HOW IRONIC
How ironic, the Holy Cross Cemetery of Cleveland, Ohio, being forced to remove the Holy Cross from its cemetery---maybe. If it is city-owned, the crosses must go.
I assumed---and you know what they say about assuming---that church cemeteries are church-owned. Not so, at least not so in all cases. St. John’s Cemetery, of Cleveland, is city-owned.
The city of Cleveland, concerned about "rising maintenance costs" are implementing cost-saving measures, such as the enforcement of a “14-year-old rule” that prohibits crosses and other “decorations” in city cemeteries. Letters have been mailed to relatives of people buried there telling them to "remove crosses and other decorations from graves or have them taken away." Although the city says its policy has been in place for 14 years, now that it's actually going to be enforced, the question of its legality with inevitably arise.
For me, the ultimate consideration of all decisions made, in all matters involving governmental policy, governmental law, and all matters of morality, whether great or small, should be: Is it right? If one must choose between two things that are good, the choice should be in favor of the thing that provides the greater good.
As far as I’ve ascertained, there is no subplot to this story. So far, I’ve found no evidence that the A.C.L.U. is behind the edict to remove crosses from Cleveland city-owned cemeteries. Naturally, in any issue that arises that concerns the removal of anything religious, the A.C.L.U. comes to mind, because the A.C.L.U. has played, and continues to play, a major role in efforts to remove all references to religion from American government.
The important question of this issue, that needs to be answered is: Is it more important to lower the budget of the city, by removing crosses from cemeteries or----Is it more important to maintain a tradition that dates back two thousand years, not only in American history, but in world history, of placing a cross on the grave of a deceased loved-one.
What is the significance of the cross on a gravesite?
It is a silent message of faith in Almighty God. It is an emblem that represents faith in all things good and lovely. It is a symbol of acknowledgment of the Holy Bible and its inspired teachings. It is a reminder of the greatest sacrifice one person can make for another.
Should we now take down the thousands of white crosses scattered across vast landscapes, of foreign lands, where American soldiers have been laid to rest? American soldiers, mostly young men, in their salad days, who gave their lives for God and country?
Shall we just take down all of the crosses from North Carolina to California and North Dakota to Texas, because we now face budget crunches brought on by power-seeking, money-hungry politicians, who use the Bible as a prop.
We need the cross more than we’ve ever needed it before in America, to remind us of love, sacrifice, mercy, and forgiveness---qualities that some parents find unnecessary to instill in their children.
For those of us who grew up before, or during the 1960s, we have seen the devastating results of the removal of prayer in school. In the fifties and sixties I lived in homes where doors were left unlocked overnight. In the sixties, I shopped for Christmas presents, for hours, on Main St., in Washington, North Carolina. When I could carry no more bags, I went to our family car, on Main St., slipped the bags through the open windows of the car and continued my shopping. I may have left the keys in the car, for all I know, because no one would steal your car in our community.
Things could be that way again if people simply adhered to the Ten Commandments. You think not. Read them and you’ll see. There would be no need for security locks on your bicycles, automobiles, homes, schools, and businesses. Morality and religion would once again dictate the behavior of society. The decent mores that make a happy society would be re-established.
I watched a television show, where families lived the way families lived in the 19th century. I watched as the face of a young boy lit up with a smile upon receiving---an orange! When the family returned, from the prairie, to their brand-new, never-before-lived- in home, I watched as the boy sat alone in his bedroom, staring blankly, at the hand-held electronic game he was playing, saying: “I’m bored. I’ve got too much stuff.”
It bears repeating. The same boy who, deprived of the excesses of life, on the prairie, who was thrilled at the sight of a simple orange, sat in his bedroom like a zombie, bored with his expensive, electronic toy, in his expensive home.
Toys and Corvettes ain’t gonna make you happy---in the long-run. The short run yes, but not the long-run. Only God-given spiritual joy is everlasting. You will experience as many or more trials and tribulations in life as before, but with God-given spiritual joy, you will face them and embrace them with uncharacteristic optimism. I cannot explain “peace that passeth all understanding;” I can only tell you, from experience, that it is real.
In the 1970s, my dad and I saw a man pushing himself down a street in Kinston, North Carolina. He had the biggest smile on his face that I’ve ever seen. He had no body, from the waist down! That’s not all. My dad said he’d seen the man’s girlfriend and she was pretty!
