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bermudaroad · 2 years

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Words for Charles

Good morning.

On behalf of our family, I want to thank you all for being here. Losing a patriarch can be a watershed time for a family and we appreciate the support of our family and friends. The last few months were not easy, but we have a lot to be grateful for: that Daddy was not in pain, that his mind was intact until the very end, and that we were able to be together and say all the things we needed to say. We are also grateful for all of those who were there to support us with prayers and acts of kindness. Special thanks go to Paige Procell and Mrs. Mary Farmer for their help with Daddy’s care.

One unexpected benefit of the last 7 months is that Karla, Cade and I have spent more time together and with Mama and Daddy than since we were kids. We’ve told a lot of stories – plenty that can’t be repeated – and gone through old pictures and we’ve had time to visit with folks who shared stories about Daddy. Like Dolly Parton said, “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.” Daddy didn’t want this service to be sad. He wanted us to talk about the good times.

Daddy was born in Rodessa, where Papaw was working in the north Caddo Parish oilfield, on Aug. 26, 1937. He was named Charles after the doctor who delivered him. Daddy was the oldest of seven children and his brothers and sisters always looked up to him. They grew up playing around Lanan Creek, riding horses and hunting squirrels. Mamaw and Papaw Pilcher came from big families so there were always lots of cousins to play with. Daddy remembered the Eisenhower Military Maneuvers and watching what seemed like a thousand horses and cavalry pass in front of his Grandpa Lopez’s house. It was quite a sight for a bunch of country kids.

Daddy always liked music, country music and old time rock and roll, and outlaw country. When he was 14, he bought a guitar at Horn’s Drug Store in Many for $35. He earned the money doing farm work and jobs for his uncles. His friends taught him some chords, but he was mostly self-taught. Daddy and Uncle Wayne used to play music at Mr. Willie Anderson’s place with their friends Kenneth and R.H. Sometimes Daddy would wake us up on Saturday mornings playing ‘Folsom Prison Blues.’ But Daddy lost part of his ring finger in an oilfield mishap and he didn’t play as much after that. I’ll get to that story in a minute.

Daddy went to school at Alliance until the schools consolidated and he went to Negreet where he played right field on the boys softball team and graduated in 1955. He did not have a stellar academic record, but that was no reflection of his intellect. Clay said one time he wondered what Daddy would have done if he had studied business or engineering or both because of his aptitude in those areas. But Daddy didn’t take school seriously as a kid. He was the class clown. Still, he read all the time and was self-educated on a lot of topics. He could figure stuff in his head and seldom forgot facts.

As soon as they finished high school, Daddy and several of his friends went to work on the pipeline, and that work took them all over the U.S. from the Gulf coast to the Midwest, the northeast and western states. He was in Kingman, Arizona, when he joined the Army National Guard and he served with the Guard till after he and Mama were married.

As a young man, Daddy affiliated with the Masonic Lodge at Little Flock and was a 50-year member. His grandfather and great-grandfather on the Pilcher side were also Masons. He was Worshipful Master of the Lodge and president of the Sabine Shrine Club in the year 2000. Mama and Daddy helped organize and volunteered at the annual Shriners Classic basketball tournament and several other events to raise funds for Shriners Children’s Hospital in Shreveport. He also really enjoyed riding in the parades.

Daddy liked cars and his first car was a 1956 Ford Fairlane Victoria, black and white. Bonnie and Connie said Daddy would get them to wash his car and pay them a quarter each. You can imagine Charles as a young man, a good-looking guy cruising around in a cool car. He was probably pretty freewheeling in those days. And then he started dating Sarah Walker.

On July 1, 1961, Mama and Daddy eloped to Jasper, Texas. They were married over 60 years. To celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, they had a ceremony to renew their vows, and we celebrated their 50th anniversary with a big family gathering.

Speaking of gatherings, Mama and Daddy hosted a lot of big get-togethers, the Lopez reunion and the Pilcher reunion for many years. One year they threw a big Christmas party and folks from all sides of the family were there. That’s the year Daddy bought himself a karaoke machine and entertained the crowd with Elvis songs.

