Throughout my life there have been a number of songs that, although I love them, I simply cannot sing. It's not that I don't like them, in fact I may love them too much. I can't sing them because they make me too emotional. So emotional in fact that I can't sing them because I get so choked up I can't sing. On the way to Valdosta today one of these songs came on the radio. The song was "He Walked On Water" by Randy Travis.
If you're not familiar with the song it's about his grandfather and their relationship when he was a little boy. He sings of him being very old, knowing how to do thing that are cool to a little boy (shooting a gun, handling a rope) and not having teeth. When he thinks of his now deceased grandfather he sings the chorus, "I thought that he walked on water."
I love the song, but I can never get through it once I start singing. It just hits too close to home with me and my Grandaddy Sam. HIs full name was Samuel Washington Hood (what a cool name). He was my mother's father and by the time I came along he was already retired so we got to spend a lot of time together. He was in his seventies when I was a kid and had spent decades working hard as a farmer and at a service station. He couldn't do much, but what he could do was pretty amazing to an eight year old boy. He could take out his teeth, play a banjo and ring a spittoon from five feet away. Talk about impressing a little boy. Our hobby was sitting together in his chair and watching the Braves on television.
I didn't know it at the time, but here was a man in his seventies who had seldom been out of town and never stayed in a hotel. In the Summer of 1984 my parents, my aunt and uncle and me, took Grandaddy Sam and Big Mamma (his wife) to Atlanta to stay in a hotel, go to the zoo and watch the Braves game. Nearly thirty years later I treasure the memory of finally getting to sit by Grandaddy Sam and watch a Braves game in person. That fall he suffered a heart attack and spent a few days in the hospital before dying. My last memory of him was peeking my head in the door to intensive care and him waving at me (I was too young to be in the hospital). Even to my little eight year old mind, I knew when my parents showed up to pick me up from school early, that Grandaddy Sam was gone.
Today I have that old Atlanta Braves hat that he got at the game and it is one of my most treasured possessions. For me that hat might as well have been a halo because I thought that he walked on water.
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