I know a man who lost his arms and shoulders as the result of touching electric wires on a utility pole. He teaches and preaches in church whenever given the opportunity. He turns the pages of the Bible with his tongue. He has a wonderful, faithful wife, who’s been by his side for many years.
You think Mayberry was just a figment of someone’s imagination? Sure there are exaggerations of the way life was then, in the South, in the Andy Griffith Show, but much of what you see was real before the revolutionary years of the sixties. People were much kinder to one another back then. They were much more courteous and mannerly in public.
I believe people, in general, are kinder than we know, today, we’re just conditioned to expect the worst from everyone, today, thanks to television, especially cable TV, and we’re afraid to talk to strangers, afraid we’ll be rebuffed.
Even when my faith dissolved or waned in temptations and explorations of life, I was still fortified by the faith my parents and grandparents maintained throughout the years and their moral teachings of knowing things like the difference between wrong and right.
Now, whenever I see a cross, I see my grandparents. I see my parents. I see fallen soldiers. And I see my other loved-ones, who cherish the cross and what it stands for.
For those who say America is not, and never was, a Christian nation, I say, read the works of our founding fathers. Read the stories of the early settlers. Read about the old west. Have you ever seen a movie in which words of the Koran were read over the gravesite of an old cowboy, on the prairie? No. Someone said a few words from the Holy Bible. Afterwards, the camera would pan back to the wooden cross with a lonely-looking cowboy hat hanging from it.
Someday when “White Christmas” and “God Bless America” will no longer be allowed to be sung in America. When Bibles must be smuggled into America as they are in China. When churches have been replaced by statues of Obama. And when crosses are outlawed across this once great land, I will curse the ones who made it so. I will raise my arms in defiance, looking heavenward, and, at the top of my lungs, say to them: Go to hell! Then I will look all around me and realize that----Hell is all around us!
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
ACT OF GOD
ACT OF GOD
There are only two possible explanations for what happened in 1876. It was either the most phenomenal coincidence that ever occurred, or it was, literally, an Act of God. The events of that day are supported by numerous sworn statements and legal documents.
Swan Quarter, North Carolina is a lowland community. When heavy rains come, the residents closer to sea level fair better than those further away.
In the 1870s, the Methodists of Swan Quarter had no church. The only land available to them, on which to build a church, was a piece of low-lying property on Oyster Creek Road. It was not by desire, but by necessity, that the Methodists acquired the land and construction began.
The church was to be a small, but sturdy, white clapboard-framed building propped up on brick pilings. In 1876, the building was completed. On Sunday, September 16, a dedication ceremony was held. Three days later, on Wednesday, a terrible storm ravaged Swan Quarter. All day long the wind howled as torrential rains poured down upon the quiet community. The townspeople could only wait out the storm helplessly as it continued its ruinous damage. By nightfall, devastated by the force of nature, the town began to flood as many roofs were ripped from homes by cyclonic turbulence. The storm raged through the darkness of night into the bleak light of day.
By Thursday afternoon, the wind subsided as the rain diminished, leaving behind, in its wake, an eerie calm. One by one, weary citizens threw open their shutters and doors and emerged from what was left of there homes.
Most of the people walked into the flooded streets or peered from there windows to witness a desolate waterscape, a community savagely rocked by nature. But those within, in sight of Oyster Creek Road, looked upon a more astonishing sight: the church --- the newly constructed Swan Quarter Methodist Church --- the whole building, intact, was floating down the street! The flood waters had gently lifted the entire structure from the brick pilings, on which it had rested, and had launched it slowly, silently, down Oyster Creek Road.
Within minutes, stunned, concerned townsfolk were wading in and sloshing about in waist-high water, in the street, fighting the rushing current, trying desperately to reach the journey-bound church so that they could moor it with lengths of rope.
The ropes were fastened to various structures, but to no avail: none were sturdy enough to withstand the weight of the church being swept away in the flood waters. The traveling chapel attracted other onlookers who immediately joined the struggle to secure the building. The church moved on.
By now, the church had floated to the center of town, still on Oyster Creek Road. And then, as if this phenomenon had not already been an amazing sight to behold, the church, as helpless townsfolk watched, spellbound, made an inexplicable right turn and continued down that road. It was as though the chapel were alive --- as though it had a mind of its own.
For two more blocks, the townspeople fought, with the ropes, to gain control of the church, unsuccessfully. And then, in the same decisive manner in which it had moved, all along, the church veered off the road, heading for the center of a vacant lot ... and there ... stopped.
