REMEMBERING ROD

            This is a day for remembering – remembering the call that informed me he had died on this day two years ago, and for peering back in time to 1963.  That was the year he was born, a healthy eight pounds, thirteen ounces in a small Catholic hospital in Paris, Texas.  St. Joseph’s Hospital is remembered now only by a placard.  So to, is he.  Two bronze placards atop the marble mausoleum tell of the man buried there, in a Catholic Church he helped build in Honduras, just steps from the pristine beach where the assure blue waters of the Caribbean lap gently over the bleached sand.

            He was my son, the third of my five children.  And like the waves of the Caribbean, memories lap softly over me this day.  I recall his first outing.  It was just him.  His two siblings were spending a week-long sleepover with grandparents in Fort Worth.  We bundled him in a soft blanket, put a bottle of milk in a plastic warmer, and took him to the only movie theatre in Paris at that time.  To Kill a Mockingbird was playing.

            There was a line outside the ticket office.  We paid our fifty cents each and walked inside.  Most who stood in the line did not enter with us.  They went instead to a wooden staircase on the side of the building that ascended to the theatre balcony where the outside door was marked “Colored Only.”  Jim Crow laws were still enforced in Texas in 1963.  Later that year, Dr. Martin Luther King would stand before a quarter-million people on the Washington Mall and declare he had a dream that one day all of us would judge each other not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character. 

            No work in American literature better depicts the brutal unfairness of segregation than To Kill a Mockingbird.  It should be required reading for every American student.  We were so moved by the movie that we left only long enough to warm another bottle and return minutes later to watch it a second time.  Four-day old Roddy Scott lay cradled in our arms, sound asleep, through both showings.

            Sleep well, my son, sleep well.