THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508200153
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: PAUL SOUTH
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
Bob turned 90 Saturday.
Formally known as George Robert Young of Nashville, Tenn., Bob is my maternal grandfather. But I learned early on never to call him Granddad or Papaw or Grandpop or any of the traditional terms of endearment.
He is just Bob. Like one of our friends.
But he is much more than that.
He was born into a large farm family in the Kentucky Bluegrass. When his mother died, he had to quit school at 8 to help rear his younger brothers and sisters, while his father worked the soil.
But young Bob managed to educate himself in the art of self-reliance. Between cooking and cleaning, he read everything he could get his hands on. And in the 1930s, he took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of FDR's prescriptions to cure an economy crippled by the Depression.
Earlier, he married Anne Owen of Bayou La Batre, Ala. They would be together until she died in 1981.
The two had met when he was on a work crew in the tiny Gulf Coast shrimping village. They found they shared the same birthday, and from that little bit, a relationship grew.
They would rear two daughters and a son. And over time, grandchildren and great-grandchildren would follow.
When his wife died in 1981, he told my father, ``I hope you know as much love in your life as I had with her.''
There appears nothing extraordinary about this man's life. Working hard, raising a family, those are just parts of the human cycle.
But there are treasured memories of his life that I carry with me in the pocket of my heart.
Years ago, my grandparents lived in a large white house on the banks of Wilson Lake. He would load us into his old red and white ski boat. We would burst into fits of gleeful laughter as he opened up speed. The boat felt as though it was above the water, floating on air. We loved it. Our parents sat in white-knuckle fear.
It was great.
At Christmas, he baked red velvet cake, a marvelous mixture of chocolate cake and white icing. And on other days he would bake homemade rolls and country ham, and regale us with stories of baseball and his life on the road with the TVA.
But the image that will endure long after the taste of ham and rolls and red velvet cake have faded into memory is this: On Sunday afternoons, the smell of fried chicken and biscuits still hanging thick like a kitchen perfume, my grandfather would be in his favorite chair. These were his last hours at home before another week of troubleshooting for TVA would take him down the rural roadways of Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky.
Bright white sunlight streamed through the large windows. Slowly, surely he would work his way through the Sunday edition of The Nashville Tennessean, taking time to work the crossword puzzle with a pen.
Then, he would pull out his Bible.
Turning past the worn brown leather cover, and through the thin parchment pages, he would read for more than an hour the words that had sustained him through joy and tragedy, good times and bad, through the deaths of a wife, a grandson, and a son-in-law, and the weddings, graduations and birthday celebrations.
The writer Pat Conroy once said of his own grandfather: ``When I think of my grandfather, I think of goodness, and that is not enough.''
So it is with me. by CNB