Excerpts from

Don’t Miss the Miracles

Book Excerpt: Thoughts Behind Writing This Memoir

Why We Remember Things As We Do

I wonder if I tend in my memory to put myself in the best possible light? While I certainly haven’t intentionally changed facts in my accounts of past events, perhaps subconsciously I have softened my rough edges and, like Walter Mitty, have glamorized myself a bit or have made myself manlier than, in fact, I really am. Also, I suspect that I don’t place as much blame on myself as is warranted when I have been in dispute with family or friends, or with a group of upset parents, or with a board or boss that makes life harder for me.

When writing from my memories, I want to make sure there is no meanness regarding someone I love, primarily my family members. In my memory, whether conscious or not, I tend to soften what I record about someone. Sometimes my journal accounts of the same occurrences are more factual, with less concern about hurting someone with how I reference him or her. My nature is to “see the best in people”; hence, negative emotions I may have had at the time of an occurrence have mostly melted away by the time I record from memory an encounter I had years earlier.

We Are Only Seeing One Side of a Human Interaction

Occasionally I’m writing about a solo experience—a walk alone in the woods or in a time when I want to be alone—but much more often both in my journals and in my from-memory writing, I’m writing of my engagement with one or more humans. And in those incidents, I don’t know what’s inside that other person: what unexpressed thoughts, what subconscious triggers, what disposition, what history, what that other person thinks of me. How presumptuous of me to ascribe motives to another person; but often I do.

I have known JoElyn and been married to her for half a century. How much closer could I be if I knew, really knew, what was going on inside her? So anytime I write about JoElyn and me (whether my memory of an earlier time or my morning journaling of yesterday’s events), it will not be 100% true. If this is true of the person I know best and with whom I spend the most time, how much further from the truth will I be when I write of others in my memory or in my current life? I am entirely likely to ascribe motives to JoElyn and others that are far from true.

It’s well worth the effort to learn of another’s primary influences, their fears, their desires. We were created to need others. To be our best selves, we live life in and around other people. I have devoted substantial days, weeks, and months to this memoir undertaking. In part I do it because I feel that writing about my life vis a vis others will carry me to a deeper level of understanding of them and me. Isn’t that interesting: we learn from writing? I become a deeper person; I throw off some of the masks I didn’t even realize I was wearing. I perhaps get a bit closer to knowing and understanding others.

“Isn’t that interesting: we learn from writing? I become a deeper person; I throw off some of the masks I didn’t even realize I was wearing. I perhaps get a bit closer to knowing and understanding others.”

Book Excerpt: Grandpa

Grandpa, the Scholar

On Piedmont Road, just north of Peachtree Road in Buckhead, there were two driveways and a grass strip with a big clump of bushes separating our home growing up from that of Walter and Agnes Dillon, my maternal grandparents. In fact, the site of our home, with plenty of front and back yard, was for decades their side yard. We started building at the end of WWII, so I’m guessing the work began late in the fall of ’45 and was completed just before Warren’s birth, June 23, 1946. Our house was brick painted white, with a front porch running to the right of the living room plate-glass window, and a same-size porch running above it.

“It was on the glass porch in this early hour that Grandpa wrote his weekly editorial for the Lions Club News. He was a founding member of the Atlanta Lions Club (est. 1920) and served two terms as its president starting in 1928. He obviously was strongly associated as a Lion because the first lion cub obtained by the Atlanta Zoo was named “Walter.””

Often, when as a single-digit kid I would get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I would look out our upstairs bathroom window and see a little desk lamp shining out of the darkness on Big Gram and Grandpa’s glass porch. It was Grandpa studying or writing. It was probably more like 5 a.m. than the middle of the night, and this was the way Grandpa started his day.

It was on the glass porch in this early hour that Grandpa wrote his weekly editorial for the Lions Club News. He was a founding member of the Atlanta Lions Club (est. 1920) and served two terms as its president starting in 1928. He obviously was strongly associated as a Lion because the first lion cub obtained by the Atlanta Zoo was named “Walter.” I remember his writing favorably about Dwight Eisenhower’s candidacy for president. This took a little bit of courage since the South was overwhelmingly in the Democratic Party camp and Eisenhower was running as a Republican. I learned to love Abraham Lincoln more from one of Grandpa’s columns. Most of Grandpa’s columns were not about politics, but more about values that were imbued in an Indiana farm boy who went on to be included in Great Men of the South , a thick tome about men who made a difference, whether in Jackson, Memphis, Charleston, Birmingham, or Atlanta.

He went to the University of Illinois Law School. He finished law school in 1900, practiced law for eight years with a Chicago law firm, and married Agnes Nelson of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in the middle of those eight years, in 1904. Just after his marriage, the Chicago law firm sent him for a stint to work with a mining company in Mexico, and his young bride, Agnes, went with him. Grandpa came to Atlanta in 1909, the same year in which Jane (aka Mom), the older of his two daughters, was born (September 23).

