Category: Stories (Page 1 of 3)

MAY IT PLEASE THE COURT

I practiced law in Monroe, NC for 37 years, from 1971-2008, when I was 62. When asked why I retired at 62, I say that I only practiced and never got very good at it so I decided to hang up my spikes, or, put another way, to take down my shingle. 

Several years after I retired, my wife Janet’s 1st cousin, Lee Douglas Flowe called me at home about a small legal matter, foreclosing on some property in neighboring Stanley Co on which he had taken a mortgage (a mortgage can be used to secure a debt with real estate in NC, but I’ve never seen one because a deed of trust is used for the same purpose probably 99.99% of the time in NC, but the term “mortgage” is often used in lieu of “deed of trust”) to secure a loan he had made to a friend of his grandson. He had contacted the Trustee in the deed of trust, normally the lawyer who prepared it, who explained the foreclosure process, but his explanation left Lee Douglas (hereinafter [I love these legal, or I guess, quasi-legal terms, used for brevity, that is, one word instead of many, which I’m now using, many that is, to explain how handy they are and how they eliminate the use of so many words, thus aiding brevity {being the sharp reader that you are, I’m sure you picked up on my subtle humor here}], “LD”), somewhat perplexed. 

PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES

If I remember correctly (let me say right here at the beginning that at 76.5 years of age my memory is still pretty good but I’m sure is slipping little by little such that when I get a few pages into this story, I won’t remember completely what I’ve written before, and will probably even comment on such, as I’m want [or is it wont, or is this improper grammar altogether?] to do, so, I’m going to try to refrain from using the “if I remember correctly” caveat hereinafter, asking anyone who might stumble onto this story to remember as you read further that I may or may not be remembering correctly what I say), the 1949-51 Ford automobile was the same each year, with maybe just a few hardly noticeable improvements. The first car I remember us having was one of those years’ Ford sedans, a black 4-door.

 I’ve just counted 393 classmates of mine in the East Wind, our annual, who graduated with me in 1964 (I’m the 394^th) from East Mecklenburg High School on Monroe (where I practiced law from 1971 until I retired at 62 in 2008) Road in Charlotte, NC. My count could be off because I made it at 7:30AM this morning, July 25, 2022 while listening to Rep Adam Kinzinger, Rep-Illinois being interviewed on Morning Joe discussing whether the Jan 6 committee should subpoena Ginni Thomas (damn right, IMHO).

If you’re reading this (bless your little pea pickin’ heart [remember whose line that was?]) from my website, tomcaldwell.org, if you’ll read the intro to TOM’S RAMBLINGS, you’ll learn probably more than you need or want to know about me, but to save you that step, I’ll tell you that I started first grade, no kindergarten, at Oakhurst School, grades 1-12, also on Monroe Rd, in the Oakhurst community, 3-4 miles closer to downtown Charlotte than East Meck when we were living in an old frame house which the folks rented from Mr. Neal Craig on Sharon Amity Rd, only a couple of hundred yards beyond the RR tracks as you’re going from Monroe Rd toward Cotswold. I’ve written about the house and yard as our sports venue in MY SPORTING LIFE, where I’ve also told about my 4 year older bro Bill and the gang of his peers that he let me hang out with. 

Gleaned from their obituaries:

CHARLES FRANKLIN GRIFFIN “passed away peacefully” (me: have you ever seen an obit which said the deceased died in a rage, screaming obscenities at his wife and children?) at the Cypress in Charlotte on May 12, 2014. He was born in Unionville, NC in 1926 to N. Charles and Mary M. Griffin. He was predeceased by his brothers Joseph M. Griffin and Elbert C. Griffin, sister Kathryn Griffin Hall, and son-in-law Arthur P. Rice. He graduated from UNC in 1947 with a BS (me: I think that stands for Bachelor of Science, not what some of you yokels are thinking) in Commerce (me: now Business, I’m thinking). After his sophomore year, he enlisted in the Navy (me: wonder if he could swim?) and spent most of his two year Naval career in the Philadelphia Naval Hospital due to a severe hearing impairment (me: without his hearing aids, Frank was almost deaf). He graduated from Duke Law School in 1950 and spent the next year at the Duke Legal Aid Clinic (doesn’t sound like the Frank I knew) before returning to Monroe where he practiced law for over 50 years. He is survived by his wife Betsy, daughters, Pamela and Tina and four grandchildren, Sally and Griffin Boiter and Andrew and Caroline Rice.