While the flood water receded, the church remained --- and is there to this day --- almost a hundred and thirty years later.
But that's not the end of this incredible story. You see, that most desirable piece of land where the church settled, on that fateful day in 1876, was the first choice, of the Swan Quarter Methodists, for the site of their church. However, the rich, unsympathetic landowner, whose property it was, originally refused to sell his land to the Christian churchgoers.
On the morning after the flood --- after discovering the church in the middle of his lot --- that landowner went to the Methodist minister and, with trembling hands, presented him with the deed. --From Carolina, My Sweet Home, by Allen Ball
There are only two possible explanations for what happened in 1876. It was either the most phenomenal coincidence that ever occurred, or it was, literally, an Act of God. The events of that day are supported by numerous sworn statements and legal documents.
Swan Quarter, North Carolina is a lowland community. When heavy rains come, the residents closer to sea level fair better than those further away.
In the 1870s, the Methodists of Swan Quarter had no church. The only land available to them, on which to build a church, was a piece of low-lying property on Oyster Creek Road. It was not by desire, but by necessity, that the Methodists acquired the land and construction began.
The church was to be a small, but sturdy, white clapboard-framed building propped up on brick pilings. In 1876, the building was completed. On Sunday, September 16, a dedication ceremony was held. Three days later, on Wednesday, a terrible storm ravaged Swan Quarter. All day long the wind howled as torrential rains poured down upon the quiet community. The townspeople could only wait out the storm helplessly as it continued its ruinous damage. By nightfall, devastated by the force of nature, the town began to flood as many roofs were ripped from homes by cyclonic turbulence. The storm raged through the darkness of night into the bleak light of day.
By Thursday afternoon, the wind subsided as the rain diminished, leaving behind, in its wake, an eerie calm. One by one, weary citizens threw open their shutters and doors and emerged from what was left of there homes.
Most of the people walked into the flooded streets or peered from there windows to witness a desolate waterscape, a community savagely rocked by nature. But those within, in sight of Oyster Creek Road, looked upon a more astonishing sight: the church --- the newly constructed Swan Quarter Methodist Church --- the whole building, intact, was floating down the street! The flood waters had gently lifted the entire structure from the brick pilings, on which it had rested, and had launched it slowly, silently, down Oyster Creek Road.
Within minutes, stunned, concerned townsfolk were wading in and sloshing about in waist-high water, in the street, fighting the rushing current, trying desperately to reach the journey-bound church so that they could moor it with lengths of rope.
The ropes were fastened to various structures, but to no avail: none were sturdy enough to withstand the weight of the church being swept away in the flood waters. The traveling chapel attracted other onlookers who immediately joined the struggle to secure the building. The church moved on.
By now, the church had floated to the center of town, still on Oyster Creek Road. And then, as if this phenomenon had not already been an amazing sight to behold, the church, as helpless townsfolk watched, spellbound, made an inexplicable right turn and continued down that road. It was as though the chapel were alive --- as though it had a mind of its own.
For two more blocks, the townspeople fought, with the ropes, to gain control of the church, unsuccessfully. And then, in the same decisive manner in which it had moved, all along, the church veered off the road, heading for the center of a vacant lot ... and there ... stopped.
While the flood water receded, the church remained --- and is there to this day --- almost a hundred and thirty years later.
But that's not the end of this incredible story. You see, that most desirable piece of land where the church settled, on that fateful day in 1876, was the first choice, of the Swan Quarter Methodists, for the site of their church. However, the rich, unsympathetic landowner, whose property it was, originally refused to sell his land to the Christian churchgoers.
On the morning after the flood --- after discovering the church in the middle of his lot --- that landowner went to the Methodist minister and, with trembling hands, presented him with the deed. --From Carolina, My Sweet Home, by Allen Ball
FRANCES MAE POWELL BALL
FRANCES MAE POWELL BALL
Frances Mae Powell Ball is my mother. She was born, at 4 pm, on Saturday, May 14, 1927, in a “plain, wooden house…un-painted,” in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
In 1927, “Whiskery,” ridden by Linus McAtee, won the 53rd Kentucky Derby, in 2:06. "Ain't She Sweet?" by Ben Bernie, hit #1 on the pop singles chart. A baked ham cost 30 cents per eight-to 12-pound slabs, averaging each pound at about 3 cents. Milk in 1927 was 25 cents, for three tall cans, averaging 8 cents per can. Eggs cost 24 cents per dozen. A 24-ounce loaf of wrapped, split bread sold for 9 cents. Refrigerators in 1927 cost $195. Mowers were self-propelled.
