Six Lifetimes of Love
the mill house, Granny’s house & the doghouse
My great-grandmother Helen was a pious, quiet woman with a placid face and a kind heart. Her husband was Reid, my short, happy and bald little great-grandfather.
Reid always carried lemon-drops in his suit-coat pocket and sat in the “Amen Corner” at church. Mama used to buzz his head clean with clippers when he asked her for a trim and I was always happy to sit on his knee and gobble up lemon drops. He loved to sing his favorite hymn, “When We All Get to Heaven”; I always liked the “we all” part of those lyrics — nobody left out.
Long before I came along . . .
Helen worked the morning shift while Reid fed the children breakfast and sent them off to school. When they got home, Reid would head into work the 2nd shift while Helen tended to homework and fixed dinner; she always sent one of the kids to the mill with some supper for their daddy, Reid. Together, they had five children; three survived infancy and grew into adults. It was not puppy love that kept Reid and Helen together after the tragic loss of two children.
The Robinson family lived in a little three-room mill house filled with love. Just out back, there was a communal spigot so they did not have too far to go to fetch water, a little patch of land to grow vegetables, and even a cow that gave enough milk to share with the neighbor’s wife and kids whose husband/daddy had died.
One day a heart attack forced Reid to retire from tending the spinning machines at the mill. He stayed at home more after that and tended to the garden. Now he had a little extra time to look after their younger daughter who was blind. All the while Helen kept up her day job so they would have enough to get by. Reid and Helen were poor but did not feel too bad about it; in the middle of the Great Depression everybody else was poor too. They had work, food, shelter and each other — everything they needed.
Well, almost everything.
Reid and Helen both drew short-straws in the pancreatic lottery of life and did not know the things we do today about nutrition. They paid the neighborhood doctor in cash if they had it, and milk or vegetables or whatever they could manage when they did not.
When they got older, there was never money enough for all the insulin to keep them both healthy at the same time.
The love that my great-grandparents shared growing old together was the powerful kind. It was the kind of love where Helen did without insulin so that Reid could go on living. They kept on loving each other until the day Reid joined everybody else in Heaven when a second, more massive heart attack came along. A few years later there was a stroke and Helen joined him. Unless I miss my guess they are still loving each other and singing along with everybody else “Up Yonder”.
The war came along, but still way before I did . . .
When my victorious and lovesick pawpaw Fred was released from the Navy at the end of World War II, he returned straight home and proposed to Frances, my granny. Frances was a senior in high school, only a couple of months from graduation. The two of them, both young, beautiful and deeply in love couldn’t wait to get married. Everybody else was tying the knot, so they did too.
My great-grandmother, Helen was furious the night when she got home from church and found out that Frances and Fred had eloped. They slipped across the state line into South Carolina where they didn’t need a blood test to get married. Apparently, there was a rule against married girls attending school; as a result, my Granny never graduated high school.
My grandparents stayed together until my Pawpaw died. To my knowledge, they never mistreated each other or were unfaithful and loved until each took their last breath. Helen got over her anger eventually; Fred and Frances cared for her with love when a stroke left her crippled and mute.
It was not “in-love” that saw Fred and Frances through the sixty plus years they shared, raising a family as husband and wife. That crazy “in-love” that makes a person drop out of high school and elope to South Carolina does not laugh that long. If a person is fortunate, a different kind of love moves in to take the place when “puppy love” grows up.
That other kind of love gave my granddad the courage to look as far as Pennsylvania to find the work he needed to support his young family. That love kept them together and carried the whole family back home to North Carolina when times got better. It’s the kind of love that helped him nurse my Granny when she had breast cancer and again when both of her knees were replaced.
In later years, their roles reversed. Emphysema made Fred gasp for air as his heart grew weaker every day, but Frances remained at his side looking after him the whole time. After Fred died, Granny could not bear the thought of grocery shopping ; that was one of the many ways my granddad had showed his love for her. I took up this task for a while until she could manage.
Fifty years after Fred & Frances eloped . . .
Things were going pretty well for me. I was happily employed with interesting work and earning great money. I bought an old house with four acres of land which gave me options to do many interesting things. I wanted a border collie and found a reputable breeder who, in addition to being a middle-school biology teacher, also raised sheep and cattle. When I arrived at the farm, the breeder lady introduced me to a little puppy she called, “Split” because his face was half black and half white, the color dividing right down the middle.
Thus began the happiest twelve-and-a-half years of my life. Mama suggested I name the little fellow “Sydney” and to this day, it may be the only suggestion of hers I’ve ever taken right off the bat.
It’s easy to fall in love with a puppy, and easier still when your puppy is smarter than many people’s kids. Everybody loves the smell of “puppy breath” and the little fur-balls are so sweet and cuddly we forgive their little “mistakes” when they look up with their doleful eyes.
But . . . puppies don’t stay puppies forever.
Puppies become grown-up dogs who still love with their whole hearts and, if you love them back, are always crazy to see you every time you return. It’s easy to love a creature who so visibly and enthusiastically loves you back. Make no mistake though, it’s not puppy breath or puppy love when man rearranges his life around feedings, long-walks, and playtime. I never minded any of those very much. Sydney was by my side, loving me unconditionally through two long-term romances. He even moved with me to Europe for a year.
The biggest difference between being “in love” puppy-style and big love is maybe only visible when the road gets tough.
I don’t know exactly how it started but one day Sydney seemed kind of sad, tired, and listless. He would not eat or drink and couldn't stand up on his own. I rushed him to the vet who gave him some emergency fluids. He rallied a little over the weekend. The vet suspected pancreatitis, a sometimes mysterious and often lethal condition in canines.
When Monday came and Sydney’s condition worsened, I knew what I had to do.
I called my dad and asked him to come pick me up and drive us to the vet. I could not allow Sydney to suffer any longer and didn’t want to let him out of my arms. It was not puppy-love when I nodded my head, giving my compassionate vet the OK to stop the pain. I held my buddy in my arms as he drew his last breath. That day I cried as I never had before. My normally stoic dad wept too, having never seen his oldest son so broken.
This very moment as I click away revealing my faithful companion’s end, I can barely see the screen through a watery veil of salty tears.
That’s my epic tale of six lifetimes worth of love. I hope that maybe it reveals a few of the differences between being “in-love” and that other, heavy-duty kind of thing.
To truly cross-up some genres, here’s a white dude in 2012 covering a 70’s disco single (used in the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s 90’s retooling of Romeo + Juliet) with a different take on the Tough Love in my story that began in the 20’s and 50’s:
“ It’s high time now, just one crack at life
Who wants to live in trouble and strife
My mind must be free to learn all I can about me, mmmI’m gonna love me for the rest of my days
Encourage the babies every time they say
Self preservation is what’s really going on todaySay I’m gonna turn loose
A thousand times a day
How can I turn loose
When I just can’t break away
(When I just can’t break away)Oh, young hearts run free
They’ll never be hung up
Hung up like my man and me
You and me” — Young Hearts, Run Free — Candi Staton
