Memory Pearls - and a Regret

SIXTY SOME ODD YEARS AGO, on a cold, rainy day, I found a tiny sparrow that seems to have fallen out of its nest. It had few feathers, seemed to just barely be clinging to life. I picked it up, carried it to the kitchen, wrapped it up in a warm cloth, and placed it in the slightly-warm oven of our wood cook stove. Then I placed it in a cardboard box in my room for the night. By morning, more feathers were showing up, and it seemed to feel better. I fed it. After lunch, I took it outside. It stood on my finger, and began its maiden flight. It aimed for a fence post, missed it, turned around, flew back, and stood on it. It looked at me, waved its wings at me, and left me forever as it flew off into its new life.

     Twenty or so years ago, I drove to school one morning at Arkadelphia high. As I exited the interstate bridge, I saw what appeared to be the crushed body of a small kitten in the middle of the highway.  As I passed it, a tiny neck and head peeked up. A string of half a dozen busses were approaching it. I pulled off, jumped out of my car, ran to the front of the first bus, and threw up my left hand, traffic cop like, and stopped the string of busses. I picked it up, took it with me. By nightfall, it was feeling better. The next day, I gave it to a sweet little girl who wanted it badly. She smiled and hugged it as she carried it off to a much better future than it could have ever guessed, even a day before.

     These sweet moments always seem to stick in my mind.

     If you look at my wall page, you will see hundreds of chickens out in front of my house. To the left of the picture, but not is sight, sat our new chicken house, with 600 laying hens producing eggs for the Hatchery at Plainview, Ar. But those chickens, in that house, were getting tired of producing an egg a day. Those in front of our house were the next generation of layers, destined to soon replace them. They were too young to produce eggs large enough to market. But they were still producing hundreds of small eggs each day in the huge barn that was on the right of the picture. Thus during that short time in 1949, we all ate many, many very small, but very good, eggs each day.

     In the 1960’s, Barbara and I had just married. She still liked to camp in the wilds with me, but that was not to last long. We wanted a tent. I found a nice one at Walmart, right behind our house, for $36. But we lived in a house trailer, and a small one at that, and we were dirt poor. We were still debating spending that much money, when my friend who I often fished with, came over. He was just a kid, as we were, and was a college student studying finance. Years later, he turned out to be a financial genus, managing money for many large companies. He told me,  “Pat, you need to rake together every penny you can. A company up the road is about to have its initial stock offering. That company is really going to go places. Buy all the stock you can!”

     “Tommy,” I said, “look at us. Look where we live. We don’t have money.”

     Tommy walked off, shaking his head. We bought that $36 dollar tent that night. I still have it, somewhere, I think, up in my attic.

     Today my grandson Christian, who is 21 and is, also, on his way to becoming a financial whiz, called me.

      “Papaw, I hope you really enjoyed that $36 tent. That $36, had it been invested in that first stock offering of that company, would convert into $335 million today.” The company?  Walmart.

      Had I decided differently, that fateful day, I would gladly give each of you who read this a million or so. But, born a poor boy, destined to die a poor boy.

     But we did really enjoy that tent, right up until the next Fourth of July, when some other camper burned a big hole in it with his fireworks.  Oh, well.