I’ve been playing my daddy’s guitar this week and it makes me smile. I’d been putting it off. Sadness, and, if I’m honest, a little bit of anger contributed to my reluctance to pick it up. But Thursday, I did it. And the first soft strum across the strings brought tears to my eyes.
The sound was amazing. Daddy always did love good guitar music, and true to his care of his instrument, it was still in tune. I even had his pick to play it with. For a few minutes, I was transported back to my childhood and he was sitting on the edge of my bed, singing me to sleep, and it made me smile.
Sounds, smells, and tastes trigger memories and ready or not, here they came, like an avalanche over my mind. All of them related but in no real order, like loosely organized chaos, snapshots of times and people long gone, the fabric of my past.
I come from simple roots. My grandparents were farmers, auto mechanics, and factory workers. They provided for their families with their hands. My parents were teachers, educated in a small college in west Alabama. We lived in small towns and my mama sewed most of my school clothes. All my people grew food for their own table. They all loved music and they all loved telling stories. I never felt like we didn’t have enough of the things we needed and I never felt unloved.
Once the memories started, it was like something broke loose. Cooking dinner, I was suddenly in my Grandmama Jackson’s kitchen. German chocolate cake, macaroni and cheese, and peach halves always remind me of her. She made good cake, her macaroni (pronounced mack-ee-roni) was amazing, and she always had peach halves for breakfast. That was a novelty for me. We never had peaches for breakfast at home. And she had plain white plates. I’d put an upturned peach half on my plate and pretend it was a huge fried egg, which is funny since I never liked fried eggs, but that was just something I did at my Grandmama’s house that made me smile.
Her Sunday dinners included my aunts and uncles and cousins. Dinner was the midday meal and anyone who left hungry had only him/herself to blame. My Aunt Eva would bring her British Baking Show worthy chocolate pie, with towers of meringue on top. My Aunt June always brought the ingredients for fruit salad, mixing it up while she and my aunts sat and visited in the kitchen and waited for the chicken and dressing and rolls to brown.
Aunt Ruby always had the latest fashion to model for us. I remember when pantsuits became a thing. She modeled her one-piece boldly flowered uni-suit and shared with us how she had to get a long girdle to make it fit right. She always made me smile.
Playing Daddy’s guitar made me smile, but it also brought a flood of memories, good and bad, joyful and painful, some making me smile, some making me cry, and some making me laugh out loud. Grief is a funny thing. It comes in waves. You think you’re done, then, just kidding, here it comes again.
I heard an interesting concept on a Zoom for writers the other day. The host talked about “resume values” and “eulogy values.” “Resume values” are those we try to portray to others and how we want others to see us. “Eulogy values” are those that people remember us for, the impressions we leave behind after we’re gone.
I’ve been thinking about that. My family, each of them, have been subject to the “human condition” just like me. I, and all of them, have blown it sometimes, and other times we’ve all been our better selves.
All humans have the capacity to be kind. We all have the capacity to be cruel. We all can be compassionate and we can all be uncaring and insensitive. We all need forgiveness and we all need second chances, sometimes even third ones, and fourth.
The woman in the Bible caught in the act of adultery in a society that required death by stoning for that sin, when Jesus quietly challenged her accusers, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her,” looked up to find that they had all silently disappeared. * I, like every other human that has ever drawn breath, have sinned, have messed up, have hurt others. Who am I to look down on anyone else when I am in need of grace myself?
As I remember my daddy, and I work through all the complicated emotions in my heart, I’m learning to forgive. I’m learning to extend grace, to him, to my family, to myself, and to anyone else in this world who is human. And I hope one day my “eulogy values” will be the same as my “resume values,” that when my kids and my grandkids remember me, they’ll smile and never doubt that they were deeply loved. I hope anyone who crosses my path, or reads my words, or sees any of my posts on social media, will go away having been uplifted, encouraged, blessed, and their day made a little brighter for the encounter.
I want to “Carpe Diem Coram Deo,” “Seize the day in the presence of God” and leave the people in my world with a smile. I know I won’t always live up to that standard, but I hope I live with such grace that those left behind will extend the same to me and to everyone in their worlds as well.
So, if you pass by and hear discordant guitar music coming from my house, bear in mind I’m still very much a beginner, but it makes me happy and it connects me with my roots. I’ve got my daddy’s guitar, and playing it makes me smile.
Be Kind. Be Generous. Be Love.
*John 8:1-11, ESV
