Unrealistic Expectations

Two weeks ago, while I was trying to impart some final words of wisdom about Macbeth to senior students who had been ingesting and imbibing a steady stream of sugar in all its many forms throughout the day, I looked forward to the final bell, thinking my Christmas break would go like this: 16 blissful days in which I would quickly and economically finish my Christmas shopping, watch as many Christmas movies on Lifetime and the Hallmark channel as I could find, catch up on the latest happenings in Salem, home to the characters in Days of Our Lives, a soap opera (or daytime drama, to be politically correct) I have followed sporadically since I was in high school, read a stack of books I’ve been wanting time to read, and spend six days in Arkansas with family, observing an extended Christmas this year because of work schedules and obligations of various family members.

I had not counted on attending the funeral of a friend from church a few days before Christmas or the rain and cold temperatures that would keep me inside several days of the break dealing with a headache and aching bones. Nor had I counted on how hard Christmas shopping would be for me, dealing with crowds, lines, and big stores with lots of square footage to cover.

Now, with the return to school imminent on Monday, I look back at the previous two weeks and realize that I did accomplish much of what I set out to do. The Christmas presents were bought, wrapped, and given. I saw a lot of TV movies about the true spirit of Christmas and learned that not much had happened in Salem since Thanksgiving. The days in Arkansas were filled with visiting with family and friends and enjoying the always plentiful, delicious foods and treats of the season, leaving me with a few extra pounds to target for one of my New Year’s resolutions. And though so far, I’ve only read three books of the stack I set aside, I still have the rest of today and Saturday and Sunday, so maybe I can get through another one or two.

Were my expectations for the Christmas break too ambitious or unrealistic? Probably, especially in the size of the bag of books I took to Arkansas and back. But, at the same time, I believe setting goals is important. A friend of mine from my college days at UT-Arlington, Rollin DeLap, who was director of the UTA Baptist Student Union three of my four years there, used to say this: “He who shoots at nothing hits it every time.” In other words, without a goal, we fail to accomplish much. Proverbs 29:18 says it this way: “Where there is no vision the people perish.” Now, some commentators limit the word “vision” to some sort of prophetic revelation from God, but considering Solomon’s wisdom throughout the book of Proverbs, I believe the verse can be applied to individuals are well as to societies or countries. Vision, that dream for something better, a goal to attain, is what propels us forward, both individually and as a group. When President Kennedy set the goal for the US to land men on the moon by the end of the 1960s, few thought it was a realistic goal. The American space program, quickly cobbled together after the Russian launch of Sputnik, had more failures than successes initially. At the time, it seemed that the Russians would dominate space, that the American effort was a case of “too little too late.” Yet in July of 1969, the world watched as Neil Armstrong took that “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

I’ve read some authors who encourage readers to set “achievable goals” to avoid becoming discouraged and giving up on goals like weight loss or financial stability. But I think a lot of people set goals that require little or no effort, goals that are certainly achievable but, in reality, accomplish little. I think Rollin’s advice about aiming high, knowing that you may not hit the mark you set but that you’ll do more with a goal than without, is sound.

As I look into the New Year, there are some new goals I plan to set, many of them seeming beyond my capability and past performances, but all the same, I want to take a shot at them and just see what happens and what I can accomplish by this time next year.

After all, at this time last year I only had the desire to write a blog, and now I have not only done so but have received some encouraging words from people who have read the entries. And if every goal I set is not met, what of it? At least I’ve had the experience of trying. Thomas Edison did not regard his more than 2,000 attempts to find something to serve as the filament for his light bulb as failures. He said he just found more than 2,000 materials that would not work. In the words of the poet Robert Browning, “… a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what’s a heaven for?”

So as I look forward to the year 2012, I plan to try to stretch myself, to reach for things possibly beyond my grasp, to attempt things beyond my capabilities, to achieve what I can, and to learn from what the world calls “failures.”         

Home for Christmas

When I was in college, I remember looking forward to going home for Christmas. In that almost four-weeks break between the end of the fall semester and the start of the spring semester, I could rest up, sleep late, read all I wanted to, and spend time with the friends and family I had known most of my life.

Later, after I moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area and began living with my sister, we started doing Christmas here, first in one of the two apartments we lived in and later at our house. Our parents would come up and stay as we used to do with them. My brother’s family started coming from Arkansas for a few days before Christmas when we lived in the two bedroom apartment over on the east side of Fort Worth—nine of us in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment. We were crowded, but we were family, and it was fun for the short time we were together.

