Time In A Pocket, Judy T. Lloyd [i can read with my eyes shut txt] 📗

Time In A Pocket

By Judy T. Lloyd


"I wish that I could put time in a pocket, with a long gold chain. Then I would pull it out and love you once again."

When we feel that time is short and may end sooner than what is our liking, we reminisce over the times that we shared with others. It does seem like so long ago when I was a child. I had reasoned then as a child. I thought about what death was and like others the thought of death scared me. My oldest brother was killed in an automobile accident when I was six. In my simple child like thinking I reasoned that he would rise from the dead on the third day. My aunt Dorothy caught me with a shovel and she asked me what I was doing.
"I go to the grave and wait for Kenneth to rise. But in case he need help, I brought the shovel.
She sighed because she knew that I attended the church where the officials came to tell my mother that my brother Kenneth was dead. She also knew that in my child like faith I believed in the Easter story. She explained to me how Christ rose from the dead but Kenneth could not because he was mortal.

I could only image what dead was like. Thinking then as a child, I wondered if I would have a blanket to keep warm. And what was it about all those long house coat dresses on older women? I am still wondering over that one even to this day. I clearly remember going to funerals and it seemed older women were dressed in satin house coats. It did not fit my grandmother and for did not fit other older women that had been buried. Oh well my memories of my grandmother centered around all the family reunions,ball games we played with the enumorous cousins. When there are eleven siblings including my father, there are also eleven spouses. The size of families when I grew up were large. I am the youngest of seven. My mother's family including her was of equal size. She had two brothers and eight sisters. For daddy it was two sisters and eight brothers.

I loved them all and they were all characters just like me. Along the way we would meet those that were included in our family reunions. If they were childhood friends,they became adult friends for life. Especially if we had gone to elementary school together as well as highschool. Among those friends was a lady named Eva Hawthorne. She taught me the love of books, and most importantly she taught me how to interpet what I had read. I believe that I wrote my first poem in the seventh grade class that she taught. Her memory stays in the time pocket. We delighted in the fact that she would sleigh ride with us. I suppose if we knew how dangerous that could be we might have stayed home during the deep snow that covered the countryside.

Mrs. Hawthorne broke her arm sliding down the hill. We did not know then but she had cancer and was living her life to the hilt. She wanted all of us to reach our potention in life. There was one thing she detested and that was a misspelled word. To this day I can not help myself when I see words grossly misspelled. Even though I often do it myself. We had a cousin named Carol who was slow. I only know that one day in a place called Viet Nam Carol was killed. The jeep he was riding in hit a land mine and Carol died instantly. I thought how sad it was that a person that was deemed as having too many termites in his saw dust would end up dead in a foreign country.

I would have liked to go back in time on the watch in my pocket and tell him that he was one of God's children too. I believe that my mother felt the same way. Some of the people frowned upon his mother as she had several children without marrying. However in families these things are also keep in a pocket. We just did not discuss these matters. Neither did we discuss the facts of life. The attitude was that we would find out about that soon enough. Still I would have liked to have known certain things. Otherwise Mrs. Hawthorne would not have had to help me with the sanitary pads when I started menustrating. She had a time with me but gently explained that I was not dying but I was having my time of the month.
My curiosity about what kind of time that was never was satisfied exactly. Until my mother found out and all she said was to not let any boy do anything to me. I did not know what it was a boy was not supposed to do. However a few of them offered to show me, they were discouraged by my four living brothers.

The alarm clock rings at six o'clock and I awake from the dream. In my dream I was back home at my grandmother's. She had a deep well that once you drew water from it, you almost had to heat it up. That water was so cold it would make your teeth chatter. My cousin Terry said that could smell the breakfast Granny Dee cooked as far as Saxe,Virginia which was a town about ten miles away. Granny often used homegrown vegetables and meats sent to her by her sons. Slabs of bacon,eggs cooked to your desire,plate sized biscuits that you washed down with coffee. The biscuits were a favorite memory of my cousins, as they often stayed over with her because she was widowed. Granny however was also a force to be reckoned with when you did wrong. The cousins remembered her turning them upside down and she would switch them. My cousin Sam told me of the time Granny Dee caught her putting chicken shit in her sister's hair. However in our own way we all loved Granny Dee. I loved to sit on the porch and watch cars go by. I would walk the fields surrounding the farm looking for arrowheads. We would play sand lot baseball in the front yard. It did not matter who won, in fact I never recalled who won but we had clean fun.

Granny Dee hated a thunder storm, it is said that she was knocked out of a rocking chair when an errant bolt struck the chimney. Once day I was at her house when a storm came up, my mother and I went and let the windows down. We missed Granny Dee and started to look for her. We spotted the tip of her shawl peeking out from under the door. There she was in her wheel chair sitting in the coat closet. It was also a pantry. She did not say anything and neither did we. The storms could get pretty scary because of all the rock formations that contained iron. To this day when a thunder storm comes up I remember Granny Dee hiding in the pantry. When she died in her ninties the church was full. Of course then more of her children were alive. We did not know that we would return to the church a month later to bury our Uncle Tom.

Losing Uncle Tom devastated us, he had a rare cancer of the heart. He died without ever regaining consciousness on the operating table. I lived in Farmville,Virginia then and recall very vividly his funeral. It was tough to deal with. Sometimes we would like to put time on a hold. Especially the times we so enjoyed together. Summer time was the time for baseball, my cousins played on the teams. Thomas Carol was Uncle Tom's only child but he was my best friend growing up. He and my brother Tom had a birthday party together on July 10th one year. Of course TC as we called him received baseball equipment. I rode with his parents to every game he played. We would go to bigger cities when the county team played
in the Dixie Youth league. Uncle Tom never once left out a cousin that wanted to go to a game,movie or to the lake. We all adored him just as his siblings did. Of course his mother did because he survived Omaha Beach. Hidden by French peasants with a serious wound he came home a man. It was with pure joy that the family who had thought him dead received him back into the fold. Ironically Uncle Tom died one month after his mother did.

When I Hear

By Judy T Lloyd

When I hear a whip-o-whill call,
I think of you and your baseball.
I think of how you stayed,
and watched as he played.

When I hear the lonesome whistle from the train.
I wish that you were here with us again.
Somethings I guess are not meant to be.
You are up there where you should be.

When I hear the birds that sing.
I see you planting in the spring.
When I think of all the treasures.
To count you among them is my pleasure.

The next month we were back at the funeral home and this time we buried our Aunt Eleanor.
She had diabetes complicated by a heart condition. The rescue squad personel did their best to save her but she died on the way to the hospital. Aunt Eleanor I think knew that she was going to die soon. When I was crying so hard that I could not see she comforted me.
"We all have to die someday Judy, even me, we can't put time in a pocket."

I began to wonder about what more is there to life? I still had reservations about the after life. I dreamed about that many times. I listened to every sermon about the after life and wondered if somehow that was the way to put time in a pocket. It was later that I found out heaven was my time, especially after I found out that I had cancer. Yet there were many more to come that I had not met yet. These would be the ones to help to put all the photos in my life's album.


The summer of all those deaths were followed by the strange circumstances of my brother-in-law's death. I had adored him, my sister was so much older than me and essentially I grew up being like a kid sister to him. David was brilliant, one of the smartest people to graduate from Medical College Of Virginia. He was found shot to death not far from his home in Charlotte County. He had pancreatic cancer and was suffereing severely from that. Because of his cancer most people felt that he had killed himself. To this day that remains a huge question in my mind and other relatives. David was the golden boy in his family and I came to cherish his mother Julia. She was very cool and had seen a lot in her day. She bought the