Memory

I'll fly away

In a pew, with light filtering through the stained glass window, I am transported back, back to being a child. I put my hands on the red cushion underneath me, and I am back in the church called Gethsemane, in Martin County, Kentucky, and I am watching my grandfather, along with his sister Florna Bell, singing at the front of the country church, and their voices mingle with that of the small congregation. I am part of that congregation, with my mother and grandmother, and I am at an age between a child and a teenager, that awkward stage, where you are influenced by what surrounds you, and there I was, surrounded by these people six or seven times my age, singing, waving hands in the air.

I'll fly away, oh glory,

This is an old song, a song they usually don't sing nowadays at the church to which I belong, but when the praise band begins to sing along with one person strumming the guitar, I find myself falling through a portal backward, a swift move, and so vivid the place I land, the church, the cemetery behind it, where my ancestors rest, my great parents, Alec and Emma (my daughter's namesake), and the rest of the Cassady's, including Thomas, the patriarch of the family, who found his way into the deep folds of the Appalachian mountains from Virginia in the 1700s. I see them, my family, some distant relatives, and some closer to me, including my grandfather, John Sampson Cassady, and his hands are clasped in front of him, and he sings, with the others, old hymns, mournful but beautiful, and they stand, in stadium fashion, ascending up the cemetery, among the headstones of those who have passed on before them. I stand, a child, looking up at them, singing, and the sky showers blue and clouds over them, and the mountains stand guard and throw the gravestones into shadow.

When I die, hallelujah by and by,

I watch the band play, in my modern church, and I can feel my grandfather next to me. I remember him playing his guitar, the guitar he taught himself to play. I remember him with his Bible in his lap, studying, learning, usually quietly, always by himself. He didn't have a lot of education, but he was wise. I feel him next to me, humming to the familiar tune, one he has sung many times before.

I'll fly away.

As I write this, my daughter, my Emma, questions me, asking about my grandfather who played the guitar. She is tired, she says she is going to sleep, but before she does, she asks if people sleep in heaven. I say I am not sure, maybe we won't be tired in heaven. I tell her that we will all be happy there, and she will get to meet my grandpa, the one who sang at the our little family church in the hills of Kentucky, and played the guitar for his grandchildren. She smiles. She thinks this will be a nice reunion. She falls asleep, and she feels safe.

I am thankful for my church, which always surprises me by awaking in me feelings that have laid dormant in me for a long, long time, and for the deeply profound memories I have of my family, my roots, of things that have molded me. The old things that even now affect me, and even affect my children.