Last night around midnight I laid down in bed and started reading the biography of St. Francis of Assisi. The opening chapter tells of Francis' death and the great fanfare (even though he would have hated that) that went along with it.

About the same time I was reading the account of his death, my last grandparent, my mom's mother, passed away-- with very little fanfare. In her sleep she quitely passed on. A couple of days before my mom knew it was getting close to being time, so she went to the nursing home and sang to maw maw and told her that everything will be ok, that it's ok to go whenever she needed.

My grandmother was a giant in my life. My dad's parents died when I was very young, so I don't remember them very well. My mom's dad passed away when I was a senior in high school. WWII did horrible things to him, and he was terribly distant. I loved him, but he was never able to reciprocate that.

But my grandmother was a moving force in my life. She spent all of her energy taking care of others. I probably learned more about being a decent human being from her than from anyone else in my life. Her life was every bit as honorable and kind as any caricature of "the old times." She used to make pies for neighbors, for no real reason at all other than being kind. She was still of the generation that you go on daily walks and when you get tired, you find who is out and about, and you go sit on their front porch and shoot the breeze.

My greatest memory of my grandmother is the times we spent in complete silence sitting on her front porch. When I was growing up, we lived about an hour and a half from Carthage-- my grandparents home town, and the town my mom grew up in. So we only got to visit about once every couple of months. But when I went to college, I was only a 25 minute drive from her house. The four years I spent in Marshall were wonderful for our relationship. I would go to her house about once a week to wash clothes, take her out to the Dairy Queen or Daddy Sams (she never found time to learn how to drive, so I was her chauffeur.) But most importantly, we would sit on the front porch, drink iced tea, and watch the afternoon go by. No pretension. No irony. No chic attitude. No need to be cool or accepted. Just two people enjoying the breeze rustling through the pine trees of east texas.

That's what I'll keep.