Wednesday, July 31, 2013

A Family Narrative

Robert Appleby
1852-1934
Tonight I have been involved in a thread on Facebook about growing up in Pasadena, Texas. It has been a wonderful journey down memory's lane as we shared stories and photos that literally brought back to the forefront of our minds things that had been hidden away in the recesses of our minds.

Those memories became the springboard for my own family journey. It was in the midst of all those wonderful memories that it dawned on me that my Appleby family was more like a Clan than a family. A Clan is a family but it is an extended family consisting of parents, children, cousins, husbands and wives who interact as a family. It is a place where aunts and uncles are more like you mom and dad and cousins are more like brothers and sisters.

Within the Clan there seemed to always be some sort of ongoing rivalry but when any member of the group was threatened from outside the group there was a closing of ranks and in some cases the election of a War Chief.

Now this was not something that happened in my generation. It was the result of a long journey that began when Robert Appleby stepped foot on Virginian soil and swore allegiance to the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1749. There was a certain wanderlust in our branch of the Appleby family tree so that by that within a couple of generations his  grandchildren had left their footprints and name across Kentucky (then a part of Virginia) and by 1819 was one of five families who were forming the community along Cane Creek that became Poplar Bluff, Missouri.

It was out of that Missouri group that my branch of the tree would grow into its own Clan. Robert and his wife Polly Flowers brought Charles Appleby into this world and Charles and His wife Rebecca Scott gave life to my great grandfather Robert. Robert, sometime after the age of 12 (1864-65), moved with his uncle in North East Texas (now the Plano-McKinney region). On September 2, 1877 he married Martha McGehee and took up farming in Collin County, Texas. Robert and Martha were, as one relative put it at the time . . . "dirt poor." They had no money and no real proper house . . .  all they had was a plot of land, each other and their hopes dreams and asperations.

They didn't have much in the way of the fineries of the day in which they lived but they did have a rock solid faith in God and were known for their character and integrity. They were the beginning of this thing I call my "Appleby Clan." Robert and Martha had eight children (William Lee, Mary Frances, Claud Elberta, Maude Jane, Clyde Delroy, Dora Florence, Minnie May and Jessie Jefferson). Claud Elberta was my grandfather.

For me, my fraternal grandparents were the head of the Clan. My grandfather was a man of great faith and a man who lived that faith. My grandmother, likewise was a woman of great faith and action. I believe it is from her that my girls have received their own drive.  If My Grandmother had been born in my generation she would most likely have been head of some large organization . . . . either business or charitable.

During my lifetime my grandparents, Dad and Momma as they were known, were held in high esteem by their children.  Those children were Ruth Agnes, Buford Marion (my father), Melvin Victor, Edna Mae and James Carroll.  As long as either lived they were held in high regard and honor by their children and grandchildren. Their faithful walk with the Lord was honored in the churches to which they belonged and through which they served. They did not possess much in the way of material wealth to hand down to their children. What they passed down was more significant than material wealth . . . they passed along the sense of family and its importance; they handed down a heritage of integrity, loyalty and fairness; they also passed along a sense of inclusiveness for extended family. As someone who was once a member of the family by marriage and now divorced remarked to me, "Once you become a part of your family it is virtually impossible to extricate yourself . . . you still treat me as though I was still in the family."

They also lived in close proximity to one another from the 1870's until the 1970's. That's almost 100 years. They seemed always manage to live in the same area. To be sure a few would move away, then when the head of the Clan moved the rest of the family, family by family, gravitated back to the same geographical region as the head of the Clan. For my older cousins, most of their memories of family and growing up are anchored in the Orange, Texas area. Indeed, that is where my own journey began.  Several chapters of fascinating family history come from the time spent in Orange.

However, when I was growing up Pasadena, Texas was where pretty much all of the Appleby Clan was gathered.  It didn't matter if your last name was Appleby, Rich, Grace or Caplinger, you were in our family and a part of the Appleby Clan. Others would be added as time past and children grew up and married.