When we bought the house, we had more room for everyone to sleep, and more room to spread out for the gift exchanges. After Daddy died in 2002, home for Christmas began to mean the trip to Conway, AR, to spend the holiday with my brother’s family, including my sister-in-law’s extended family. Mom was with us in the Christmas of 2002, and then she went on to join Daddy in 2003, so that was the first Christmas we had without our parents. I had read a book then about that final going home for Christmas, spending it in heaven with the One Whose birthday we celebrate, as well as with relatives and friends who moved on before us. What a great homecoming awaits us then! 

This week, a good friend from my Sunday school class, Jerry Kilgore, went home for Christmas. She had been in the hospital since suffering a massive heart attack a month earlier, and although there had been no change in her condition during that time, her friends and family were praying for divine intervention, that she would be restored to good health. She was only 52, just a few weeks older than my sister, and nine years younger than I am. 

In fact, not knowing that Jerry had already moved on into the mansion that was prepared for her, I prayed that very prayer for divine intervention in her health yesterday morning in Sunday school, as well as for her family and the exhaustion they were feeling after spending much of the last month at the hospital where there was little encouraging news. God did intervene, but not in the way we imagined. He healed her completely by leaving her damaged, imperfect body down here on earth for a perfect one in heaven. “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ (from Isaiah 25: 8) ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ (from Hosea 13: 14, recorded in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 15: 54-55 NIV). 

Or in the words of John Donne, one of my favorite poets from the 17th century:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me. 
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, 
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die. 

I’ve modernized the spelling, but Donne’s words still carry comfort today. For the Believer, physical death isn’t an end. It’s like falling asleep and waking up in a place more wonderful than we can imagine, like walking through a doorway separating time and eternity where we are surrounded by our family and friends, never to be separated again.

And while Jerry was a great friend, and all her friends at church, at work, and in all other phases of her life are sad that our time with her is over in this life, we know that she will be there in the Life to come, waiting for us with all who have gone on before us, and there we will all be together forever. For now, we’ll enjoy Christmas with our friends and family here, missing Jerry but knowing she is really home for Christmas this year, home for a celebration that we can’t even imagine until we join her there.

A True Man

Yesterday, Dec. 16, would have been my father’s 97^th birthday. He was born Dec. 16, 1914, in a house in Wood County near Quitman. He was the youngest child of Joseph Thomas and Beulah Moore Hail. They named their third child Truman Preston, baby brother to big sister Saba Irene and brother Vernon Ray.

The family moved around a lot in his early years, from Wood County in East Texas down to the Beaumont-Port Arthur area on the Gulf Coast, and back to Central Texas where they lived at various times in San Saba, Lampasas, and Kempner. My grandfather had worked as a blacksmith, but the family mainly worked as sharecroppers, and even the children were expected to work. When it was time to pick cotton, the children, too, pulled those heavy bags up and down the rows.

In many ways, life was pretty primitive for them. When Daddy was just a little boy, the family went out to Scurry County to visit relatives, traveling by covered wagon and camping out in fields along the way. When a tremendous thunderstorm came up, they took refuge in a church until the storm ended.

Because of the family’s frequent moves and the fact that the children were needed to work, none of the children spent a lot of time in school. But because he was the youngest, Truman’s schooling ended after the second grade. He would start second grade in one school, then the family would move and he’d be out of school for a while, so when he reenrolled, he’d be put back in second grade. Finally, after this happened several years, his parents decided that his time for schooling was over.

His lack of education was something that he would regret for the rest of his life, although he did try to learn as much as he could on his own.  He figured out some way to do basic math. He’d learned addition and subtraction in school, then memorized multiplication tables and learned some basic division on his own. Years later as an air conditioning and heating contractor in the booming housing market around Fort Hood in the 1960s, he developed his own forms of algebra and geometry to be able to figure the size and amount of air conditioning duct work necessary for the size and configuration of the house and the air conditioning unit and amount of air to be moved. I watched him do it and still don’t understand how, just from his measurements and his careful consideration of what looked to me like random pencil marks on a scrap of paper, he could come up with the exact amount needed for the job.

