by

Anna June Spring ‘24

April 2024

Ah, where to begin! So much going on with this girl I don’t know what to talk about first!

We had a great visit with JohnJohn at the Union Station back in March when some of our friends were playing there, and June just loved seeing him and hanging out with the kids at the Station. She wants to go back every weekend! She was very well-behaved, though I had a little bit of a hard time keeping up with her in the crowd. But she was not intimidated at all and didn’t cause any problems. She played with a group of mostly older kids around inside and out in the courtyard. She can hang with the big kids!

Her conceptual development continues to amaze me. Last month, she asked me, just out of the blue, “But Dad, who made God?”

I tried to answer that in a way she could understand, saying basically that no one could really answer that question, but there are different ideas about it. I refrained from trying to explain that we can’t rule out an infinite regress of causation…

She also asked me who was the first person. Also hard to answer. She’s constantly questioning! Those church folk are not likely to be successful at indoctrinating her!

Lots more to journal, as life goes on in stressful, joyful and unexpected ways! But focusing on June is what I’m about here! She’s with me at least five days a week, sometimes more, and we are getting on very well. I almost never need to resort to threat of punishment to get her to do what I’m asking her to do, and she’s almost always a very happy kid!

We do lots of activities, scooter rides to the park and playing in the yard, plus games inside. She loves hiding eggs — we’ve been doing that since a few weeks before Easter — and hide-and-seek, musical concerts, and lots of reading.

As we approach her sixth birthday and the end of Kindergarten, her reading skills are developing rapidly. She loves reading the Accelerated Reader books with me, and most of them she can read through with no help on the second or third read. She’s made 100s on all of them so far. It’s really fun seeing her decode and learn to read with expression.

She still just loves to talk, and it’s sometimes very entertaining, though late at night it’s annoying! Her vocabulary now includes words like “eventually,” “obvious,” “similar,” and “solution.” Are these Kindergarten words?

She calls me “Dude” or “Bro” sometimes now. But sometimes, she still likes to baby-talk. And she tells me she loves me every day!

She is totally amazing on the scooter! She can go so fast and make tight circles with both feet on the board, which she calls skateboarding—she met some skateboard kids at the park and got to try out a real skateboard. We do videos often for Granny!

She’s going on her third boat ride with her friend Ember today, and she loves driving the boat!

We’re really looking forward to our trip to Dixie next weekend! She needs to know all her cousins and other family! Should be fun!

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LittleJohnnyIX

(Another installment in the series of stories I tell June from my childhood.)

A visit to Granmunnie’s house

When Little Johnny was about eight or nine, he would ride the train, the Central of Georgia, from Adel to Macon and go visit his grandma—he called her Granmunnie—who lived in Gray. (Georgia Gray, as Johnny called it.)

Johnny got to ride the train because Granmunnie’s friend Mr. Green was a conductor, and he helped look out for Johnny on the trip.

Granmunnie lived in a big two-story house right in the middle of Gray, and worked as a social worker for the welfare department in Jones County. Johnny loved the house, though the upstairs, especially the room that was always locked at the top of the stairs, was a little scary. One day he climbed out the window of the landing onto the little porch roof and slipped down to look in the window of the locked room. He was kinda disappointed, though, because there was nothing but boxes and trunks and old manikins and piles of clothes in the room. No skeletons or ghosts or anything exciting!

He also loved going to work with Granmunnie at the courthouse annex, but the “trusties” who did yard work and janitorial work around the courthouse were a little scary too in their blue and white striped uniforms.

Johnny would get to ride with Granmunnie to visit some of her clients out in the county, and they would often stop at a peach orchard a friend of hers owned and she would walk out into the orchard and pick a few peaches and then she and Johnny would sit in her old 1940s Chevrolet and eat them.

They would visit a man who lived out in the middle of a pasture in a little shack he had made out of old signs and cardboard boxes, and a family who lived in an very old wooden house that was teetering on top of piles of rocks on a little clay hill. Johnny would try to talk to the kids who were sitting on the rickety old porch, but they never said much.