Mom & Dad's Wedding
London Jan 13, 1945
Pasadena really was "our town." We had our annual family conclaves and a whole host of minor gatherings from the late 1940's through the late 1960's.  We worked there, we worshipped there, we were educated there; we formed friendships that will last a lifetime there; we fell in love and married there; our children were born there; and we buried our parents and elders there.

In time, college, war, marriage and jobs began to scatter the cousins (my generation) all across the country. What once was a local clan within the greater Pasadena Nation became the scattered "Clans of Appleby" as we experienced our own family Diaspora. One by one the "Old Ones" who inhabited the land and set the family's character and preserved our heritage began to enter the great beyond. Now that generation has completed their journey and my generation has become the "old ones" among us.  Each cousin has become the head of their own Clan in another place.

This family into which I was born by the grace of God has a marvelous history, and honorable heritage and a story worth knowing and sharing. I remember my father's words to me as at the age of 18 I walked out of the Houston Federal Building where I had just registered for the draft. He said, "Son if they call you to service remember who you are and (1) don't volunteer for anything, they'll send you where they want you or need you, (2) don't do anything you'll regret later in life and (3) don't do anything that would bring dishonor to our name." By our name he meant the Appleby name.

By the way, for you family members who might be reading this you need to know that while largely pacifists at heart that Appleby family members . . .  your family . . . . has served this country in every major war from the American Revolution to the Iraq War and done so with honor. A few have given their "full measure of devotion" . . . . at least one during WWII, one in Korea, and one in Endo-China.

A Our Last Christmas Gathering
2008

I sometimes long for at least one last great a gathering of the chiefs and their families in one last conclave. I don't know if it is a doable thing but it would certainly be a good thing. To have an opportunity to pass down to our children and our children's children the wonderful story of the grace of God as it has played out in our Appleby Clan.  It is a wonderful story . . . I can only hope that we don't forget the story and it gets lost in the sands of time.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Don't Take Yourself Too Seriously and Enjoy Life

I want to give a big shout-out to Don Cole as it was something he wrote on the I grew up in Pasadena, Tx Facebook Page that sparked my thinking for this blog entry.
 
I had to be one of the last people of my generation to embrace social media in general and Face Book in particular. It just seemed silly to me. What would make anyone post what they had for breakfast complete with photo for the world to see? Better yet, what makes them think I am interested in what they had for breakfast?

After time and pressure from friends and colleagues I finally caved-in and signed-up for a Facebook account and was off and running. I started with no friends and now I have hundreds. I discovered that it was a powerful platform for making ones voice heard. I used it to help with my High School Reunion and I used it to oppose a name change for my College (You can read about that in some of the earlier postings on this blog) and I have used it countless time to express my feelings and thinking which were often opposed to one another. Oh yea, and I have used it to display where I've been and what I have been doing and that is part of the genius of Facebook.

For many it is a place to vent their frustrations. My only advice with venting is that you choose your words carefully for Facebook is full of ravenous wolves ready to pounce on your every word. Others seem to see it as their personal political, moral, ethical and/or religious soapbox. I suggest you just politely listen and then go your own way and ignore the ones you don't like unless of course you enjoy debate. More than likely though what  you'll get is an argument.  Get tired of it just click "hide" get really tired of it the click "unfriend."

What I really like about Facebook is that it has allowed me to become reacquainted with my own life as I have discovered friends from my past. Truth is, I have friends on my Face Book "Friends List" from every stage of my life. It is such a marvelous reminder of the Tapestry of my life just to see the names of people who knew me early in my life listed right alongside of those who I met just last week. I know better now what the song writer meant when he penned "trials dark on every hand and we cannot understand all the ways that God would lead us to that blessed promised land." Facebook has been the vehicle that reminds me how different and how much the same our life journeys are.

I join my Facebook Friend, Don Cole, in asking, "What happened to all those years?"  Friends have said to me more than once, "My how the time flies when your having fun" and I remember replying "Fun or not time does seem to fly." But then I remember that time is merely a tool for measuring our movement through life. It is how that life is lived that matters.

The human mind being created after the fashion of the mind of God and our most remarkable feature as a human has this uncanny ability to make time seem irrelevant. Things that happened in our youth live on in our minds as though they happened just yesterday. Scripture speaks of God being the same "yesterday, today, and tomorrow." I have this feeling that there is a sense in which the same is true of those "created in His image and after his likeness."  Perhaps, one day I'll talk about what this means for the belief that we are eternal spirits.

