Words from WW Blog

WORDS FROM W.W.                                                          June 30, 2014

There are some things that stay with you even though they don’t make sense. Kind of like that old TV that is sitting in the family room. It’s been a part of the family. You don’t just take a part of the family to the dump!

My “blankie” falls even more securely into this category. My blankie is my blanket. It’s been my blanket since…about August of 1979. I say “about” because I married my wife on July 28, 1979. She brought the blanket into the marriage relationship. It was hers. You know that saying, “What’s hers is his!”  I actually don’t know if that is a saying or not, but it should be.

Soon after July 28 “the blankie” transferred partial ownership to me. That means, it crept to my side of the bed at night.

There’s gold, and then there are those few things that are more valuable than gold. My “blankie” is threaded gold.

When we go on driving vacations I take it with me. I don’t take it places if I’s flying. I don’t trust the airlines that much.

I took it on a mission trip to British Columbia…three days drive away! I took it to Park City, Utah last summer.

I took it to camp where I was being the camp pastor. I needed some form of comfort in the midst of a multitude of middle school students, many whom were discovering that there was an opposite sex that could offer them a different kind of comfort.

I took it to Arizona and South Dakota. For thirty-five years it has just felt…right!

Now it is beginning to look pitiful, like the family dog that just lays around and whimpers. My blanket has a few holes in it, frayed ends, faded patterns, and stuffing that is settling in the same spot, like a middle-aged man whose body has decided to most gather around the waist and stomach.

The other thing that makes this unique…and weird, is that my grandmother made incredible quilts. Sixty years after the fact they are in almost-mint condition. They are warm and comfortable, memories for me of my Mamaw Helton who had “settler skills.” That means that she could have survived on the frontier is she wanted. Quilt-making was just one of her gifts. She could kill a chicken, clean it, and fry it up for dinner almost as fast as my Papaw could drive to the grocery and buy a chicken from the butcher. She kept the eastern Kentucky farm going that she and my Papaw owned.

I slept with those quilts as I was growing up. Somewhere along the line after July 28, 1979 I switched over to the “blankie.”

My wife sometimes thinks I love my blanket more than her. That’s not true! Although my blankie doesn’t kick me at night when I snore. She reminds me that the blanket was hers first, but I remind her that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

When I die I hope my blankie is still around. If so I want to it to be buried with me. I don’t want to have to worry about wearing a suit as I’m all laid out in the casket. When do I ever wear a suit while I’m laying down in this lifetime? My mom would never permit such a thing. I can hear her say, “It’s going to get all wrinkled!”

So just cover me with my blankie. Throw a tee shirt on me just in case chest hair is upsetting to some, but drape my tired perishing physique in my tired perishing blanket and let me rest in comfortable.

I know I’ll be walking the streets of gold in heaven, but if I get to nap in paradise I hope I can have my threadbare gold wrapped around me. It only makes sense. It fits…comfortably!…in my picture of perfection!

This entry was posted on June 30, 2014 at 4:35 pm and is filed under children, Death, Humor, love, marriage, Story. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: blanket, comfort, gold, paradise, quilt, quilt-making, sleep, treasured possessions