Sometimes while Granmunnie was working in her office, Johnny would go into the little county library that was in the same building and lie on the couch and read. He loved reading books about dogs, like Big Red, and one of his favorite characters, Augustus, and he even read some adult mysteries, including a lot of Perry Mason stories. (The Darby Trial was one mystery, which he read because he thought it was the Darby ‘trail’ not ‘trial,’ and he didn’t understand much of what was going on in it!.)

He and his Granmunnie had lime sherbet with Bubble-Up almost every day after supper, and Johnny still thinks of her whenever he sees lime sherbet.

Granmunnie’s house had a closed well on the back porch, but she never drew water from it. There was an old shed and a storage building in the back yard, which was all bare clay with a few oak leaves scattered around, and Johnny would get a rake and run around the back yard pulling the rake behind him to make tracks through the leaves.

There was also a very old, one-room house at the very back of the lot, just across an alley that ran through, and a woman who occasionally would cook or clean Granmunnie’s house lived there by herself. The old house had an open fireplace in it and the woman did all her cooking in the fireplace. Johnny remembers the way the house always smelled like wood smoke, because there was always a fire, even in the summer.

There was an old, old car in the shed that Uncle Dan had bought when he was young—maybe it even worked—and Johnny loved to sit in it and pretend to drive. It had wire wheels and no top, and Johnny thought it was just about the coolest thing he ever had seen!

The house was very mysterious to Johnny, because there were doors at several places outside that went under the house, which was higher off the ground than Johnny was tall! The whole thing was surrounded by old rusted iron fences that had very decorative, pointy things at the top of each post and gates that opened up into the alley at the side of the house.

When the visit was over, Granmunnie would drive Johnny in to the train station in Macon for his ride back to Adel. She always packed him a nice little lunch for the ride, and he enjoyed looking out the window while he ate.

One time, he had just finished his lunch when the conductor came through with a large garbage can calling out to the passengers for trash. Johnny wanted to get his lunch bag into the can, so he quickly rolled it up and tossed it in.

Just as the conductor pulled the trash out of the train car and started across the clattering, scary platform where the two cars were hooked together, Johnny realized that he had forgotten that in the bottom of his lunch sack were about four of his favorite cookies—Nabisco sugar wafers—and he had just thrown them away.

He was so disappointed and sad that he almost cried when he realized the cookies were gone. But it was too late to chase down the trash and get them back! Little Johnny remembers that trip—and his Granmunnie—every time he eats sugar wafers!

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Little Johnny VIII

Little Johnny and the grease trap

(A very funny one in the Little Johnny series, stories I tell June from my childhood.)

Once upon a time when Little Johnny was about four, he had a very embarrassing experience—one of quite a few, as he was a bit of a showoff as a little boy!

Johnny and his family were all visiting Aunt Sadie and Uncle Andrew in Pidcock, Georgia, one summer weekend, and all of Johnny’s many cousins were there, the McKinnons who lived there—Billy, Mabbat, Wallace, Phillip—and Patsy and Marilee, and Barbara and Little Bill, and maybe a few more. It was one of those family gatherings that happened a lot down in Brooks County.

So they were all playing outside that day, which is what they mostly did wherever they were, and Little Johnny decided he needed to show off a little bit.

“I bet y’all I can walk all the way around the top of that grease trap!” he boasted, knowing everybody would be impressed because nobody wanted to even get close to that grease trap most of the time. It was stinky and yucky and scary. It was just a little brick wall about a foot high that made a pool just underneath the kitchen windows that caught all the dishwater and trapped the grease (hence its name!) from all the dirty dishes instead of running it through the septic system where it tended to clog up the pipes and the drain field. But it was yucky!

So everybody poo-pooed Johnny’s boasting, saying they knew he wouldn’t get up on that wall and walk around it cuz he would be in big trouble!

Well, that was about all it took to make sure that Little Johnny was gonna do it, since they dared him.

Well, he stepped up on it, and they all gathered around oooohhing and ahhh-ing and taunting him even more. So off he stepped on his daring journey around the little wall. Except that about three steps into that journey, his foot slipped on that old crumbly brick and down he went, Plop! right into that stinky, greasy, yukky mess!

