Father's Day

I've talked to both of my sons today. Lane and his family are vacationing in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Raleigh is spending the weekend in a recording studio on Asheville, North Carolina. Both of them--all of them--make me a good Daddy and Granddaddy. I'm proud of them and blessed to be a part of their lives.

I was thinking about my great-grandfather in my last post. I'll add here that my grandfathers were Amos Stackhouse Reeves (maternal) and Caney Hobert Cody (paternal), both of whom left this world some two weeks apart in the summer of 1968, when I was nine years old. My father was Plumer Jean Cody, who would have been 80 this year had he not passed out of this life at 65 in 1996. Although I don't think about my grandfathers all that often, I think of my dad a lot, and I miss him.

So, my Father's Day wasn't too different from most Sundays. I got up early and took a shower. Grabbed my guitar and gear and headed for Cherokee Church for 7:45 band practice before the 8:45 service. I taught Sunday School. I then went to lunch at Jack's City Grill with my wife, after which I came home and took a nap. After my nap I drove up to Bristol, Virginia, and watched the new film The Green Lantern. While this is unusal for a regular Sunday, it isn't so much for my Father's Days. Usually Raleigh is with me, and we go from one movie to another, seeing two or three back-to-back. But Raleigh wasn't with me today, so I just saw the one and then came back home.

All-in-all a good day, "my day," as I claim it, although I share it with Plumer and Stack and Caney and lots of family and friends.

Mallie Reeves

The generations are long in my mother's family. Mom was born in 1931, when my grandfather, Amos Stackhouse Reeves, was 48 years old. (He and his wife Lottie would have one more child, my aunt Ernestine, three years later.) When Papa Reeves was born in 1883, his father, my great-grandfather Mallie Reeves, was also 48, having been born in February 1835. My cousin Ken Reeves recently sent me this obituary for Mallie Reeves, who died at the age of 77 in February 1912. The obituary was published in the county paper on 29 February 1912.

Mallie Reeves, the well known old soldier of the Cross and one of the oldest citizens of Walnut, who was stricken down with paralysis, died Friday night Feb. 16th. The funeral was conducted on Sunday Feb. 18th by Rev. J. L. Hurdt, followed with short remarks by Dr. A. J. McDevitt, B. E. Guthrie and H. Chandler. He was then laid to rest in the Walnut cemetery on his 77th birthday. This ended the career of one of the most Godly and faithful men that we have ever known. He has done more good throughout Western North Carolina by his praying and singing in revival meetings, perhaps, than any other layman of his day. He deserves the praise of the following scripture. "Well done, thou good and faithful servant, thou has been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

In the context of the history that I know, he was born the same year as Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and about five years after Emily Dickinson. Nathaniel Hawthorne was about 30 years old and writing some of his best short stories. Ralph Waldo Emerson would publish Nature the following year, in 1836. Closer to home when Mallie was born, the Cherokee were in the midst of trying to keep their homelands and avoid the Trail of Tears. Mallie died two months before the sinking of the Titanic and two years before the beginning of World War I.

I've heard that Mallie Reeves could be working in his fields or garden and somebody would come along the road to say he was needed to sing in a revival at such-and-such a church. He would drop everything and go to lead singing at the services. I wonder how that sat with my great-grandmother, whose name was, I think, Julina.

[I might have written about this before, but I wanted to get back to the blog and this was on my mind.]