{"id":1202,"date":"2009-12-30T09:15:35","date_gmt":"2009-12-30T15:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"2121414439"},"modified":"2009-12-30T09:15:35","modified_gmt":"2009-12-30T15:15:35","slug":"we-buried-aunt-margie-yesterday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/we-buried-aunt-margie-yesterday\/","title":{"rendered":"We Buried Aunt Margie Yesterday"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"\"As many of you know my mother passed away in May of this year.\u00a0 She was the middle daughter of three girls.\u00a0 Her older sister, Mildred passed away many years before.\u00a0 And then over this weekend, her younger sister died. \u00a0Her name was Margie.<\/p>\n

Margie was 81, lived a simple life, and was the wife, for many years, of a farmer.\u00a0 And during about 6 years of my adolescence I spent summers on their farm.\u00a0 The interesting thing about sitting through Aunt Margie\u2019s funeral was, she was born on December 29th<\/sup>, and we buried her on December 29th<\/sup>.\u00a0 How ironic, it seemed to me, that we would be celebrating the life of this humble farm wife who was far better than most in her simplicity.<\/p>\n

As I was talking with my daughter Paige about my memories of those summers on the farm, it dawned on me that her husband, my Uncle Henry, taught me so many things that I had forgotten.\u00a0 And it all flooded back in that rush of memory and sadness.<\/p>\n

Uncle Henry taught me in those summers how to fish and how to swim.\u00a0 His method was to throw you in the deep end and then you\u2019ll find your way out.\u00a0 He taught me how to clean fish, shoot a gun, and hunt squirrels.\u00a0 He taught me how to drive a tractor, to bale hay, to work on a farm, to get up early and milk cows; to train cow dogs to corral the cows at milking time, how to put out feed, clean the stall, spread manure, put up electric fence, plant, chop and prepare tobacco for market.\u00a0 He taught me the satisfaction of a hard day\u2019s work.\u00a0 I remember many days after hauling hay in the sweltering summer heat, and coming in to lay down on the cool linoleum floor and drinking cold milk, thinking \u201cthis is heaven.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Part of the sadness of this day and remembering so many things in my early childhood, is that my own dad didn\u2019t teach me these things.\u00a0 I\u2019ve often wondered why.\u00a0 He was a good man, a simple man, and a hard-working.\u00a0 But somehow he didn\u2019t see the need or know how to take an interest in his sons and teach them the simple things; the things about what it meant to be a real man.\u00a0 Oh, I\u2019ve learned them \u2013 too many of them the hard way.\u00a0 But at least I\u2019m glad God had someone in my life called Uncle Henry to teach me things that helped make me a man.<\/p>\n

The question is, who taught you those manly man-things, those things that make you who you are today?\u00a0 More importantly if you are a father, are you teaching your sons how to do those things that help them grow up and take responsibility, to learn what it means to work hard and find satisfaction in work well-done?\u00a0 I had Uncle Henry.\u00a0 Who do you have?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As many of you know my mother passed away in May of this year.\u00a0 She was the middle daughter of three girls.\u00a0 Her older sister, Mildred passed away many years before.\u00a0 And then over this weekend, her younger sister died. \u00a0Her name was Margie. Margie was 81, lived a simple life, and was the wife, … Continue reading “We Buried Aunt Margie Yesterday”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"series":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1202"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=1202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}