Raymond E Canada Family Reunion. This is the blog for the R.E. Canada Family Reunion. It is a place for reunion information and photos as well as stories and memories.
Found some typewritten notes from mom (Anne Spence) that she put together for her service. We got the service right, but missed some music selections.
She wanted the Little White Cloud That Cried. I couldn't find it by Louis Armstrong as she requested but found these two.
She also wanted some CCR.
A few years ago, my mother asked me to
be the executor of her estate, whenever that time came. It came.
It probably wasn’t really a surprise like when my father passed, but it
is always unexpected.
The time came and I picked up “the
briefcase” that contained all the essential paperwork that I would need. That’s a loaded statement.
I have done enough large-scale or very
involved projects to know there are always three categories of information.
1. The known knowns—what we know and know that we
know it.
2. The known unknowns—what we don’t know and know
that we don’t know it or don’t know it yet.
3. The unknown unknowns—aka, the fun stuff. Stuff that we don’t know and didn’t even know
that we didn’t know it or even needed to know it.
When I opened the briefcase, I was
looking for legal and financial documents.
Most of those official sort of papers that I found were from things long
past that were sold or expired or really not necessary to life in this century.
But I found some other things that I
had never seen before. I found school
report cards, not for my mother, but for my father.
My mother kept dad’s elementary and
junior high report cards. My dad was an
electrical engineer with a math and science mind who could make a radio from a
box of junk. Why keep his elementary
school report cards?
Then I read them. I knew that I wasn’t going to find 1000
shares of stock in Microsoft or Apple from three decades ago, but I had to
look, but then I had to look at the report cards.
Some of them were very
nondescript: S for satisfactory. That is, until the seventh grade. Then there were a few more comments in a few
more categories that were a bit more descriptive.
One of the categories was: Interested and does his best—Improving.
Is clean and orderly: Fair.
Sits, stands, and walks well: Generally so.
Is acquiring good health habits: Fair.
Works and plays well with others: Generally.
There were other categories. His best subject was reading and he needed
improvement in—not math, but arithmetic. How long has it been since anyone
called it arithmetic? Nobody even sings the song anymore and singing it to the tune of a hickory stick has sure gone out the window.
Why did she keep this stuff? His college degrees, yeah, I could see that,
but elementary and junior high report cards, really?
Maybe it was in case one day they had
a son who learned to shoot pool his sophomore year in college and his grades might
have said fair instead of good. Maybe
that was it.
It was fun to look at these and there
was something interesting that I haven’t seen before. It was an admission certificate, not to a
university, but to high school.
Enough for what she kept in her
important papers. Note to self: Shred
all my school paperwork while I still am in good health.
I want to talk about smoking. My mom smoked all of her life. She subscribed to the Mark Twain philosophy
of smoking. Which is:
Quitting smoking
is one of the easiest things a person can do.
I’ve done it hundreds of times myself.
Why am I talking about smoking?
When my mother was looking for a
church in Burns Flat, she knew that the pastor at this church smoked. It was sometime in the 1990s and Jim Fisk
was that pastor. She thought that she
wouldn’t be judged for her smoking.
Remember, she grew up in a time when
people smoked and it was good for you.
Times changed and it became bad for you and you might be looked down
upon for doing it.
In any case, it got her to the
Cumberland Presbyterian Church.
She had grown up in the church. That’s just what you did. So we come to that point in the service where
the preacher is finally going to throw in a Bible verse.
Train
up a child in the way he should go,
And when he is old he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6
My mother was brought up in the way
she should go and she brought up her children in the way they should go.
I remember Saturdays in Mangum at the
Central Christian Church, which was next to the old United Supermarket, and
both of my parents would run off the Sunday bulletins. They were not the fancy things we have
today. They were run off of a mimeograph
machine.
You know what I am talking about. Those thick blue sheets that you typed on
with a manual typewriter and then hand cranked out the copies then tried to
wash the ink off your hands and arms before Sunday.
Everywhere that we lived, we belonged
to a church congregation. We were brought up in the way we should go. How did she come to believe?
When I was in college at OSU, every
once in a while, I would drive
to my grandfather’s house east of Edmond and watch a ball game with
him. It was on a black and white
television, with rabbit ears adorned with foil, and occasionally it had a picture
where you could figure out what was happening in the game.
I was sitting with him one time, with
the trash can sitting between us—not for trash—but lined with a paper grocery
sack and used for spitting tobacco. How
could you watch baseball without some Redman or Beechnut in your cheek?
This one time, I knew that I was
supposed to talk to him about Jesus Christ.
What do you do? How do you bring
up that subject with your grandfather?
Then out of the blue, he stopped talking
about baseball and tells me in a matter-of-fact manner how important it is to
know Jesus Christ. Wow.
From that moment on, I knew that my
mother had not only brought up her own children in the way they should go, but
that she had been brought up in the way she should go.
Being brought up in the way you should
go did not mean that there were not some excursions
off the path from time to time. One of
them involved some colorful language that she also got from her father, the
most notable of which ended with the words and save the matches.
Here’s something that most of you have
seen. It’s the finger. Amanda, not the finger you are thinking of,
but the one she would point at you if she didn’t like what you said and she
couldn’t come up with the words to counter your position.