In 1927, a dollar sounded more exciting and valuable than it does today. Today when you walk down the street and see a nickel or dime, it seems easier just to walk on by than take the effort to pick it up. In 1927 though, a nickel or dime was enough to buy a whole pound of baked ham or a tall can of milk. If you found a couple nickels or dimes, you could have purchased dinner for the whole family.
My brother, Arnold, and I used to pick up soft-drink bottles, wherever we could find them, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and take them to grocers, for the deposit money, which we used to buy more Pepsis.
I was at the Dollar General, the other day, and saw Randy Wade, a member of my brother’s church: the La Grange Church of God. Someone said something about the value of pennies, these days. I told Wade that it’s an unbreakable habit, for me, of picking up pennies, so much so, that “I’ll pick up a penny, in the parking at Wal*Mart, in a rain storm.”
Times have changed, but my mother is the same: sweet, kind, compassionate, and generous-to-a-fault. She once loaned $465.00, to a hospice woman , who had given her a sad story. My mother then sat on the edge of her bed, for days, depressed and angst-ridden, wondering if she’d ever she’d ever get her money back. She had asked for no documentation, for proof of the loan. My mother lives on a fixed income.
I discerned that something was wrong, other than the fact, that my dad, mama’s husband, of 61 years, had recently passed away. She explained. I got the money back from the woman, who, interestingly, asked mom for a receipt, although she’d deemed it unnecessary, apparently, to give my mother a receipt for the money she’d borrowed from her. The woman, by the way, drove a big, late-model automobile. It is illegal, as a hospice worker, to borrow money, from a client.
I had always heard that my maternal grandmother, Addie Powell, never enjoyed holidays that most of us look forward to with great anticipation. But Mama Powell, as we grandchildren knew her, had good reason. She was no stranger to tragedy. Her two-year-old, “Little” Elbert, was accidentally killed, on Thanksgiving Day, by her six-year-old, Horace. Uncle Horace died on Easter Eve, in the ‘70s. She witnessed, along with other family members, the fatal shooting of her father, by a son-in-law, on Christmas Eve, 1916. Two brothers were killed in Philadelphia, mysteriously. Another brother was killed when a stack of lumber, at a lumber yard, rolled down over his body.
Vaden and Addie Powell had ten children; they outlived four of them.
*****
Mama’s family lived in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Irene was the third child born of Vaden and Addie Powell and the first girl. She died of croup, at age five.
On Thanksgiving Day, in 1931, My Uncle Horace Powell, six-years-old, was in the back yard with his mama. He was playing with a metal rod from a screen door, throwing it around. His mama, Addie Powell (my maternal grandmother), was washing clothes in a big, black pot filled with water that she heated by burning wood underneath, to bring the water to a boil.
On this fateful Thanksgiving Day, in 1931, two-year-old Elbert, (called “Little” Elbert) and my mama, Frances, four-years old, were emerging from the back door of the house to walk outside just as Uncle Horace had, once again, tossed the screen door rod. The rod pierced “Little” Elbert’s tender, fragile skull. If he hadn’t been in front of Mama it would have injured her instead.
Mom told me: “When Mama pulled that rod out of ‘Little’ Elbert’s head, his brains came out with it.” He was taken to the hospital in Wilmington because there was no hospital in Jacksonville. Little baby Elbert died that night.
In the early ’40s, Uncle Horace enlisted in the navy. According to my mother, he was in Philadelphia, at one time, during his two-year tour-of- duty. She said she didn’t “know if he was cruising around or just walking with friends” or alone when, suddenly, Uncle Horace saw a woman who fell or jumped off a bridge. He jumped in and rescued her from drowning. An article appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper about the rescue. Uncle Horace mailed the article back home to his mom and dad.
Many years later, in the early ‘70s, Uncle Horace called Mama one night, from a motel in South Carolina, where he worked as a maintenance man. (My family lived at 303 Tyree Rd., in Kinston, at the time. I was stationed with the 440th Army Band, Ft. Bragg, North Carolina). Mama said: “He sounded like he was drunk or on drugs. He was so out of it; he said: ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow morning; I’ve got to go,’ then I heard the phone drop. And that’s the last I ever heard of him….”