Of his practice of law in Atlanta, the 1922 edition of Men of the South had the following to say:

“Among the men of learning and ability who are contributing to the prestige of the Atlanta bar is Walter S. Dillon, senior member of the well-known law firm of Dillon, Calhoun & Dillon [Commercial law]. Mr. Dillon ... is one of the city’s most successful attorneys.... Mr. Dillon manifests a deep interest in municipal affairs and for one term represented the fourth ward in the common council.... Mr. Dillon represents the highest type of citizenship and among his fellow practitioners is recognized as a lawyer of high attainments who respects the unwritten ethics of the profession.”

Grandpa’s practice of law ended prematurely when he had a stroke about 1943. In the 1940s when I can first remember him, he was slightly stooped and walked with a cane, but he had no other ill effects of the stroke that I picked up on.

Grandpa, the Teacher

Here on the glass porch Grandpa would read poems to me and my brothers from One Hundred and One Famous Poems. He may have had another book of poems or two because it seems that we got an extra dose of Frost, Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay, but this could have come from Mom. I was easily stirred by heroism. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “ O Captain! My Captain!” were ones we heard often from One Hundred and One Famous Poems.

It was on this glass porch that we prepared for summer meetings of the Noah Webster Club. Grandpa created this idea as a way to hook in his rambunctious grandsons, and he named the club after Webster, an English-language spelling reformer. We bought into the whole idea enthusiastically, drawing heavily on our set of Compton Encyclopedias. The meetings themselves more likely were held in the living room adjacent to this porch to give them the weight that Grandpa desired us to experience. His theory was that the younger we began having to get up and speak in front of an audience, the more likely we were to avoid the stage fright that hampers so many adults. We would meet on one Sunday afternoon in each of the three summer months. Everyone who attended had to prepare a written report that would then be presented. (Only Big Gram was exempt; she said it was because she prepared the refreshments, which I primarily remember as Coke Floats or Root Beer Floats.) Grandpa would assign the broad topic (e.g., birds, Indian tribes, states); then each of us would choose a topic within that category, with no two people choosing the same topics. I think I probably did robins and Cherokees and Georgia because I was the youngest when we were doing this. Interestingly, all four of Grandpa’s Atlanta grandsons went on to use public speaking to advantage in their careers.

Grandpa took us fishing to pass on to us the love of that hobby. I pause on the word hobby. Stemming from his childhood on an Indiana farm, as a boy he may have viewed fishing as man bringing home good food for the family to eat. On one occasion Grandpa took us to Lake Blackshear in south Georgia. I got painfully sunburned sitting still and quiet (not my nature), and never catching a fish. We stayed in a “cabin” that only had a partial wall between us and people next door. The group on one side of us had come to drink and stay up past 9 p.m.; and Grandpa embarrassed me by telling these neighbors to be quiet because we had young children that needed their sleep.

The more positive memory is of going fishing with a guide in the St. Simons Island streams and marshes. When we were with the guide, we were with a member of the Sullivan family, descendants of African royalty. Ben Sullivan had been Grandpa’s guide when both were younger men. Now, as Grandpa took his grandsons, it was Qu-zee Sullivan, Ben’s son, who took us. Qu-zee spoke with a beautiful accent, particular to the Geechees on the Georgia coast and Gullah on the South Carolina coast—African people who settled on these islands and also in the Bahamas. There was a lot more action in the salt water than there had been in the still and hot waters of Lake Blackshear.

Grandpa, the Farmer

At first light, he would turn off his lamp, gather up his buckets and baskets, and head down the hill to the chicken yard. Here he would gather the eggs, and feed and water his beautiful white laying hens. The two chicken houses with a feed and garden-tool shed connecting the two, were beautiful in the sheen of their unpainted wood, and in such features as the roosts that you could pull up by pulley to scrape out the chicken manure that would accumulate under the roosts. This manure went into the wheelbarrow and out to be spread over the fields of vegetable gardens.

“Qu-zee spoke with a beautiful accent, particular to the Geechees on the Georgia coast and Gullah on the South Carolina coast—African people who settled on these islands and also in the Bahamas. There was a lot more action in the salt water than there had been in the still and hot waters of Lake Blackshear.”

Then as the sun shone bright (and hot in summer), Grandpa would go to his terraces of vegetables and gather in all that were ripe and ready for eating. There were other chores involved with keeping the chicken yard in apple-pie order such as swing-blading grass and burning the trash. (Grandpa collected the trash in a tall funnel-shaped basket and lugged it down each morning to the chicken yard.) There were cans and bottles in the trash, and they were thrown into a pile that was over a bank behind the chicken houses. When the ashes of the trash fire had cooled, we would sometimes find treasures that had been thrown out and now resided in the ashes. It could have been old cigarette lighters or spare pieces of costume jewelry or marbles or the like.