Don spoke in his posting about how it seems like no time at all has passed since we were just kids living a simple life in a small town. He talked about time flying by and how we wonder how it could have slipped by so quickly without our noticing that it had passed until we reach maturity (old age). He concluded that we must have been in some sort of Rip Van Winkle sleep for decades to awaken to the senior life with surroundings and times so seemingly strange to us now.

I share that thought to some degree. The Apostle Paul likened life to a race and I reckon he was right about that. I once fancied myself a "track star" in junior high school running the quarter mile sprint and high jumping. I can still hear my coach saying, "On your money, get ready, get set . . . go" except instead of saying "go" he'd blow his whistle. I liken those early years to the "on your money, get ready, get set" part of that instruction. It was a slow deliberate pace where you took note of the details of getting into the starting blocks and making sure you didn't "jump the gun." But when that whistle blew it was an all-out run. While the race was being run there was "no time to stop and smell the roses." At least not if we expected to win or even finish the race.

However, there were plenty of time between races when  we could have and perhaps should have slowed down and soaked in a little life. Maybe had we done so those intervening years would not seem like such a blur. But, as they say these days, "It is what it is" . . .  whatever that really means.

However we didn't, like Rip Van Winkle, sleep through the last forty years. We just didn't pay attention. We were too busy. We had to finish our education either in institutions of formal higher education or the school of hard knocks. We got jobs; we fought our war or protested fighting it; we started a career; we married and started a family. Many of us have buried our parents and the rest have become care givers as we struggle with our own weakness of the flesh. It wasn't that we didn't think about stopping and smelling the roses, we just couldn't seem to find a time to work it in our busy lives.

I guess it just wasn't important to us at the time. After all, we did seem to find a way to do what we wanted to at the time. I think we allowed the urgencies (squeaky wheels) in our life to take the place of the better things. As Jesus told Martha, she didn't choose a bad thing Mary just chose the better thing.

Somehow . . .  somewhere along the way our priorities got changed. As my friend Don Cole put it, "Adulthood, responsibility and choice of lifestyles will do that. Lying in a lush bed of fresh spring clover and searching the cloud formations for make-believe animals no longer are high priorities to us now. Seniors scour at the sudden thunder rainstorm rather than try to run barefoot between the raindrops."

Ah, but that image of God thing comes back and our minds have, as I have said earlier, have this
uncanny ability to make "time stand still" and as the intro to the original Lone Ranger series always began "We go back to those thrilling days of yesteryear." I still appreciate the smell of fresh cut grass or the air after a Spring shower. I stand on the porch during thunderstorms to watch the lightening and hear the thunder. And, yes, I'd jump in the puddles (maybe with a little less force) if I weren't worried about breaking a hip.

This is not really an article about nostalgia. It is more like an advice column. So here is my advice. As important as it is for us to come to the end of life's with a fist full of memories it is more important that we enjoy the moment in which we are living. For those of us nearing the end of life that involves a lot of remembering but for those not where we are there is still time to build some memories.

Remember that time with your family is more important than time on the job. My friend, don't be fooled, there is no such thing as quality time without quantity of time. Reconnect with friends of a day gone by, touch base with cousins and kin who have not been seen in far to many years. Don't make funerals your family reunion. Express your love to those you love.

Try smiling more and crying less. Hang out with children.  Laugh and smile at every opportunity to do so.  Truth is, none of us knows how much time we have. As I look back over the years I think of those friends who will never grow old because they died young. I attend High School reunions and am reminded that the rest of us a growing old . . . well at least most of us look like we are. Father time and mother nature have not been as kind as mom and dad.  You may not have as many years ahead of you as you have behind you, but they can be the best years of your life if you just don’t take yourself too seriously.
 
BTW - One of the reasons some of us can not see each other for years but when we do get together again it is as if we have never been apart is nothing happened between meetings. Give it some thoughts and stay connected.

 My latest sun is sinkin' fast
My race is nearly run
My strongest trials now are past
My triumph has begun