Memories of Papaw

Indulge me for a moment in some storytelling?

My Papaw passed away eleven years ago this past week. I spent a lot of time pondering the great blessing I was given in being loved by such a man. So many aspects of his life and mine as they intersected brought me a mix of joy and loss as I weighed them, and poked the hurt places to see if they were still bruised. They are. Very much so.

This morning I’m going to share something that always brought my Papaw a touch of shame: he could not read. Papaw was completely illiterate. He couldn’t read or write his own name, let alone navigate print in the wild.

The cause was simple enough. Raised at the middle of ten children— and only the second son— in a rural Appalachian holler, he was needed at home to help scrape a living from the farm.

At the age of seven, when the children of his day were streaming into classrooms in cities around the nation, my Papaw was entrusted with guiding a team of mules to haul timber, one length at a time, out of the deepest sections of forest up the mountain.

He always told me it was easy work for a boy. If you could lift some chains and had command of two good mules, you could ground skid (that’s what he called it) a couple of felled trees of a certain size every day. He and his older brother liked the work, just like they enjoyed planting and plowing well enough— at least compared to their handful of days attempting to learn in the schoolhouse at the mouth of the holler. That, he would tell me, was much harder than convincing mules to drag tree down a mountain.

I learned to read through an organic process called spontaneous reading. My mother was an obsessive reader of Harlequin Romance novels when I was very young, and I can remember pestering her as I sat beside her with my own books—ones I knew so well I could recite them. “What word is that?” “Where does it say ‘fire engine’?” My mother sent me off to play before too long, but something happened in those cumulative hours spent studying text: I mastered the one thing my Papaw could not.

I could read.

This opened up doors for us both, Papaw and me. Always his shotgun rider, I was now given the title of navigator, and I expanded Papaw’s world by alowing him to drive places he’d never gone before. I could read road signs, after all, not to mention maps. I was an invaluble co-shopper when looking for something specific. And let’s not forget how necessary it was back in the day to read each week’s copy of TV Guide!

Years later, I would read purchase agreements in the offices of the auction pen, or the directions off the side of a prescription bottle of blood thinners. Every time, he thanked me. Often he’d look away and say aloud that I shouldn’t have to do “that.” I know it hurt him to have a scaled back independence. This proud man who could fix anything, who could raise any seed or livestock, who was known and respected four counties in any direction… he relied on colors and shapes to lead him up and down the grocery aisles.

I think of Papaw every time I set down to write. It was something he could never do, just like I could never rebuild an engine from memory. I think of the gift God gave us in one another, and I smile at how a need was answered in His timing. An illiterate man and his hyperlexic granddaughter. Isn’t that just like the Lord?

In Christ,

Heather