After not showing up for work, someone from the motel called a woman “that he (Uncle Horace) liked” and “she went to the motel to check on him,” Mama recalled.” Unable to enter his room when she arrived at the motel, someone there told her: “We’ll have to call the law.
“He (Horace) must have left evidence,” Mama told me, “for someone to call Leon (their brother) if something happened to him; because somebody called him the next day, on Saturday, to say he (Horace) was dead. Leon called me and told me he was dead. It broke my heart. He said, you can tell Mama, but don’t tell Papa. I’m afraid he’ll have a heart attack.” When Papa Powell was told that his son was dead, Mama recalled that he said: “He’s not dead. He’s comin’ home.” And “he waited up for him,” she added. “He just couldn’t get it in his head that he was dead.”
When I asked Mama if she thought Uncle Horace’s death was intentional she said: “I don’t think he meant to, he just over-dosed…did too much. I don‘t think he ever got over ‘Little’ Elbert‘s death.”
Mama told me, from her sick bed, that when Uncle Horace was a grown man, he asked his mama to forgive him for “Little” Elbert’s death. Her answer was wrapped in silence.
*****
Mama’s Uncle Henry James worked in a lumber yard in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the 1970s. He went to the lumber yard on a Monday morning. While working, a stack of lumber fell on him, killing him.
*****
Mama’s uncles, Uncle Lacy and Uncle Cyrus James, operated tugboats in Philadelphia, in the early ’40s, and often worked as far down the coast as Florida. They moved to Philadelphia together. Uncle Cyrus lived with a woman named Frances and Uncle Lacy lived with a woman, whose name my mom could not recall. They both lived in common law marriages. They lived much of the time on their tugboats.
Uncle Cyrus died mysteriously. He was found “stuffed down a hole on his tugboat naked,” Mama said. The James family never learned who the killer or killers were.
Within a year, Uncle Lacy, too, died a mysterious death. He was found somewhere in Philadelphia with “the back of his head beat off,” according to my mom. His killer or killers were never discovered.
*****
Robert Lee Powell was the last of the children. My grandmother was 50-years-old at the time she gave birth to him. “Mama was not happy about it,” my mother recalled. “People were talking about it.” Robert Lee developed “colitis” and died in the “old Parrott Hospital, in Kinston, North Carolina, at the age of six months.
“I was staying with Aunt Clara and Uncle Henry, in Raleigh,” my mother said, “when Robert died...they were mama’s youngest brother and his wife. They always liked me and wanted me to stay with them.
“They [mama’s family] came and got me...He [Robert Lee] was in a little, white coffin. I picked him up. He was wearing a little white dress.” mama recalled, wistfully, at age 77, head bowed.
*****
My mother sat in the bleachers, many times, with my sisters, Carolyn and Carlene, as Arnold and I played baseball, in the Little Tar Heel League, in Washington. When Arnold and I were afraid to ask daddy for a dollar, to buy a cheeseburger, fries, and Pepsi, on out-of-town, high school band trips, mama asked for the money. When daddy was unable to make a payment on the drum set he was buying for Arnold, mama gave the seller the five-hundred-dollar diamond ring she’d won, recently, in a contest. It was the most expensive item she’d ever owned. A picture of her with her new ring was published in the Washington Daily News.
In 1965, my dad became a born-again Christian. My sisters, at the height of mini-skirt popularity, were allowed, by my dad, to wear ankle-length dresses only. Mama had to make the dresses for them. “I was sneaky,” my mother said, I would drive the girls to school in their long dresses. In school, they changed into appropriate, normal-length dresses, that we had hidden in the car.
My mother sacrificed, her entire life, for the husband she adored, and her children, she adores. I cannot properly convey the love she’s given us and the devotion to our happiness and well-being, that she’s exhibited these many years.
But that’s not all. My mother cared for her mother and father the last few years of their life. They were totally dependent on her for everything. My mother was up until 7 am, with Mama Powell, my grandmother, when she laid down in her mother’s room, saying: “Mama don’t get up without calling me first.” She got up, fell, hit her head on a dresser, dying two weeks later. Papa Powel died in his sleep, about a year later, from, literally, grief over the death of his wife, of 62-years. When mama went into his room, his body was still warm.
In a column by the late well-known writer, Lewis Grizzard, he spoke, wistfully, of his recently departed mother. The column ended with words that rattled my heart: “I wish I had called her more.”
I promised my mother, in the mid-1980s, that: “As long as I’m able, you’ll never go to a nursing home.”
