Growing up in the city
November 9, 2009 (Monday)
November 3 was my maternal grandmother’s birthday. This would have been her 124th birthday, but she died at 85 in 1971. I called her, “Mama,” and I called my mother, “Mother.” I lived with her and my grandfather a lot when I was growing up. My parents divorced and remarried some time between my birth and the births of my twin sisters two years and nine months later. So I lived with my grandparents for a while back then even though I don’t remember it.
My parents had a stormy relationship with each other, and found it hard to stay together, so I lived with my grandparents off and on until I was five or six, then my parents stuck it out as I went to the first through third grades, when it all fell apart again. I was back with my grandparents but my sisters, I think, were living with other relatives in my father’s family. When my sisters started to school, we all got back together in a house two doors down from the school, but after that school year all three of us moved back with the grandparents. We lived with them for the next three years, until I was in the eighth grade and my sisters were in the fifth. Our father remarried and we started living with him and our stepmother. After one year, our mother remarried and I moved to live with my mother and stepfather, where I stayed until mid-way through my senior year of high school, when I moved back with my father and stepmother. My sisters alternated between the two families, with the two of them sometimes together and sometimes separated. We grew up living in at least eighteen different houses. Two half-brothers and two half-sisters became part of the family as time went by.
When I went away to college in 1949, I never lived in Houston again until 2004 when I started preaching at Timbergrove Baptist Church here in the Heights.
For some reason, when I think of growing up I always think of my grandparents, who took us in and taught us a lot. Most of all, they loved us and let us know it.
My twin sisters are widows and I am a widower. When we get together for lunch these days, people see three senior citizens at a table, but I think we feel like three little kids searching for a childhood.