Beech Tree News Network

Sometimes, old documents appear at our house, seemingly out of thin air.  Recently, I was looking through my small personal safe, searching for Garey’s army discharge papers, when I came upon something unexpected.  Savings Bonds.  From 1970 & ’71.  There were seven little pieces of yellowed paper, each marked with a face value of $25.  I know zero about bonds—I’m an annuity kinda girl—so I asked Garey about them.  He said he’d known about them all along, and that he had paid $18.75 apiece for them back in the day.

“Does that mean they are worth $25 today?” I asked.  “I would think they had matured by now.”

“I have no idea,” Garey said.

It amazes me the sub-basement level of curiosity that Garey has about stuff like that. I saw quickly that It was up to me to get to the bottom of this, so I do what I always do when my curiosity is piqued, I went online.  I found a government site where I could enter the bond number and issue date.  The site would then calculate the bond’s current value.

After I picked myself up off the floor, I told Garey that he might want to go to the bank and cash in his bonds.  Garey looked up from what he was reading, and said, “Okay, maybe I can get to it next week.”  He did.  Get to it.  He left the bank with over 900 dollars in his pocket.

A couple of days ago, I found three old documents in a box where I keep papers that I need to sort when I get a minute.  Several minutes had come and gone since I last sorted.  The documents I found were business licenses from 1946 and 1947.  They were in the names of Garey’s dad and Garey’s grandfather.  I have no idea how they ended up in my miscellaneous paper box.  Since the papers were issued before Garey was born, he called his uncle Jesse, his father’s only living brother.

Jesse told Garey the licenses were for a permit to sell vegetables from a stake-side truck—a flatbed truck with brackets that enable the truck to be fitted with wooden sides in order to haul produce for sale.  Each license was stamped WWII Veteran, and the price was reduced from $1.50 to 50cents—the Veteran discount.

J.D. continued to grow vegetables for the market throughout Garey’s growing-up years, even though he also worked a public job.  Garey continued the tradition with our granddaughter, Sabria, and her sweet potato crop.  Those pieces of paper document Sabria’s heritage and her love for the land.  Now and then, she reminds me that we are never to sell this farm.

About 6 months ago, I started searching for any documents that contained the name of my biological grandfather.  I found one.  His death certificate.

When my mother was twelve years old, a little girl at school told her that the father who had raised her—Dan Mattingly—was not her biological dad.  Her real dad, she was told, had killed himself when he found out her mother—my grandmother—was pregnant with her.  When she came home from school that day, she asked her mother about it.  Her mother told her, yes it was true.  That information haunted my mother for the rest of her life.

According to his death certificate, her father—my grandfather—Arnold Stevenson, shot himself in the chest, just below the heart, on February 27, 1932.  My grandmother would have been a couple of months pregnant at the time—my mother was born in September of that year.  The most heart-breaking thing about the whole incident is that my grandfather didn’t die immediately.  He lived until November 5th of that year, finally succumbing to the lung infection and pneumonia caused by the gunshot wound in his chest.  

Arnold Stevenson was 21 years, 8 months, and 5 days old at the time of his death.  He is buried in a cemetery in Cave Spring, located in Breckinridge County, Kentucky.  I haven’t visited the gravesite yet, but I will.  I will take flowers, and I will tell my grandfather that I know what it’s like to feel hopeless, and I will assure him that I made it through those feelings to the other side, where hope lives.  I pray that he made it safely to the place where everything is documented with love, and I hope I can meet him there some day.