1 Corinthians, 13

The words I spoke to honor my Grandfather, February 2003…

When some of us decided to speak today about my grandfather, my brother Eric commented that we would be “reduced to words.”  And he was right about that.  

All of my adult life I have been attracted to the power of written words on a page, but today I am struggling with what is in any way adequate to tell you about Grandpa.  It was easy the think that my Grandfather would never grow old.  If you look over all the photographs that are scattered across the front of this room, you can see that from the time I was a very little girl until now, Grandpa looked the same.  You could almost say he was ageless.  While the years passed, he remained a place of steadiness and love standing by quietly watching his grandchildren make their way into their respective adulthoods.  And while we weren't necessarily graceful or lovable through the process, he unfailingly was.  

Through the years that hurtled past while we lived through whatever maelstrom, joy or growing up experience we might be in, there was something that we all understood; something unspoken between us.  It went: find Grandpa, find your base, find your center again.  He was our friend, our rock, our old angel man.

His five grandchildren are very different…and of the five, I was the "horse-crazy kid."  I got my first horse when I was five.  Grandpa got him for Steve and me as a Christmas gift.  "Baron" was his name.  Baron was a horse on his brother Woody's farm, but come Christmas morning 1963, Baron stood outside our front door with a big red ribbon woven into his braided tail, a big bow at the bottom.  I was taken.  I have loved horses for the rest of my life.

Some of my best days and memories with Grandpa were the two of use hanging out in the little red barn in Plant City and caring for my colt, Aslan, and the two mares we had there.  Whatever I was doing…cleaning stalls, moving hay bales or grooming horses, he was right there with me.  He always wore his work clothes: Dickies and a vintage-style Pith hat to limit the sun.  He took turns with me for all the manual labor parts of taking care of a horse barn in the right way.  I still have two horses and for years and--as recently as a year ago--Grandpa cared for one of them.  He liked doing that.

Grandpa and "Hasta," my cutting horse

As respects barn duties, I have two words for my family: hay baling.  Those were the few days a year when it was time to fill up the big barn from Grandpa's hay field.  It was the sweatiest, most back-breaking thing we have probably ever done together as a family.  Grandpa drove the tractor wearing his work uniform, those khaki Dickes, a red bandanna over his head with his Pith hat, while my Dad and brothers and sisters, Steve, Eric, Luana, Deanna and her husband Kirby and I threw and stacked the bales of hay in the barn.  They weren't light.  My Mom and my sister-in-law, Vicky brought pitchers or lemonade or tea for us.  I have to say that in hindsight, it was fun.  We laughed.  We talked.  We walked behind the hay trailer and called each other "slow-poke,"as we took took turns getting tired.  Or, we lent a hand to climb up on the stacked bales for a ride back to the barn when the hay trailer was stacked and full…a hayride.  We were a team.  I guess I should speak for myself on that front, but I wouldn't trade those sweaty days for anything.

My brother Steve, brother-in-law Kirby and Stevie stacking hay

I look back on those days with such a grateful heart.  Those sunny days in that cool barn allowed us the time to talk…about the way the world used to be, the different way it was then, about life, about practical stuff.  Born in 1911, his eyes had seen so much in his life.   I was learning perspective.  I was learning practicality, but mostly I was soaking in the love of my good Grandpa, knowing without a doubt that he would rather be spending time outside with me in that little old broken- down barn, than anything else he could be doing.  His family was his first priority.  He didn't spend a lot of time talking about it.  His actions spoke for him.  My Dad always said "Grandpa wasn't a talker.  He was doer."  And that is about as right as he could put it.  Grandpa went through everything with us. We would not have had it any other way.

Breast cancer was a rude interruption in my life at 38 years old.  When I was going through chemotherapy we joked together about having peach fuzz on our bald heads.  And when that chapter of my life was over and I had the son that all my doctors said I would not be able to have, I brought him to my home in Florida and laid him in his great-grandfather's arms.  It didn't matter what it was: new babies, weddings, funerals, cancer, new jobs…Grandpa was always there.

Grandpa with Stevie, his first great-grandchild

There were hundreds of days and hundreds of stories in all kinds of different settings, but the underlying reason for all those wonderful times was clear: Grandpa loved us deeply.  He loved us entirely with no doubt.  And he loved us with the same degree of earnestness that we loved him…perhaps more.  It is hard to find the words to tell the place Grandpa held in each one of our hearts.  He never, not once, let any of us down.  Whatever good that I am as a person today is in great part from all he taught me by his life and by his steadfast, unconditional love.

When Grandpa was in the hospital and we were
trying so hard to encourage him and help him to get well, we made sure that he was alone as little as possible.  We didn't want  him to feel the isolation of being a hospital patient.  We were afraid of losing someone so precious to us.  And when it was all said and done, I realized that the message of his life was coming back to us then; that the love he gave us all through the years would help us find our way without him.  I realized that, in the end, the only antidote to the isolation is love, the antidote to fear is love and today, as we are grieving, it is the only antidote to loss.  It is what sustains us above all else.

