I’ve spent some time back “home” in coastal Georgia this summer, far more than any ordinary summer, and I’m sharing stories this month about time with Dad in his final days and the stories he shared. Dad was a Baptist minister who served twice as pastor of First Baptist Church on St. Simons Island, Georgia – so my brother and I grew up there – learning to swim and ride bikes, learning to read and multiply and add, learning to crab off the pier and fish and learning to live. We lived a few other places over the years, but St. Simons came full circle as the beginning and the end of Dad’s career as a family of four.
I think what I loved most about growing up on an island wasn’t really ever about the where, but about the what and the whom~ more specifically, the what of childhood and its carefree nature. The friends, the family time, and the things we did together. It surprises me when I go back there that I ever lived and played in all that extreme heat. As a post-menopausal female now, I much prefer cooler places with drier air. While I love the beach, I’m not a fan of swimming in any ocean because Jaws came out when I was ten years old and wrecked my ability to see anything but a place where hungry sharks lurk when I look to the sea. It scared me so bad I didn’t even want to put my hands in the kitchen sink to wash dishes after that – – let alone go down to the shoreline.
My good friend Lisa Warren and I used to ride our bikes to church back in the 1970s when the world was a safer place, and I remember Dad’s sermon jokes he told from the pulpit. He told so many of them that always helped break the ice and get the sermon going. In his final days, I recorded a retelling of a favorite joke that you can hear him tell in his own voice below.
Earthworms and Moonshine
The Sunday School teacher had a mason jar of moonshine and an earthworm. He drops that earthworm in that moonshine, and it disintegrates.
Now, boys and girls, what does that teach you?
A little boy said, “If you drink moonshine, you won’t have worms.”
Today, I salute childhood summertime memories in a tricube: three stanzas of three lines each, each line having three syllables.
A favorite Saturday morning hangout in our corner of the world over here in middle Georgia is 1828 Coffee Company. We go there some Saturday mornings for the best local cup of coffee, cinnamon roll, cheese grits, and breakfast casserole. Even though they don’t open until 9:00 a.m. on weekends (a little different business model for a coffee shop), and even though I will have had at least two cups of coffee by then, and even though I’ll be counting a single Weight Watchers point with Chobani Zero Sugar Yogurt and a fresh diced peach, we will go.
My husband, who loves all things food but is a creature of habit to the degree that if he ever goes missing, I’ll know to start the search party hounds in all the local Chick Fil As, loves this coffee shop on the Zebulon, Georgia square. It’s a restored, quaint place with a 100% Zebulon, Georgia vibe perhaps like no other place in our county.
You can offer him any breakfast nook anywhere, but he’ll pick 1828 over a full breakfast every time just because of the atmosphere. I don’t believe it is the sustenance alone that draws him back again and again. It’s the place, with its ambiance and friendly people. It’s the originality of a place from the past, pulsing with life in the present. It’s “sure ’nuff” Georgia culture, a sense of deep-rooted belonging that anchors a person to a place where they can talk for an hour with most anybody who walks through the door, call them by name, and ask about all their relatives past and present, and conjure memories like a pop-up picture book that only they can see.
If you were here having coffee with us, we’d show you our county. We’d drive you down the dirt roads and stop at the meadow with the holy cows who run toward a cross at feeding time. We’d take you to the Strickland Building where they filmed Cold Sassy Tree in the late 1980s, and show you the exact spot on the courthouse square where a naked James Cromwell appeared in a movie scene for Tank and the same little old ladies who’d called to complain about it and wanted it stopped actually showed up for a front-row spot to watch it being filmed.
Then we’d show you Pike County Schools today and where they were located in the late 1800s and tell you all about one of the four Georgians who was aboard the Titanic when it sunk. Only the woman, Lilly Futrelle, survived. Her husband, Jacques Futrelle, a Georgia writer who was born in Pike County on April 9, 1875, died on the ill-fated Titanic. Futrelle, who had celebrated his 37th birthday the night before he and his wife Lily May Peel Futrelle set sail to return from their tour of Europe, along with two other men from Georgia, perished. Lily told friends that if he’d been a drinker, he might have lived a longer life, because he may have gotten drunk at his party and missed the boat that next morning. Instead, the last she saw of him was from her seat in only a half-filled Lifeboat 16 as he stood next to John Jacob Astor smoking a cigarette on the deck of the sinking ship.
So while we might have taken you to his grave here in Pike County, it’s not here in Pike County. He’s buried in the deep belly of the ocean.
But like all hometown Pike County folks who know everybody and all their family members, we can tell you that Jacques does have a cenotaph at Poplar Springs Methodist Church Cemetery in Adrian, Johnson County, Georgia, on the bottom of the headstone of his mother. His mother’s obituary cites grief over her son’s death as the direct cause of her own death at 66. His father is buried in Atlanta’s historic Oakland Cemetery in the Masonic lot, having died of nephritis. His sister Elberta, buried in North Carolina, lived in nearby Barnesville for a time and was the only female life-long charter member of the Massachusetts State House Press Assocation at the time of her death. His wife, Lily, lived to be 91 and is buried in Massachusetts. Her grave is now marked, but for a long time was not, and the newspapers did not report her death when it occurred. Jacques’ son, who bears his name, lived to be 80 and died on my 13th birthday (July 8) in 1979; he’s buried in Maryland. His daughter Virginia Raymond is buried in Massachusetts, but there are no records of her death.
Since those graves are all a bit of a drive from here, we might take you to A Novel Experience on the Zebulon square to look for one of his books.
Jacques Futrelle – Picture from Encyclopedia Titanica
Futrelle Family – Picture from Encyclopedia Britannica
Finally, we’d bring you to the Johnson Funny Farm and throw the hammock up between your choice of the thousands of Loblolly pines out here and offer you a glass of sweet tea in a Mason jar and invite you to get lost in the pages of your new book as you hear Futrelle’s voice transcend the depths of the ocean and tickle your reading tastebuds right here in the county where he was born.
Common Threads 