Where I First Saw The Light

I visited my retired and aged father in East Texas five years ago. I did so two or three times a year until my step-mother died and he moved to Dallas last year. My father was born in that general area as was most of his kin and also that of his second wife, my step-mother.

My father still has a few years in him, but no ones how many and he wanted to share something of himself now. I knew about his war exploits and stories of his growing on a farm during the depression, but I hardly knew anything of his earliest childhood, those spent here before they moved on to West Texas hoping to grow cash crops, in particular cotton.

I went with him as he took me around just to be courteous. There was a bit of curiosity, but mostly I just wanted to be nice to an old man that seemed to need to tell me something. To leave something behind of himself.

I knew him to be born in the county seat, but that was the big city compared to where he was really born. Ten miles from the county seat was a village so small, it wasn't even a village, it was a farming area with a name. He showed me the cemetary where his grandfather was buried, his grandmother, his father, his mother, and some other relatives. A small cemetery that had more people than any other place on this two lane road. Across the road was the colored cemetery dating all the way back to pre-Civil War where they buried the slaves.

Just up the road was a twenty acre farm that his father used to farm. When the soil gave out they moved a few miles further up the same road and we went there too. He kept on driving until he came to a shack so dilapidated it was barely standing up. My father stopped the car and just stared for a moment. His mouth fell open and he explained that his grandfather used to farm this land and this was his old house. The present farmer was using it for a store house. My boys were with me and I was so proud for them to see this. This is how it was. This was us, the real us, not the educated city slickers we had become. This was our heritage, our makeup. We were Southerners, sons of sharecroppers. Dirt poor, but hard working and proud. The backbone of history.

I had my camera with me and my wife took a picture of these three generations of Texans. Later I had it blown up and framed. I hang mine up in the boys room, I gave my father a copy and he has it hanging next to his war pictures.

By now I was hanging on to every word, every story my father told. I was bulging in pride. Who would want to be a Rockefeller when you could be a Texan?

On an adjacent road was a cattle tank. Everybody used to fish there. It was sociable and relaxing and a source of some of the few morsels of meat they got. One day a revival passed through and they threw up their tent next to this tank. My grandmother was religious and though of a different denomination, Methodist, she went and brought the kids with her. My granddaddy tagged along, making sure they got there okay, and giving into his nagging wife, but he smoked and drank and cussed and didn't put much worth in all of this foolishness. So much pie in the sky nonsense that made you weak.

He stayed outside the tent entrance and smoked a cigarette. You could hear the Pentecostal preacher bellowing out his message and my grandfather almost guffawed as he pulled out another cigarette. But something in the sermon touched a chord and he flicked the half smoked cigarette away, took off his hat and sat down next to his wife and kids. At the end of the service he answered the altar call and our family has been Pentecostal ever since, two of his sons becoming preachers.

All these memories came back just now as I listened on the stereo to a Hank Williams Gospel song called Something Got A Hold Of Me. Hank Williams was a sinner, like Elvis Presley, but something in their dark, moody, lost souls were moved by the same calling. They wrote and sang some of the greatest heart felt Gospel I've ever listened to. I have lost, dark sides to me too and Jesus hit it smack dab on the head when He reached out and called out to people like us. All of us aren't lost in every way. Some of this is real in us and humbles more than the 'sinless' and proud could ever know. Where would we ever be if we had not crashed the dinner of Simon the Pharisee and been welcomed by Jesus as we washed his feet with our tears and dried them with our hair as Simon judged Jesus for taking us in? Who has more to love with and be grateful for than the lost sheep for which He forsook the ninety and nine to come fetch and bring home.