Reaching and creating goals

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Reaching lifetime goals often means it is time to reformulate your life and create new goals. As time passes, these goals seem to race by like fence posts but each one is a marker I look on fondly. I reached a career goal in 1993 that I had pursued since I was a little child.

Since the first time I watched Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs sing “Little Girl of Mine In Tennessee” to “Granny” and “Uncle Jed” on “The Beverly Hillbillies;” since the first time I saw Wayne Newton play a down home country boy who could really saw the fiddle; or since the first time I watched Doug Dillard and all the Dillards entertain “Sheriff Andy Taylor” as “The Darlings” on the “Andy Griffith Show” with his up tempo banjo tunes; I dreamed of walking on network television to pick and grin.

I always figured that such national exposure for a young boy from Georgia had to come through music. There were just not that many other avenues at that time. So I worked and studied to improve my music, working to create and market our youth group, The Peachtree Pickers®, by working flea markets, churches and schools. We began competing at fiddler’s conventions and then moved up to entertaining larger and larger audiences at bluegrass festivals and fairs. The support of my late parents Pearl and Floyd Franks and those of the other group members helped to move our joint goals forward. We reached network cable in its infancy with a children’s show called “The Country Kids TV Series,” essentially a children’s “Hee Haw” which aired in the United States and abroad. Our growth would eventually lead us to performances for the Grand Old Opry ® and some acceptance by the more mainstream music industry.

In 1987, members of our youth act decided to go their separate ways, partially due to new college obligations. I was at a new point in my life, trying to decide what is next. I had not yet reached my childhood goal, but without a group, which was still the foundation of bluegrass and southern gospel music at that time, I did not know what my next step would be. I decided to make some solo appearances pulling together musicians when needed and continued appearing with other acts such as The Marksmen Quartet and Doodle and the Golden River Grass.

I began work at the Atlanta-based MBM records in 1987 helping to guide the careers of several artists signed with the label while still performing every opportunity I had. In 1988, the label changed hands and my job was eliminated. So, once again, I found myself searching. While I had enjoyed doing some minor acting in school, I decided in order to reach my television goal, I would have to begin a more intensive study of acting and take any opportunity, which were not many at the time, I could to get to be on screen in Georgia.

But God seemed to immediately open the doors, giving me opportunity after opportunity. The music talents God gave me seemed to put me where I needed to be. It would not be music that landed me my role as “Officer Randy Goode” on “In the Heat of the Night,” but it would be the many friends I developed from years of touring and recording that would share their exuberance about my presence on the show. After countless requests from those who cared about my music asking for me to perform on the show, Carroll O’Connor wrote a uniquely designed scene in an episode entitled “Random’s Child” which would set up a reason and purpose for “Officer Randy” to be pickin’ and grinnin’ just to frustrate the bad guys in that episode. One of those bad guys was Robert O’Reilly, “Gowron,” leader of the Klingons, from “Star Trek, Deep Space Nine.” I bet that is the only time in my life I will get to aggravate a Klingon.

Anyway, Carroll wrote a little piece entitled the “Sparta Blues” for actor Thomas Byrd and I to perform at the Sparta Police impound yard when the bad guys came to claim their car.

I have always jokingly called it my biggest hit since millions saw and heard it on CBS and millions more around the world have heard it since. I’ve often wondered what it sounded like when translated into Chinese or Italian. Recently, one of our Italian fans actually sent me some Italian performances, they were interesting. I didn’t know I spoke Italian so well.

It took years but the childhood dream was reached, and the goal I had chased for years was accomplished.
Then I had to decide what was next. Life is a constant re-evaluation of where you are and where you are going. We can’t just simply drift or what service will that be to God and our fellow man? He has a purpose for everyone’s life. It is up to us to make His vision for us happen. He will open the doors; we must simply study and be prepared to walk through. But at the same time, as we walk with the confidence He gave us we must always be mindful of whether what we are reaching for is His will or one we have created. Only time will tell.

Striving through the hard days

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Often in life we find ourselves looking at the calendar and it fills us with emotions of an occurrence on that date somewhere in our past.
On some occasions it is a good memory or emotion. My grandmother’s birthday still sticks in my head for some reason although to the best of my memory, we never celebrated it, nor do I recall ever being with her on that day but each day when it rolls around, I think of her despite her passing being long ago.
The end of August for me marks the passing of my father and the end of May that of my mother’s. No matter how many years have flown by, when I hit those days, the memories still come back. Thankfully, my folks taught me the importance of grieving through the experience at the time and moving on when the process is complete.
I remember my mother saying to me just hours before she crossed “I put everything that was and is in your good hands, my time is done, yours continues. Live.”
Holidays are hard, sometimes due to missing loved ones, sometimes due to lingering memories of what once was or what might have been. I know for me I often found the end of relationships at specific holidays which soured those annual festivities for me. Each year I have to work my way through the days anew.
I work to bring the spirit of the holiday into my life by finding and helping others, thus taking me outside my own head and not letting the past crush the present.
I wish I could say there is a magic pill to take or an easy course to take that will make everything all better for each of us. We all grieve differently. We all move through transitions in different ways. The best approach I have learned is just do it.
Get up. Get out. Find your new normal, add in your bliss, help some other folks along the way and eventually, you look at the calendar a day or two after one of these heavy-laden anniversaries and realize that the day went by and the day’s once significance, didn’t even cross your mind.

