A middle-age friend and I were talking the other day and we decided that young men are 20 years old before they realize their parents have feelings, and about 30 years old before they actually care.
I was thinking about this last week as I stared at a watercolor painting in our dining room. The painting, of an old-time country store with a Model A Ford parked outside, was a Christmas gift from me to my mother in 1990. I was 32 years old and single at the time, and she was in her mid-50s, a little younger than I am today.
Mark KennedyThe painting was by John Wood, a gifted artist and a friend on staff then at the Chattanooga Times. He produced the artwork over several months as a favor to me, just because he had a good heart and a love of nostalgia.
Since I was a kid, I had heard my mother – who generally wished for nothing – talk about her dream of one day having a pen-and-ink drawing of her father’s general store. I think she envisioned something about the size of a postcard that would serve as a memory prompt that she could put in the family photo album.
My maternal grandfather, a Maury County merchant named C.B. Whiteside, had been 60 years old when he fathered his only child, a little girl named Wilma. One of my mother’s enduring memories was of her Dad sitting on the front porch of his store, smoking a cigarette while she swung on the hose connected to the store’s lone gasoline pump.