Family Fun

“The wounds have healed but I marvel at the scars,” I wrote in response to a dear friend.

“You are continuing what you have always done since I've known you; living out your spiritual journey in public. Whether that is courageous or dangerous is up to you to determine,” he wrote.

Even with the cryptic ending, I liked reading this.

A lot of people hide from the things that they don’t like or that make them uncomfortable. I’m not sure why, but I’ve never been one of them.

So this is a story that I’ve never told before.

When I was a small kid my Mother would pick me up and sit me on the kitchen table in Port Wentworth, Georgia of all places. Then she would look me dead in the eye and say, “You know that you’re going to be great. You are! You are going to do great things!”

And I can remember sitting there, feet dangling below, blues eyes looking at blue eyes, and nodding my head up and down. As I write this I can feel those feelings. I am perhaps seven or eight. But she did it time and time again.

Of course this is from a Mother who did great things. She busted down the doors of sexism at banks, humbling the men she worked for, and shattering record after record. As I make my way around Savannah today people still say to me, “That’s your Mom?” before launching into stories of things that she’d done.

I get it from my brother too. David and I had different sets of gifts but the one that we share is competition. I learned that from him. He was an incredible athlete and we would spend hours in the back yard trying to out do one another. Depending on which particular way that we were trying to humiliate one another we were relentless about it.

And David taught me to fight like hell to win. Against all odds! no matter how far down you happen to be. You can always pull it out! Victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat.

Always bring tarter sauce!

Angi, Age to me, and me were full of mischief. My baby sister is five years my younger but we’ve had this closeness. Age has always been determined. She knows what she wants and then she goes and gets it. She also hates rules and boundary lines. Over the years I’ve watched her do unconventional and crazy things. Just like me. Looking back we encouraged these things in one another.

Dad taught me laughter. He struggled over many things but laughing wasn’t one. “Never take it too serious,” is what he told me though he always did. So when things weren’t going his way he had this innate ability to laugh at it all. There is a thin line between laughing and crying and Dad lived on that line.

He passed it on to me.

A few years ago I was at a black tie something in downtown Savannah and Herb McKenzie and I were talking. Herb was the Chairman of the Union Mission Board of Directors at the time. Paul Hinchey, President & CEO of St. Joseph/Candler Hospital and I were having a row with one another at the time in the press that he was winning and I wasn’t looking all that good.

I handed Herb the glass of wine that I was having and said, “OK, time to go to work.”

I left him standing there and strolled over to Paul and his entourage (he always has one) and he can smile and shake hands with more enthusiasm than anybody I’ve ever met. So we did and we chatted and we promised to do things that neither one of us had any intention of doing.

Then I returned to Herb who handed me my glass of wine and said, “I can’t believe you did that? How did you do that? I would never have done that?”

“It was fun,” I remember saying.

I got it from my family.