You Favor Your Daddy

“You favor your daddy,” Betty said to me.  We were standing in the old Barton Cemetery, right after burying my Uncle Slick (Paul Eugene) Hayes.  Betty is related to me somewhere down the line – I’m not sure I could draw the family tree.  “I’ve been told that before,” I said to her in reply.  We didn’t talk for very long.  It was raining, and I was a bit drained from Uncle Slick’s funeral.

At the funeral I met one of my cousins – my 3^rd cousin, Billy Yarbrough.  My great-grandmother was a sister to his grandmother.  He said, “I’ve got some stories about Slick I want to write down and get to you.”  “That would be great,” I said.  He said, “I also have a couple of stories about your dad, Ray, and your granddad, Oscar.”  “I would love that,” I replied. 

The stories came in the mail today.  My favorite story about my dad from Billy’s reminiscing took one sentence to tell:  “Ray was the only boy I knew in Margerum who had ever climbed the water tower near the depot and went swimming.”  (Water tower?  Think Petticoat Junction.)  I love that my dad did that.

The older I get, the more I think I favor my dad.  My memories of him are a little sketchy, since he died when I was 17.  But I look in the mirror sometimes, and I see him.  I say things to my children, and I hear him. 

What if somebody said that about me and my Heavenly Father?  Wouldn’t that be great?   Maybe, as I mature in the faith, I will bear more and more of the family resemblance, until one day, somebody will look at me and say, “You favor your Daddy,” and be talking about God.