Happy birthday, Ray!

Today, Tuesday, August 21^st, is Grandpa’s 78^th birthday. I asked Grandpa today what his favorite birthday present was. He referred me to a picture from seventy years ago of him standing behind a table that held a birthday cake with eight candles. Behind him is his birthday present: a tent. In the tent sits his dog Scraps, staring at the camera with one ear perked up.

The picture is of me standing in front of my Indian type tent. In front of me is a little table with my cake and eight candles. I remember putting that tent up in the backyard, taking an old blanket for a pillow, and spending the night out there. I could think of it as being out in the middle of nowhere. My little dog Scraps would stay in the tent with me; he was my guard dog. He, to me, was a very big dog at that time, I would imagine. The reason I became so thankful that I got it that tent was for that private time.

I also had another place where I could spend some time alone: our wooden front porch. Although, private wasn’t so private with my super dog. That porch was well-used. What I enjoyed the most and this came back last Saturday: when it started raining, the thunder and the lightning, the early drizzle, then heavier and heavier with a little more wind. It reminded me of my younger days when a northern would blow in. The place that was the driest to be outside and not get wet was the front porch of the house, which was not enclosed at all. What I enjoyed was to kinda tie together a cardboard box or two and that was my cover. I would crawl inside the cardboard box. I wouldn’t tear the box up; one side would be the floor. I could slide in there and take a piece of old towel for a pillow and I would lay there and listen to it rain and the wind blow.

Still to this day, I can sleep through a thunderstorm. It’s a comforting noise, if you may. Saturday morning, out where the dumpster is, either Paul or Danny drug a box as big, deep, wide, and long as this kitchen table. It was a cardboard box that was sitting on top of a wooden pallet, and it had a lot of parts from Modern Manufacturing out of Beaumont. I’m thinking we’re liable to get some rain and I don’t want to see this box get destroyed. Man, what I could have done with that box when I was little. I drug it away and put it on the back of the pickup that was outside but under the roof of the shop Saturday morning. Later, when I saw Paul, I told him, “Y’all can cut that box into four pieces and put them on top of the rafters and use those as a creeper to slide on and crawl underneath the cars. That’s what I used to do when I didn’t have a creeper good enough.” I didn’t want it to get wet and messed up.

So I’m sitting here on the back porch, seeing it starting to rain. I probably could have laid down somewhere where the rain wasn’t getting to me and fallen asleep. I flat out enjoyed not only the wind and the rain but to see changes in attitude of birds and, when it stopped, here these frogs emerged. I got the biggest kick out of those frogs. For ten minutes duration, I’d take that water jet nozzle and shoot this frog and it immediately would jump. The way some of those frogs could jump tickled me. I’d shoot another one. There was a couple on the sidewalk down here next to the plants. They didn’t know whether to go back against the house or into the yard. This one of them was right by the wheelbarrow and jumped over the wheelbarrow, over the sidewalk, and next to the swings. But where did they come from? Penny said that happens occasionally in Berry Creek. So anyway that was the frog ordeal. Sometimes when it rains a lot, we call it a frog strangler.

Grandma went grocery shopping and when she was leaving to go back out to the truck, it was raining cats and dogs so she literally stayed in the grocery store damn near half or three quarters of an hour and finally decided to heck with it. She ran to the pickup and still got soaking wet. Her hair told me that.

So anyway, that was like a Saturday evening from the past, nobody else around.

After seventy-eight years, it’s amazing to think something so simple, the feeling of freedom and independence, is what Grandpa cherished the most out of his birthday gifts. And I take comfort in the fact that he can easily recall and regain that feeling every time a thunderstorm passes through; I can only hope there will be no shortage of rain in his many years to come.