Category: Family

This weekend I had the privilege of celebrating my paternal Grandparents’ 70th wedding anniversary with my family. Seventy years!? That is just plain hard for me to fathom. I mean, I clearly remember their 50th anniversary party. Which means I am old, and they are ancient. But I must say, those two old people LOVE each other. And it is beautiful to see. My grandparents have a great story, and I thought I’d let their son (and my favorite famous blog commenter), my Uncle Paul, tell it to you.

___________________

On September 16, 1939, Charles Marvin Brads married Della Victoria Higgins in the parsonage of the Lexington Presbyterian Church in Lexington, VA. She was 20, he was 17

FDR was in the White House and Hitler had just started WWII in Europe. Through FDR, WWII, (Jenny’s note: during WWII, my Grandpa went to war in the Pacific, and my Grandma got a babysitter for her two kids and went to work in a gunpowder factory – a true “Rosie the Riveter” – a family in true service to their country!) the New Deal, Harry Truman, the Atom Bomb and devastation of Japan’s Hiroshima, Ike, Mamie, Pink, the Cold War, JFK, The Cuban Missle Crisis, LBJ, The Great Society, Social Unrest, Nixon, Watergate, Ford, Carter, The Iran Hostage Situation, The Reagan Revolution, Bush I and a thousand points of light, Bill Clinton, White House Scandal, Bush II, 9-11, and onto an Historic Election of the first President of African Descent, this marriage has lasted. Countries have come and gone, leaders of come and gone, even the Berlin Wall, came and went, but they still last. It ranges somewhere between a miracle and and Act of God. I’m going with the latter.

I never questioned the love of my parents for one another. Every morning before Daddy took us to school, he would look at Mother and say, “Brown Sugar, give this old boy a kiss he’ll remember all day long.” And she would. A sweet memory, one I cherish, and one that reassured me daily that I lived in a safe home where love abounded. I’m sure it wasn’t all a bed of roses, but I know that through drama, trauma, illness, heartbreak, and sometimes even anger, the love lasted and lasts.

Mother was a devoted mother, devoted wife, and devoted Christian. She did all in her power to show hundreds of people what true love was, in every form. Daddy, though more stern, and far more unbending, told me he loved me, something that fathers often have a hard time doing. And though I know both of them didn’t like me on occasion, I know they loved me and love me still.

It’s because they loved each other so, and knew that the five of us were the product of their love and that God had given each of us to them for a purpose.

They taught me the meaning of the word sacrifice. They taught me that though they had to learn to love each other and then fall in love with each other, they loved me before I was born.

Daddy told me once that my name, Paul David came to him the night before I was born when he was reading the Apostle Paul’s writings where he quoted King David when David was talking about justification. He said, “I got the idea for your name, and Mother agreed from reading Paul’s quoatation of David in Romans, Chapter 4 Vs 6-8. He was quoting Psalm 32:1-2. (God imputed righteousness, We didn’t earn it, He forgave our iniquities, He covered our sins with he blood of Christ, And the Lord will not in the future tense, impute sin. Our sins may get us into lot of trouble here and every act, thought and deed has it’s own built in consequence, but they will never be on our account in heaven.)”

This is the home in which we grew up. This is the love we saw, and this is the love we learned.

It’s no fluke that your Mother and Father have been married for 41 years, or Diane and I for 32. We had great examples.

Five children, eight grand children, and 14 great grandchildren later, they still love each other. And they love all of us.

It’s a good thing!

_______________________

It’s a great thing. I am so blessed to be part of this family. We’ve had good times and bad times just like every family, but there’s always been a lot of LOVE.

Today is my dad’s 65th birthday. Happy Birthday, Dad! (It’s Medicare time, WOOHOO!) In honor of this big day, I thought I’d share with you some of my favorite memories of my dad.

My dad is an awesome dad. I always knew he loved me, because he told me AND showed me. There were never any worries of me having “daddy issues”. The self-confidence I’ve had that has been the subject of many jokes on this blog, was I think, not necessarily innate but the product of two parents who loved the crap out of me and encouraged me.

When I was little, my dad used to take me fishing a lot. He loves to fish, and he’s a real “outdoor guy”. These days, you probably couldn’t pay me to fish (borrrr-ing) but back then I thought worms were cool, and my dad was cooler. One time when we went fishing, there was a bird trapped on the water somehow. I think it was injured, and it couldn’t get back to land. Well, my dad went all Nature-MacGuyver and saved that bird. I was SOOO proud and excited. It was a major drama and my daddy was the hero! He just couldn’t stand to the the bird suffer, or to let me see it.