My long journey on the treacherous road of life has brought me safely, thus far, to La Grange, North Carolina, the most recent home of my mother and my dad, who passed, peacefully, after his evening meal, at Britthaven of Snow Hill, on July 10, 2008.
I live in my mother’s home, where she requires 24-hour, around-the-clock, attention. There’s no place I’d rather be and there’s no one, with whom I’d rather be. I’m twice- divorced. A roving minstrel come home. I’ve chased a dream of becoming a successful songwriter, for forty-two years. I do so to this day. But not in New York, where I lived, briefly, in 1975, and not in Nashville, Tennessee, where I lived for five years.
My priority now is to see that my mother never, never, never is placed in a nursing home, where some precious souls, are unavoidably placed. Unlike my dad, who, with Parkinson’s disease, a bad heart, prostate cancer, and a newly broken hip, was placed in a nursing home, after thoughtful consideration. My brother and sisters felt that I would not be able to care for both my parents any longer. My dad had become bed-ridden.
I will, however, no matter what her condition, stay with my mother, until the light in her pretty blue eyes no longer sparkle and angels come to lead her home. She has a great fear of nursing homes, born of nursing home stories of horror and tragedy, of abuse and neglect.
Unlike Lewis Grizzard, I will never regret not calling my mother more, because I’m blessed; my mother is with me every day.
When I needed my mother, she was there. She needs me now, so I am here.
*****
If you go to the following URLs you can listen to “What Would I Do,” written for my mother, after another cancer scare; and you can listen to “Mother,” “God Gave You To Me,” and an instrumental song I wrote: “Purple Rose,” all appropriate to send to mothers on Mother’s Day, May 10, 2009.
The songs were written, arranged, recorded, and performed by me, at home, using an I4S Korg keyboard.
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!
Allen Ball
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1UwWs3JeCs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=078WoBRE_nM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3sFzV8v3p0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25bG9uQ7rD0
Frances Mae Powell Ball is my mother. She was born, at 4 pm, on Saturday, May 14, 1927, in a “plain, wooden house…un-painted,” in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
In 1927, “Whiskery,” ridden by Linus McAtee, won the 53rd Kentucky Derby, in 2:06. "Ain't She Sweet?" by Ben Bernie, hit #1 on the pop singles chart. A baked ham cost 30 cents per eight-to 12-pound slabs, averaging each pound at about 3 cents. Milk in 1927 was 25 cents, for three tall cans, averaging 8 cents per can. Eggs cost 24 cents per dozen. A 24-ounce loaf of wrapped, split bread sold for 9 cents. Refrigerators in 1927 cost $195. Mowers were self-propelled.
In 1927, a dollar sounded more exciting and valuable than it does today. Today when you walk down the street and see a nickel or dime, it seems easier just to walk on by than take the effort to pick it up. In 1927 though, a nickel or dime was enough to buy a whole pound of baked ham or a tall can of milk. If you found a couple nickels or dimes, you could have purchased dinner for the whole family.
My brother, Arnold, and I used to pick up soft-drink bottles, wherever we could find them, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and take them to grocers, for the deposit money, which we used to buy more Pepsis.
I was at the Dollar General, the other day, and saw Randy Wade, a member of my brother’s church: the La Grange Church of God. Someone said something about the value of pennies, these days. I told Wade that it’s an unbreakable habit, for me, of picking up pennies, so much so, that “I’ll pick up a penny, in the parking at Wal*Mart, in a rain storm.”
Times have changed, but my mother is the same: sweet, kind, compassionate, and generous-to-a-fault. She once loaned $465.00, to a hospice woman , who had given her a sad story. My mother then sat on the edge of her bed, for days, depressed and angst-ridden, wondering if she’d ever she’d ever get her money back. She had asked for no documentation, for proof of the loan. My mother lives on a fixed income.
I discerned that something was wrong, other than the fact, that my dad, mama’s husband, of 61 years, had recently passed away. She explained. I got the money back from the woman, who, interestingly, asked mom for a receipt, although she’d deemed it unnecessary, apparently, to give my mother a receipt for the money she’d borrowed from her. The woman, by the way, drove a big, late-model automobile. It is illegal, as a hospice worker, to borrow money, from a client.
