It seems my mother never tired of telling this story. How many times I’ve heard it I can’t remember. Childhood scenes flash before my mind like foil edged photographs drawn against a pale sky. Dinner table doctrine, I always called it. Family values, truths, warnings, and all our family stories were shared and aired at that round piece of oak we called the dinner table.

The Bible says there is a “time for every purpose under Heaven; a time to be born and a time to die.” Yes, Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3! I knew it well because Mama would read it to us over and over again! “There’s a time for everything” she would say. “You pray to know what God wants for your life and ask Him for His Timing.”

I was never very good at this but Mama was very good at it. One day, so the story goes, she started saying that even though she prayed about God’s timing, she felt she’d missed so much joy only having one child. She wanted another and that’s when she got pregnant with me.

I often wondered what Grandma Rildy and Uncle Henry and Aunt Helen thought! After all, my mother was over 40 years old herself! I think they were a little scared.

That’s when the McGrim family came into her life. It was the summer of 1945.

The McGrims lived in Farmersville, Illinois. There were four of them, Stephen and Sophie, Serena, and Sam. My Mother, Father, and brother Garrett lived in Auburn, Illinois, not very far away. Mother met the McGrims at an Ice Cream Social her church gave . “THE ANNUAL PIE AND ICE CREAM SOCIAL OF THE AUBURN CHRISTIAN CHURCH…..1945”, it was formally named.

The McGrims came for pie and ice cream and left with a new friend, my mother.

The McGrims son, Sam, had returned from the war and was having a lot of trouble adjusting to being home again. Serena, their younger daughter cried a lot, saying Sam wasn’t Sam anymore. She would get very upset and ask Sophie, “Where did Sam go? This isn’t Sam!”

Sophie would cry and she and my mother would go shopping.

Mother said on those shopping trips she would try to think of baby clothes and baby things to buy for me, but she would always end up buying something for Sophie McGrim or Sam or Serena. Stephen McGrim never talked much or said more than 10 words at a time, so my mother said, but she always knew he was deeply troubled about Sam.

It got to be Christmas. I was born the day after Christmas, 1945.

On Christmas Eve, Mama was having a dream that the McGrims didn’t have any Christmas presents for Sam. She said she guessed it was a time she walked in her sleep because in the morning she found she had decorated the Christmas tree with all of my dad’s shirts and had tied tags on them that said “Merry Christmas, Sam”.

Then, it was her time to have me. My dad drove her to the hospital Christmas night and I was born on the night of Dec. 26, 1945.

My mother told me I was the best Christmas present she ever had, and the first member of the McGrim family who came to see me was amazingly, Sam. He was very shaky when he held me. She said he would rock me in the big rocker on the front porch for hours. Sometimes he would cry.

She told me my birth had also been a very special time for Sam McGrim. She said it was in Ecclesiastes 3. I remember asking her if MY name was in Ecclesiastes 3 and she said no. But, she repeated those words once again, “To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under Heaven…a time to be born and a time to die, a time to kill and a time to heal….” She said, for Sam, it had been a time to heal. She said I was born at the same time Sam needed to heal.

I remember the day the McGrims moved away. We were all together and saying goodbyes. Mama and Sophie were crying. Mama had packed a picnic basket for them to take along to the city.

One day we were sitting around the big oak table in the dining room having another one of those times, laughing and telling stories, listening to Mama’s “dinner table doctrine.” That’s when I heard that Sam was getting married.

I guess it was God’s time.