I didn’t know my grandfathers, but I certainly knew my
grandmothers.
I grew up being close to them, not always geographically but
always emotionally and relationally.
Today, many decades after their deaths, I still remember them
vividly, mostly because of their cooking.
When
I was a university student, I used to eat lunch occasionally with my
Grandmother Chumbley—“Grams,” as I called her.
I’d often go by her house between my classes. We’d sit in
her tiny kitchen, eat ham sandwiches on Roman Meal Bread and sip sugary iced
tea. I’d tell her about what I was learning. I’d listen to her stories of
growing up on a farm in Tennessee. And at the end of the meal, I’d dig into her
lemon meringue pie, my favorite dessert. It was a taste of heaven, as was her
company. She’d let me eat as much of the pie as I wanted, even the whole
thing.
I looked forward to lunches with Grams. She loved me, as did my
Grandmother Bodner, who also made delicious food, including homemade cabbage
biscuits and noodles. Her Germanic background was most visible, or edible, in
the kitchen and at the dinner table. At supper, she often enjoyed a small glass
of beer, a taste I never acquired. (There are limits to grandparental
influence.) And she told stories of trudging through the Great Depression
and the 1937 Flood, which devastated parts of my hometown of Louisville, Ky.
My grandmothers made a deep, enduring impression on me. I am who
I am in part because of them.
And now I am a grandfather.
My
granddaughters, June and Christa, are growing up with my wife Penny and me as a
big part of their lives, and we’re aware that we’re shaping them—their
personalities, their values, their lives.
In some way, we’ll live on in them after these earthly bodies of
ours are dust, just as Grandmothers Chumbley and Bodner live on in me and just
as my grandfathers live on in me through the stories I heard about them from my
grandmothers, my parents and my aunts and uncles.
What might June and Christa remember about me in 20 or 30 years?
First, what they won’t remember is Poppy, their name for me, an
Episcopal priest and rector, praying prayers of thanksgiving at their births as
I held them or of me baptizing them as infants.
What
they might remember, instead, is that Christmas dinner when I discovered a
wriggling green worm in the broccoli, dangled it above my open mouth and then,
after a few seconds of suspense, dropped it in, just for the pure silliness of
the act. I remember: “Poppy!” they yelled in unison.
I hope they remember our doing Taekwondo together on Saturdays;
our games of tag in the park on Sunday afternoons; doing homework at the
kitchen table; playing Chinese checkers; reading stories before naps and at
bedtime; vacation visits to our Kentucky family; Grammy’s and my sitting in the
audience at their school band and choir performances.
They’ll remember, I pray: singing in our church’s junior choir,
with me, “Father Poppy,” as they sometimes call me, looking on and listening to
their young voices raised in the praise of God; helping me at the altar
and sometimes, long after the church had emptied of worshipers, standing there
and saying (or sometimes singing) the Communion prayers from memory, just as I
had said them earlier from the altar book.
As God is molding us humans more fully into his image and
likeness, so Father Poppy and Grammy, an extension of God’s hands, are molding
June and Christa into the image and likeness of God. With God’s help, we’re
forming our girls for an earthly life of happiness, meaning and purpose and
preparing them for heaven, where one day we shall be together again. Eternally.
And
what fun we shall have. With or without wriggling green worms.
The Rev. Kenneth L. Chumbley is Rector of Christ Episcopal Church. You can write him at ken@christepiscopalchurch.com. Read him at www. onepriestsblog.blogspot.com.
The Rev. Kenneth L. Chumbley is Rector of Christ Episcopal Church. You can write him at ken@christepiscopalchurch.com. Read him at www. onepriestsblog.blogspot.com.
