Stayin' Alive

“Papa Collins would have been 112 today,” Mom said one year when I was an insolent and (self-proclaimed) omniscient 13-year-old. “Yeah? And Methuselah would be a million,” I replied. (Best educated guess, in 1987, Methuselah would have been 5,206.) Okay, so I wasn’t actually omniscient.

I didn’t understand, at least as a teenager, why one would play this seemingly futile and borderline macabre game of marking someone’s birthday as if they were still here. 

Papa was very tall. Pictures attested to that fact, but I’d also heard how his wife, Mary Ellen (or Mama Collins), a bit more vertically challenged, would stand under his stretched out arm with plenty of clearance. He loved the Lord and knew the Bible intimately, but he didn’t like to go to church. With an insatiable thirst for knowledge and a love of the written word, he always had a stack of books by his armchair. As a profession, he was a carpenter, a handyman, and made a living for several years digging storm shelters for people, right here in middle Tennessee.  Rarely was he seen without his trusty pipe. He had seven children, four of whom lived passed birth, and one of them was my Mom’s Mom, my maternal grandmother. Papa Collins was Mom’s maternal grandfather.

Every year, we’d play this game. “So and so would have been ____ tomorrow.” It, like many of the things my mother did, drove me insane. It seemed pointless. Oh, but she got the last laugh. Several times over. Because, now that she’s gone, you better believe I play that game on her birthday. Why? Maybe it’s wishful thinking. Maybe it’s a way of keeping a memory alive and passing down genealogical information to the next generation.

Papa (John Calvin Collins) died in 1951, so I never knew him. Yet, in part because of stories kept alive and passed down, I feel like I did. So, yes, I will open time capsules of memories and stories and share them. And I can only hope, one day, someone will keep my memory alive.

I awoke yesterday morning, October 5, 2014, and you know what my first thought was? It's my Mema's birthday. Hmm. She would have been 102.

Collins Family, (c) 1947
(L-R) Myrtle Collins, Bessie Collins, Anna Bell Collins Bennett (my Mema), Felix Bennett (my Papa), Mary Evelyn McGowan Collins (John's wife), Gene Collins (the only boy), and John Calvin (Papa) Collins. A cousin is peeking from the back. And the little girl in the front? That's my Mom, Patricia Ann Bennett Eagan.