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~~~Absence Magnifies!~~~

1K views 11 replies 5 participants last post by  David Miller 
#1 ·
As you all have noticed, I am a word-a-holic. I am the opposite of a word miser. I have never met a true stranger and I will make friends with anyone who can hear me, or come near me.



My personality is identical to my grandmother's when she was alive. At family reunions, relatives whom I've only met once or twice in my life have approached me and said the old familiar words, " You are exactly like Mom! " ( " Mom " is my grandmother. Everybody called her Mom. As I grew up in the same town as Mom, all I would hear is " Mom, could you come here? " or " Mom, when is dinner? " or " Mom...Mom!...Mom? " ).


You see, Mom had 17 children and was my Mother's ' Mom '. Mom had 10 sons and 7 daughters. Three toddlers died of the Whooping Cough back just before the First World War that started around 1914 or so. Mom was 14 years old in 1910 when she got married and stayed pregnant for many decades. Two toddlers died the same day. They got sick with the cough and a car came up and took Mom and the babies to the hospital. 3 days later, she came home without them.



Mom walked around the house, up in the West Virginia coal mines area, and looked for signs of where her 2 children who died, had played. She would find a smell on clothing that reminded her of her dear little ones. She saw where they scribbled on the wall. She couldn't understand it all..." Why, God, did you take my babies so soon? " She cried and choked those words out loud.



Then, after wondering in a stupor for so many days, she walked into the living room where she had picked up her babies for the last time that they were alive in that house. She had remembered hearing them coughing and coughing, so she called a friend who had the only car in the area. He came and took Mom and her babies to the hospital up in the big city. As she stood there remembering..she looked down on the floor...There it was....there was something on the floor. A Bible lay opened . She had told those two boys not to mess with the family Bible. She told them that if they messed with the Bible, something bad could happen to them.


It was an empty threat. A threat she said many times before. She didn't mean anything by saying it....So, she bent over to pick up that Bible and noticed it was opened up to a page in the Scriptures that read, " ...Suffer the little children...." She screamed and dropped the Bible! Some of the family in the house came running!


Mom was flat on her back on the floor, grasping the Bible and crying......That Bible was the last thing her two sick babies ever played with.( She later told me she blamed herself for her babies dying because of that threat).



Mom got up after a while and placed the Bible on the coffee table. She lost one more child ( 3 in all) to that Whooping Cough sickness pandemic that was a prelude to the pandemic that was about to hit the world a few years later in 1917 or 1918. It was called, " The Swine Flu " and it killed millions, worldwide. There was absolutely no resistance to fighting it.



Mom lived to be 87 years old. Born in 1896 and passed in 1983. Except for the 3 toddlers who died before 1918, all 14 remaining children, 7 males and 7 females, were at her funeral! All of them survived the Great Depression, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam Conflict.


I was her 2nd oldest grandchild. My brother was her first. She had 49 grandchildren, 72 great grandchildren, 17 great great grandchildren and 3 great great great grandchildren! Amazing, isn't it? There were over 600 people at her funeral!


I miss her very much. We were so much alike. She loved to write.



With the virus going around, I started thinking of her and how she lost 3 babies to a pandemic!



Take this pandemic seriously! Stay home!


David....














 
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#3 ·
What an amazing family and what an amazing legacy. You, please take care of yourself. We all need to stay strong and careful. But your presence on this forum is a strength in itself and a strength for us all. I'm not sure if you'd like to take that responsibility, or even meant to, but I do come here to read your posts. Mainly because you are "a word-a-holic"
. I enjoy your posts. I enjoy hearing about your family (so very different from mine an all respects), I loved hearing about both of your P'lets. I feel as if I "know you", and I am glad of that. I wish you and yours, a very long and healthy life.
 
