Monthly Archives: January 2024

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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!