I had always heard that my maternal grandmother, Addie Powell, never enjoyed holidays that most of us look forward to with great anticipation. But Mama Powell, as we grandchildren knew her, had good reason. She was no stranger to tragedy. Her two-year-old, “Little” Elbert, was accidentally killed, on Thanksgiving Day, by her six-year-old, Horace. Uncle Horace died on Easter Eve, in the ‘70s. She witnessed, along with other family members, the fatal shooting of her father, by a son-in-law, on Christmas Eve, 1916. Two brothers were killed in Philadelphia, mysteriously. Another brother was killed when a stack of lumber, at a lumber yard, rolled down over his body.
Vaden and Addie Powell had ten children; they outlived four of them.
*****
Mama’s family lived in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Irene was the third child born of Vaden and Addie Powell and the first girl. She died of croup, at age five.
On Thanksgiving Day, in 1931, My Uncle Horace Powell, six-years-old, was in the back yard with his mama. He was playing with a metal rod from a screen door, throwing it around. His mama, Addie Powell (my maternal grandmother), was washing clothes in a big, black pot filled with water that she heated by burning wood underneath, to bring the water to a boil.
On this fateful Thanksgiving Day, in 1931, two-year-old Elbert, (called “Little” Elbert) and my mama, Frances, four-years old, were emerging from the back door of the house to walk outside just as Uncle Horace had, once again, tossed the screen door rod. The rod pierced “Little” Elbert’s tender, fragile skull. If he hadn’t been in front of Mama it would have injured her instead.
Mom told me: “When Mama pulled that rod out of ‘Little’ Elbert’s head, his brains came out with it.” He was taken to the hospital in Wilmington because there was no hospital in Jacksonville. Little baby Elbert died that night.
In the early ’40s, Uncle Horace enlisted in the navy. According to my mother, he was in Philadelphia, at one time, during his two-year tour-of- duty. She said she didn’t “know if he was cruising around or just walking with friends” or alone when, suddenly, Uncle Horace saw a woman who fell or jumped off a bridge. He jumped in and rescued her from drowning. An article appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper about the rescue. Uncle Horace mailed the article back home to his mom and dad.
Many years later, in the early ‘70s, Uncle Horace called Mama one night, from a motel in South Carolina, where he worked as a maintenance man. (My family lived at 303 Tyree Rd., in Kinston, at the time. I was stationed with the 440th Army Band, Ft. Bragg, North Carolina). Mama said: “He sounded like he was drunk or on drugs. He was so out of it; he said: ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow morning; I’ve got to go,’ then I heard the phone drop. And that’s the last I ever heard of him….”
After not showing up for work, someone from the motel called a woman “that he (Uncle Horace) liked” and “she went to the motel to check on him,” Mama recalled.” Unable to enter his room when she arrived at the motel, someone there told her: “We’ll have to call the law.
“He (Horace) must have left evidence,” Mama told me, “for someone to call Leon (their brother) if something happened to him; because somebody called him the next day, on Saturday, to say he (Horace) was dead. Leon called me and told me he was dead. It broke my heart. He said, you can tell Mama, but don’t tell Papa. I’m afraid he’ll have a heart attack.” When Papa Powell was told that his son was dead, Mama recalled that he said: “He’s not dead. He’s comin’ home.” And “he waited up for him,” she added. “He just couldn’t get it in his head that he was dead.”
When I asked Mama if she thought Uncle Horace’s death was intentional she said: “I don’t think he meant to, he just over-dosed…did too much. I don‘t think he ever got over ‘Little’ Elbert‘s death.”
Mama told me, from her sick bed, that when Uncle Horace was a grown man, he asked his mama to forgive him for “Little” Elbert’s death. Her answer was wrapped in silence.
*****
Mama’s Uncle Henry James worked in a lumber yard in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the 1970s. He went to the lumber yard on a Monday morning. While working, a stack of lumber fell on him, killing him.
*****
Mama’s uncles, Uncle Lacy and Uncle Cyrus James, operated tugboats in Philadelphia, in the early ’40s, and often worked as far down the coast as Florida. They moved to Philadelphia together. Uncle Cyrus lived with a woman named Frances and Uncle Lacy lived with a woman, whose name my mom could not recall. They both lived in common law marriages. They lived much of the time on their tugboats.
Uncle Cyrus died mysteriously. He was found “stuffed down a hole on his tugboat naked,” Mama said. The James family never learned who the killer or killers were.
Within a year, Uncle Lacy, too, died a mysterious death. He was found somewhere in Philadelphia with “the back of his head beat off,” according to my mom. His killer or killers were never discovered.
