"All the flags are for me"

That is what my papaw (grandfather) said to me sometime in the 1970's.  In small town Clinton, Tennessee every business and home put out Old Glory on flag day.  Or as my grandfather wanted me to believe, in honor of his birthday.  Papaw Keith was born on June 14, 1908.  Flag Day was proclaimed an observance by President Wilson in 1916.  So my grandfather had memories of his birthday when there were no flags.  Someone maybe told him when the flags came out that they were all for him.  And he passed the joke on to me.  He was born Theodore Benjamin Keith, but everyone called him "Red"  because of his hair.  (Thankyou Scotch Irish genes).  His initials were T B.  Also the initials of the disease that took his father's life and I think one of his brothers.  So he legally changed his name to Benjamin Theodore.  The Benjamin came from president Harrison and the Theodore came from President Roosevelt.  Good GOP names for a good old GOP family.  (I guess I broke the trend.)  BT Keith graduated from the sixth grade, Glenn Alpine grammar school.  Farming was more important than school.  So that was the extent of his education.  Yet he read the newspaper every afternoon.  Maybe that's where the news hound in me comes from.  And he walked everyday down to the corner store to buy the paper. I love to walk too.   I spent my meditation this morning with some memories of my grandfather. He died in 1988.  He made eighty with a bad heart and some alzheimers.  I saw him one time in dream after his death.  He was lying in a hammock.  The face was the old man's face I remember, but the body was that of a healthy thirty year old.  Like he was telling me it was him and that he was okay. When he was alive he would quote Benjamin Franklin without attritbution.  "Once a job is first begun, never stop till it is done, be it labor great or small,do it well or not at all." Sometimes when I want to take a short cut at work I hear those words and most of the time I don't take the shortcut.  He had this strange habit of picking up pennies and saying "We may need this penny to pay our taxes."  What a great guy.  And he is still with me in memory and in spirit.  Maybe all those flags were for him.

In Light,
Enoch