Some days you spend all day locked away in your office trying to get things done. And when you finally come out you find it is just the perfect time of day.
The Christmas season is now fully on campus:
The moment I began to see my great-grandmother as a poet: “I never know what the day may bring – it might even bring my favorite dreams.”
That was from her memoir, which she wrote in 1980, at around 75 years old. Some of it is prosaic. Some of it is art. I’m just reading it again, because I haven’t read it in several years and then I only skimmed it.
She was a neat lady. She became a rural teacher at a young age. Her first year in the classroom she had students older than she was. She went to school, taught school, brought in the crops. By 1925, was being courted by two young men. One she liked, of whom her father didn’t approve, and one that really liked her that she “really didn’t care for.”
She decided to write them each a loving letter and mail them in the wrong envelopes to see which one of the boys quit visiting first.
Her conscience, she wrote in her memoirs, got the better of her.
“I could never endure seeing Kelsie with some other girl.”
That story is in her memoir. They got married in 1927, had three kids and eight grandkids. She said she never found out why her father disproved. But life moved on. She became a mother, a grandmother, a sales manager, she ran an electronics store and became a secretary, which was work she wrote that she always wanted to do.
Her husband died in the 1970s, and she buried her son soon after. She turned to crafts and hobbies. She learned to paint, practiced all of her many sewing techniques, returned to her poetry. (Everyone in her family was a poet, it seems.) When her mind still turned to her grief she focused for a while on her memoirs, which she finished in 1981, in her mid-70s.
In 1996 she called me and asked me to come to her graduation. She’d been secretly taking classes again, picking up her education where she left it off when it was time to raise a family. Now, decades later, she became the oldest graduate of the University of North Alabama. (One of her daughters is believed to be the youngest graduate at UNA.) I made a phone call and had the governor declare it Flavil Q. Rogers day.
She made the section front in the Times Daily, her local paper:
And the state’s largest daily, The Birmingham News. Click to embiggen:
I think this is the last photograph I have of her:
“I never know what the day may bring – it might even bring my favorite dreams.”
I’ll have to reprint large swaths of her memoir now, I think. She’d probably get a kick out of that.