Of course, he started yelping right away and somebody went running off to get his mommy and he was trying to climb out when she arrived.

She was not very happy! She mostly just snatched him out of that mess and marched him around to the back steps by the ear.

“Stand on those steps!” she ordered.

So Johnny stood on the steps while Mommy hosed him down good with the garden hose, and she wasn’t too delicate about it either. She finally had to make him strip down to his underwear to get him halfway clean, and then she marched him into the shower—luckily, there was a shower room right off the back porch, because this was a country farm house and being dirty was pretty normal.

Johnny was not happy about getting hosed down, especially with all his cousins standing around laughing at him and taunting him for being such a showoff.

But we all hope that Little Johnny learned a good lesson from that grease trap! He sure did stay away from it for the rest of his childhood!

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Little Johnny VII

(Another installment in the stories I tell June from my childhood and youth. This is a re-telling of one of her favorites – it’s also in LJ II along with the bike ride story.)

Little Johnny and the trestle

Once upon a time when Little Johnny was a teenager, he was driving his Daddy’s station wagon (that old 1956 black Ford) around in the countryside in North Carolina with some of his brothers and his sister and their friends when a scary thing happened.

They were just out “riding around” as they liked to do, but it was in the country around Lake Junaluska, and Johnny didn’t know much about the roads up there, since they were just visiting their friends during the summer. Bunny Anna, who had spend most of the summers of her life there, at least a few weeks every year, knew the area and she was helping Johnny know where to go on their ride.

One of the nicest drives around was old County Road, and they were just cruising along it when suddenly Bunny Anna said, “Oh look, here comes the trestle, speed up Johnny! It’ll be fun!”

So, of course, Johnny speeded up. Maybe a little more than Bunny expected! Because she started yelling, “No, no, slow down, I was just kidding!”

Well, Johnny tried to slow down, but it was a little too late, because he was going a little too fast and when they went under the trestle, he discovered why Bunny was yelling.

On the other end of the trestle, County Road made a pretty sharp right curve, following the mountain, as those mountain roads tend to do, and Johnny was going a bit too fast for that curve. He was wheeling the old station wagon around and putting on the brakes as hard as he could, but the car drifted right on across the left lane and onto the shoulder of the road! Johnny could hear the tires on his side of the car roaring in the gravel on the shoulder, and that’s when he looked out the side window. There was not much shoulder there, just a very steep bank down to the little river that the road followed, and lots of rocks and scary stuff.

Johnny was hanging onto the steering wheel and trying to keep the car from running off the road, and nobody was saying anything—they were all holding their breath and covering their faces to keep from screaming. It was lucky there were no cars coming the other way, and after a little while Johnny was able to slow down and get the car back onto the road.

He pulled over into a pullout on the cliff side of the road and stopped. Then everybody in the car started laughing and talking and being really happy that they didn’t just die, but Johnny’s sister, Linda, was so scared that she didn’t really like all that laughing. She was a very sweet, very good little girl, but it really upset her and she yelled out at everybody, “Y’all stop your damn laughing!”

Everybody got quiet all of a sudden, because they were all so shocked to hear Linda say that! You could hear some of them whispering, oh wow! Linda cussed! I never heard Linda cuss! and things like that. And then everybody started telling her how sorry they were for laughing and that she was right, they shouldn’t be laughing because they did almost just die!

After everybody calmed down, Little Johnny drove them all back to Junaluska, but he drove very slowly! After a while, they all kinda started talking again, but everybody was talking really quiet now, and finally Johnny told everybody how sorry he was that he scared them, and Bunny told everybody how sorry she was that she suggested for Johnny to speed up, and everybody kinda go over, but they never forgot it!

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AnnaJune Fall 23

The children

Summer-Fall 2023…

Me and June…

Well, it’s been me and June a lot since the beginning of the summer. She’s spending lots of time with me, tho Mommy’s not here much, and we’re getting on well. Her birthday was fun, and she’s very proud to be five — tells everyone she meets that she’s five.