His one chance to see the world came in the 1940s when he joined the army in World War II. After some time in England, he took part of the invasion of North Africa, spending some time in Tunisia where he picked almonds from the trees. Later he went to Italy to take part in the liberation of Rome. He was in Paris when the end of the war came. From his time in Italy he told stories of swimming in the clear water of the Mediterranean and of seeing the Italian countryside including the Roman ruins.  When my sister DJ was in college and I was a young reporter for the newspaper in Copperas Cove, we were all visiting in Arlington one weekend when the Pompeii Exhibit came to Dallas. DJ and I planned to go, but we couldn’t persuade Mom and Dad to go with us. It was a cold winter day, and we were going to have to stand outside in the cold in line for a while to get into the exhibit, so they decided to stay at DJ’s apartment while she and I went to Dallas. When we returned home later that day, Daddy proceeded to describe in detail everything we had seen.  Finally, I asked him how he could possibly know what was in the exhibit, and he said he had already seen it. “Where?” I asked. His answer—Pompeii.

Probably because of his own history, he wanted his children to do well in school and to go on to college. Consequently, all three of us earned college degrees, and he was so proud of that. Like any proud father, he was quick to boast about his kids’ accomplishments. That continued on to his grandchildren, too.

Daddy loved joking with people, and he could also tell some entertaining stories.  He enjoyed talked to people and would strike up a conversation with just about anyone. We made several trips to North Carolina in the 1960s and ‘70s to visit friends there, and every time he stopped for gas, he would get back in the car knowing a portion of the life story of the attendant who waited on him or another traveler he had run into while we were there. Once, on the last family trip to the East Coast he was able to make, we spent a weekend in Washington, D.C. He wasn’t able to walk for any length of time then, and we were planning to go to the FBI Building for the tour. Mom had always been a fan of detective stories, and she was excited about seeing the demonstration where the FBI agents fired a machine gun like those of the 1930s gangster days. Daddy couldn’t hold up for all that walking and standing in line, so we dropped him off at the Old Post Office, which was by then a collection of souvenir and specialty shops.  He would sit there and people watch while we went to the FBI exhibit. However, the crowds were bigger than usual, and we were gone much longer than I had anticipated. We all thought he was going to be upset that we had been gone so long. Instead, he greeted us with descriptions of all the people he had met and the stories he had heard that day. He was apparently thoroughly entertained by the complete strangers whose lives intersected with his for a few minutes that day.

Daddy was a country boy at heart. He wasn’t comfortable in heavy traffic and large crowds unless there was someone else who would drive so that he could just watch the scenery. He really didn’t care much for big cities, although he did take us to Dallas occasionally when we were young, and he took me to the zoo in San Antonio before I was a year old. Still, the first time I mentioned Washington or Philadelphia or especially New York, he didn’t have much to say about the proposed trip. In the early 1980s I took a trip to all three of those cities, and Daddy and Mom came with me.  He liked Washington, as he had been there in 1976 for the Bicentennial while I was in grad school in North Carolina. He liked Philadelphia, too, because there was so much to see. Because he had missed out on high school, his knowledge of American history was spotty, but he soaked up information on trips to museums, and Philadelphia had many sites he did know about, including the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, so he enjoyed Philadelphia.

But he was more than a little anxious about going to New York City. I finally got him to agree to go if we didn’t drive all the way into the city, so we drove from Philadelphia to Trenton, N.J. where we took the commuter train into Penn Station. When we walked out onto the street with the tall buildings and traffic and hundreds of people on the sidewalks, I think he was ready to turn around right then and go back. As we crossed the street, a large man who was leaning against the building suddenly turned to face us and blocked our way. From the way he was dressed, he could have been a gang member or street thug.  At that point, even I was thinking, We’re about to be mugged. But he grinned, pointed his finger at Daddy, who, as usually, was wearing his summer straw Stetson and his big Texas belt buckle, and said, “Let me guess. Texas, right? I have some friends in Houston, and I was at Fort Hood when I was in the army.” That was all it took. Daddy had made another friend, and he stood there on the corner of a busy New York street chatting about home while busy New Yorkers bustled past the tourists stopping to talk. That was the start to what was an exceptional day, and by the end of the day, Daddy had met a fair share of New Yorkers, a security guard at the Statue of Liberty, some people on the subway, and even a couple in line at the Empire State Building who lived on the next street over from my home in Austin.

Daddy enjoyed hunting and fishing, and our menus when I was young were sometimes supplemented with venison steaks cooked like chicken friend steak or with catfish he’d caught on a fishing trip. He had a favorite fishing hole over near San Saba, and he used to there with his brother, my Uncle Ray.  Uncle Ray’s grandson Danny tells about a time when as a young man he went to that fishing hole for an afternoon of fishing. He took some time getting set up, then tossed his line out a few times only to hear a gruff voice say, “Hey, boy, you’re scaring off the fish.” It was Daddy and Uncle Ray, who had been watching him since he arrived.

