A STORY WORTH TELLING
“There are only two lasting bequests we can give our children – one is roots, and the other, wings.”
— Hodding S. Carter
Dear kids and grandkids, Every day, I live with history around me including aging pieces that sat unmoved in my grandparents’ home for 63 years.
They include a curved glass buffet with a table and chairs purchased as used furniture during the 1920s by your great- and great-great-grandparents. Plus, a bedroom suite and a library table. To visitors, they are antiques. To me, they are time machines.
Please let me explain that connection.
My next birthday will be number 79; the exact age my grandfather was when he died in 1967.
I was 19, old enough to know him well as a child, but only now old enough to understand the sheer scale of what his eyes witnessed compared to mine. And I’m awe-struck by how two lifetimes can span nearly 140 years of rampant human progress yet remain anchored by tangible timeless reminders.
Some of those reminders are pieces that graced the residence of S.V. and Hattie Lois Aldridge in Pittsburg from Halloween 1930 until my grandmother died in 1993.
Because their home remained a living time capsule, my childhood summers are permanently woven into this furniture. When I look at it, memories flow.
I see their dining room filled with family, the table laden with food my grandmother spent hours cooking. I hear laughter and clinking cutlery at Sunday and Christmas dinners.
I vividly remember being just tall enough to reach the top of the buffet, stretching for the cut-glass dish where Granny kept bananas.
I’m at home with the bedroom suite where I slept during my magical summer visits—the dresser with the same clock. The bed still wears the chenille bedspread, today some 70 years old, where I played for hours tracing the tufted patterns like tracks for my toy train.
Remembering that now feels incredibly poetic. My grandfather was born in Hamburg, Mississippi, in 1888. He went to work for the railroad in 1901 at just 13 years old and spent 53 years on the rails, a career that ended with a heart attack in 1954.
He worked through the transition from horse-and-buggies to automobiles in the early 20th century. He witnessed two world wars, fought in World War I in France, and saw the dawn of airplanes, electricity, radio and television. Had he lived just two more years, until 1969, he would have witnessed the humans landing on the moon.
By contrast, my 78 years have spanned the dawn of the Space Age, the rise of the internet, smartphones in our pockets and a completely interconnected digital world.
My grandfather was also a uniquely special figure in my life. Dad’s parents were the only grandparents I grew up with and spent meaningful time with.
The bond I share with my dad’s parents, and the physical things they left behind, became my deepest anchor to the generations before me. When I look at it, I think of them, and I think of you.
History isn’t just something found in textbooks. It’s alive in my house.
I am writing this praying that you will consider these pieces not as relics of the past, but as a promise for the future. You carry their resilience and my memories in your DNA.
I hope some of you will become caretakers of these pieces someday.
And, more importantly, that you will take care of the stories I write that keep them alive.
All my love, Grandpa Leon Contact Aldridge at leonaldridge@gmail. com. Other Aldridge columns are archived at leonaldridge.com.
