Traipsing down country roads is an everyday affair for me, like most folks around these parts, and one of my favorite pastimes while traipsing — as I’ve written here in the past — is reading the messages on signs out in front of country churches.
Some of the messages are inspirational, some simple Bible verses, and some that take a little deciphering, like one at Steele town that reads ch ch , what’s missing?....u r!
Monday morning I happened to be just outside of Morton where two churches sit across from each other on either side of the roadway. In front of one the sign reads Stay Positive, the other reads Aspire to Inspire before you Expire! Those are pretty good messages, especially during these challenging times.
Often it is a struggle to “stay positive” when so much negative has us encircling the wagons of life just trying to survive. That in itself is a great reason to do our best to inspire before we expire. I’m going to take both of those messages to heart and try to do my best to follow through with what they ask of me.
We were inspired somewhat over the weekend as the Mississippi Press Association reconvened their annual Mid-Winter Conference after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was inspiring, I suppose, just to be around a group of business associates — some of whom I’ve been working with for nearly 40 years and whom my wife, Danny, and I have socialized with at Mid-Winter and our annual Summer Convention for all of those years.
We’ve missed those good folks and although we only were able to visit with some of them at a dinner on Friday night, we were still able to mix and mingle and catch up on the goings-on of the past two years.
The last time we had seen some of that group, who are really more like family than associates, was in the fall of 2019 when they came to my mother’s funeral to show their respects. We all know that shortly after that the pandemic hit and most everything came to a standstill.
The stories we tell now are quite different from the ones we told back in the day but at the same time very much the same. I vividly remember being gathered up together with some of these fine people, and some other fine people, perhaps finer, now gone, in a little bungalow at one of the old time hotels in Biloxi when we announced that Danny and I would soon be parents to a baby girl. That’s been 30 years ago this summer.
This past weekend some of those same folks at our reveal in 1992 were revealing plans for new grandchildren now on the way. Not us! All we were revealing this past weekend was photos and videos of our new granddog, Lady, whom we were babysitting while daughter, Rachel-Johanna, was in New Orleans with some sorority sisters.
Danny was more in charge of the sitting than me since I was in meetings all day long. It is probably a good thing she had Monday off for Presidents Day because I can assure you that babysitting a three-month-old German Shorthaired Pointer is about the same as chasing around a two-year-old toddler, in diapers, with a full blown case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Throw in the 10-year-old chihuahua and the 12-year-old chihuahua, that live in our house on a daily basis — that were bound and determined not to play with a three-month-old pointer — and all hell was bound to break loose. It did! But mostly in the form of jumping, and running, and fighting over food and which kennel belongs to which dog.
And barking. Lots of barking.
We stayed positive, and we did our best to inspire, and I’m here to tell you, folks, that was the best we could do! Just like grandchildren, though, a granddog sooner or later goes back home to live with its momma.
Praise the Lord!
