Category: Family

The Game that Filled Her Head With Dreams

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

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When my father was still alive football was king in our household. Of course it was not just any brand of football. It was always about Texas A&M football. After my dad died my mother kept his love of the Texas Aggies alive. Anytime a game was aired on television she faithfully tuned in and sang all of the school songs with gusto. Thanksgiving dinners were always timed to work around the annual game against the University of Texas. She’d get almost reverential when chanting the Aggie cheers and songs on those occasions and she fill our heads with stories of the times that she spent with my father on campus when they were young newlyweds and he was earning his degree in engineering.

She had a way of making Texas A&M seem like a magical place with her tales that she spun like the fairytales of old. The Aggies were heroes in my mind and my father was a knight in shining armor who captivated my beautiful mother with his Aggie manners and brilliance. I listened to her memories of happy times with a kind of reverence and awe.

My mother remained faithful to the Texas Aggies and their football team throughout her life with a fervor that belied the fact that she had not had the opportunity to be a student there because it was an all male institution back when she was young. Sometimes she even hinted that she thought it should have remained that way, but once my youngest daughter was a student there she changed her tune. She was quite proud of finally having another Texas A&M graduate in the family and felt doubly blessed that she also gained an Aggie grandson-in-law in the bargain.

If possible, my mother was an even bigger fan of baseball. She made sure that both of my brothers took part in Little League and was rather proud of their prowess on the field of dreams. She recounted the times that she attended baseball games for a minor league team in Houston back when she was young. Baseball was her game and she knew it well. As soon as the city of Houston landed a major league team she became an instant fan. The guys started as the Colt 45s and she would take us to watch them play in an outdoor park filled with hot nights and mosquitoes. Those were amazingly fun times when my mother became as raucous as the most enthusiastic fans. 

Eventually the Houston team got the first ever indoor playing field and a new name, the Astros. Mama was giddy with excitement each spring when the season began and she never once lost her childlike spirit when it came to the hundreds of games that the Astros played. If she wasn’t at the stadium or if the team was out of town she tuned in on her radio listening to every play and punctuating the air with her cheers and groans. I’ve never known anyone to be as faithful to a team particularly during some years when the Astros were not doing well at all. She weathered many disappointments with optimism and spoke of the players as though they were her good friends.

Mama had grown up listening to the radio so just hearing a game was as vivid to her as being there in person. She was able to feel the excitement and see each play in the vividness of her mind. She often spoke of the stats of each player and described their incredible feats as though they were living heroes. She knew the opponents just as well and talked of what to expect from them. She critiqued the manager’s decisions and made predictions that often came to pass. She was not to be disturbed whenever there was a game. During those times she did not answer her phone and only came grudgingly to her front door if there was knock.

She had a collection of baseball cards that she purchased over the years. Most of them were Astros but she also had those of other players that she admired for their prowess. She thought of Nolan Ryan as a kind of baseball god and she boasted that she had actually seen a couple of the famed “Killer Bs” in a restaurant on one occasion. Getting her started on a discussion of baseball was unwise unless there was a great deal of time to hear a long history of what she saw as the greatest game in America.

When I was a teen my mother befriended a woman named Emily whose brother worked with the New York Mets. The lady was as much of a fan as my mom and the two of them often went to games together at the Astrodome. Mama would come home as giddy as a child at Christmas with blow by blow accounts of every inning and every play. Sometimes she even got extra special seating when the Mets came to town compliments of her Emily’s brother. You would have thought that she had won the lottery.

We took our mother to an Astros game at Minute Maid Park one Mother’s Day. She was having trouble walking by then and she became easily exhausted from the hike to the seats. She enjoyed being there in person but somehow knew that she would have to be content with “seeing” them on the radio in the future. When she spent her last spring in my home I often heard the sound of the play by play announcements coming from her room. She would lie on her bed and visualize the ballpark, the guys in shades of orange and blue and white, the hotdogs and peanuts and beer.

My mother never got to see her Astros go all the way to the big championship. She died six years before they won the World Series, but somehow I knew she was watching. She never missed a game, not even on the day that she died. From her bed in the ICU she watched her beloved Astros one last time before she fell peacefully asleep and later breathed her last breaths.

