Tell Me a Story

My dad told me a story a couple of weeks ago about when he was a boy and I think it’s worth repeating. He’s quite the storyteller, so I won’t be able to do it justice, but I would like to try because it bears testimony to just how fast a culture can change. Dad used to tell my kids stories. Some of them he made up and some of them were traditional favorites that he told like he knew the characters personally. My kids called them “Papa stories”.

He started out something like this, “You hear people talk about east Texas in the 1940’s and 50’s, about how many people, especially in the rural areas, were poor. When I think back, though, I really don’t remember that many people having it all that hard………… except for us. Now, we were poor. Yeah, we were poor.”

My grandma didn’t marry my grandpa until she was 30. My grandpa was a circuit preacher. My dad called them Ma and Pa. They married in their thirties and had 5 children. Ma had a stroke and was paralyzed on one side afterward. She had been a schoolteacher in her younger years. Pa tried everything to make ends meet and put food on the table. He tried tomato farming for a couple of years and kept my dad home a lot from school to help him with the planting. One day, my dad’s teacher, Mrs. Malone, sent a sealed envelope home with my dad and told him to give it to his ma. He said he wasn’t sure what it said, but ma got red in the face and picked up her Big Chief tablet and wrote out three pages (front and back) and put that letter in an envelope (unsealed), and told my dad to give it to Mrs. Malone when he got to school. Dad got about halfway to school and decided he had better take the letter out and read it. “I was glad I did” He said. Ma had written three pages on the trials and hardships of poor people in rural east Texas and how families had to work together to make it. Then at the very end, she wrote, “And besides all that, he really doesn’t like to go EVERY day, anyway.” He took the letter and buried it in a field, but said he had wished many times since then that he would have kept it. What a treasure that would have been. I would have loved to have read it. I never even got to meet my grandmother. She died before I was born, but stories like these help her to live on.