My Grandpa has gone to be with God now.  Our old angel man is living with the God's angels.  In the Bible, it tells us that love conquers everything.  My Grandpa taught me that too.

*********

I Corinthians, 13 ... If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,1 but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Chickens

At the time, I couldn’t imagine the man he would become, much less the notion of him as a man.  My brother Steve was only 14 years old, but my father was raising him to be a capable, self-reliant man in the most old-fashioned sense of the word.  In fact, I can’t imagine my teenaged son doing a lot of the things we did back in the day.  We lived on a five acre chunk of land on the highest point in Hillsborough County.  In fact, it was named for my great grandfather, Henry Pugh Kennedy.  The local folks referred to it as "Kennedy Hill."  And that was where we lived with a small assortment of livestock…and chickens.  The chickens were as near-cherished as my Dad 
could muster in an emotion for farm animals.  Most days they laid their eggs and happily chirped and pecked the days away on our sunny Florida small farm.

When Dad’s chickens began to disappear, we were worried.  One by one, we'd find the remnants of a former loved hen when morning came. There was a fox that was stealing the hens, a true master of stealth.  And after an entire week of waking up to feathers strewn untidily all over the back yard and around the pool deck, I decided that this fox must have had  a death wish because our Dad, Papa Pierre, was getting ready to pull out the stops.  He had tried to fox-proof the hen house with no luck.  He double-locked it, wired the roof shut, then he triple locked it.  The recalcitrant fox continued to prevail.  The hens were nervous.  They stopped laying eggs.  And when evening came, there was always hopeful discussion at the dinner table of the new tactical improvements to the chicken house.  No, the fox would not win tonight.  No, he wouldn’t.  

Inevitably though, we would awaken to beaks and feathers and assorted gross-looking discarded body parts. Worse, the fox had the temerity to drag all that mess across our pool deck.  The consensus was a mixed “ewwh” from all of us kids and downright shocked outrage from Papa Pierre.  Now, he would resort to his “big gun,” my 14 year old younger brother Steve.

“Boy,” he said the next night after dinner.  “I want you to find a big ball of string.”

“Yeah, Dad?” said Steve.

“And then, I want you to take it with you when you go to bed tonight and tie it around your big toe.” 

Now, my brother Steve was truly the model kid.  He made good grades.  He was an athlete.  And unlike his big-mouthed big sister, known occasionally for her stubbornness, he was unfailingly respectful.  But as soon as the words “big toe” passed out of our father’s mouth, he began to look suspect…and also a little perturbed.  

“Aw, Dad.  How come?  I just wanna go to bed.”

“Listen here.  I’m gonna tie a dead hen at the other end of that string and leave it out by the hen house.  Now when you feel it pull on your toe, just get up and shoot that fox with the 12 gauge.  I am going to get that fox or bobcat or whatever it is that is stealing my hens." 

“No, Dad.  I think I am going to be doing that,” my brother said.

And that was the end of the conversation.  My brother Steve was on the hook for getting that chicken-stealing fox.  I felt bad.  I was often a little jealous of some of the fun stuff my Dad did with my younger brothers: target shooting, driving the riding mower, building stuff…but at that moment, well, I was really glad to be a girl. 

That night we all went to bed in our usual way.  That is, except for my brother Steve, who had gone to bed early in anticipation of the fox watch.  He was sleeping the heavy sleep that falls on a teenager with a very long string attached to his big toe.  The 12 guage shot gun sat, oblingly, nearby with the safety clicked to the “on” position in case duty called.  The string, went off the top bunk bed over our the bottom bunk bed and over our sleeping kid brother Eric.  It passed out beside the closet and out the bedroom door.  It went through the living room, out the back double glass doors and through the backyard to the pasture where the chicken house was located and, accordingly, was attached to one very dead hen. 

It’s almost 40 years later and now I can’t remember if I heard the gun go off that night, but on my recent Christmas visit home I was reminded again of those chicken days back in the 70’s.   All these years that have passed, all forty of them, Dad has always had some chickens pecking around the place.  And among these we've had some famous ones in the family lore.  There was "Peep-Peep," and "Henrietta" and there was even a scraggly little rooster named "Mister Kennedy" accompanied by another even dinkier rooster named "Fancy-boy." We sure have had our chickens.

This past Christmas, Mom and I walked outside after dinner to discover red feathers scattered about the woods near the house on the family compound.  Papa, by that time, was in his comfy reclining chair taking a post-Christmas dinner nap.  I wondered how many times over the last forty years Papa had lost chickens just that way, still always fighting the good fight trying to keep them safe.  I shook my head a little realizing how much things were the same…in that way at least.  Here we were, all of us grown now, with children and even grandchildren, but the chicken saga continued.  The sameness of that small thing struck a chord with me.

My brother Steve wasn’t nearby at just that moment that Mom and I walked outside.  He'd taken the grand babies to his house to nap, but I knew: if I walked myself on over to his house around the corner and handed him a ball of string and a shotgun, he’d know just what it meant.  He’d probably have a good chuckle about it too.

Joie and "Peep-Peep..."