Terry Taylor died recently. You didn’t know him, and frankly neither did I. He was from Waycross, Georgia. His daughter emailed to tell me that he dutifully read my columns daily.
Even when my writing sucked pondwater, Terry read it. He might have read this one, too, if he were still around.
So I’m thinking about him today as I write this. I’m sitting on my front porch, watching the sun heave itself above the rooftops of Birmingham, and I’m thinking about the brevity of life.
For example, throughout this last century, there have been five families who lived in our house before us. And most of the people who lived in this house during its 100-year existence have already inherited their eternal reward in the Great Hereafter.
Which is how old-timey newspapers used to say someone died. Back in the day, newspapers never came out and said So-And-So died. They always flowered it up. It was always: “Sister Such-And-Such was instantaneously called from this present life into the Great Hereafter,
singing at the burnished feet of the Maker of Earth, where she shall reside forevermore.”
I love the floral language of my ancestors. And I wonder what my predecessors were like before they met the Maker of Earth personally.
I wonder what kinds of conversations happened within their little rooms. I wonder what photographs hung on their walls. I wonder about their fashions. The young women with finger-waved hair and drop-waisted dresses. Young men clad in knickers and flat caps.
One family in this house endured a Great Depression. I think about them. I think about the mother of this household, wearing her modest house dress and inch-thick nylons, trying to make tomato soup out of ketchup and water.
I think about the young girl with her bobbed haircut, her hand-me-down clothes, and her big dreams. The kid who snuck into Shirley Temple pictures because she couldn't afford a…