Our Redneck Past

Dear Mini,

Tucked inside family photo albums interred in deep storage are two very telling pictures of me and your Daddy.

In the picture of him, he is in a pig pen crouching between two very large sows with an arm slung affectionately around each one.  He’s tanned and bare-chested, which boasts of the lean muscle most people enjoy only in adolescence (but which somehow he’s also managed to pull off in his twenties, lucky sucker).  It’s one of the few pictures that I’ve seen from this period in which he’s completely unconcerned with the tortuous vanities associated with the teen years.  I love the boy in this picture.  He makes no apologies for his ruffled hair or the mud crusted up to his elbows.  This is your Daddy when no one is looking.

In my picture, I’m standing in front of a rickety stage at the county fairgrounds, sheepishly dangling a 5th place yellow ribbon from my hand.  I’m the definition of awkwardness at ten in my black jeans and a droopy brown fringe vest, my bangs in a questionably styled hair blob riding sideways across my freckled forehead.  This snapshot was taken shortly after the results from my first talent show were announced.  Out of six contestants in my division (Vocal Solo), I had come in next to last place, and I was pretty sure that the tone deaf girl whom I had beaten was wearing a hearing aid.

In retrospect, the results don’t shock me at all.  The whole event was a very last-minute affair for me; I remember pulling clean, wadded clothes out of the cold dryer and throwing them on as I hurriedly picked through the two karaoke cassettes I kept for church specials, choosing the least drowsy-sounding of the pair.  The importance of practice and preparation hadn’t quite occurred to me yet.  Neither had the proper use of hairspray.  Still, this picture tells so much of who I would become by showing who I was longing to be – skilled, confident, and willing to put myself out there to face the scrutiny of others.  My expression says,I know what I’m capable of and I know that I could have done better. 

To me, his picture serves a similar self-definitive purpose, but in a different tone.  It says,I don’t have to be perfect here.  These creatures don’t judge me; I care for them, and they love me.  

During the same time in your life, Mini – the period between when you stop wearing cartoon character-printed shoes and college – we will amass many, many of these kinds of pictures of you, I’m sure.  Pictures of awkward beginnings and private moments that belong in the attic – for just a little while. 

Then they belong on your coffee table. 

It’s good to see where you come from, to be able to look into the eyes of the person you were when life was less cluttered with mortgages and bosses and taxes, and recapture the original purity and vision borne of your God-given gifts.  I can’t imagine where I would be at this point in my life if I hadn’t sought to hone and develop the skills that I so longed to master during the time my picture was taken.  As a matter of fact, you might not have even happened -- I believe that music was part of the way I attracted your Daddy. 

And the kid in Daddy’s picture who fed his talents for caring for another living creature became the man I spied on at Dillard’s as he showed attentive kindness to each customer who crossed his path.  That boy is the man I saw when we met.  I’ve never known another individual, either man or woman, who has the ability to nurture broken peopleor animals back into functionality like he does.  He’s the reason why I’m not knitting my eighteen cats individualized sweaters in an Winnebago parked behind my parents’ house at thirty years old.

My point is this, hon:  as long as you’re seeking God’s will and using the abilities he gave you – even if those abilities seem trivial to you --  it doesn’t matter if you succeed in ways measured by society’s standards.  Be joyful in who he made you to be, and he’ll bless you for it.

He blessed me with your Daddy.

And now here you are.

(Or will be!)