The back part of the chicken yard, below the chicken houses, consisted of four terraces cascading down to the creek. While Grandpa’s health was strong, he planted all of these terraces in vegetables. In the chill of March a black man in a mule-drawn wagon would come down Piedmont Road, going to plow up the gardens of many between Peachtree and Roswell Roads. Grandpa would hire this man with the mule to plow, to dig up his garden, all four terraces of it. Once it was tilled, Grandpa spread a stored stock of chicken manure over the plowed-up dark soil. It would look for several days as if it had snowed because of the little chicken feathers embedded in the manure. Now Grandpa was ready for spring planting. For the finer tilling of the soil, such as digging a furrow in which to plant seeds (e.g., lettuce seeds), Grandpa had a “plow” with a wheel in the place where the mule would go on a bigger rig. He or my strong brother Dick would push this smaller plow as the final preparation for planting.

We brothers learned something about a good work ethic by working alongside Grandpa. We might push the wheelbarrow full of chicken manure into position where Grandpa could then spread it. Or, as he would place cabbage slips into the rich tilled soil, we would come along behind with buckets of water, sloshing against our legs and into our shoes, as we further lightened the heavy bucket by pouring about a cup full on each plant.

As Grandpa trudged back up the hill from the chicken yard late in the morning, near lunch time, he would bring two baskets of vegetables and eggs; one he would leave on our back stoop, and the other he would take to his home where Missouri (the cook, pronounced Ma-sur-rah) and Big Gram would turn the raw materials into midday dinner. This was their big meal of the day, whereas we, next door, a more modern family, had sandwiches for midday lunch. I will say that on those summer occasions when we would be invited next door for “dinner,” maybe when Aunt Virginia (Grandpa’s younger daughter, Mom’s sister) and her husband, Uncle Wally, were here for their summer visit, it was a grand reenactment of Thanksgiving dinner. Missouri the cook became Missouri the server who would bring us at the table bowls of steaming vegetables and platters of chicken. On the best days we would end with warm Apple Brown Betty, with maybe a scoop of ice cream on top—the Brown Betty made from Grandpa’s apples.

Remember, Grandpa grew up on a farm, so the rural life was in his blood. I love that he was passionate about pouring into the lives of his grandsons, and a big part of that was to give us some of the “farming” experience. Even before we lived next door (that commenced in 1946), he called us together with the following farm/business proposition:

“Boys, I want you to help me with my egg route. Fresh eggs are delicious and better for your health, and they are scarce during these war times. So, there are people that want some of my eggs. I just have to get the eggs to them. Dick, I’ll pay you ten cents a dozen to deliver the eggs; Dillon, I’ll pay you five cents a dozen to help your big brother deliver. And, Chuckie, I’ll pay you a penny per egg carton to collect the cardboard cartons and bring them back to me. And your mom has agreed to drive you boys on the delivery route.”

We boys filled a need that Grandpa had, but it was also for him an opportunity to pass wisdom down to his grandsons. I felt grown up at ages four and five being a part of a delivery team. Mom, the driver and delivery team boss, helped us each open a saving account at the Citizens & Southern Bank, so our learning experience was complete. Oh, by the way, our egg earnings had to go into those savings accounts. Even then I think those were called our “college savings accounts.”

When Grandpa grew older and less able to tend all the terraces of vegetable gardens, he planted some of the fields with alfalfa grass and bought a steer (or, rather, he bought a young male cow, and I watched with some pain of my own as a veterinarian came and castrated the animal). This (now) steer we named Ferdinand. Grandpa taught me about feeding it, including hay, and about when to let Ferdinand in and out of the barn for grazing in Grandpa’s beautiful terraced fields.

He might have wondered why Ferdinand wasn’t putting on more weight until he learned that we had taken up the sport of bull riding. I one time stayed on for three bucks, though two bucks usually threw me sprawling out into the grass. Great fun! Dillon came down to try the sport a time or two. This type of activity that we found growing up on our little in-the-city farm now reminds me of part of one of the poems Grandpa would read us:

I should prefer to have some boy bend them [the birch trees]

As he went in and out to fetch the cows –

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer and winter, and could play alone.

(From Robert Frost’s “Birches”)

Ferdinand eventually went to the butcher and came back in pieces wrapped in white butcher paper. A new freezer was bought to hold Ferdinand, along with the figs and tomatoes and okra and squash frozen for winter’s eating.

“He might have wondered why Ferdinand wasn’t putting on more weight until he learned that we had taken up the sport of bull riding. I one time stayed on for three bucks, though two bucks usually threw me sprawling out into the grass.”

