LET FREEDOM RING ...

Hope everyone has a happy and safe Fourth of July.

I visited a blog today that reminded me of a birthday party we threw for my grandfather on his 90th birthday and so I thought I would reminisce for a moment.

My grandfather was the most incredible man I've ever known. By the time he died in January of 2001, he could barely walk due to his bad knees and his eyesight was failing, but he was still sharp enough to win a game of forty-two or checkers.

He loved to drive. In the last years of his life I'd get calls from friends who'd seen him driving ten miles an hour in the middle of the road, or going straight from the turning lane when the light was red. When I stopped by his house after work one day, he asked me to get a bottle open. It was super-glue, so the lid was stuck, and it took a pair of pliers to get it open. I asked him what he needed fixed, and he looked at me and said "those are my eye-drops."

His maternal grandparents were Black Irish and his paternal grandparents were French and Cherokee. Even at 90 he had a head full of thick, wavy hair. He used Grecian formula for years, so it was still dark, but not the black that I remember from childhood. He was a big, strong man who worked hard all his life, but his spirit was sweet and gentle. He loved his God and gave bear hugs that could squeeze the air out of your lungs. He would give a stranger the shirt off his back if they needed it.

He grew up poor on a farm in Coolidge, Texas, worked for an ice-plant in his teens and early twenties. Moved to Oklahoma and bought a Conoco gas station which he ran for forty years, hence the bad knees.

His son was murdered in 1982. He lost a daughter to diabetes in 1990 and a granddaughter to the same disease in 1992. My grandmother died in 1998. His faith never failed, his spirit never wavered.

We wanted to do something special for him to celebrate his 90th birthday. We planned the party for months. It turned out to be a family reunion since relatives from several states came for the festivities. California and Oregon, Texas, Colorado, and Arkansas. His birthday was July 1st and my grandmother's had been the 4th, so we obviously went with a patriotic theme, using the flag that he hung from his front porch for the festivities. I had red buttons made for everyone to wear that read "I love Cliff" while his button read "I am Cliff." He got such a kick out of that.

He kept his button on his dresser and once in a while I'd see him wearing it while looking through his picture album from that day. We'd sit on his front porch and he'd tell me the old stories about growing up on the farm. He could still crack open pecans with his bare hand.

By then, I'd quit the job I'd had for seventeen years to take care of him in order to keep him out of the nursing home. Six months later we had no choice. There were a few men who played dominoes, and he looked forward to that, but most of the time he had a look on his face as though he were thinking, "what in the heck am I doing here with all these old people?" Two weeks later he suffered a massive stroke. The first words he spoke? "Where are my pants?"

Wearing the "I Love Cliff" buttons to his funeral seemed like the perfect tribute.