Most of the time it was pointed at me,
we were talking politics and that finger came out frequently.
My mother was a worrier. The whole be anxious for nothing thing
didn’t really catch on with her. Most of the time, she would just say it will
be ok when Vernon gets home.
But one time, in Weatherford, Texas in
the winter with snow and ice on the ground, the school called her and asked if
she could come in and talk about me. That wouldn’t wait until Vernon got
home. He worked on the F-111 in Fort
Worth and wouldn’t be home until after school was out.
She had to go to the school. It was the sixth grade in an old building by
itself, and she parked across the street from the building and fell on the ice, and broke her leg crossing the street.
I was at school and didn’t know they
had called her, and didn’t know she broke her leg, and didn’t know why she was
worried when I got home. She never found
out until days later that the school had tested the sixth grade a couple weeks earlier and they wanted to put me in all sorts of advanced math classes—stuff that I
had never heard of, but through all of this, until she found out what the school
wanted, she worried about what I had done.
These thoughts are called negative
fantasies and generally involve the worst-case scenario. I don’t know if she
thought that I had gotten into a fight, spit in the grits at lunch, or thrown
down the horns—remember we lived deep in the heart of Texas—before the whole upside-down horns was even
a thing.
She worried.
One time, years later, while I was in
Iraq, a sailor dressed in his Cracker Jack Blues knocked on the door where my
parents lived. It’s the same place
where my mom lived until a few days ago.
She opened the door and thought the
worst. I’m sure she envisioned words
that she had only heard in movies: “We regret to inform you.”
That wasn’t it and that’s not how the
Marines make death notifications anyway. This
young sailor was looking for an address in Burns Flat and couldn’t find
it. He spotted the Proud Parent of a
United States Marine sticker and thought he might find a friend who would help
him.
I wonder what he must have thought with
the look that he got when my mother saw him standing there in his blues and
surely all of the blood in her face and emotion in her body left her in an
instant.
Just to put you at ease if you have a
son or daughter in the Corps, the Marines will send a Marine, normally an
officer, to make that notification that nobody wants to receive.
This episode peaked her worry meter.
One time I was talking with her, and
she had something important to ask me. She
had been wanting to ask me this one thing and finally, she got around to it. She
said she was confident in the promises of God and that by grace through faith
she was saved and would go to heaven.
But she said she was worried that when
she got there, she wouldn’t know what to do.
I convinced her that by the time she got there, they would have all the
kinks in the orientation package worked out.
She worried.
One of the things that she really
enjoyed was family reunions. While two
of her sisters were still alive—all retired—they would travel around the state
looking for places to stay. One of her
sisters, Fern, was well off financially, and paid for the accommodations each
year.
Finding where to have the reunion was
probably about as much fun as the reunion.
You have heard the term word salad,
yes? I want to introduce you to name salad. My mother’s grandchildren sometimes
frustrated her. Sometimes it was not
intentional. Sometimes it was, but if
she became frustrated and tried to speak your name aloud, name salad kicked in.
She would go through most of the names
of people in the family—living and dead—or close friends and if she still
didn’t get to your name, then she went through the names of pets past and
present.
I know that Matt and Christopher have
been called Frostybob on more than one occasion.
My mother’s mind was slipping near the
end. At our last family reunion, she
would ask me who this kid was or that one and I would tell her. Sometimes more
than once in a five-minute span.
She would look at me funny and I would
say that’s Christopher and Courtney’s son.
I would go through the list of their children—there were only up to 4 at
that time—and she would stare at me and finally ask: Are they married?
Of course, I said, “They have been
thinking about it. They have been
shacked up for a dozen years or so, but they are thinking about it.”
That’s when the finger came out.
I need to say some things that are
appropriate for every believer and that includes my mother.
At some time, long before I was born,
my mother passed
from death to
life in her profession of Jesus as Lord.
She ran
the good race.
She fought the good fight.
She kept the faith.
There is now in store for her a crown
of righteousness and not just for her, but for all who have professed Jesus as
Lord and seek after his righteousness, who will take his yoke and learn from
him.
His yoke
is easy and his burden is light.
I need to say some things to those who
are here. My mother is just fine, but
you are to receive this counsel.
Be
anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and petition with
thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the peace of God that
transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
Trust
the Lord and receive
his peace even though you can’t make sense of everything, even though all
the pieces don’t seem to fit together.
And finally, bring
up your children in the way they should go.
They may stray for a time, but your investment in their training will
bring them home when they are older.
Bring up your children in the way they
should go. The world wants you to adopt
a lie. The world will try to convince you that God
is not real and if he is, then he is an angry old man throwing lightning bolts
randomly at his creation.
But the
truth has been revealed to you—God
is
love—and we are all
without
excuse when we resort to our own understanding over trusting God—the very God
who can lift the
blindness that so many suffer and bring you to the
truth and to life.
Many of you know this so well, but
what will you do?
I want you to share your memories of
Anne Spence today and in the days to come.
Some of the youngest here will only know her by your stories.
Here’s one thing that I ask you to
take with you today.
Train up a child
in the way he should go,
And when he is
old he will not depart from it.
Proverbs
22:6
Amen.