For all of his strength and outdoorsmanship and his intense physical labor all his life as a cotton picker, farmer, street department worker, railroad track maintenance worker, school bus driver, mechanic, electrician, and air conditioning contractor, Daddy was also a family man, and he loved his children and grandchildren. When Casey, the youngest grandchild, wanted Papaw to play with her in her Little Tykes kitchen, he would go sit in a little chair and let her fix him numerous cups of “coffee” and plates of pretend food. He also enjoyed going to Little League games of the two grandsons, Corey and Graham. But he didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything special if family were involved. He was just as content sitting there watching TV with one of us. Being together was more important than what we might be doing.  He always looked forward to our visits and hated to think about us leaving. When he was in the hospital and nursing home in his last months, he still looked forward to having company as often as possible. He loved his family and friends, and almost anyone could be his friend if that person were willing to sit and talk “a spell.”

Next July will mark the 10^th anniversary of Daddy’s death, and yet in many ways it seems as though he is still with us. Our memories are especially strong this time of year, but he’s here in other ways, too, as in the values he taught us and in the relationships I see between my brother and his children and grandchildren. One of Daddy’s long-time friends, Marvin Moore of Devine, died shortly before he did. Those two grown men, when I was a child, were always up to mischief when they were together. And if there was water around, one—or maybe both—of them would eventually be going in, usually fully clothed. Both were Christians, so I’m sure the last ten years have been pretty lively in heaven. And if there’s water there, that “crystal sea” mentioned in some of the old hymns, I suspect that they’ve met up with some of the other fishermen there, from apostles to other family members, for some time out on the water, where most likely, laughter fills the air and someone is going to get wet. 

Remembering Grandman

My grandfather, Harris E. Lancaster, my mother's foster father, was born 129 years ago, Dec. 13, 1882, in Mississippi, and moved to Texas with his family as a boy. His parents, Alex and Cynthia Lancaster, had an average-sized family for the time: sons Harris, Clint, Norman, and Aubrey, and daughters Annie, Hattie, and Minnie. There may have been others, too, but those are the ones I remember. They settled on farm land in the northern part of Lampasas County, about five miles south of Adamsville along School Creek. There they grew, married, and most raised their own families in the area or not far away.

In 1925 Grandman and Granny, who had been married for about 15 years but had no children, took in a little boy and his little sister from the West Texas Children's Home in Abilene. My Uncle Billy and my mother were from a family of five children in Brownwood that through some family intrigue somehow had the three youngest children removed from the family and sent to the children's home in Abilene. Our best guess today, after piecing together little clues for many years, is that my mother's aunt, who had two children, was upset at her sister's five children receiving more attention from their grandparents and arranged for the three younger ones to be sent to the children's home while my grandmother was ill. When Granny and Grandman went to Abilene to pick up my mother and uncle, the youngest of the three, who was not quite two at the time, had already been taken by a family from Snyder. The five siblings were not reunited until more than 10 years later, although the youngest, my aunt, did come for summer visits to the farm.

Grandman farmed, hunted, and fished to provide for his family. When the highway expansion projects across the country in the 1930s brought the construction of U.S. Highway 281 right along the westward boundary of the Lancaster property, Grandman took a job of helping to build that road, or at least the section closest to his farm. He was paid $1 a day for 12 hours of work, and he received another 50 cents a day for the use of his team of horses.

In 1936 when the Texas Centennial opened at Fair Park in Dallas, he determined that his family should go to see the exhibits, but the family car was not up to the trip. He drove into Lampasas and bought a new car so that they could attend, and the trip was something my mother often talked about when I was growing up. 

When World War II began, Grandman was too old to serve. I remember hearing how the family had gathered around the radio the night of Dec. 7, 1941, to hear President Franklin Roosevelt talk about “the day that would live in infamy.” My mother later enlisted in the Women's Army Air Corps, and his nephew Thomas became a bomber pilot in the Army Air Corps. Thomas' plane was later shot down over Eastern Europe, and for a while the family grieved because he was listed as “missing, presumed dead.” Then he made his way back to Allied territory, with the aid of resistance forces, and the word came that he was, in fact, alive and well. Mom’s brother Paul, one of the two older children who stayed in Brownwood when the younger three were sent to the children’s home, also became a pilot during the war. He flew reconnaissance missions over enemy territory. On one mission, his plane developed engine problems, and he had to make an emergency landing in a field. He was captured and spent time in a German prison camp. For a time, too, he was listed as “missing, presumed dead.”

