OPINION

Back to Maynard

Memories become like tears washed away by the rain ...

To know Kenneth Masterson and Bobbie, his wife of 68 years, is to love them as much as they have those around them. Turning 90 last week, the gentle World War II veteran requested one gift: To return for a final visit to the Northeast Arkansas community of Maynard where my uncle spent much of his childhood raised by his mother, grandmother, Amelia, and her sister, Mary.

Ken, with long-deceased older brothers Rue (my father), Tipton and Ron, had lost their mother, Blanche Tipton Masterson, to illness when she was 43, a few years after she and their father divorced. That left the older three siblings to fend for themselves. Those were hardscrabble times when many extended families divided child-rearing responsibilities.

As the youngest son when the immediate family disintegrated in 1933, Ken wound up moving back with his mother to his widowed grandmother Amelia's white-frame house in Maynard.

Three years later, Blanche would die in a bedroom of Amelia's home less than a block from the home where she had been born in 1893.

In the decades since, Ken has returned to attend Maynard's annual Pioneer Days. And ever since Wal-Mart opened in nearby Pocahontas, he's watched the town fade from a vibrant community to vacant storefronts and a dwindling population. It's been painful for him to observe the decline of a way of life imprinted deep from within his childhood memories.

And so it came to pass that, accompanied by my daughter Anna, also a U.S. Navy veteran who lives in the Memphis area not far from Ken, we took our uncle, proudly wearing his World War II cap, on an overnight journey back to the source of so many memories, in the process making our own while discovering our heritage.

Along the way, we turned right at Walnut Ridge into a parklike setting that was the campus of Williams Baptist College. There, Ken pointed to a remodeled and transplanted version of the chapel that hosted his graduation ceremony in 1946.

He talked of how he and Bobbie had spent their first blissful year of marriage in this sanctuary, walking everywhere since they didn't own a car. The edges of his eyes moistened in recalling the fresh beginning he and Bobbie shared there. The corridor from Walnut Ridge to Marked Tree, Pocahontas and Maynard, 12 miles northward, was familiar territory from Ken's youth.

They'd been married in Bobbie's mother's home amid a rural field not far away at Turrell. That house has long since crumbled, leaving only the field and Ken's recollections, since 88-year-old Bobbie today suffers from cognitive impairment.

On the hilltop entering Maynard, he asked us to pull into a circular dirt driveway. There he gestured toward a vacant spot. "This is where my maternal great-grandparents arrived in the mid-1800s and settled in a house that sat right there."

A few minutes later, we were standing beneath gray skies in Maynard's town cemetery at the gravesite where Blanche lay buried between her mother Amelia, and Amelia's sister Mary. Ken had brought red plastic flowers to add to his faded bouquet left years ago. His great-grandparents, the Hiram Smiths who'd settled on that outskirts hilltop (Amelia and Mary's parents) were buried a few yards away.

In town we visited with Ken's only surviving lifelong friend, Bemis Poore, an auto dealer and former mayor. Together, they rattled off the names of former classmates now departed and reminisced about the town in its heyday when thousands lived in and around Maynard.

At grandmother Amelia's home where Ken lived from age 6 to 14, the current residents kindly invited us inside. Ken immediately pointed to a side of the living room and said that was where his mother's casket was placed after her service. He paused to reflect at the bedroom where Blanche died.

"I remember her good days even when sick when she'd come out of that room in a gown singing, and how happy that made me feel. I have sad and happy memories in this home," he said. "We never had anything materially, but I never realized it."

Throughout the day, memories flowed through Ken like a spring breeze. "I remember my mother skipping home with me from school, crawling through the metal culvert under the driveway, playing in the wooden barn that's still standing, and fetching water for classmates at the old school."

He pointed out the faint imprint of a letter "B" made with long removed pennies still visible in a crumbling concrete sidewalk at the front door of the home where Blanche was born.

"Life has just gone so, so fast. I can't believe I'm already 90 years old."

Back home, Ken pulled his bag through the front door to immediately hug and kiss Bobbie who, despite memory loss, smiled and remembered Ken as "my husband," adding that she'd missed him. Then he handed Anna and me each a card of thanks containing their Christmas picture.

My daughter and I knew it was we who owed the debt of gratitude because we'd been able to share Kenneth's memories of our long-departed family before the rain washed them away.

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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].

Editorial on 05/06/2017

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