Carrying Your Love With Me

Carrying Your Love With Me

For Ed Johnson and all my aunts and uncles who have taught the next generation the love of family

This time last summer when the biscuits and gravy had been eaten and the smell of strong coffee and bacon lingered around us, we gathered around the living room together.   We had been meeting like this when I was home from teaching to choose a few pictures that Grannie Fannie had saved through the years to reminisce about and to tell a few stories.  My heart’s hope was to learn about the lives of my aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandparents that created the strongest roots of our family tree.  My aunts and uncles passed black and white photographs with scalloped edges and blue ink written by hands long gone across our laps and when one picture would spark a story someone would start the telling of it and everyone else would chime in, back and forth and across the room reminding me of lightning bugs shining through the dusk of a summer’s evening.

We had just gotten started when Uncle Ed went out to his truck and came back in with an old battered toolbox.  I could tell by the eagerness in his eyes and the lightness in his step that he had brought something he was proud of.  He sat the toolbox down in the middle of the living room and began telling us that this toolbox belonged to their daddy, Little Berry Johnson.  He shared with us that Mary was given the toolbox after Grandpa Johnson passed away and she gave it to him.  He said more important than the few tools he had were the memories that each object held and how together they told a story of the best daddy and grandpa our family ever knew.

In the battered tool box, Uncle Ed showed us the few things that Grandpa Johnson kept with him through the years. He showed us the few tools grandpa had and kept for fixing things around the house Grannie needed taken care of and the car they had.

He showed us the paycheck stub Grandpa kept from Poe Mill in Greenville where he worked third shift for most of his life.  We learned he was a filling doffer.  He would work the small bobbins while Ed and Randy and Marion did warp bobbins. Dad said it was a hard job.  You had to doff so many frames in an hour to make production and to earn your pay.  It was a hot and sweaty eight hour a day job with a couple of ten minute breaks.  Grandpa rarely missed a day.

Uncle Ed showed us how Grandpa Johnson would use the back of his check stub to figure up what the family needed from the general store, writing down how much each item cost, and how much he would have left to pay his bills.  When I looked closely at his list I wondered what “step ins” were.  Uncle Ed told me that back then everyone called girl’s bloomers or underpants, “step ins” because the girls had to step into them.  During this time he would have had three of his girls at home, Sara and Mary and Martha. Uncle Ed told us how Grandpa was careful with his money.  Feeding and raising nine kids required him to be a good steward of what he earned.  We learned how once a month right before the electricity man would come out and read the meter on the back of the house, Grandpa would go out and figure out to the penny how much he owed per kilowatt for his electricity bill to make sure that he wasn’t being overcharged.  On the back of the white clapboard would be a list of Grandpa’s penciled “cipherings” month by month.

Uncle Ed told us how Grandpa would always have a white Liberty life insurance pencil on him to do his ciphering.  Ed said he never bought pencils from the store because he knew whenever the Liberty Life insurance man came by to collect the life insurance payment he would give him a handful of their new white pencils.  Dad told us that he always kept one of the pencils in the front bib of his overalls and while he never liked to raise his voice or whip his kids because he knew Grannie Fannie gave it to them whether they needed it or not, he did use the pencil every now and then to make a point.  Daddy said that whenever he or Ed would get in trouble his daddy would sat them down and whip that white Liberty Life insurance pencil out and pop it against their forehead and say, “Boy, now don’t you do that no more.”  We learned that he called everybody “boy” even the girls.

Ed showed us a few other items that Grandpa Johnson had in his toolbox like a brown buckeye that he kept in his overall bib pocket for good luck, a few buffalo nickels from the thirties, some wheat pennies, some $2 bills, and his pocketknife.

Aunt Mott told us that one time when they were younger Granny Fanny went to the doctor because her back was hurting.  The doctor suggested that they get a new mattress.  When Granny pulled the empty mattress up she found few empty liquor bottles from where Grandpa would have a “little nip” in the evenings when he would get up from third shift.  Aunt JoAnn said Grandpa never would drink in front of the kids or his family.  Uncle Ed said when the family moved from the mill house at Park Place he would hide some of his bottles under the floorboards or in the rafters. Daddy said he remembers he favored  Old Crow whiskey.   Ed said the only time they ever remembered Grandpa having a little bit more than a nip was when Uncle Vernon was coming home from Vietnam.  He was so excited that his boy was coming home that he was high stepping all over the yard.

My daddy said Grandpa Johnson also kept a black leather bound King James Bible at home and would study on it some.  Daddy said a man from a church down the road would come by and talk to him and would tell him about the verses and he would make some notes in the margins of his bible.  Daddy said he remembers Grandpa telling him not to ever turn anyone away who came to the door to talk to you about the Lord.  Daddy said a few years after Grandpa died, Aunt Joyce gave him the Bible that Grandpa  kept.

My favorite thing that Uncle Ed showed us that Grandpa Johnson kept in his toolbox was his leather wallet that he carried with him when he worked in the cotton mill. He said back when Vernon and Marion were in the first and second grades Grannie Fannie bought a package of their school pictures they had made back in 1954 and 1955.  Eddie said back then men would put their kids’ pictures in their wallet to show their buddies at work and that Grandpa was proud of his kids.

Grandpa Johnson didn’t have much in terms of money or material wealth.  The few possessions he had barely filled a toolbox but he left his worth in the hearts and minds of his children and grandchildren. He would tell my Daddy growing up that he could have had a cattle ranch or a little more of this world if he hadn’t had so many kids, but he loved them all and felt he was rich in family.  This belief always makes me think of the verses in Matthew 6:19-21 “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

I never met Grandpa Johnson.  In fact, most of us that fill up a picnic shelter at our family reunions were born after he left this world in 1979, but I know my cousins and I know the love that he left behind.  Without his belief that family was everything and his daily work to keep everyone fed and well, the rest of us wouldn’t be here.  It’s been forty years this spring since he passed away but his love for us and the Lord’s love living in and through him has kept our family close through distance and death.

Thank you Uncle Ed for sharing with us the treasures from Grandpa’s toolbox.  Most of all, thank you for filling the big shoes he left in looking after our family.  You and Aunt Brenda are always there for each of us, in good times and in bad times.  We are thankful for you!  Happy Father’s Day!