A Bit of Nostalgia

I think I always start to get a bit nostalgic around the holidays, not just for sweet Thanksgiving and Christmas memories but also just ones from my childhood. I’m going to take a couple of posts to share a few of these with you. I thought I’d do one this week and one next week. Hmmm, maybe I’ll even make it a weekly thing. We’ll see.

ONE: My first memory comes from when I was two years old… yes, two. We lived in some apartments in north Nashville, and I was walking with my mom to the pool where a party was going on. I remember people being on the roof of the clubhouse when we arrived at the pool, and they were diving off into the pool. It seemed so exciting and dangerous, and I thought that adults must always have fun like that.

TWO: I am perhaps four years old. It’s such a lovely family picture of us --- Mom, Dad, my older brother Wayne --- having a picnic in a pavilion in the park. I remember my mom was wearing light colored jeans, and her dark hair hung loose down her back. Wayne and I went to hunt four leaf clovers in the grass. I looked up to see Mom and Dad close together in conversation and wondered what they were talking about. They would soon join Wayne and me in our search for four leaf clovers. Being only four, I didn’t understand then that this was no “normal” family picnic; I was just happy that we were all together. What was not “normal” about it? We were visiting my dad in prison, and that “park” was the prison yard of the Tennessee State Prison, incidentally the same prison from The Green Mile and The Last Castle.

(FYI for those of you not in the know: Daddy had become a Christian and a “man on fire” for God while in prison and did get out of prison. A year after getting out of prison, he started a ministry, Hope and Life Ministry, which includes jail/prison ministry and free counseling for marriage, drug/alcohol abuse, etc.)

THREE: I was about 11 years old, and we had a magnificent snow that winter. (Oh, why can’t it snow like that in Nashville once again?) Dad took Wayne and me and our best friends, Bonnie and Luke, out for some fun in the snow. His brand of fun was so different from most parents. He tied the sled to the back of the car and pulled us all over our neighborhood. Once all four of us were on the sled when Dad turned sharply around a corner sliding us all off of the back of the sled and landing us in exactly the same positions as on the sled. Later Bonnie and I were on the sled when it flipped over and somehow caught her food between the blade and the board causing her to be dragged behind the car. She was reaching out towards me and yelling, “Kay-Kay, help!” I tried running towards her but of course could not catch up to the slow moving car on the slippery snow. Finally freeing her foot, she laid there panting when I caught up to her and we set out to walk the mile back to our house. It was a short trip however, because Luke noticed the empty sled, and Dad turned around to retrieve us.