Y’all know my Mama and Daddy are two of the hardest working people around. During his long career in the oilfield, Daddy worked all over Louisiana and Texas, in the Middle East, the North Sea, South America and the Gulf of Mexico. As a young man supporting a wife and child, Daddy worked as many shifts as he could. He was working on a land rig out of Many when his hand got caught in a chain that took off part of his finger. Trying to drive himself to town, Daddy’s truck got stuck, so he had to get the come-alongs and pull his truck out of the mud to get himself to the doctor.

Aunt Bobbie asked me to share something. In 1974, she and Uncle Tommy were living in Abu Dhabi where he was working, when Uncle Tommy had a heart attack and died. Daddy was also working in the United Arab Emirates. He left his job and went to help Aunt Bobbie and accompanied her back to the U.S. with Uncle Tommy’s remains and my cousin Tom Tom, who was about 11 years old at the time.

Back in the gulf, Daddy was a senior toolpusher / OIM for Penrod for many years and experienced more than one well blowout offshore. On March 1, 1979, a blowout on a production platform took the lives of eight workers. Daddy and the rest of the crew escaped in a survival capsule. Like all oilfield families, we had to adjust our holidays so we could celebrate when he was at home. He missed a lot of Christmases, graduations and birthdays.

Daddy also raised cattle on the side and spent most of his off time off occupied with the farm, messing with the cows, cutting hay and fixing fence. It gave us a great childhood. Daddy was a strong man who stayed fit doing manual labor, tinkered on cars, trucks and tractors and he could fix just about anything. He always figured out how to do things for himself.

I mentioned our large family. Our generation has lots of cousins, too, and they loved to come to our house in Zwolle. Laura and Colleen told about how when they lived in Franklin, Daddy would pick them up on his way home from work to come stay with us. Laura, who was in about 8th grade at the time, would drive home -- in the company car -- while Daddy slept in the back seat. Uncle Charles taught several of his nieces and nephews how to drive, swim, ride motorcycles and shoot guns.

After Daddy retired from the oilfield, he and Mama had a lot more time for leisure. They got in with a local RV group and took several trips to different parts of the country. Daddy was not much of a dancer, but Mama got him to join a square dancing group for a while. After they had the camp they got involved with the Toledo Bend Lake Association and they made many, many friends with other retirees on the lake. Daddy was a board member of TBLA and was instrumental in establishing the annual Bass Unlimited program, their biggest fundraiser. He also looked after his brothers Jerry and Stan when they became unable to take care of themselves.

Mama and Daddy bought their camp at Lanan in the 90s and it’s actually located where Grandma and Grandpa Lopez’s place was before the lake came in. In 2006, the state of Louisiana paid Mama and Daddy for their house in Zwolle, where they had lived since 1970, and it was torn down to make way for the four-laning of Hwy. 171. That’s when Mama and Daddy built their house at Lanan. The joke at the time was that Mama was going to live in the new house and Daddy was going to live in the camp.

Mama Sarah and Papa Charles enjoyed their grandkids and kept them all pretty often. They took the kids out to the farm, out on the lake, took them to airshows, to movies, to the sale barn. Last Christmas Claire compiled a book of memories called “Tales from the Grandkids.” Some of the common memories are of Pop’s crazy antics and silly pranks he would play to get Mama Sarah’s goat. They wrote about swimming, camping, fishing, flying kites, playing dominoes and Papa Charles teaching them to drive in the pasture. They talked about one time when Pop jumped in the pool with all his clothes on. They thought it was hilarious! They never forgot it. When Karla and her family lived in Coteau, Daddy would stop at their house and surprise Claire and Joey with donuts and one time they met him in Amelia and he let them on the rig.

Gracyn wrote about going out on the barge with Pop in the evenings, looking up at the sky, looking for the North Star and the constellations, some that were real and some that were made up.

