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When I was a little girl, my daddy worked in his daddy’s grocery store. I loved to visit him at work. I stopped by on my way to school in the morning and on my way home in the afternoon. Sometimes Daddy was helping a customer, bagging her groceries or carrying her brown paper bags to the car. At other times, he was stocking shelves. I knew the process well. He rolled boxes out from the stock room on a green metal cart and headed up an aisle. He put a cardboard box on the floor, cut the top off with his box cutter, and began to price the cans. In those days, prices were applied with a metal pricing tool. Daddy rolled individual bands of numbers around on it until he had the correct numbers and the cent or dollar sign lined up. The rubber numbers grabbed ink from a built-in ink pad before Daddy banged the pricer on a can and they left their marks. Daddy quickly went down the first layer of cans in his box, “Cha-chunk, cha-chunk, cha-chunk.” He put the cans on the shelf and then priced the next layer of cans underneath. I stood, watching or talking to him, until it was time to go to school or head home.

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I found this pricer at an antique store.
The nametag came off of one of Daddy’s work shirts.

Boyd’s Market delivered groceries to ladies around town. I can still see Daddy standing by the store’s wall phone taking down an order. Sometimes on Saturdays or in the summer, I got to climb into Daddy Leland’s pickup truck while Daddy delivered an order. Whether in the store or on a delivery, Daddy smiled and talked with our customers and he made them smile. In my home are two treasured possessions that once belonged to one of the sweet little old ladies to whom Daddy delivered groceries, a rocking chair and this little bowl.

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Another fun trip was when Daddy loaded up a big pile of cardboard and we headed off to the town dump. No landfills in those days in my little town. We crossed the iron bridge across the Cumberland River, turned left on River Road, and soon headed behind a little hill where everyone threw their garbage into a valley where it was burned.

My memories of those days were prompted by a story I heard at the Georgia homeschool convention last weekend.  I was showing a mother a lesson about the 1957 civil rights crisis at Little Rock Central High School. I’ll call this mother Karen. I told Karen about the time I met a homeschooling mother who grew up knowing Ernest Green, one of the most famous people involved in that crisis. This prompted Karen to tell me a story from her husband’s childhood.

Karen’s husband (I’ll call him Mike) grew up in Kansas City. Sometimes, especially on Saturday, Mike went to work with his dad, who worked as a chef and manager at a place where major events were held in Kansas City. Sometimes when Mike’s dad needed to run an errand, he left his young son with a very nice and very old gentleman. The gentleman would play finger games with Mike until his dad returned. Years later when Mike was in high school, he studied World War II. In his book was a photograph of a man who looked very familiar. He went to his dad and said, “I know him.” Turns out that Mike’s occasional babysitter was former President Harry Truman. Sometimes when Harry was tired of being former President Truman and wanted to be just plain, ol’ Harry, he would duck into Mike’s dad’s office to hide. When Mike’s dad needed someone to watch his young son, the former President was happy to oblige.

Your children won’t remember every detail of every day that they spend with you, but as you live with them moment by moment, you are filling their hearts with good experiences and teachings and feelings that are helping to mold who they will become. Some of those experiences will become their own precious childhood memories.

When I was a son to my father,
Tender and the only son in the sight of my mother,
Then he taught me and said to me,
“Let your heart hold fast my words;
Keep my commandments and live.”
Proverbs 4:3-4, NASB

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