Jackie, come sit with me.

Grandma had died five years earlier, and from time to time at Grandpa’s house we could ask permission to go through her cedar chest and certain drawers. On a previous visit I found a cigar in her cedar chest. Understand that the strict fundamentalist church in which I was raised viewed smoking as about the most sinful thing there was before sexual debauchery and drinking alcohol. I began to wonder if Grandpa was going to Hell.

On the way back home to Oklahoma, I asked Mom if Grandpa was hiding a smoking habit. She assured me that he didn’t smoke and that the cigar might even have been put there before Grandma died as a way to fend off bugs and moths. When we were back for this weekend visit, Mom told him I had asked. Thus it was, Grandpa stopped me as I bounded off his small concrete porch on the way to my cousin’s house.

“Jackie;” a name I thought I had left behind with the 2nd Grade, “come sit with me. I want to talk to you.”

He was sitting alone on one of his two springy metal porch chairs. I sat in the other one for the only memory I have of Grandpa intentionally asking to visit with me alone. I was 12, and he was 85. I was in Kindergarten when he and Grandma moved off the farm, so I don’t have many clear memories of a young Grandpa. As I approach 69, I hold this memory dear to my heart as the only overt lesson I remember from him; a stalwart heritage, to be sure.

“Jackie, when I was young I loved drinking a glass of beer, and smoking an occasional cigar, but when I began teaching back in Indiana, I gave it up. I knew it was my responsibility to set a good example, even though I didn’t consider smoking and drinking to be sinful. Even today,” he said, “I could go into the bar downtown and have a glass of beer, and I would love to smoke a cigar. It wouldn’t be a sin, but if you or Ronnie” (my brother) “or any of your cousins would see me and take it for an example, and if you became addicted to smoking and drinking, I couldn’t live with myself.”

Such were the attitudes of responsibility of my elders. It’s not THE reason I never took up smoking, or even drinking more than an occasional goblet of wine; maybe 20 times in my whole life. It is, however, a grand testimony to setting a good example. I truly hope I have been so faithful that someone some 50 years from now will remember me so well.