Recent Memories

Last week brought back memories.  My four-year-old great grandson began playing on a soccer team.  When I was four years old, soccer was a game played in another country or at least in a far northern state.  He also began Pre-K.  Again, from my days in Miss Baker’s Little Kindergarten in Paris, Texas, I have only one memory and it is bad.  For Halloween, all the students wore masks to school.  My mother no doubt found one on sale somewhere, and I wore a pig mask. Something else we’d never heard of back then was bullying, but I experienced it as all the other kids in the class laughed at my pig mask and called me names associated with a pig. Somewhere around that age, my older cousin shot me with his new BB gun.  It probably didn’t hurt near as much as I made it out to hurt, but I wanted to get him in trouble, and it worked.  He got his gun taken away from him, at least for a while.  Even in my last visit with him, before his death last week, he reminded me of how much I cried as I ran to tell his Daddy. I remember Barney, the mule who pulled the Ice Cream Wagon and how I would run to the end of the block and ride the wagon to my house.  Barney never seemed to mind the extra passenger.  Speaking of riding,  I remember riding on the fire truck in the Vacation Bible School parade, and being told to, “Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth” (Ecclesiastes 12:1) but I’m not sure I knew where Ecclesiastes was located. Whether they bring back positive or negative feelings, memory is one of God’s greatest gifts.