And boy is she five! She has such expanded ideas about things these days, and it has been very interesting and sweet watching her learn about a wide variety of things since she started kindergarten. She has a great kindergarten teacher, Mary Frye, and she usually is very excited about going to school, tho as the year is progressing, she is getting less eager to go.

She’s also just generally expanding her awareness of life — sometimes it’s disturbing, as she has said to me several times that she doesn’t want me to die. She was also playing pretend about someone dying and asked me frequently about my brother Bob’s death. Gene’s death (June 27) has been very hard on her, as well as on me. I think the reality of Taylor’s mom’s early death and these two uncles dying has made her especially sensitive and aware of the subject of death.

I wrote in my journal soon after Gene’s death, “I guess June keeps me going. She’s very loving, though stubborn, and so aware. She asked me yesterday if I was going to die in a long time or a short time. I told her I didn’t know, that no one knows. Gene’s death is a big factor in that, I guess. We tried to prepare them both, but kids don’t really understand. Just that someone’s gone.

“I do worry about her dealing with my death, but I think she will be okay. She’s strong and very self-reliant. I just hope she remembers how much I love her!”

We got a kitty and she is crazy for that cat! She doesn’t really know how to be nice to it, tho. Just treats it like it is a stuffed animal. Luckily, the cat is very tolerant!

June and I rode to St. Simons together to visit with Linda and John, and Stewart and Julian showed up with the little one, Charolette! June loved being with everyone!

She would really much prefer we were all together, so this back and forth life is hard on her. She’s with me about four days a week, usually, and then sometimes more, as Taylor stays over occasionally.

Taylor texted me one day to say, as part of a long and involved message, that “Anna June says she has the best Daddy in the world. And she’s so proud of you…” That meant a lot to ole Dad!

One of the most amazing things she’s said to me lately was about black holes, which I included in Little Johnny V – I had told her a story about crashing on my bike as a kid, and she said, well, you have to careful not to fall into a black hole because they suck up everything that falls into them!

I was astounded and asked her further, discovering that she had learned about them from some YouTube thing, but she didn’t realize there were not any on the Earth. So we talked further. Then she asked me, “But where do things go when they fall into a black hole?”

I said, when I got over being amazed, that no one knows the answer to that and lots of scientists are trying to figure it out.

The list of amazing things she says has gone beyond keeping up with it! And she’s doing so well in Kindergarten! She was in the paper twice for being in the student’s of the month for the Leaders in Me program, and her diagnostics are really good for the first half of the year. She can read lots of stuff and is very into learning more reading as well as the phonics. She enjoys seeing the words in the stories that she almost knows by heart and realizing that it’s the word that says… whatever it is. And she loves sounding out the words she doesn’t know.

Her math skills are pretty amazing too! She can “subatize” so well! (I just learned that term, which means recognize how many things are in a group without counting… something like that.)

She loves playing dice, and I think it helps her math awareness.

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Little Johnny VI

(Another installation in the Little Johnny series… stories, mostly true, that I tell June based on things from my childhood. This one is very true. I still feel a little sick when I remember it… one of the first of the several times in my life when I came very close to death.)

Little Johnny and the train crossing

Once upon a time, when Little Johnny was a teenager, he was driving around in Daddy’s station wagon after Church one Sunday night with a bunch of his friends and a really scary thing happened.

Johnny and his friends had the radio on loud, and they were all talking and laughing and being loud, which they usually did when they were riding around—which was a favorite thing to do in those small, South Georgia towns where there was really not much to do but ride around, and the radio was truth… but that’s a whole ‘nother story!

This particular night, they were cruising down East Main Street (Highway 280) toward Spring Street, where Johnny lived with his family, so they could stop by and see if Mom had some snacks for them.

Now Spring Street crosses the railroad tracks that run through Claxton right at the point where the tracks come up next to Main Street, with Railroad Street on the other side of the tracks, and just before Spring Street there are several businesses — the Coke Plant and the NeSmith Gas Station — between the highway and the tracks, so nobody in the car saw the train that was running along the tracks beside them heading into town just like they were, and because they were being so loud, nobody heard that train whistle blowing.