I think of her each spring when the Astros take to the mound. She would have been so happy and proud of their accomplishments, even when they struggled. I suspect that her spirit is always with them each time they take to the field. There was a never a more devoted fan. Spring and summer were her favorite times of the year when her boys took to the field and played the game that filled her head with dreams. 

When History Comes Alive

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

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I’ve become fascinated by a series of classes at the Rice University Glasscock School of Continuing Education featuring the history of the kings and queens of England. Dr. Newell Boyd uses primary and secondary sources to bring the reigns of the British monarchs to life. His courses are exciting strolls through history that illustrate that human nature tends to be the same from one era to the next. The cast of characters may change but the themes echo over and over through time. His is a very personal look at history through the eyes of those who wrote commentaries about the people and events as they were happening.

The thing that has most struck me throughout the series of lectures is that so many of the problems that we humans face today were concerns hundreds of years ago. Those of us who are not royalty or “mighty barons” today may have a better quality of life than the common folk of yore, but questions of religious freedom, power, and economic equality remain essentially the same as they were when peasants’ lives were brutish and brief. The saga of mankind has been a story of wars and intrigue but it has also been one of slowly evolving equality and freedom and opportunity even for those not born into wealth and power. Much of that trend began in the rise and fall and ultimate decline of aristocracy and the belief in the Divine Right of Kings.

I’ve learned from the study of the Tudor kings that the audacious dealings of Henry VII in his quest for an heir had more to do with keeping peace in the empire than simply attempting to father a male child. Prior to Henry’s reign there had been years of warring between families to claim the throne. Henry desperately hoped to maintain a firm hold of legitimacy and continuity in the royal hierarchy. He believed that only a male heir would insure that there would be no challenges to the authority of his line. Of course we know in hindsight that his beliefs about biology were erroneous and that a woman would ultimately rise to the throne and do so successfully.

This semester Dr. Newell is outlining the story of the Stuart kings who descended from Mary Queen of Scots. Because Elizabeth never married and died without an heir there were many questions about who was the rightful heir to the throne. Untangling the family tree that lead to James I  is a story in itself but the gist of his troubled monarchy lies in the fact that he was raised in Scotland as a Presbyterian and as such was never fully accepted by the people of England. His reign and that of his descendants was continually marked by both political and religious intrigue that lead to unrest, civil war and revolution.

The Protestant Reformation had let the genie out of the bottle. While the Church of England was the official religion of the land there were still Catholics and Puritans determined to defy the dictates of the king who served as the head of the church. In his efforts to demonstrate his power and legitimacy James I was rigidly doctrinaire which lead to treasonous attempts to assassinate him by religious groups, perhaps the most famous of them being the plot to blow up Parliament when James was present by a group of Catholic revolutionaries that included Guy Fawkes.

James’ son Charles did little better than his father to earn the love and respect of the people. It was during Charles’ reign more seeds of revolution were sowed as Parliament became more and more powerful and the king became more dependent on their whims. It was also a time when grand new philosophies regarding the rights of ordinary people began to flourish. The world of royalty in England would never again be quite the same.

I have been particularly intrigued by this period of time in history because I can trace my own ancestry to the times. Charles was being plagued by warring forces in Scotland. People of the Puritan faith refused to bow to his demands that they adopt the beliefs of the Church of England. In an effort to rid him of those problems while also diluting the Catholic influence of the Irish Charles encouraged many Scots to relocate to northern Ireland. It was from that migration that my paternal grandfather’s people came. He always proudly boasted that he was Scots Irish, a strange mix of cultures that I never before clearly understood. Now I know that they were probably trouble makers searching for a place where they might think for themselves.

I am also learning more about Oliver Cromwell, a defiant member of Parliament who would lead England to revolutionary ways of thinking. From a woman in my paternal grandmother’s ancestral line I am a relative of Cromwell, all of which helps me to understand my own somewhat rebellious nature and unwillingness to simply follow the crowd.