Cale said “as we got older, our fun outings turned into work outings: working cows, working in the hayfield, working on equipment and helping Mama Sarah move things in her house.”

Chas had an interesting conversation with Pop about the creation of Toledo Bend. He told Chas about the farmland, now underwater, in front of their house that had belonged to the Pilchers, the gas station in Sabine Town where he used to get gas because it was the cheapest, ferries that went across the Sabine River and how the water just seemed to creep up and it didn’t take long for the land he grew up on to be completely under water. Chas said, “I felt this was the reason they built the house where they did, so he’d be able to look out on what was once his childhood.”

The boys also wrote about how much it meant for Mama Sarah and Pop to attend all their ballgames. Mama and Daddy went to see three of their grandsons play football in the Super Dome.

Then, the great-grands came along. Karly and Joseph best remember Pop cracking jokes, playing pranks to drive Mama Sarah crazy and Pop slipping them some cash on the sly. Olivia and Lily Kate obviously have fewer memories but Claire said Olivia was in Walmart one day and started yelling at a man with gray hair and a plaid shirt that she thought was Papa Charles. She said “Come back! I hold you!” I hope that Olivia and Lily Kate will remember Papa Charles before he got sick, our last Easter and the last Father’s Day. And our family keeps growing. A couple of weeks ago, Joey and Katie Facetimed Pop to tell him he was going to be great grandpa again.

One other little about Daddy is he had a sweet tooth. He loved ice cream, Hershey bars, M&Ms and he often used the grandkids as an excuse to go get a blizzard from Dairy Queen. Walker Roe said that one time Pop ordered a blueberry blizzard for Clayton, knowing he wouldn’t like it, so Pop conveniently ate the whole thing.

In recent days, Mama and Daddy lived quietly. Daddy enjoyed watching NASCAR, football and basketball. They watched Jeopardy every day. In the last seven months, Mama hardly left Daddy’s side and he received the best care possible because of her. She said it was the closest time of their marriage.

Daddy was a character. Anything he said was completely unvarnished. He never sugarcoated anything. Uncle Jim said Daddy got his smark-alecky nature from our Papaw Pilcher and that gene is quite persistent in our family. We’ve shared a lot of laughs telling hilarious stories about Pop. He wasn’t a saint. He wasn’t a regular churchgoer until his retirement years. When he was working in Brazil, he had a life endangering experience that precipitated his profession of faith. Gracyn said he often told her that she should always go to church and tithe faithfully. During his illness Mama and Daddy read a prayer card and said a special prayer every night.

There’s about a dozen other stories we wanted to tell today, but time runs short. However he was referred to, Charles, Bubba, C.L. (whenever anybody was mad at him), Daddy, Papa Charles, Uncle Charles or Pop, he was one of a kind.

The last few weeks were agonizing. But we looked for the blessings. This past Sunday was a beautiful sunny day. Daddy took his last breath surrounded by his wife, his children and his brother and sisters. We prayed over him and he slipped away, surrounded by love. And this is how God works: Brother Tony showed up about 10 minutes later. He was stopping by to check on us after church and his timing was perfect. He prayed with us and he said, “Death is not always a tragedy.” I’m not sad that Daddy left that old body. That’s not how I will remember him anyway. I’ll remember the guy who would walk on his hands up and down the hall to entertain the kids.

I’ll close with a passage of scripture that a friend shared with me recently. It’s also printed on the back of your bulletin.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

God rest your soul, Daddy. We love you.

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bermudaroad · 4 years

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Personal History: Summer of ’91

My kids Walker Roe and Clayton, ages 18 and 20, his girlfriend Adrian and their friends Reed, Shelby and Trevor spent the covid spring and summer of 2020 hanging out together, swimming, kayaking, watching movies, lamenting their lost semester and generally not following recommended guidelines for social distancing. Clayton was able to continue work while the rest finished spring classes online, which was a total bummer. With businesses and restaurants shuttered for quarantine, there hasn’t been much else to do. Walker and Reed had internships lined up that were cancelled. Adrian did some housecleaning and as soon as a few restaurants did open back up, she and Trevor, who both used to work at the pub, got part-time jobs. Reed cuts grass. The rest of their time is spent mostly at leisure.

