For Goodness Snakes!

 

    On an Independence Day, I sat down on the pew of a small country church. A few minutes into the service, a tall grey-haired man stepped deliberately up to the microphone. Cupping a harmonica with his aged hands, he played patriotic fare in celebration of the holiday. 

    The familiar sound filling the sanctuary carried me back to my childhood to serenades of my daddy's French harp, as he used to call it. Even though I had never met the grey-haired man named Henry, I endeared him right then and there.

A Bucket and a Nail

I heard about a simple man

    on my mother's family tree

A faded photo black and white

    proves the authenticity

He stands so tall in tattered clothes

    from his arm there hangs a pail

Inside it only emptiness

    and a solitary nail

    Every family has its weird characters and my step-great-uncle might be one of the weirdest. His first and middle names are Christopher Columbus, and with such an impressive designation, he really should have gone places in life, but unlike his presumed namesake, my ancestral Christopher Columbus came nowhere close to voyaging the ocean or discovering a new territory. This Columbus mostly hoofed it on foot.

Fifty Cents

    My mother's younger brother, Clinton, visited us often when we lived on the farm in Gibsonville, and that is why he claims more than a page in my scrapbook of childhood memories. Another reason is that sometimes before he left to go home, he gave me a shiny fifty-cent piece.

     A framed picture of him used to hang on our living room wall, right next to one of Jesus, and if that is not a place of honor, I don't know what is. A friend of our family once stood gazing at Uncle Clinton's 8x10 and said he looked like a movie star.