Reflections of Sixth Birthday: Appreciations and Remorse

  

         Facebook is a problem for me.  I spend too much time reading posts when I need to be writing on books or newspaper columns or my magazines.  I enjoy most of what you folks write and especially the photos.  I was surprised to get so many good birthday wishes, better than 500 on facebook.  I can’t thank everyone, as I would like to, so here is a true story you might enjoy… one I never wrote before.

 

         I didn’t have a good relationship with my mother, she wasn’t fond of my dad’s family, and I was too much like the worst of them.  I was as close to my father as a little boy can get, at the age of five.  On my sixth birthday in October, I had been in school since August and  I was the youngest in the first grade class. Mom had me when she was 16, and was way too young to have a rascal boy like me.  Her mother was an angel, and she spoiled me and did as much to raise me right as she could.  For my birthday, the two of them made me a shirt, most likely out of an old dress or perhaps a flour sack.  Back then flour sacks were all different, with color patterns on them, and it was common  for ladies to make children’s clothes and even dresses from them.

   I wasn’t the best example of a first grader. First grade teacher Violet Frost held me on  her lap part of the time because I cried for the first two days.  Then after a couple of weeks I found an apple tree in the school yard like the one’s on  Grandma McNew’s farm and I climbed up in it to hide, intending to stay there forever.  Mary Lou Troutman,  who in time would prove to be the smartest of our whole class at graduation 12 years later, saw me in the tree and climbed up to join me and I kicked her out.  I wasn’t spanked, as I should have been, but when I saw her skinned knee I felt so bad I didn’t need to be.  I was an obnoxious 5 year old, but soft hearted.  I didn’t like anybody, but it killed me to hurt someone.  

         I cried again when I unwrapped my birthday shirt, and it must have hurt Mom  and Grandma something terrible.  It is funny but I can still plainly see that shirt today, and that pretty little red and brown plaid dress with the white collar Mary Lou had on when I kicked her out of the apple tree.

         As for the shirt, it wouldn’t do!  I had seen a paint-by-number set in the dime store in Houston and I wanted it more than I wanted anything in the world. After I threw a fit (and got a paddling from Dad), Mom and Grandma got it for me and I was happy.  But here is what I can’t understand…  I still think about my 6^th birthday often and I want so much to tell Mom and Grandma that I am ashamed of the way I behaved then.  In time, I come to love that shirt, and that paint by number set, (a picture of two ducks flying from a pond) proved  I would never be an artist.  Once I messed up our bathroom just trying to paint the walls.  

         I just wished I had told them when they were alive how sorry I am that I never told them how great that little shirt was.  And thinking about it often brings me a certain amount of agony.  It is a hard thing for me to forget.  But so is the fact that in all those years I never told Mary Lou Troutman how sorry I was that I kicked her out of that apple tree and skinned her knee.  In twelve years of school, I almost never talked to her, or any other girl for that matter.  Now 70 years later, I wish so much that I had apologized  to her and  it   still bothers me that I didn’t.  But when you get right down to it, over the years I remember a lot of folks I should have apologized to and didn’t. And there were a lot of folks I should have told how much I appreciated who they were and what they did for me.  But it is a good reason for St. Peter to let me into heaven.  I have a lot of people to find, starting with Mary Lou.