​The Blessed Table

Granny at her table.

Those of you who have read my writing before know that when I was a kid, back in the early nineteen sixties, I spent most of my summers down on the panhandle of Florida with my Granny and Grandpa Tharpe. For a little boy who loved the outdoors and fishing in particular, I could not have asked for a better place to be or two more loving folks with whom to share that wonderful time of my life. As I have said on several occasions over the years, if you want to blame someone for the bulk of who I have become, you need to look no farther than the corner of Drake Avenue and West Seventeenth Street in Panama City, Florida to find the culprits. 

Granny and Grandpa were great. They taught me how to catch `em, how to clean `em and how to eat `em. They kindled within me a love for the woods, the swamp in particular, and an inner itch to explore the wilds. They also taught me to watch my language, to love my family and to respect my elders and others with no regard for anything other than the person before me.

We used to spend every Wednesday up in Wewahitchka, Florida; Wewa for short. Wewa sits to the left of Apalachicola and to the right of Panama City, about half way between Port Saint Joe and Bristol, and it has two claims to fame: Genuine Tupelo Honey, everything else is just a pretender, and the Dead Lakes dam. It was a little spill way of a dam that spanned the Chipola River up until 1987 when some paper pushing bureaucrat over in Tallahassee decided the world would end if it wasn’t removed. Please forgive that outburst. I just loved that old dam and hate to see it gone.

From the dam and the banks surrounding it, you could catch everything from shell-cracker to largemouth bass, from bream to channel cats and from warmouth to mullet. It was a great place to fish.

Now my granny was one of those chosen folks who have the ability to always catch fish. She could catch fish in a dry river bed in the mid-summer heat. Today she would be called a fish whisperer. The fish just seemed to love her more than most, and they weren’t alone. Her fellow fishermen loved my granny as well, mainly because she loved just about everybody she met and always said “Hi,” no matter who you were. On top of that, she would tell you exactly what she thought, no matter who you were. So people never doubted that she loved them, and they always knew exactly where they stood with her, and you have to love a person like that.

Like I said, Granny was a great fisherman because she could always find them, and in turn, we always had fish to bring home.

I will never forget, when I was maybe six or seven years of age, what happened one day after we had caught ourselves a cooler full of fish and were heading back home.  Somewhere along the way Granny said something to Grandpa after which he altered his course just a bit, and we soon found ourselves in the poorest section of Panama City. As it turned out, Grandpa had a friend who lived down in that section of town.

The man, whose name escapes me, was a mechanic for the Borden Milk Company, and my grandpa was a driver; and somehow they had hit it off and become friends over the years. 

We were going by to drop off some of the fish for this fella’s family; and Lord knows he had a lot of mouths to feed. Later, I came to learn that this was a habit of Granny and Grandpa. Not just with this family, but with anyone in need.

On this particular occasion though, we arrived somewhere around 6:00 in the evening. Well, supper was already on the stove, so we were invited to dinner, and what a dinner it was. As old Andy would say, “It was lip smacking good.”

Now I was just a kid, so I didn’t understand that the civil rights movement was in full swing in the early sixties. I didn’t know of the separate bathrooms or the all-white counters or stuff like that. I didn’t know of riots, or water cannons or police dogs. I just knew that these folks looked a little different than us and we from them. I soon learned, however, that our differences aside, man, that woman could cook, and that man could laugh as if his life depended on it; and my Granny and Grandpa loved them. So, I did the same.

As we sat around the dinner table, I can still hear the laughter and the gentle tinkling of the silverware against the plates. I still hear the shared “Amen” after the blessing. I can still see the picture of Jesus hanging over the mantle; the same one, by the way that my Granny had in her house and the one that now hangs in my office.   

I didn’t know it at the time, but my Granny and Grandpa were radicals; but radicals or not lessons were being taught and understanding was being born right there at the dinner table.

They were lessons of respect; respect for differences; respect for others.

They were lessons of charity; of giving, not out of abundance, but out of love.
​
They were lessons of love; love among friends and love within the family that is the body of Christ.

They were also lessons of understanding, that no matter what station we hold in life, we all struggle. We all hurt, and we all need forgiveness and love. We all need Christ, and we all need each other.  

I owe quite a debt to my Granny and Grandpa and to that unknown mechanic and his family for those lessons. They have held me in good stead over the years.

With that being said, I wish with all my heart that I could invite today’s world to return with me to that same blessed dinner table on that long ago Wednesday afternoon.

Mark 12:29-31
29 "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.   30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'   31 The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."      NIV
 
Love,
Pastor Tony
 
 
  

---

The Dead Lakes