This if my final installment on southern phrases I grew up hearing. Let me know if you have heard them.
“In three shakes of a sheep’s tail.” [fast, quick, like how a lamb wags it’s tail.] When I call, you better be home in three shakes of a sheep’s tail!” Continue reading THREE SHAKES, AND MORE THINGS SOUTHERN
Five years ago about this time, my father, Coolidge Sims, learned that he had cancer– a health difficulty far beyond the heart condition he had dealt with for years. It took him by surprise, as it did all of us.
My 88 year old Dad was in the hospital for an overnight stay to investigate the source of pain and discomfort he was feeling when the tests came back with a malignant tumor diagnosis.
It’s a rite of passage in our country– learning how to drive. From the time I first became a teenager, I lived for getting my permit at age 15 and my license at 16. It was the longest wait of my life.
All my childhood I loved playing with little toy cars– the cheap ones made out of five inches of molded plastic. My neighbor Cathy and I would play for hours with them, making roads in the dirt with our hands until our hands were raw and caked with red dirt. It only took one summer rain shower to obliterate our little homemade town of highways, streets, and driveways, but we were always eager to get back out there the next day and make new ones. When I was playing cars, I was driving those cars in my mind.
Family stories are the best. Aunt Charlotte, my mother’s only sister and my granddaughter’s namesake, loves family stories as much as I do. Sometimes we laugh and carry-on during a phone call like nobody’s business! I can seem to get Charlotte to laugh at almost anything, and we enjoy every moment of it. When we’re not discussing politics, religion, or Auburn football, we are recalling and re-telling our family stories. Aunt Charlotte and I are truly oral history junkies.
As a pastor, I am often called upon to conduct funeral services for members of our church family or for extended members of their families. Every once in a while, I get a phone call from a local funeral home about a family who has no pastor, and am given the opportunity to come and minister to them. It’s something I welcome, and know that it might be a divine appointment for a grieving family to hear about God’s love for them.