I suppose that many of the folks who eventually came to the New World in search of opportunity and a new start were pesky Puritans, Scots Irish, people who had grown weary of being persecuted and limited by kings attempting to assert their authority. The philosophies and tyranny that had once been accepted as the Divine Right of kings began to unravel with the reign of the Stuart kings and it would end with a revolution unlike anything that they might ever have imagined. It’s fun to watch it all unfold while already knowing how it will end and it’s even more exciting to know that my kinfolk were part of it. Dr. Boyd surely knows how to make history come alive!

Nothing More Special

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

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When my father’s parents were living on Arlington Street in the Houston Heights we would go visit them every Sunday after church. My grandmother always prepared a lovely dinner for us and since she was a gifted cook it was invariably our most delicious meal of the week. What was most wonderful about it had little to do with the food, however, and everything to do with the joy of sitting around her big mahogany dining table laughing and talking while we filled our bellies with her beloved dishes.

My grandmother was a stickler for tradition. She covered the table with a crisply ironed cloth on which she placed her Sunday best china. She always waited for me to arrive to set the silverware next to the plates. It was from her that I learned the proper way of placing the knives and forks and spoons and folding the napkins.

In the meantime the aroma of chicken or roast beef tempted our tastebuds while Grandma put the finishing touches on potatoes, vegetables gravy and baked breads. I marveled at her ability to juggle so many culinary tasks at one time and still be so pleasantly patient. She reveled in the art of making us happy with her homegrown abilities that were all memorized in her head. Years of practice made every single item perfect and we waited with growing anticipation for her to finally announce that it was time to gather at our places to say grace before digging into all of the wondrous foods that she had prepared.

I loved the sameness of those Sunday afternoons and I missed them when my grandparents moved away to their farm in Arkansas. My mother did her best to reproduce the feel of those Sunday afternoon galas but I sorely missed the ceremonial nature of the tradition that my grandmother had brought to the table. After my father died my mom switched to going out for brunch after church which was quite a fun treat but was not nearly as wonderful as those formal gatherings at Grandma’s house.

I suppose the my wise mother knew that attempting to reproduce our once glorious Sunday tradition without my grandparents and my father would only serve to emphasize their absence in our lives. She redirected our thoughts of the old times to the adventures of eating yummy pancakes and waffles in restaurants filled with joy and laughter. Still, I would often think about how much I missed Sunday dinner with the family until I rediscovered the routine with my mother-in-law after I married.

To my great delight she was well versed in the art of entertaining on a Sunday afternoon. Like my grandmother she prepared her dining table with fine linens and her best china, silver and glassware. She was particularly well versed in the preparation of a Sunday roast in the grand tradition of England. She had learned how to perfectly roast the meat from her mother, always including potatoes and carrots and green peas. She was masterful at making a dark brown gravy to pour over the muffin-like Yorkshire pudding that was the highlight of the feast. My husband Mike always insisted that his mom never quite mastered the art of making Yorkshire pudding the way his grandmother had, but I never found any reason to fault it. It was gloriously delicious.

As my daughters grew older my mother-in-law taught them the art of setting a table just as my grandmother had done with me. They delighted in being helpful and being part of a routine that had been passed from one generation to the next. It was one of the best times of each week for all of us as we sat together being reminded of the loveliness of family and tradition.

Once the meal was finished the menfolk always went to another room to watch sporting programs or talk about the latest news. My mother-in-law brewed coffee for them and a big pot of tea for me and my girls. She always served it so elegantly along with a tray of cookies bought especially for the occasion. She showed us how to warm the pot before pouring the hot water over the tea and cautioned us in how to wait for the brew to steep. I still laugh because her very English mother who had been born in Newcastle, England had told her that Lipton tea bags made the very best brew.

We would sit and talk about wonderful things while we sipped on our tea and munched on little cookies. I so loved those times because they reminded me of the importance of family and tradition. I’d think of my grandmother who had died when I was fifteen and how she too would have enjoyed the time spent with just us women bonding over conversation and tea.

It’s been a long while since I sat down for a traditional Sunday dinner. My mother-in-law has been gone for sixteen years now. For a time I attempted to resurrect her routine for my children and grandchildren but the world was moving so quickly for everyone that it became more and more difficult to find a time when everyone was free. Sundays used to be more sacred but now weekend homework assignments and even athletic and club obligations pull children away. Everyone is moving at breakneck speed and spending three or four hours eating and relaxing is all too often a luxury that nobody can afford.