JAMES EDWARDS GRIFFIN, 85, “passed away” (me: peacefully or fighting against the dying of the light? Remind me to tell you about what Jim told me his father said about dying) in the Hospice House in Monroe on January 3, 2014. He was born in Union County in 1928 to William Doss Griffin, Sr. and Mary Ethel Edwards Griffin (me: remind me to tell you what Jim told me about his mother’s notions about visiting relatives). He served in the Merchant Marines during WWII and “was also well known as an Attorney At Law serving this area for several decades.” He is survived by his wife Joan, three sons, Bart Griffin and Scott and Andy Webb, two daughters, Elizabeth Griffin and Amee Webb; 8 grandchildren, Tyler Griffin, Blair Griffin, Jason Cruz, Scott Foltz, Daniel Foltz, Nina Webb and Nate Brewer. He was preceded in death by grandson Jacob Webb. 

Growing up, I don’t know what I would have done and who I would have become without sports. Artists and musicians would probably say the same thing about their art and music. Maybe mathematicians and chemists say as much about numbers and molecules, and poets about their rhyme and meter, or whatever it is that makes modern poetry.

 If you’ve read any of my rambling stories, you know I can’t resist an aside (I’m not sure that word is completely appropriate here but it popped into my brain, and, since I don’t remember ever having used it before either verbally or in type, I decided to throw it in, appropriate or not), or, more colloquially, chasing a rabbit. So, here goes:

                                            THANKSGIVINGS, HALF-BRO (?) JOE, and MO

                           Begun Nov 23, 2021-Completed hopefully by Nov 25, hopefully, 2021

The most important Thanksgiving for me was in 1938, eight years before I was born. Dad and Mom were married at Mom’s aunt and my great Aunt Em’s(Emma Dunn Cook, sister of my maternal Grandmother Nancy Dunn Beaty-I’ve written a little about Mom and her sister, Edna living at Aunt Em’s in an earlier story entitled My Most Unforgettable Character about my maternal Grandfather, William Badger Beaty) house off Tuckaseegee Rd in Charlotte on Thanksgiving Day, 1938. I don’t know who married them, who attended, whether they celebrated by eating Aunt Em’s whole wheat biscuits (Bill, Harry and I thought they were delicacies, probably just because they were different from Mom’s white flour biscuits), or anything else about their nuptials. I don’t know where they spent their first married night, maybe in or near Asheville. Dad was living in Atlanta and they must have been headed there, but they at least stopped in Asheville because we have a photo of them in their Sunday best, Mom wearing a hat and corsage and Dad a tie, topcoat and hat, outside the Grove Park Inn in the snow. In commenting on the picture in the past, I’ve said that they didn’t stay in the Grove Park because they couldn’t afford to, but I really don’t know if that’s true. Maybe one of them told that but if so, I don’t remember them telling it. Maybe, like how many stories from our past get embellished with time, I, to use a phrase of my sons, “put a little meat in” that story.