*****
Robert Lee Powell was the last of the children. My grandmother was 50-years-old at the time she gave birth to him. “Mama was not happy about it,” my mother recalled. “People were talking about it.” Robert Lee developed “colitis” and died in the “old Parrott Hospital, in Kinston, North Carolina, at the age of six months.
“I was staying with Aunt Clara and Uncle Henry, in Raleigh,” my mother said, “when Robert died...they were mama’s youngest brother and his wife. They always liked me and wanted me to stay with them.
“They [mama’s family] came and got me...He [Robert Lee] was in a little, white coffin. I picked him up. He was wearing a little white dress.” mama recalled, wistfully, at age 77, head bowed.
*****
My mother sat in the bleachers, many times, with my sisters, Carolyn and Carlene, as Arnold and I played baseball, in the Little Tar Heel League, in Washington. When Arnold and I were afraid to ask daddy for a dollar, to buy a cheeseburger, fries, and Pepsi, on out-of-town, high school band trips, mama asked for the money. When daddy was unable to make a payment on the drum set he was buying for Arnold, mama gave the seller the five-hundred-dollar diamond ring she’d won, recently, in a contest. It was the most expensive item she’d ever owned. A picture of her with her new ring was published in the Washington Daily News.
In 1965, my dad became a born-again Christian. My sisters, at the height of mini-skirt popularity, were allowed, by my dad, to wear ankle-length dresses only. Mama had to make the dresses for them. “I was sneaky,” my mother said, I would drive the girls to school in their long dresses. In school, they changed into appropriate, normal-length dresses, that we had hidden in the car.
My mother sacrificed, her entire life, for the husband she adored, and her children, she adores. I cannot properly convey the love she’s given us and the devotion to our happiness and well-being, that she’s exhibited these many years.
But that’s not all. My mother cared for her mother and father the last few years of their life. They were totally dependent on her for everything. My mother was up until 7 am, with Mama Powell, my grandmother, when she laid down in her mother’s room, saying: “Mama don’t get up without calling me first.” She got up, fell, hit her head on a dresser, dying two weeks later. Papa Powel died in his sleep, about a year later, from, literally, grief over the death of his wife, of 62-years. When mama went into his room, his body was still warm.
In a column by the late well-known writer, Lewis Grizzard, he spoke, wistfully, of his recently departed mother. The column ended with words that rattled my heart: “I wish I had called her more.”
I promised my mother, in the mid-1980s, that: “As long as I’m able, you’ll never go to a nursing home.”
My long journey on the treacherous road of life has brought me safely, thus far, to La Grange, North Carolina, the most recent home of my mother and my dad, who passed, peacefully, after his evening meal, at Britthaven of Snow Hill, on July 10, 2008.
I live in my mother’s home, where she requires 24-hour, around-the-clock, attention. There’s no place I’d rather be and there’s no one, with whom I’d rather be. I’m twice- divorced. A roving minstrel come home. I’ve chased a dream of becoming a successful songwriter, for forty-two years. I do so to this day. But not in New York, where I lived, briefly, in 1975, and not in Nashville, Tennessee, where I lived for five years.
My priority now is to see that my mother never, never, never is placed in a nursing home, where some precious souls, are unavoidably placed. Unlike my dad, who, with Parkinson’s disease, a bad heart, prostate cancer, and a newly broken hip, was placed in a nursing home, after thoughtful consideration. My brother and sisters felt that I would not be able to care for both my parents any longer. My dad had become bed-ridden.
I will, however, no matter what her condition, stay with my mother, until the light in her pretty blue eyes no longer sparkle and angels come to lead her home. She has a great fear of nursing homes, born of nursing home stories of horror and tragedy, of abuse and neglect.
Unlike Lewis Grizzard, I will never regret not calling my mother more, because I’m blessed; my mother is with me every day.
When I needed my mother, she was there. She needs me now, so I am here.
*****
If you go to the following URLs you can listen to “What Would I Do,” written for my mother, after another cancer scare; and you can listen to “Mother,” “God Gave You To Me,” and an instrumental song I wrote: “Purple Rose,” all appropriate to send to mothers on Mother’s Day, May 10, 2009.
The songs were written, arranged, recorded, and performed by me, at home, using an I4S Korg keyboard.
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!
Allen Ball
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1UwWs3JeCs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=078WoBRE_nM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3sFzV8v3p0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25bG9uQ7rD0
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