My dad is always helping people. When I was a child, (a terrible, sinful child) he used to exasperate me to no end by stopping to help every person with car trouble he ever saw. Be it the side of the road or the Big Lots parking lot, Dad would ALWAYS stop to help. And he usually COULD help because he was very good with cars. Also, if something was wrong with your plumbing, your appliances, or your roof, my dad was the guy to call. He could fix anything, and he still can! I learned a lot from watching him offer help to strangers – because he could.

One of my best memories of my dad is when he walked me down the aisle on my wedding day. I was his little girl and yet he graciously accepted Bobby into our lives and graciously moved from being the #1 man in my life to #2 (and with Joshua’s arrival, #3, I guess!) Dad never made me feel worried about spending money on my wedding or college either for that matter, or the Christian school we attended growing up. He wanted us to be kids while we could be kids, and made sure we had the kind of childhood that would lend us to being functional, happy adults.

Ok, this is getting long and sappy but one more thing. I love the way my dad loves my mom, and I love the way my dad loves my kids. He dotes on my mom like they are still teenagers, I mean he really LOVES her, after 41 years of marriage, he loves her. And my babies – my dad loves to spend time with my kids. He takes Joshua on big walks and loves to snuggle Sophie. She definitely has “Papaw” wrapped around her little finger!

So, anyways, happy birthday daddy. You are the best dad a girl could ask for – truly. I know you always say that I got “every bad trait you have” but I like being like you. I wish I could be as good! I love you!

Jenny Michelle

Yesterday was Grandparents Day. Emily and I saw Maria tweeting about how she was writing about her grandparents, and we thought this was the perfect time to introduce you to our grandma.

There is a lot we could say about our grandma. Like, how when Em’s dad was helping her clean out her house recently (where she’s lived since 1969), he found over 50 plastic rings you get off the top of a milk jug, that she was keeping around, you know, just in case. Or that she watches waaaaay too much cable news, or has been convinced for as long as we can remember, that she is going to win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse (seriously? Stop getting her hopes up, you jerks!)

But while those things are evidence of her quirkiness, they are not really indicative of who our grandma is.

She is quiet, she is very shy. Recently when my mom and I were talking about how my Sophie doesn’t really like big groups or parties, Grandma laughed, and said, “Well she gets that from me!”

My grandmother is certainly old-fashioned and conservative, and yet she is the most independent woman I know. She married at twenty, and had two kids in 11 months (that gives me heart palpitations!). She moved from her home in Kentucky to Ohio with her husband and two toddlers so he could take a job at Frigidaire and give their kids a better life than they had. She kept house for twenty-four years, and then, our grandpa died suddenly. He had a heart attack at age forty-four. Her two kids were grown, and she was alone, about to become a grandmother, supposed to be enjoying an empty nest. Who could have imagined?

Fortunately, Grandma had gotten her driver’s license a couple of months before Grandpa died. Up until that time, he’d done their grocery shopping every Friday after work, because she didn’t drive.

When speaking of Emily’s parents wedding, which took place just three weeks later, my grandma told my mom, “I never wanted to break down so bad in my life.”

But she didn’t. She got a job at Elder-Beerman, a local department store, and worked there for the next twenty years until she retired. I think she retired because she was 65 and that’s what people DO when they are 65. She could have worked longer, it seemed. But she devoted time to being a grandma. She was the best hide-n-seek player EVER, and really, still is. I have never seen her run out of patience with a child. She mowed her lawn, cleaned her own gutters (and has been scolded for doing the latter as recently as this spring!), and every Sunday, cooked an amazing lunch for her entire extended family. Emily, her sister, Anna, and I owe our closeness I think, in large part to Grandma and her Sunday dinners. To say the majority of our childhood bonding happened there over biscuits, meatloaf, hide-n-seek, and rummy games would not be an exaggeration.

Now our grandma, though thinner and a little more white-haired, still opens her house to us every Sunday, though we don’t make it nearly as often. But we do see her as much as we can, because, well, she is the best cook in the entire world, and because our children adore her. They love her never-ending supply of desserts, coddling, and energy for hide-n-seek.

And we love watching them love her.