                                                                              STRANGERS                    

I don’t know when or how I developed my fairly recently (the last few years, I guess) acquired proclivity for meeting and engaging perfect strangers in conversation. Maybe for most of my 75 years it’s been somewhat dormant, lurking right under my skin, or awaiting just the right time to emerge. I don’t remember, but cousin Mary Lynn Caldwell Morrill says that at extended Caldwell family gatherings, usually at Grandma’s house, my dad and his 11 siblings’ (Mary Lynn is the oldest child of the oldest of the 12, my Uncle Frank) birth and home place, I was running around, bugging everybody, asking endless questions and getting in to mischief while brother, Bill, 4 years older, was the reserved and perfectly behaving elder statesman (brother Harry, 2 years younger, was yet to be classified). The Kiser (my Aunt Verla Kiser had 4 sons and one daughter) boys (Frankie, the youngest, was 8 years my senior) had two, probably more but two that I remember, usual responses to my incessant queries: 1) “You’re too little in the britch(es)”, and 2) “That’s for me to know and you to find out”. (A few days after writing this paragraph, I called 1^st cousin, Ben Franklin, who I hadn’t talked with in a while, and told him about this story I’m writing. He said he remembered me as being pretty quiet and reserved in the old days, traits that he only began to notice receding in recent years. Who knows or cares where my inquisitiveness came from? The fact is, it’s arrived in spades!)

                                                                                                                                 THE FIRST TIME

When is the last time you did something for the very first time in your life? At my age, 75 years and almost 3 months, it doesn’t happen very often; in fact, I can’t remember the last time it happened, that is, until it happened yesterday, Thursday, May 20, 2021.

                                                                              WESTWARD HO, THE WINSTONS GO, TEMPORARILY

I wonder if Albert Tweed had heard Horace Greeley’s admonition to “Go west young man, go west” when he decided to load his wife, two daughters and son Douglas, my wife Janet’s paternal grandfather, on a covered wagon and go to California in the 1870s. They got there, probably looking for gold, and when I suppose there was little to be found, they boarded a ship and sailed to Charleston, SC and made their way back up to Marshall, NC, 25 miles NE of Asheville, hard up against Tennessee. Albert may have gained his adventurous spirit and passion for travel when he joined his father Neely and his brothers in going north and fighting for the Union Army, after Neely, the Lincoln sympathizing Republican clerk of court, had shot and killed Ranson Merrill, the Democratic sheriff of Madison Co in April, 1861, as revenge for the sheriff shooting his son.  Merrill, brandishing his pistol with his fellow Democratic Confederates to celebrate their slim victory over the Republicans in an election to decide, along with the 99 other counties in NC, whether to join the Confederacy, most likely drinking moonshine and shouting “bring on those Yankees”, as in a similar fictional scene from Gone With The Wind when it was announced that the Confederacy had declared war on the United States,  apparently by accident,  winged Neely’s youngest son, Elijah, who was milling around the crowd in front of the courthouse on the main street of Marshall, with just a flesh wound. A year or so after Albert and family returned to Marshall from California, he told his wife they were going to California again. She, obviously an intelligent woman, refused, protesting that they had almost died on their last trip, having to trade their blankets to the Indigenous Americans for food. So, she took her two daughters to Knoxville and worked in a hotel to make ends meet, but Albert and son Douglas went west again, getting as far as Kansas, where they stayed for several years before returning to Madison Co.

                                                       CHRISTMASES LONG AND NOT SO LONG AGO

I don’t know which is the earliest Christmas that I remember. We have a black and white photo somewhere of Mom playing the piano, with Dad sitting beside her on the piano stool, and Bill, Harry and I in our pajamas with hymnbooks in our hands singing what must have been Christmas carols since there’s a Christmas tree in the corner in the living room of the old, white frame house we rented from Mr. Neal Craig on Sharon Amity Rd between 1948-9 and 1955. I guess Frosty first and later Bing caused us to associate snow with Christmas. Whether it was on or near Christmas I don’t know, but I remember Dad and Bill racing each other, barefooted if memory serves me correctly or maybe in or also in their under wear through the snow to the chicken house behind the house, and back. Don’t remember who won; also, the only time I ever remember Dad running anywhere, but I do remember thinking it was the coolest, literally and figuratively, event I’d witnessed to that point in my young life.