#4 ·
What an amazing family and what an amazing legacy. You, please take care of yourself. We all need to stay strong and careful. But your presence on this forum is a strength in itself and a strength for us all. I'm not sure if you'd like to take that responsibility, or even meant to, but I do come here to read your posts. Mainly because you are "a word-a-holic"
. I enjoy your posts. I enjoy hearing about your family (so very different from mine an all respects), I loved hearing about both of your P'lets. I feel as if I "know you", and I am glad of that. I wish you and yours, a very long and healthy life.
I am wordy! I am pro-social. In my youth, I was likeable, but I didn't let people into my life like I do now. I had a severe learning disability in mathematics. I made straight " A's " in almost all classes except math. I got 'D's ' and ' F's all the time. Every year I spent the summer in summer school just to get enough credit in math. I was never held back from a grade.
The math problem kept me out of medical school. I wanted to become a doctor or scientist.


My father was aware enough about my math problem to get me to work on my writing and reading skills. I am an expert on ancient histories ( Humanities and Religions). My son is too! My father had photographic memory for much of his life, so when we went fishing, he filled my head with human history. He constantly talked to me about the world. He made me write and write and write and read and read and read! In second grade, I was reading college level!


My main weirdness, if you will, is my continuing dreams. I have had 16 of these dreams throughout my lifetime. I sense things in my dreams that come into fruition. When I have these dreams, I will have the same dream for 3 nights in a row, but each night, I get more information. The thing is, is that I have trouble putting the dream into prospective. These are visions, but are not clear enough for me to predict the future, unless I can put things together.


I won't got into detail now about what I had dreamed all those times, but Vicki knows that I have had these dreams because I told her about them the next morning. ( I saw the 911 attacks and I saw me giving a piano concert and I never had piano lessons! It did happen!).


My life is weird, to say the least. I just don't know what to do with my life. I feel like there is something I am missing.


Dave
 
#8 ·
I have made many friends on this forum ( and some who can't stand me). If you knew me years ago, I wouldn't have ever thought of telling my business to an open audience. I decided to open up because of how Bogie influenced me! I read this forum for years and didn't join in posting until Bogie was about 5 years old.


Of all the birds I have ever owned, it was Bogie that brought me out of my shell...and boy did he! I had a dozen or so articles written about Bogie to a Florida magazine that was self printed by the President of the Exotic Bird Society of America, Inc.. There were 2,000 magazines in local circulation. He printed every word I wrote about Bogie and never had to edit a word. Each article was about 2,000 words long. You will see some of the articles in Bogie's book. You have only seen some of his life.


Stay safe!
David and Vicki




 
#10 ·
I know written words can be around a long time. I have written in this forum on Chit Chat about the time I was sitting in a poetry class at the University of Central Florida and when the class started, the professor handed out a poem we were going to critique.


I about fainted when the poem was one of my father's poems that he had written and published back in the late 1960's or early 1970's! I told the professor that this poem was written by my father and published by The National Book of Anthology!


The professor had a nice long talk with me after class and said she loved several of my father's poems because they were written on a level that made a person really think about them and what the poet was trying to get across! I gave her my father's phone number and told her to call him if she wants.


When I got home, I called my father and told him all about my experience. I told him that the class gave me their critiques to give to him. He was almost speechless! My father was never speechless...ever! He passed away about 13 years later and he mentioned the critiques as one of his humble accomplishments not too long before he left this world. I get chills just thinking about him.


With this electronic age we are experiencing, our future generations will see what we wrote. Even the average 2020 Twitter will pop up once in a while a hundred years from now! What do you think ' they ' will think of us?:confused:


David;)
 
#12 ·
I was looking through some of my threads and ran across this one. Bigboy said my writing skills was genetic, because my father was a writer. You should hear about my father's younger brother sometime!
He was a member of a barbershop quartet who traveled all over the world. He was very musically gifted as many of my family were. My first year in college was spent as a music major. I was totally bored with it. I couldn't see me teaching public school music classes all my life.

My mind right now is working at about half power, compared to how it worked when I was younger. My wife said she had a hard time keeping up with me and my ideas.


I owe everything to my dad. He was my father, but he and I were real buddies. He brought out the personality in me. We could face anything together.


I think we all have had a hero in our lives at one time or another.


Believe it or not, but when Bogie came along, he became my hero! I treated him like a child, not a bird. I talked to him on his level and he began to pick up on my moods and body language. I miss that little ball of feathers so much! I still hurt....still hurt....!


Dave
 
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