents on both sides are all gone now, as are my Mom and Dad. The house and farm may or may not still be there. I don’t know. I haven’t been back in years.

But I still remember the house and the fields and the barns and the cabin my mother and sister and brother and I stayed in one summer.

And the back porch. It seemed the model for all back porches.