I miss those Sunday dinners and the love that they represented. Mostly I miss the people who gathered with us on the Lord’s Day. They have been gone for so long now but I still see them smiling and laughing and enjoying the biggest feast of the week. I’m so happy that I have those wonderfully joyous moments to remember. The memories are so vivid that I can almost smell the food and see my grandmother and my mother-in-law bustling about the kitchen preparing heaping mounds of love for us. There is nothing more special than that.

Suffer the Little Children

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

brothers holding hands

The children at my church make me smile. They are so precious and innocent, God’s special creations and the future of our world. At our church they gather in the center aisle just before we adults hear the readings from the Bible and the homily from the priest or deacon. They are always so incredibly adorable that I see all of what is most beautiful in the world reflected in their little faces.

On a recent Sunday there were two brothers among the group who could not have been more than four and five years old. They were dressed in matching plaid shirts resplendent with fall colors and the older of the two tightly held his little sibling’s hand with great pride. The love between the pair shone brilliantly throughout the church and there were smiles in abundance as we all watched the little tykes sauntering off to learn about Jesus in a lesson geared more appropriately to their ages.

The gospel reading and homily is always followed by offerings from the congregation for the support of the church. The children return at that time and have their own little ceremony in which they drop dollar bills and quarters into a special basket. Once again the two brothers captivated my heart as they proudly presented their gifts. One of the parishioners gave them an extra bit of cash to place in the basket and they went back and forth between him and the place where they left the donations. All the while the big brother of the two never once let go of the younger one’s hand.

Eventually the two literally danced down the center aisle of the church in an effort to rejoin their parents. In that moment I felt certain that Jesus was smiling along with the rest of us who witnessed their guileless joy. It was such a pure and beautiful sight.

We are centered on children these days, but not always in the most appropriate ways. We know that we can’t protect them from reality forever but it’s nice to enjoy the time when they are still so filled with innocent joy. They are watching us and learning from us even when we don’t even realize that their eyes noticing everything we do. They will get tired sometimes and not behave well. They may even make us angry and impatient. We have to remember that they are not yet fully formed. We must teach them how to manage their feelings and allow them to be open and honest with us. We don’t have to be authoritarian but we must set appropriate limits from which they learn how to direct their lives.

We speak a great deal about developing and becoming the best possible versions of ourselves, but we can’t forget the children when as we continue to grow. Once my own children were college bound I offered more of my talents to my work. I was able to stay later on the job and take classes to improve my knowledge and skills. I often saw little ones who were left at school at seven in the morning and did not leave until six in the evening. They and their parents were exhausted and harried. Moms sometime complained that their babies would fall asleep on the way home and when they awakened them for dinner and bath time arguments and cranky behavior dominated the evenings. It was sad to see how anxious so many families were because of the imbalance of work and home life.

I felt for everyone because I had enjoyed the luxury of staying home with my children until they were both in school during the same hours that I worked. We had the same holidays and the same summer vacation. They never actually missed me and even when they got sick my beloved mother-in-law came to the rescue to watch them while I went to work. My girls still talk about how much they enjoyed those golden days.

I know that children are amazingly adaptable to whatever circumstances become their reality. My brothers and I learned how to live without a father in the house. So too do little ones thrive in differing situations as long as they have guidance that is centered on their well being. It does not require money or extensive activities to build character. A wise parent need only model with love and integrity to turn a boy into a man, a girl into a woman. We know that we can’t keep them as angelically innocent as the two brothers who brought smiles to our faces on that Sunday morn, but we can make certain that they will one day venture out on their own with the tools that they need to meet whatever challenges the world throws their way.

I suspect that those two boys already have a good start. Their parents are preparing them emotionally and spiritually. They are learning that they belong to and are loved by an entire community. They feel the security and protection of each other in the grip of their hand hold. Surely they will know that God is smiling on them and rooting for their success as people. It’s a wonderful start.

