Did I Ever Tell You The Story About Mama John?

Funeral services for Mana John were held, 1984, in a Checotah, Oklahoma cemetery. It was a hard scrabble place. No trees. Just tombstones planted to hold down the dirt. Rather like the people who lived in this small town. No frills. Those Checotahtans knew their jobs and they did them. Hard working folks. Expecting nothing from the government.

The day was cloudless, unusually hot for a February, the air still. A tent was set up to shield the small number of family members from the sun. Everyone was seated in a folding chair when The Reverend Charles McCarty began the service. He talked along, saying the usual niceties. Not too short, not too long, the number of words were sounding just right. The Reverend moved into the closing of Mama John's service by reading a poem by Henry Van Dyke, an American preacher, poet, and philosopher.

"I am standing upon the seashore, A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength and I stand and watch until at last she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says, 'There she goes!'"

Just as The Reverend McCarty said, 'There she goes,' I was startled by the feel of a light breeze brush across the skin of my arms, followed by a slight puff of wind, every so slightly, lifting the tent top. Time stopped. I looked up. The tent settled. Everyone else stared straight ahead. The preacher never paused and continued reading.

"Gone where? Gone from my sight...that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, 'There she goes!'"

The wind came again. A little stronger. Goose bumps ran up and down both of my arms. Hair stood. The tent puffed again and lifted higher as the last sentence of the poem was being spoken.

"There are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, 'there she comes!'"

For the third and final time, the tent lifted. Mama John was gone. Not only did I see her leave, I felt her spirit.

In the last years of her long life, several strokes weakened Mana John's little body. But, this tiny, sturdy, woman, my maternal grandmother, worked as hard as she knew how, facing the sorrows in her life and the challenges heaped upon her by the times in which she lived. With little education, a never ending wellspring of common sense, and fortitude, tested and conquered on a daily basis, she braved 91 years of service to her family.

People said Mana John had the healing power. Folks knocked on her door and with the eyes of those with no money to pay, asked her to cure their aches and pains. Not too often discussed in the family was her highly tuned sixth sense about things that had happened, or eerily, her 'sights' of events to come.

How I know this, I do not know. Perhaps, I overheard the grown-ups talking at night when I would crawl out of the big feather bed where her grandchildren slept, often, together, and I would lay by myself on the linoleum floor, at a half-opened door, listening.

My mother once told me that Mama John said I had the same gift of 'sight' and it shouldn't be encouraged. Mother later denied ever having said such a thing. Mother? That's another story.