So when Johnny got to Spring Street, he just rolled around that left turn that took them across the tracks without even slowing down a whole lot and not even looking to see if there was a train coming — and of course, in those days there was no crossing guard on any of those small town railroad crossings — so they just bounced right up onto the tracks full speed. And then— and then— they heard the whistle and saw that train headlight beaming right in the passenger window!

Johnny jammed on the gas real hard and that old Ford just leaped over those tracks with a big bump and then, zoom, roar, that train flew right by them, just barely missing the tail end of the station wagon as the flew over the tracks and bumped down across Railroad Avenue!

Everybody screamed all at once and then as the crossed the street and Johnny stopped the car, they got real quiet, ‘cuz they all knew they had just almost died that night. They sat there on the side of Spring Street for a few minutes breathing real hard and talking to each other about how lucky they were, and some of them were crying a little bit and Johnny was saying how sorry he was that he didn’t see that train and everybody was saying oh my gosh, how sorry they were for being so loud and it was all very crazy.

And then they drove on down Spring Street to Johnny’s house — it was only a block away — and got out and went really quietly into the house. Somehow they told Johnny’s mom about what had happened, though they tried to make it sound like it wasn’t so bad, but they all knew they were lucky to still be walking around, and they kept looking at each other, like, don’t ever tell anybody else what really happened or we’ll never get out of the house again!

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Little Johnny V

Little Johnny and the bike crash…

—and black holes!

(A new Little Johnny story—to add to the stories I have told to June over the years when she wants to hear “Little Johnny” stories. Mostly they are true stories of things I remember from childhood, tho sometimes the gaps of memory are filled in with things to make it interesting to her. She often remembers stories that I’ve told her that I have forgotten I told her, and it’s sometimes challenging to remember what it was all about from her description, so they are an evolving form! The titles are mostly from what she calls them when she asks to hear them…)

When Little Johnny was in about the fourth grade, he got a big-boy bike for his birthday. He loved that bike, and he even learned how to work on bicycles with it, because it wasn’t exactly new and there was always something he had to be fixing.

One thing he had to fix was a front wheel that got a bit smashed up because Johnny crashed into a concrete post. Now, the story of how he happened to crash into that post is not one he’s very proud to talk about, because it was really a pretty dumb thing he did, as he usually will admit now that he’s not such a little boy anymore. But he did learn a big lesson from this crash!

That lesson was, don’t ride your bicycle with your eyes closed.

Yep, that’s how he crashed into that concrete post and broke his wheel and almost broke his head—he did fly over the handle bars and bang into that post with his head!—one of the many head injuries he got as a kid. Which maybe explains why he’s done so many not-so-smart things in his life!

Now why would Little Johnny be riding his bike with his eyes closed?! That’s a good question.

Well, the answer is also not such a smart thing that Johnny did. He had a girlfriend—well, he wanted her to be his girlfriend anyway—who lived just down the street from them in Adel, and he was not supposed to ride his bicycle down that way because he had to cross a big street to get to it. But he really wanted to ride his bicycle down to Marilyn’s house, so he hit on the idea of closing his eyes and telling his brothers, who were out in the yard watching, that he was gonna show them how he could ride with his eyes closed. Then if he got in trouble for going down Marilyn’s street, he could just saw he didn’t know because he had his eyes closed. Yeah, brilliant plan, huh!

So off he goes, riding down the street in front of their house with his eyes closed, crossing the big street. Somehow, he sorta veered off to the left as he was going, and when he got across the big street, he crashed right into the street sign, which was a square concrete post, bam!

It really hurt and he had to push his bike back home and explain to Mommy how he had banged his head and broken his bike wheel.

She wasn’t happy, but she decided he had probably learned his lesson from the crash, so he didn’t get into too much trouble for it.

But he did promise to never again ride his bicycle with his eyes closed!

…the black hole.

(After I told June this story last night, she started talking about the dangers of riding with eyes closed, and said that you really have to be careful because you could ride into a black hole and that would be really bad because black holes suck everything into them!

At first I wasn’t sure what she was saying but then I realized after I asked her some questions that she actually was talking about Black Holes… the cosmic ones! She said she heard about them on YouTube, and we proceeded to have a long and very interesting conversation about Black Holes.

