I've been tied up with computer problems and now the holidays.  I'm sorry to have been so slow with this blog.  I've also lost all of your e-mail addresses.  If you have time, would you please send them to me?  Thanks!--Marci


My grandfather was a crusty rancher who resembled something of John Wayne and Jack Palance.  He grew up poor, like most Texans who were born in the late 1800's and early 1900's.  His parents were ranchers, and he was the youngest surviving child after a string of others, whose numbers remain in the ether.  He quit school in the sixth grade so he could help out at home.  Yet, he did not quit learning.  Even at an advanced age, he would study books about the solar system or wild west heroes most of us know nothing about.  He loved the music of Hank Williams, Jimmy Rogers, and Ernest T. Ford.
    He could pick up a rattler by its tail and crack it against the ground, killing it before it knew what hit it.  He fought the Great Depression without gloves, and lived to tell the tale, though it left its mark upon every financial decision he made afterward and in the slope of his shoulders.
    All these things I know to be true about him, and yet there was a tender side.  Whenever my sister and I stayed with our grandparents, we were told to take a nap after a lunch of  fried chicken, butternut squash, and blue-ribbon beefsteak tomatoes from the garden.  We were never ready to settle down.  My grandfather would eventually appear into our room and give us a reprieve.  He'd carry us into the kitchen and lift us up onto the counter top, and let us dip our hands into the perpetually full peppermint jar that stood to the left of the stove.  We were sworn to secrecy and told to especially not to tell our grandmother, lest she skin him alive.  She was five feet tall with her shoes on, and the sweetest woman on the planet.  He was six-feet-four, and yet we were somehow convinced that his life hung in the balance.  We never told, but, of course she knew and didn't mind one whit.
    Some Sunday afternoons, I'd find him in the living room sitting in the office chair he used to snap across the linoleum floor to change television channels or put on a record, all without standing up.  He'd turn on the record player and listen to Ernest T. Ford sing, How Great Thou Art,  In the Garden, and Amazing Grace, all the while looking a little sad.
    I didn't understand it at the time, but, now I think I know why he was sad.  Sad about the loved ones who'd passed.  Sad about all the good times behind him, and that he hadn't recognized them for what they were when they were happening. Sad about the mistakes he'd made.  Sad about the things he'd left undone.  Just like the rest of us.  There are none of us without regret.  All have something for which to be grateful.  I loved him in all his crustiness.  Beneath that tough exterior was a man with a soft underbelly.  He was surely good to me.