Siblings

[No date noted.]

My sister was on the phone. She is a little older than me and, like most people, still retains childhood jealousies when anything good happens to a younger sibling.

"Saw your picture in the paper," she said, trying to sound disinterested.

Scan of Jim's column headline, circa 1990

"Yes, what did you think of it?" I asked.

"You're looking older, more gray in your hair." She paused. "More wrinkles. And you're putting on weight. How much did you pay them?"

"I didn't pay them anything," I protested. "The paper asked me for the picture, said they wanted to see what I looked like. Is that so hard to believe?"

She ignored my question. "I have to admit when I first saw your picture, I thought you had been arrested and I was glad Daddy is not alive to see it. You know what a law and order man he was, it would have broke his heart."  She hardly stopped for breath. "I bet you didn't read any other story that was in the paper. I bet you just sat and looked at your picture all week."

"I did too read some other stories in the paper. There was a story on the front page about a mussel diver who said he contacted a body while working in 22 feet of water in Kentucky Lake, but then he lost it, then he found it again. But couldn't bring it to the surface."

The thought occurred to me that the body could have been that of our kinswoman, Mary Parker, who escaped from her grave at Mt. Zion Cemetery some months before. Mary had lived down near Harmon's Creek. Maybe that high ground at Mt. Zion was just too dry for Mary and she decided to go swimming.

"Don't go making jokes about a dead person." She sounded pained. "So you read the front page and nothing else?"

"Sure!! I saw the pictures of all the high school graduating kids. A lot of names sounded familiar, I probably know most of the fathers and grandfathers. And that's not all, in the "Liberty News," Andrea Madden wrote about a preacher who had hit the happy trail because he wasn't being paid enough.  In her "Chalk Hill" column, Nell Morrisette mentioned a lady from Ooltewah, Tennessee. That sent me scuttling for my atlas. I never heard of that town before. Sure enough! There it was, in the Southeast corner of the state, a few miles east of Chattanooga. And there are only two people in the obituary section this week, which is a considerable improvement over the last issue."

My sister seemed not to have heard. "I hope," she grunted, "if they print your picture again, they do it in color - not black and white - so the wrinkles will stand out more."