Grandpa put some of his money alongside the lesser amount from my savings account, and he went with me to buy a steer of my own—as an investment. I picked out a young Black Angus male who immediately let me hug him around the neck. I named him Blackie. I was probably in the sixth or seventh grade (age eleven or twelve). Friends of mine would come over after school to play with Blackie—which mainly consisted of watching him come to me when I gave my cow call and then petting him. They had heard tales of my riding Ferdinand, and some friends wanted to try the same with Blackie. Maybe on separate occasions Tom Garden and Bobby Stephenson might have tried it once, but with Blackie it was mostly a matter of just sitting up on his back.

Ms. Paschal, the principal of R.L. Hope School, invited me to bring Blackie up to the school’s lush front yard (next door to our house) to graze. Her well-intentioned gesture was, as they say, “too much of a good thing.” The grass was so green—damp with chlorophyll—that Blackie caught diarrhea within an hour and soon made a mess of the area right by the flagpole where he was tethered.

Blackie was a bookend to a season of my life. When you have two brothers that you want to be just like, you don’t mind when you begin to move into sports and have to leave behind the freer form of play. Grandpa had taught me a lesson about working hard and making money. Blackie became a good three times bigger than when I had bought him two years earlier, and I sold him. Just as I saw Chad at age thirteen hugging the much-loved family dog Cocoa’s neck with such affection, I hugged Blackie’s neck for a last time. They loaded him into the back of a truck, and that provided a painful closure to a beautiful part of my life. I wouldn’t sob that much again until Grandpa’s death a year or so later.

Grandpa’s Love Overrides My Shortcomings

It was my job to use a basket shaped like a cone to carry trash from the back of Grandpa and Big Gram’s house to the chicken yard where Grandpa would separate it into the burnables, which would go up in flames every day, and the tin cans and such that would be thrown on a big pile towards the edge of the property. I grew tired of my job and I decided that I could dump some of this trash to the side of the aluminum garage, over towards the school playground. This cut my trek to the chicken yard in half. Grandpa was soon on to what I was doing.

“Chuck, I thought I could count on you to do this job for me. I’m not well, and I need help. What entered your mind that you would do such a sneaky thing? You’ve let me down. How many times have I told you, ‘If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.’”

I’m so embarrassed, even now, that I can’t imagine what I might have said. I expect I said, “I’m sorry, Grandpa. I guess I might have been just being lazy.” To which he might have said, “Well, we’ll get over it, but get every smidgen of trash away from the garage and carry it where it needs to go. I expect more from you. I’m disappointed.” Even to this day it pains me to remember letting him down.

The End of a Life Well Lived

It’s interesting how much language floats around you as a child that has little meaning to you. Being “retired” just meant to me another term for being a granddad. Grandpa was a retired lawyer. I understood that he had been important, and then he had had a stroke. The only vestige of the stroke was that he walked with a cane. Even so, he was as strong as an ox.

Then the season came when he announced that he had an important message to deliver at that year’s Christmas dinner. He spoke about the importance of health. The adults at the table, especially Mom, had tears in their eyes; and I was the clumsy kid who asked after he had spoken, “What’s the important announcement?” The adults knew what I didn’t—that Grandpa had been diagnosed with cancer of the intestines. He had three painful months until death came in March of my seventh-grade year.

“The adults knew what I didn’t—that Grandpa had been diagnosed with cancer of the intestines. He had three painful months until death came in March of my seventh-grade year.”

Late in his illness I was sitting by his bed in the evening to give Big Gram a reprieve. He woke up strange and a little wild, as if in a nightmare, saying, “Who is this?” and acting scared of me. Gram scurried into the room, and in a scolding manner said to him, “You know who this is. This is your grandson Chuckie. You’ve scared him.”

And then his bad spell left him and he said in a soft and gentle tone, “I am so sorry, Chuckie. If ever a grandfather has loved his grandson, I love you.” I was shaken by seeing him in a delirious state, but I have never forgotten his sweet, sweet words. He would have said the exact same thing had it been Dick, Dillon, or Warren at his sickbed that night. He loved us each and all with a stern, deep, deep love. Though we were blessed with love all around us throughout our youthful days, it could be argued that next to Mom and Dad, Grandpa’s love had the most lasting impact on all of us.

“And then his bad spell left him and he said in a soft and gentle tone, “I am so sorry, Chuckie. If ever a grandfather has loved his grandson, I love you.” ”

Not many days after this bedside episode, he died in his sleep. I had my first experience with grief that hurts in your lungs, during the flow of hot tears and still when the tears stop. Now when I think back, I can’t imagine this loss for Mom. She and Grandpa were so very close, being lovers of poetry and literature together. He softened the relationship between Mom and Big Gram. Now the buffer was gone. I remember Westview Cemetery. It had for me a feeling that only the elite were buried in these hallowed grounds. Riding in a police-escorted convoy and being looked upon with pity was heady stuff for this twelve-year-old boy.