Taking Time for a Child
Oops! Yesterday morning I realized that I didn’t explain the framed “Charles” above the calendar in this photo that I included in Long Days, Short Years.
When I was a girl, I saw an embroidered fabric name patch like that almost every Monday through Saturday. It is from one of the uniform shirts Daddy wore in his daddy’s grocery store (actually most people called Daddy by both his first and middle names, Charles Leland).
Besides seeing Daddy in his uniform shirt and khaki pants at home, I went to Daddy Leland’s grocery store almost every day. I felt at home all over the store–at the checkout stand with Earlene the checker, in the butcher department with my Uncle Ronnie, in the backroom with Emory the produce man, and especially in the aisles where Daddy put up stock,
At Boyd’s Market, Daddy also wore a white bib apron. I wish I had a photo of him like that. For some reason, he is wearing a plaid shirt and a red apron in this picture, but it is still a great illustration of what Daddy did at the store. Here he stands beside bottle after bottle of dishwashing soap that he had placed on the shelves himself, while leaning on boxes of Wesson® cooking oil, waiting to go on their shelf.
The store’s backroom had three sections: a silver metal walk-in freezer, the produce preparation area, and the stock area where boxes of groceries waited for Daddy to put them on shelves. Every Thursday afternoon a semi-truck from one of the grocery warehouses in Nashville arrived at the loading dock. Daddy and other employees unloaded one box after another.
Emory the produce man was Daddy Leland’s next door neighbor. He took vegetables out of wooden crates and wrapped them individually for sale. I liked to help Emory, especially with the lettuce. After a head of iceberg lettuce (we didn’t sell any other kind) was dropped into a plastic bag, it was fun to grab the two sides of the open end and spin the lettuce around and around to twist them. It was also fun to push the twisted ends into a little contraption that wrapped a piece of red tape around them.
In the butcher department, I watched Uncle Ronnie cut up meat and make hamburger. Sometimes I peeked inside the walk-in cooler and saw sides of beef hanging from giant hooks. Once when I was a teenager, Daddy Leland hired me to be Uncle Ronnie’s assistant for two weeks, while his regular assistant was on vacation. Uncle Ronnie put meat and chicken into trays and passed them on to me.
As I stood in front of the wrapping stand, I stretched plastic wrap over a filled tray. I then set it on a heated pad which sealed the plastic. My next jobs were to weigh the package and then hold it up to the sticker machine to attach the price. I can’t tell you how many times through the years I have remembered a whole chicken lying bare in a tray before me as I prepared to wrap it. It’s funny what we remember.
My memories of Daddy Leland’s store are sweet. I don’t know what this photographer was aiming at when he took this picture, but here we are: Mother, my brother Steve, and me in front of Boyd’s Market. I must have been about six years old. I’m sure that Mother had made both of our dresses.
My memories are so sweet that I have made the hall outside our kitchen a pantry and I have decorated it as our own little Boyd’s Market. I sponged the walls to look like the brick exterior of Daddy Leland’s old country store which he ran before building his little supermarket in Ashland City.
Sometimes we got gifts from particular companies or from the warehouse. This set of tins was one of them. It stayed in my under-my-bed “hope chest” until Ray and I got married.
I am thankful that I could watch Mother work in her sewing business at home and then walk across our backyard and the grocery store parking lot to see Daddy at his work. I am also thankful that I was surrounded by other adults– some relatives and some grown-up friends–all of whom cared about me and had time for me. I don’t remember Mother, Daddy, Earlene, Emory, or Uncle Ronnie ever making me feel that I was in the way — though I probably was. I learned that adults could carry out their responsibilities while still taking time for a little child. That makes me think of Someone else who did that 2,000 years ago.
And they were bringing children to Him
so that He might touch them; but the disciples rebuked them.
But when Jesus saw this, He was indignant and said to them,
“Permit the children to come to Me. . .”
And He took them in His arms and began blessing them,
laying His hands on them.
Mark 10:13-14, 16