When I was young child, I asked my father what the package was that sat on a shelf in his closet. It was wrapped in brown grocery bag paper and tied with twine. “That,” he said, “is the family Bible, and one day it will be yours.”
That day came during a visit home to New Orleans about 25 years later. Apologizing for the sorry state it was in, my father thought I might find someone in St. Louis to restore it. Instead, I did the time-honored thing and put in on a closet shelf. I did find a conservation box to store it in, and I did handwrite a copy of the four pages of family records. But it sat on the shelf, just as it had sat before.
But as I studied the family records, I noticed that the entries for births, deaths, and marriages were all in the same hand, presumably that of my great-grandfather Samuel. He’d even signed his name on an inside cover page. Samuel was something of a family legend, a legend which my later research showed was almost entirely untrue. But he’d certainly written all of the entries.
To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog.
Some Wednesday Readings
What Socrates Teaches Us About Love, Politics, and Death – Agnes Callard at The Free Press.
5 a.m. – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.
The Terrorist Who Murdered My Cousin Now Walks Free – Gideon Black at The Free Press.
Matter Matters – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.
Blood, squalor, and a taste of things to come: 4 literary adventurers on Japan’s invasion of China – Jeffrey Meyers at The Critic Magazine.
AI Can Replace Work, But Not Worth – Cameron Fathauer at Digital Liberties.
Hugh A. Garland Jr. and the Old South – Joseph Ricci at Emerging Civil War.
Our National Precipice – poem by Kenneth Horne at Society of Classical Poets.
Virgil and the Christian Imagination – Paul Krause at The Imaginative Conservative.
The Lord’s Corner – poem by Tyree Daye at South Writ Large.
No comments:
Post a Comment