I tried to assure her that she wasn’t going to encounter any Black Holes in our back yard or on her bike rides, because there aren’t any here on the Earth, they are all way out in space, so that made her feel a little better. I also tried to explain, at a level appropriate for a five-year-old, what Black Holes are, and she was very interested.

At some point in the conversation, she asked me, “Where do things go that fall into a Black Hole?”

After I regained my composure—the question is pretty astonishing coming from a five-year-old!—I told her that a lot of scientists who have been studying Black Holes for a long time would like to have an answer to the question! And basically, I said that nobody knows where things go that fall into a Black Hole. I even told her a little about worm holes and some of the other theories related to the subject, so I probably got a little over her head, but she was very interested and very excited to be talking to me about this subject. Of course, she often gets excited about anything that will allow her to avoid being quiet and going to sleep!

But it was a most interesting bedtime conversation.

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Little Johnny IV

(These are a few more of the Little Johnny stories as I tell them to Anna June. Most of this is true…)

Little Johnny Rides His Bike

Once upon a time, when Little Johnny was about six or seven, he got a new bicycle without training wheels, and he was trying to learn to ride it. It was a little scary, but his Daddy was helping him.

One day they were riding up the dirt road from their house at 400 W. Alden St. in Valdosta, with Daddy holding on and keeping the bike balanced. Johnny was doing pretty good on the way up, and so, on the way back down the road, Daddy turned loose and Johnny was riding along on his own. But then… he got a little nervous and looked back to see if Daddy was still holding the bike, and when he did, he accidentally turned the handlebars a little too much and the bike flipped up and threw him right over the handlebars!

He hit the road right on his forehead, and a nice rock cut his head. Daddy pushed the bike on back to the house as Johnny walked along crying. He was okay; it wasn’t a terrible wound, but he did have a little scar right at his hairline for a long time.

The next day, though, Little Johnny went out and got on that bike and rode it right up the road all by himself! He was so proud and happy, and he rode that bike every day after that.

Little Johnny and the Train Trestle

(This is June’s favorite Little Johnny story.)

One night when Little Johnny was a teenager, he was driving his daddy’s station wagon around the mountain roads near Junaluska, North Carolina, where Johnny and his family were visiting their friends who had a cabin at the lake. He and several of his brothers and his sister Linda and their friend Bunny Anna were all just riding around ‘cuz there wasn’t a lot to do at the lake at night.

They were coming down County Road and everybody was having a nice time, and then Bunny Anna said, “Oh look, here comes the trestle, speed up Johnny!”

So Little Johnny, always hoping to make little Bunny Anna happy, stepped on the gas and the car started speeding along toward the trestle.

“No! No! Slow down! I was just kidding!” Bunny Anna said.

She thought that Johnny knew about the trestle and the curve that was on the other side of it, but he hadn’t done much driving on County Road, so he didn’t remember that curve.

When Anna said to slow down, he tried, but it was too late, he was going too fast!

The little Ford station wagon zipped underneath the old railroad trestle and there was the curve, twisting around to the right. Johnny was trying to slow down and putting on the brakes and turning hard to the right, but the curve was too sharp and he was going too fast! The station wagon crossed the left lane—luckily, there were no other cars coming from the other direction!—and was riding on the left shoulder of the road. Down below was a valley with a river and lots of rocks and Johnny was very afraid, but he kept holding the wheels on the road and finally the car slowed down and was able to get back to his side of the road.

Just a little ways further and there was a place to pull over on the right, so Johnny pulled over and stopped.

Suddenly, everybody started laughing and saying silly things because they were so happy they didn’t fall off the mountain into the valley.

But suddenly Johnny’s sister Linda, who was a very sweet and good little girl, yelled out at them all, “Stop your damn laughing!”

Everybody stopped laughing right away and gasped! They were so surprised, because Linda never, ever had said a bad word before! Everybody started saying sorry and feeling really bad for laughing after they almost died, and Little Johnny especially felt terrible about being so foolish and driving too fast. He promised Linda and all the others that he would NEVER do that again!