Your Worst Nightmares

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

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We were gathered together at my daughter’s home on a Saturday evening. It was just my two girls, two grandsons, my only granddaughter, and I deciding to play a board game. One of the boys brought out a box labeled Your Worst Nightmare. He said that he thinks that I once bought it for him. I don’t remember doing that, but it sounds like something that would appeal to me. Anyway, the premise of the game was to rank four things in order of how scary they are from greatest to least, then try to guess how someone else’s list might look. It was fun and created lots of laughs but I did a terrible job of determining what other people’s fears were. Nonetheless the little entertainment got me to thinking of what is most frightening to me and why is it so.

I suppose that the most terrifying nightmare I have ever had or thought about having revolves around the idea that I am driving across a high bridge over a deep river and somehow end up careening from the structure into the darkness of the water with only seconds to free myself from the constraints of my seatbelt, find a way to open a window, and then somehow swim to safety. In those dreams I never get past the fight to get out of the car but then I never actually drown either. I don’t know how long the dream actually lasts but I wake up shaken and exhausted whenever it occurs which luckily is infrequently.

Supposedly such a nighttime vision indicates feelings of loss of control. In my own car I suspect that they stem from my father’s death inside a car that plunged into a ditch. He died immediately upon impact so there was never a question of escape for him, but I suppose that I still have a strong desire to be able to change the course of events that lead to his death. Getting out of my own car and swimming to safety is a metaphor for being able to somehow prevent him from taking the fateful drive that ended with his heart stopping and mine breaking.

Our fears are sometimes irrational, but more often than not they are somehow related to traumas we have actually experienced. I fear being caught in a burning building because I witnessed a man being carried lifeless from his home after it caught fire. Later one of my cousins died in his bed when he fell asleep smoking. It would not be irrational for me to sense the need to be careful and to have a plan in the event of a fiery outbreak. Thus I always rehearse an escape route just to be safe wherever I go.

I can’t explain why I fear snakes as much as I do. I have had no negative experiences with them other than one occasion when I disobeyed my grandmother and came upon a frightful sight of snakes infesting a lake. They did not hurt me, but their image makes my heart race whenever I see a snake, no matter how harmless it may actually be. Perhaps it is just a primal thing or maybe a feeling of guilt for having ignored my grandmother’s instructions.

Likewise all of  the dentists that I have visited have been painless save for the cost of their procedures and yet the mere thought of going to an appointment makes my heart beat faster and a feeling of dread spreads through my entire being. Maybe it was a scene from the movie Marathon Man with Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier that planted a seed of terror in my mind or perhaps I just find the tools of the dental trade to be similar to Medieval instruments of torture. Indeed dentists are some of the nicest people that I know who bend over backwards to keep me free from pain. I really don’t know why they scare me so.

Our fears are personal and not always easily understood which is why we all did so poorly in the game that asked us to determine how well we knew the fears of others. Nonetheless it was quite enlightening to learn about what actually terrifies another person. Everything from being dumped by a friend or lover to working in a cubical can make someone break into a cold sweat, while walking through a graveyard at midnight might be little more than a fun adventure.    

We humans are undoubtedly complex and what we don’t like can be as individual as what pleases us. I have a niece who would be totally comfortable having nonpoisonous snakes roaming around her house. My husband thinks that visits to the dentist are a piece of cake. My brother ran into burning structures for a living. On the other hand those same individuals might dread speaking in front of an audience which I actually enjoy. Our nightmares are often simply reflections of traumatic events or feelings from our lives. In my own case loss of control is what drives my greatest fears and no doubt my need to be in charge of my own fate has its foundations in the one moment over which I had no power, the death of my father.

Few of us actually sit around morosely worrying over things that go bump in the night but our dreams are windows into the sub conscious part of ourselves that lie in wait to frighten us while we sleep. It’s all a quite normal process but actually admitting to things that seem irrational is a difficult thing to do. Playing a game with people that we trust helps us bring our worries to the surface and sometimes even helps us to laugh when we feel as though we are about to cry. A bit of honesty in the name of fun can be a therapeutic way of understanding ourselves and the people that we love. It also reminds us that each of us is very human.