Matthew Dickerson, Addison Independent, April 5, 2001 (reprinted by permission)
I've been feeling just a little old lately. It started on the court where I play in a regular lunch-time hoops game. I've been coming home bruised, battered, and sore--which is nothing new, except that now it takes me five days to recover instead of a five hours. When I first started with that group, I was one of the younger guys. Last week there were a number of participants half my age.
Of course there are also a few regulars who are wiser than me by a decade (or more). If any of them are reading this column, I'm sure they're telling me to close my mouth--though perhaps not so politely. It's not their voices that keep me from complaining aloud, however. Two weeks ago, my grandmother, Inez Riddle, turned ninety-eight years old. She has now outlived three of her five children and two of her grandchildren. She has outlived her only husband by just over a quarter of a century. She has outlived her hearing and her sight, and most of her bone mass. She, I guess, has a right to complain about her body not being what it once was.
Her short term memory and her grasp of the present have also declined--while her distant memory has grown less distant. Which is to say, she has begun to live in the past again. Surprisingly, this reverting of her memory hasn't hindered her ability to tell good stories. She's always been a story-teller, but now her tales of days gone by seem like just yesterday. Among other things, Grandma talks a lot about her late husband, my grandfather Thomas C. Riddle. Though I was only thirteen when he died, I remember plenty about Grandpa Riddle. Among other things, he was an avid hunter. In part this was out of necessity. A coal-miner turned Nazarene preacher, he helped supplement his meager depression-era pastor's income selling the pelts of rabbits he shot in the corn-fields of southern Indiana. But mostly, I suppose, he was drawn to hunting by the sheer joy of the sport. He was a superb marksman who once brought down a deer with a .22 caliber pistol. I can still remember him showing me his prized gun collection, including that little pistol with its 4x scope.
I never had the chance to hunt with my grandfather, being still a bit young when he died, but he and my uncle Bill did take me fishing a few times in old quarries near his home. The crappies, rock bass, hornpout, and perch were only half as interesting as the bait we used to catch them. As a ten-year old boy, I wasn't too squeamish gathering crawfish by the bucketful from a local farm pond, but I confess I did find it a challenge to peal off their shells--a process that my uncle Bill claimed made them more appealing to the fish.
I was the last grandchild to see Thomas Riddle, spending Thanksgiving of 1975 at his house before his death on Christmas morning of that year. Despite his stroke, he was still one sharp cribbage player even up to the end. He'd forget whose deal it was, but he never missed a point pegging. Being in the younger half of more than a dozen grandchildren, I didn't inherit any of his guns. But my middle name I inherited from him, and have proudly passed on to my oldest son.
Maybe because I have her husband's name, my grandmother still remembers me, and my three boys, all of whom she has held in her lap. So now when we get together, we swap stories. She gets excited to hear that I still fish and hunt, carrying on the tradition of my namesake. Indeed, she is almost as happy to hear stories of my adventures (and misadventures) as to tell her own. I don't complain to her about body aches. I guess I still have a way to go before I've earned that right. In any case, if I live to be that old, and if I'm still writing this column then, I hope you'll forgive me if I repeat a few of my old stories (assuming, of course, that you're still around to read them.)