Thursday, July 10, 2008 ;
2:30 PM
When Sarah, my mom, was 21 years old, her Dad became sheriff of Hancock County, Findlay, Ohio. The family moved to the old jail building, a huge stone edifice that looked like all the other government buildings of the 20's. My Grandma Cooper became the cook for the prisoners, and for the first time in history, the prisoners of that town ate better than the righteous citizens. Grandma was German and a FANTASTIC cook.
When Mom went to Chicago to college, she met a young country boy from a dirt-poor southern Ohio farm. He was a fire-ball preacher, out-spoken, funny and a lover of hunting, making wooden gun stocks, and literature. Mom was a reserved, quiet, well-behaved Scotch/German musician who had grown up in the city and loved opera and the Ohio State Buckeyes. Totally, totally opposite, so of course they fell in love.
After college and marriage, Mom and Dad traveled from church to church doing what was called "evangelism". They had VERY LITTLE MONEY (you don't go into the ministry if your main goal is to make money), so their first home was a bedroom upstairs in the county jail! When little Margie was born in 1951, guess where her first home was? You're right, the county jail! I've gotten a lot of mileage out of that.
But let me go back to the year before, 1950. Dad went up to Michigan for a revival and also went hunting in the deep woods with several friends. He had orange on, saw his friend take aim at him, hollered "Don't shoot, it's me!!" and got shot anyway. The bullet went clean through his shoulder, and the friends panicked and stuffed his wound with KLEENEX. The Doctor said later it wasn't the bullet that almost killed him, but the bits of Kleenex.
Wow. And Mom was 8 months pregnant with me! She had to travel up there, stay in some nice church people's home, travel on the bus every day to the hospital, and contemplate being a widow before she would be a mother. But, God came through for them and used a grouchy, agnostic doctor to pull Daddy through. When Daddy tried to thank him, the old doc brushed him off. "It wasn't me at all. It was the 'man upstairs'." And Mom lived through that! What a trouper.
Tomorrow - "Coloring the Carpet"
Labels: Sarah Dorsey
♫♫♪♫♪ from Marg
Marg Marshall, 2:30 PM