By the time I arrived on the scene in 1950, Grandman was already a senior citizen. He and Granny lived in the little two-bedroom farm house down the road from the house where his parents had lived and across a field from his brother Norman's house. There were fish in School Creek, and I can remember many fishing trips down to the creek where I caught perch and sunfish on a cane pole. The land near the creek was pecan bottoms where Grandman and my dad threshed the native and budded pecan trees every fall. Whenever I stayed overnight with Granny and Grandman, the nights were frequently interrupted by barking from Grandman's dog Ruthie, who had treed a possum or a raccoon. Grandman would get up, dress quickly, get his gun, and go out to see what the problem was. I can remember waking up and hearing the sound of the shot from his .22.

Grandman loved a good story, and he had plenty of personal experiences to draw upon for material. He had gone up to Indian Territory as a young man and lived among the Indians for a time. He hunted black bear in Big Bend, killing a bear whose skin made a bearskin coat for my mother. I remember trying it on when I was a teenager. It was heavy and a little scratchy. For many years Grandman was involved in Democratic Party politics around the state, and among his personal papers were many letters from Texas politicians of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. He invented some pieces of farm equipment for which he held the patents. And he had lived most of his life in rural Texas, so he had material from those experiences, too, which he used to craft his stories.

He could tell some tall tales, too. One that I remember was about a rattlesnake that a man ran over in his car, crushing the head and leaving the fangs imbedded in the tire. Later that day the man had a flat tire. In changing the tire, the man happened to grab the tire in the exact place where the snake's fangs were. They pierced the skin of his palm, and the venom in them was enough to kill the man. It was a case of a man being killed by a dead snake. Looking back, I think the purpose of that story and some of the others he told were to keep me from straying into areas where I might encounter a snake. There were rattlers on the farm, a fact that I was very much aware of. (Granny had me almost as afraid of black widow spiders, which I was convinced were giant in size and just lurking in their basement, waiting to pounce on me if I ventured onto those concrete steps. Now, I think she was probably more worried about my falling down those steps and hurting myself.)

When I was in elementary school, my dad worked some on Grandman's farm, helping with the plowing. About that same time, Grandman let me sit in his lap and "drive" the tractor. I think he probably kept a hand on the steering wheel, but I don't remember. If not, I'm sure those were some fairly crooked rows. 

In 1960 or '61, Grandman decided to sell the farm. For the first time in about 70 years, the property would be owned by someone whose last name was not Lancaster. But he and Granny were slowing down and wanted to have fewer responsibilities and be nearer our family (my sister DJ was then about one year old and the apple of Grandman's eye). So they moved into a little house on Naruna Road on the southwest edge of Lampasas, where Grandman filled his time with a garden and his beloved red roses. He always had red roses, in bushes and running roses on trellises, both at the country farm house and at the house in town. A family member had traced the family line back to the time of the Wars of the Roses in England, and like any good Lancastrian, Grandman preferred the red rose to all others.

His retirement and move to town either came too late for Grandman or his body could not adjust to the reduced activity of retirement. His decline came along suddenly. In his last days he showed signs of what we would call today Alzheimer's but then it was just the memory loss associated with old age. He died in the summer of 1964, just months before I turned 14. The night before, my parents had taken all of us to the hospital to see him. They knew that his time was short, although I don't remember that they had communicated that to my brother and sister and me. I suppose I was old enough to know, especially since he didn't react to my brother or me. But when my sister, who at that time was almost five, spoke to him, he smiled. The next morning, my mother woke me up with the news that he had died in his sleep.

Grandman was a self-educated man who had earned the respect of his friends and neighbors back the kind of life he lived. He was a man of integrity whose word was his bond, someone who could be relied on in a time of need, a man who liked a good story, who appreciated his family and friends, a simple farmer who was so admired by his nephew Thomas that when Thomas had grandchildren of his own, he asked them to call him Grandman. His character traits were perhaps more the norm in his time than they seem to be today when when hear of so many who seek only what benefits them. We’ve lost that concept of honor that Grandman’s life exemplified, and we are the poorer for it. My cousin Linda Lancaster McDonald, Uncle Billy’s daughter, who was, I think, the first to use the name Grandman, said after his death, “He truly was a grand man.”