Moving Day

 

Well, this will be my last post on Blogspot. At least, that's the plan.
When I first created this blog, in 2005, this was pretty much the place to post. It's still a pretty simple, somewhat intuitive platform, but as the interweb as progressed...er, evolved, other sites have emerged, I have found the need to learn about other platforms for my work-related duties, and the best way to do that is to plunge right in and start learning the ropes.
No dipping of the toe in the water. 

Also, the email address under which I established this page is an ancient one, in a domain that I fear one day will disappear in the nether-ether of the world wide web. Moving my stuff to a more conventional site has been a goal for a while.

So moving forward, my material will be posted to my new Substack.com blog platform, creatively titled, Brent Clanton's Blog. There are other attractive features that enticed me to go with the new site, and I'll be learning about them as things go along.

Faint not, dear readers--all of the posts that have resided here on Blogspot have been re-populated onto the Substack page. Not exactly the Trail of Tears for my post, but they are on a different reservation now.

And if you're already reading this post on Substack--thanks for keeping up! I will try not to disappoint.

Photographs & Memories

 

It is the middle of January, and the earth has frozen solid. My bride and I are commemorating the cold by staying in our pajamas, making chili, and sipping hot cocoa. I don’t usually like hot drinks, other than black coffee, but when the temperature is in the low 20’s in Southeast Texas, I make exceptions.

I have been entrusted with an old photo album from an aunt who has been gone for several years. Maxine was the oldest of six girls—my mother was third in that pecking order of sisters. They shared an older brother whose job it was to keep them all in line.
Or so they say.

The album is a mish-mash of black and white prints from cameras of various vintages, now yellowed with age. Some of the notations on the back are as interesting as the images on the front: “Bertha’s School Pic. Gore, Okla.” Bertha Brown was my grandmother. I scan the faces of these young children peering back from the early 20^th century; was my grandmother really ever that young?
She was.

Another photo is marked, “George Edwards & a friend,” probably snapped in the early ‘teens. Nineteen-teens, that is. I see the face of my Grandpa unmarked by the lines and creases that were so characteristic in his later years.
I see myself.

There is also a photo of my Aunt Maxine standing before a wisteria bush, dressed to the nine’s. The notation on the back says, “This is not a good one of Maxine, but she sent all the good ones to Jack.” The date is 1944. It is wartime.

I find it fascinating to note the places and times at which these images were captured. I recognize the house in which my maternal grandparents lived until they passed, located in the small burg of “Iago,” deep in Wharton County. I suspect some of the photos are from Gore, Ok. as well. There’s a snapshot of a small child on an ancient tricycle. That tricycle appears in the background of another photo of my grandfather as a young adult, too, and I wonder as to the connection between the two photos. The marking on the back indicates the film may have been processed by “Kelley Photo Studio,” somewhere in Texas. And the very ones who could answer this riddle now belong to the ages.

There are photos, too, of my late mother as a young girl and as a teen, always with at least one or more of her sisters. These are somewhat poignant to me as the first anniversary of her passing draws near…
a subject for another post.

Blessed Be the Tie

Christmas Eve Sunday (12/24/23) Somewhere else in the Gulf of Mexico -

 

I met John and Carol Murphy in the autumn of 1977 at a small church house in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They were among a handful of families that had decided to start a Work in the southern part of that city and were meeting in a cinder block structure that had formerly served as a repair shop for diesel engines.
It was…aromatic.

 

Thru the years, our families remained engaged in one form or another. My parents stayed at the Murphy home while they were away during one visit to the "Okie Contingent" of the Clanton clan.
The Murphy's are like that--come stay at our house.
We won't be there…

 

I met Heather and Steve Bergman under slightly different circumstances. Steve was a preacher at a church in the Cypress-Fairbanks area of NW Harris County, Texas. I'd met Heather long before that: She was in diapers. Her father worked on my car and on my father's vehicles.
I've known her longer than I've known my wife.

 

These couples, plus another pair of "newly-weds" in their '90's, and a single fellow from College Station all managed to be on the same cruise ship as my Bride and I over the Christmas break.
They didn't know we were coming.

 

While most on the ship were preparing to celebrate the commonly accepted birth of Jesus, we gathered on that Christmas Eve Sunday to commemorate the death and resurrection of the Christ. Steve had procured some unleavened bread and a small bottle of grape juice; the Murphy's had brought along a supply of single-serve communion packets ("the bread tastes like Styrofoam," Carol would sneer), and we had all the makings of a proper Christian communion service.

 

On the way to the worship, I ran into a couple in an elevator lobby, Wade and Rebekah Matthews, from Temple, Texas. She noticed I was carrying a hymnal and copies of sheet music. "Are you going to a worship service," Rebekah asked. "Are you a worship leader?" When I affirmed that I was heading forward for that purpose, she asked, "Can we come?"
And so we went.

 

We sang the hymns that Steve had copied, which included one of Carol's favorites, "Count Your Many Blessings," took the Lord's Supper together, and then sang two songs from memory, "I know Whom I Have Believed," and "Blest Be the Tie that Binds," before closing out our service.

 

The last hymn was so poignantly significant: Meeting up on a cruise ship with a couple I'd known for 46-years; a woman I'd known since birth and her husband; and the establishment of new friendships with 90-year old newlyweds, a vacationing accountant, and our new friends from the elevator lobby…all joined by a common faith and purpose on that Sunday before Christmas.
Blessed be the Tie that Binds, indeed.