Persistence – To try and try again.

When my oldest daughter, Melissa, was learning to talk one of her first words was persistence. I would ask her, what’s the magic word, and she would say, persistence. What’s that mean, I would ask, and she would say, try and try again. Lest anyone think I was attempting to start some sort of cult let me share with you how all this came about.

When I was in college I took a course in education psychology. My teacher hammered into us that parents create in their children a core set of fundamental beliefs that govern how the child will respond to the world. She emphasized that the number of ideas that would form this core group of beliefs would be relatively small but that they would have an indelible impact on the child. Normally this implanting of values is done by parents with very little thought. In most cases what we do reflects what our parents did. My instructor challenged us to sit down and carefully decide what theme or themes we want to create in our home. Her ideal was to consciously pass on the good we learned from our parents but to leave the bad behind.

She opined that if a parent tried to teach too many beliefs the parents impact would actually be diluted, so we had to create a focus for ourselves and our children. To create a theme in our home and in our child a handful of values or beliefs had to be reinforce to the exclusion of others. We had to write a short paper identifying the core values we would attempt to transfer to our children and why. For my class project I chose faith, family and persistence.

I took all this to heart and set about teaching Melissa persistence. Man did I succeed. Melissa’s persistence is legendary. There were times especially when she was a teenager that I had serious doubts about the wisdom of me teaching Melissa to be so persistent. To this day Melissa is focused and extremely persistent about everything in her life. She is truly amazing and fortunately she has learned some patience as she has gotten older.

When my second daughter, Kristina, was born I chose the same three core values I had taught Melissa but I added a fourth, patience.

The adults in this picture from left to right are Millicent Armand Carr

Kenneth Warford

Uncle Chuck Warford

Uncle Floyd Warford

Aunt Katherine (Kitty) Pool Warford

Mamaw, Sally Teague Warford

Papaw, Elmer Warford

The kids are:

Eddie Warford

Jerry Warford

I am the baby

I was born in Houston, Texas but my parents moved to Arkansas when I was only about six weeks old. This was the first of many moves. For most of my childhood my father was either a Baptist preacher or an Air Force Chaplain. We had a good life but we were nomads. From the time I was born until I left home I never spent more than three Christmases in the same house. When we got to Arkansas we went to Papaw and Mamaw’s house. This picture is actually my first Warford family picture. It was, I am told, a very big occasion but as you can see, I appear to have slept through the whole thing.

I love this old picture for many reasons. Obviously the fact that it was a first is a pretty big deal but there is something else. Most of the Warfords from my line, at least the ones that have gray hair or color it, refer to that little white house as the old home place. Can you see the porch right there on the front of that little house? One glance at that porch drowns me in memories. That porch was an all-weather playground for all the kids in my family. So many things happened on that porch. When we played hide and seek that porch was the base, when we ate watermelon we ate it on that porch, when I got my hair cut it was cut on that porch, we shot firecrackers, bottle rockets, BB Guns, rifles and shotguns off that porch. I could probably fill a nice little book with porch stories but for now let me just say that was one seriously all-purpose porch.

It is hard to explain, I never lived in the little white house at the end of Warford road and I never visited there for more than thirty days at a time but for me the little white house in this picture will always be my old home place.

Some times words just get in the way of a picture. 😀

In this photo Olga Baker, Armand, Griffith, is holding the trophy for winning the Houston Women’s City Softball League Championship. Olga Griffith was my maternal grandmother. Of course I didn’t know her when she was a young woman winning softball championships. I am told she was also very athletic and a strong leader. She was also a great dancer. I think we all wish we had been able to know our parents and grandparents when they were young. It was only after my grandmother had passed that I came across this picture and it is now one of my favorites. When I found this picture my youngest daughter, Kristina was a senior in high school. Kristina was a pitcher and star player on her school’s softball team. My oldest, Melissa, had likewise played and been a leader and star a few years before. In flipping through old photos the past few weeks I kept coming back to this one. It does not lend itself to any particular spiritual lesson or words of wisdom but it just makes me smile. I was not sure at first why I liked this picture so much but then it occurred to me that while I will never see my grandmother play softball maybe I did see a reflection of her years later when my two daughters took the field. I certainly see a reflection of her in both of them in so many ways other than playing softball. She was smart, independent and very strong as are her great-granddaughters. None of us like all the same things our parents and grandparents do but it amazes me how often our personalities reflect our ancestors. I think I may have to share a few more of these reflections in the coming weeks.