J

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Little Johnny III

“Little Johnny and the sad Christmas”

Once upon a time when Little Johnny was about six or seven, he had a very sad Christmas.

Johnny and his family had their last Christmas in their house at 400 West Alden Street in Valdosta, because they were moving to Adel so Daddy could buy the newspaper there. They had a really nice Christmas day and Johnny and his brothers and his sister got some nice toys and had a fun day with the family.

Johnny was really happy, because he got the beautiful Golden Trumpet that he had been wanting for a long time from Santa that morning. It was not a real trumpet, it was just a plastic toy, but it looked like a real trumpet and he could play it like a trumpet.

But just a few days after Christmas, the family packed up all their things and started moving to Adel. They moved all the furniture, including the beds, but they left their clothes and most of their toys all packed up in boxes in the house. Since they didn’t have beds, they spent the night with their friends, the Hamils, and they were going to come back to the house the next day and get all the boxes and finish moving to Adel.

But during the night, they got a phone call from the fire department. The house had caught on fire during the night. The fire department came and put out the fire before everything was burned up, but it got really hot and smokey in the house and a lot of their things were ruined.

One of the things that got ruined was Johnny’s new Golden Trumpet. He was walking around in the smokey-smelling blackened house when he found it, in the box all melted and not even golden any more. He was so sad that even though he was a big boy now, he started crying.

He saw that Mommy was crying too, because her favorite two paintings, Pinky and Blue Boy, were all blackened and wrecked by the smoke and the fire.

Most of their clothes were burned or so smokey they couldn’t keep them, so they had move to Adel with no change of clothes. But all the people in the church in Adel were very kind to them and brought clothes so that everyone had more clothes for the next week.

But nothing replaced that sweet little Golden Trumpet for Johnny, and he always remembered how sad it looked, all melted and wrecked that morning after the fire.

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Little Johnny II

Little Johnny Stories — As told to June by her dad (that’s me!)

“Little Johnny and his Magic Daddy”

Once upon a time when Little Johnny was about 5, he had a painful thing happen, but his Daddy helped him get through it.

Johnny was trying to build a little house in the back yard of their new house in Valdosta, so he was finding things around the yard to stack up. He found an old concrete block in some bushes at the back of the yard, so he decided to add that to his stack. It was heavy, but he managed to get his arm through it and pick it up. He was struggling along headed for his little house, but he got tired and it slipped out of his arms and landed, smash!, right on his toe!

Aiiee! He cried out and headed for the back door. By the time he got inside, he was crying, and his Mommy came out of the kitchen asking him what happened.

He told her about the block, and showed her his toe, which was bleeding a little and looking pretty banged up.

“Oh! Poor little boy! I’m so sorry!” Mommy said. “Let’s get that fixed up!”

So Mommy put some medicine on his toe and a nice big bandaid, and gave him some water. He was still crying a little and his toe was really hurting when his Daddy came home from work a few minutes later.

“Oh no!” Daddy said when he heard the story. “I bet I can make that toe stop hurting!”

So Daddy showed Johnny his “magic jewel” — a pretty red piece of glass that he got down from a shelf. He gave the glass to Johnny to hold, and told Johnny to squeeze it and then give it back to him. Then he told Johnny he was going to make the jewel disappear.

Daddy put the jewel is his hands and moved them around really fast, put them behind his back and then held his hands out in front of Johnny — and there was no jewel! Johnny was amazed. Then Daddy asked him where he thought the jewel was. When Johnny said he didn’t know, Daddy said, “I bet it’s in your ear!”

We’ll, Johnny didn’t believe that, and he laughed, “No!”

But then Daddy held his hand out and reached up to first one ear and then the other, and then he flashed his hand open in front of Johnny and there it was! The jewel was sitting in Daddy’s hand!

“Hey! How’d you do that!” he asked.

“Magic!” Daddy said!

By then, of course, Johnny had forgotten all about his injured toe, and though it still hurt, he felt so much better about the whole situation that he stopped crying, and he and Daddy had a fun time together talking about magic tricks and all kinda of interesting things!