In seeming unrelated news, Thomas, one of my oldest friends, became a grandfather last week. Because of covid, no visitors could go into the hospital, so when the baby was born, the new dad held her up to the hospital window and the grandparents all held up posters and signs of congratulations outside. It was shared on Facebook, so I sent Thomas a text. I could tell from his response how giddy he was. They didn’t get to actually hold the new baby for three or four days.

The quarantine, my kids’ spring and summer getting derailed and Thomas becoming Pawpaw got me thinking about the summer after our first year of college, back in Many, the summer of 1991. I spent that time mostly with a small group with whom I had been friends since first grade: Thomas, of course; Ginger who was home from school in Oklahoma, Jeff and Andy who, like Thomas and me had been going to Northwestern State, and Ginger’s brother Clay who had just finished 10th grade and had finally stopped being a complete jerk. Sometimes there would be one or two others, but that was the core group.

Except for Clay, we were 18/19 and had just got our first big kid jobs. Thomas and Jeff went to work at the mill in Florien, Gin got a job at the radio station and I was tellering at Sabine State Bank. I can’t remember what Andy was doing, probably working for his grandpa, and Clay, who was 16 and fast growing into a giant of a man, tooled around in his truck and worked out at the gym. We no longer had curfews and seldom felt the need to ask our parents for anything.

We were all single, too, which probably explains why our group was small and close.

Ginger had come home from Oklahoma unsettled. The previous Christmas, she had appalled her family by getting engaged to her long-time boyfriend Nathen, the same person who had been fooling around with our other friend Jamie behind Ginger’s back for most of the time they were dating. Ginger found out about it in the middle of our senior year which was pretty much wrecked after that, but she and Nate stayed together, even though neither was happy. Her parents had hoped that when she shipped out for Oklahoma and Nate left for LSU, things would fizzle between them, so their surprise engagement at Christmas 1990 was less than joyous. By February, Ginger had come to her senses. She mailed Nathen back his pitiful little ring and he decided to stay in Baton Rouge for the summer, thankfully bringing that awful drama to an end. Also, she had met someone new in Oklahoma.

Clay’s girlfriend Anna had broken up with him right after Prom. She was a classy girl, also a friend of ours, and she returned the jewelry Clay had given her, which Ginger divided up with me. Thomas and Jeff had recently split with the girls they dated through and beyond high school. Andy was always single, even though he carried a torch for Jamie for years. They were funny, affable guys and great pals.

I was fractured, too. My first love Patrick and I had outgrown each other and he had broken up with me in the spring, which was for the best, but I missed him terribly. He was already seeing someone else. I was on a mission to get over Patrick, lose the freshman 15 I had packed on and have fun with my friends – Thomas being chief mischief-maker and proponent of fun.

Riding around town, “making a drag” as we called it, wasn’t for us anymore as we tried to avoid our old flames, which was hard to do in Many. Most of our friends had significant others to absorb their spare time and several had jumped straight into adulthood, going to work in the oilfield, joining the military or getting married. We, on the other hand, aside from work responsibilities, could do pretty much whatever we wanted.

Often after work, we would meet up and go hang out somewhere on Toledo Bend, the long pier at Pendleton or my parents’ place down near Quiet Cove, to drink wine coolers and talk nonsense. Weekends we went swimming at LaNan or San Miguel and a couple of times Andy drove his grandpa’s barge across the lake to the cliffs on the Texas side where kids used to shinny up a frayed rope as thick as my arm to the top of the bluff and jump off. The boys listened to the Beasty Boys, N.W.A., Sir Mix-A-Lot and Color Me Bad (I wasn’t a big fan of any of it) and Ginger had discovered Garth Brooks. We went to our friends’ weddings, stayed out too late, crashed at each other’s houses, made it to work on time and irritated our parents.

