DOWN HOME: Pondering Popo, but looking ahead

Popo’s been on my mind all week. I always think about Mother’s father a lot this time of year. His birth day was Aug. 2—the same day as this edition of the Baptist Standard—104 years ago.

The world knew Popo as Leonard Moore. He grew up on a homestead in northwestern Oklahoma when farmers plowed the land behind horses and mules. He married my grandmother, Grammar, when she was 17 and he was 21, if I remember correctly. He worked my great-grandmother’s homestead until the Dust Bowl dried up the land and blew most of it into surrounding states. Then he went to work for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway.

By the time I came along, Popo and Grammar had moved to Waynoka, Okla. Popo eventually operated the Sante Fe Reading Room, a company-owned hotel for railroaders. Most of the crews who ran the trains lived in Amarillo or Topeka, Kan. Their shifts took them to Waynoka, where they slept over in the Reading Room and then worked another train back home.

Popo and Grammar lived in an apartment in the Reading Room, and Popo had the perfect job for a granddad. He could accomplish every task with a little boy hanging around. So, when we went for a visit, I spent almost every post-breakfast moment of every day shadowing Popo.

For part of my childhood, Mother attended summer school at Northwestern Oklahoma State University in nearby Alva, obtaining her teaching certificate. So, I got to spend about six weeks in the summer at Grammar and Popo’s home.

Most of those years, Grammar worked alongside him at the Reading Room. If Popo and I wanted to go fishing late in the afternoon, Grammar watched “the front”—the office where guests registered—and we headed for the stock tanks. After supper, we often played catch out by the car shed. And after sundown, we walked along the railroad platform behind the Reading Room, where fat toads squatted in pools of light and zapped flies and mosquitoes with their tongues. Then we took our “vitamins”—Popo’s euphemism for ice cream—and went to bed.

Those are some of the best memories of my life. I’ve been rolling them around in my brain more than usual this summer. That’s because Joanna and I will be grandparents by this time next summer. You may recall I told you Lindsay, our older daughter, is expecting a baby shortly after the first of the year.

For a long time, I thought I wanted to be called Popo by my grandchildren. But lately, I’ve come to think my Popo was a one-and-only specimen of grandfatherhood. So, now I’m thinking Marvo would be a terrific grandpaw name.

Of course, I’ll probably go by whatever consistently comes off the lips of that baby growing in Lindsay’s belly. But no matter what my grandkids call me, I hope I fill their lives with as many wonderful memories as Popo poured into mine.