This past weekend I returned from a 4,000 mile round-trip visit to St. Louis, Missouri, where my Vietnam platoon was holding its annual reunion. The journey took me through parts of a dozen states, and in the seemingly endless process, I was reminded up-close-and-personal for the first time in decades of what a vast and beautiful land we live in. I took the southern route to get there, and the northern route back, hoping to see as much of the country as possible.
I spent the first night in the Nevada desert, near Needles, and was up bright and early the next morning with the goal of reaching Oklahoma City, a good thousand mile drive. But as I was leisurely motoring my way through northern Texas (near Amarillo) I began noticing that the sky was getting dark, which seemed a little odd since it was only about 6 o’clock in the evening. Then a heavy rain started to fall, followed by very forceful gusts of wind which kept blowing my little truck out of its lane. Suddenly, sounds of eardrum-shattering thunder, which had been off in the distance only moments earlier, where right above me, and that was quickly followed by the scary part!
Bolts of bright-white lightning began shooting down from the now black-as-night sky, and not only were they striking the ground, but they were doing so on both sides of the road I was traveling, some not more than a football field or so away from me. And then, when I was sure the weather couldn’t possibly get any worse, the hail started. Little pea-sized frozen balls of rain were hitting my truck with such force that I instinctively drove up as close to the big semi-truck in front of me as I could, figuring it might provide me with a little protection. The driver didn’t seem to appreciate my impromptu NASCAR drafting technique and began angrily blowing his horn at me. I seriously considered pulling off to the side of the road until the storm passed, but since no one else on the highway seemed to be doing that, I just assumed they knew what they were doing and pressed on, admiring all the lightning strikes while at the same time wishing they would stop.
When I finally reached Amarillo, I pulled into a gas station and asked an attendant if he had heard what the weather was going to be like the rest of the way to Oklahoma City. He flipped out his cell phone, somehow pulled up a map of the current weather conditions in that region, and matter-of-factly informed me that I would be crazy to drive a mile further.
“All the real bad stuff is just ahead of you,” he warned me.
“You mean to tell me that what I’ve just been through wasn’t the real bad stuff?” I asked in amazement.
“That’s right,” he answered. “You haven’t been in a real Texas thunderstorm until a tornado hits the ground and the hail is so big that your car ends up looking like a golf ball.”
Although I really enjoyed seeing and spending time with many of the guys I had served with in Vietnam so many years ago, the real reason for my trip was to keep a promise and to visit a little rural town called Ava, Missouri, which is where my mother and grandfather grew up, and is also where my grandparents on my mother’s side are buried. I hadn’t been there since I was nine years old, but the memories came flooding back once I reached the old town square where I had once sipped on cherry cokes and gone to Saturday matinee movies for a quarter. A very nice lady who was just getting ready to close down her antique shop even let me borrow her phone to call my mother to try and get the correct address of the house where she had grown up.
“I’m afraid we didn’t have street addresses back then,” my mother explained to me all the way from California, “but if you take the south road out of the town square for just a few hundred yards, it should still be there.”
And so it was, still painted white, still with the same front porch where I used to watch fireflies do their magical dance when I was less than 10 years old, but without chickens roaming everywhere and the rabbit hutches and outhouse that used to be in the backyard. And then, with still plenty of light left in the late-afternoon sky, I got back in my truck and slowly motored up a gentle hill for a couple of miles until I reached the town cemetery, which, like Ava itself, is peacefully nestled in the beautiful Ozark Mountains.
When I finally reached my Granny’s grave, I could see that my Aunt Margie (who lives less than an hour away) was still taking very good care it. Flowers had been recently placed on both sides of the marker, and at my feet rested my Granny, right next to the only man she had ever loved, whom I sadly never got to meet because he passed away about a year before I was born.
As I have written earlier, my Granny was born before there were airplanes, lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression, saw a man take a stroll on the moon and was a walking, breathing history book. She also made sure that for more than 40 years, no matter where I was (including Vietnam), I always received a loving card on my birthday with two crisp, brand new dollar bills in it. And she never once left any doubt in my mind that she loved me to death.
“Well, Granny,” I told her as I sat down on the warm, dark green grass that covered her grave, “the creeks didn’t rise, and the Lord was a willin’, so here I finally am, just like I promised — and I still miss you!”