There were some long serious talks, too, as we commiserated and sorted out our broken hearts. Clay even opened up about his lost love. It was a bonding period for Clay and Ginger who had spent most of their childhood fighting, and for he and I as well.

I hope my kids aren’t as stupid as we were and I’m eternally grateful that social media did not exist. One night – I don’t know what go into us - we got a wild hair and vandalized a dumpster with spray paint. Thomas and Jeff frequently made a contest of pitching empty beer bottles at road signs going 4/60 down the highway headed to the lake. Under a full July moon, Andy took us armadillo hunting at his grandpa’s farm. Riding four-wheelers and armed with .22s and homemade pipe bombs, we crisscrossed the pasture in the moonlight firing at will in the humid night that was thick with recklessness. Another time Thomas and I were headed to Natchitoches in his monster old Bronco when I told him I wanted to smoke a cigarette. Thomas habitually swiped packs of Marlboro Reds from the carton his dad kept on top of their fridge. He offered me a light and told me what to do. And so it was that I smoked the inaugural cigarette – the very first one -- in the drive-thru at Maggio’s, coughing and turning green and reveling in my rebellion. I even remember the music we were listening to: a cassette single of “I Wanna Be with You” by Pretty Boy Floyd. I don’t know why that detail has stuck with me.

At some point, Jeff and Andy both noticed charms about Ginger that had never been obvious to them before. This was typical of Andy but surprising for Jeff. Thomas and I were greatly amused. Jeff made the first move, asking Ginger on a date that Clay offered to chaperone. They went to see “King Ralph,” and the rest of us chased them down at Hardee’s after the movie. I remember gathering around Jeff’s white Dodge stepside in the parking lot and snickering because Gin was sitting next to him in the cab. We all knew it wasn’t going anywhere; it was just a lark. It wasn’t long before Ginger’s beau from Oklahoma couldn’t stand the separation anymore and hauled it down to Louisiana for a visit, which is how I met Brent and was maid of honor at their wedding a year later.

With Ginger unavailable, Andy turned his attention to me and was rebuffed again. But he wasn’t too disappointed.

As summers do, it went by in a blink and in mid-August, it was time to get back to business. Clay started two-a-days, Gin packed up for Oklahoma and I, who had starved myself down to a wafer, moved back to Natchitoches. Thomas and Jeff were supposed to commute together, but Jeff dropped out of school to work full-time. Andy transferred to LSU. Thomas fell in with my college buddies and we share those memories as well. It wasn’t our last summer of fun – we had a few more in store before adulthood really caught up with us.

Now we are in our late 40s – the summer of our lives. Thomas and Jeff still work together. They are deacons in their church, volunteer coaches and planners of wholesome youth activities. Ginger and Brent have been over in Nacogdoches for over 20 years and active in ministry in their community. Andy married a girl from Baton Rouge and lives on his family’s farm. Clay went on to play football at Louisiana Tech, but personal troubles have always dogged him, even unto today. I married a nice guy I met in journalism class and have lived in Natchitoches ever since. We have seen each other quite a bit over the years, most recently when Ginger and Clay’s dad died, an occasion marked by the same old sense of camaraderie, nostalgia and some measure of sadness.

It’s been a strange year, this spring and summer of covid. It’s nice to see Clayton and Walker spending quality time together. Interestingly, during the pandemic, Walker and her college friends have been writing old-fashioned letters and mailing them to each other, a true novelty for them.

It brings to mind the contrasts between the now and then. In 1991 we had no cell phones, no email, no Internet, no Netflix, no Twitter or Snapchat. Our parents had no idea where we were or what we were up to most of the time. We had to make plans and sometimes locate each other by that peculiar friend-radar teenagers used to have. We could buy alcohol and never wore seatbelts. Most blessed of all, youthful indiscretions were not splashed all over the social media, although I do have some lake photos boxed up on a high shelf. It seems like our freedom was much greater in many ways. Some things change and some things stay the same.

It’s hard to believe it was almost 30 years ago. Summers always go by too fast.

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