A little fig goes a long ways

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There were several things that folks could depend on in the valley below the Gravelly Spur Mountain, one was that the cool clear water of the Frog Leg Creek trickled its way from the springs upon the mountain and flowed crystal clear throughout the valley insuring that no one went without the liquid of life; the leaves always turned the valley into a patchwork quilt of yellows, reds and a smattering of auburn come fall; and the lovely and interesting and sometimes quirky Lola Roberts will have enough fig preserves to cover every biscuit from Jim Town to Burke and back again.
As young Pearl was coming of age, she spent more and more time with the valley’s elder stateswoman. Her tenacity and her uniqueness set her apart from everyone else. From the squirrels that kept her company by having free run of the house to the birds that roosted next to her porch that she knew by name, many thought she was more than different.
There was no one more vocal about the well-being of the valley and its natural inhabitants, or the welfare of folks who were in need. She often took up the issues no one else wanted to tackle and forged ahead bringing the valley around to her thinking about things.
But when the large bushes on the hillside behind her cabin filled with plump rich figs there was no one that took more delight in picking each of those fruit.
This year was another time that Pearl got to tag along as the two ladies with woven baskets filled them until the could not hold another. Lola passed the time telling stories of the pioneers who first came across the Gravelly Spur and forged out a meager existence in the timber laden valley while fending off Indian attack.
She would point almost ceremoniously at the large black spot on the rear of her cabin below where a fiery arrow had hit its mark only to have Lola’s great grandfather, a boy of eight, to climb out the loft window and detach the burning arrow and dousing the fire with a chamber pot returning to the window safely.
She spoke of how the family brought the first two fig bushes into the valley and from it the entire grove was born.
When the baskets could hold no more figs, the tales would stop and the ladies made their way down the hillside to the garden area below where a large cast iron pot sat over a large wood fire.
Lottie carefully sorted the figs one by one culling those she didn’t like and saving them for her bird friends.
The rest were prepared and dropped into the pot of boiling water above the flames in the garden.
Basket after basket of figs was added until the cast iron could hold no more and then another pot was added.
The figs were cooked and cooked hours on end as Lola reached into a variety of cotton sacks where she stored her individual spices and secret ingredients gathered from her woodland walks until the mixture bubbled with just the right plopping sound.
When it was all just right the savory sugar filled dark brown solution was dipped again and again with a wooden gourd filling Mason jar after Mason jar.
Lola would then carefully tie a ribbon around each and every jar preparing them for her later holiday delivery where she would spread her figs around.
For almost all except Grandma Kitty this was a delectable and joyous gift but for Kitty she could not stand figs but did not have the heart to tell Lola, so she always received them graciously with a smile and added the jar to the collection tucked way back up in the cupboard where they could never be found again.
But Kitty could just not contain herself when she came home one afternoon and found planted next to her back porch three of the prettiest fig bushes that ever touched God’s rich dark soil.
The three were also a gift from Lola but not for Kitty, this time for young Pearl who had helped her steadily.
But Kitty could not contain her frustration insisting on the removal of the bushes banishing them to some distant corner of the far, where only the birds and animals could find them but Grandpa Bill, never being able to resist the pleas of young Pearl defended their placement.
To this day even long after the old house sits in ruin the great great grandchildren of Lola’s feathered friends still roost and peck at Ms. Lola’s figs by the Grandma Kitty’s back porch.

(A story from Randall’s book “A Mountain Pearl: Appalachian Reminiscing and Recipes”)

A chuckle with the Doolittles

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One of the more interesting characters I have met in my life is my second cousin twice-removed Rufus A. Doolittle. No matter how many times the family removed him he just kept coming back. If you meet Rufus on the street, he will always have on his old blue Bibb overalls covering nearly 300 pounds of his favorite dishes. He always said he was built more for comfort than for speed.

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Answer it?

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Sometimes in life we have a sense of foreboding, a phone rings and we know there is bad news on the other end of the receiver.
Do we pick it up and find out the feeling is true?
If we don’t, we will never know. If we do and it’s not what we expected, we are worried for nothing.
Perhaps there is the feeling at the pit of our stomach when we are speeding down the highway that makes us place our foot on the brake.
Have we averted a disaster, we wonder?
The answer may never be revealed or it can be bolstered in our mind when we find an accident just ahead of us.
We have been equipped with such feelings, some are innate, some are learned, some are simply inspired by God’s messengers speaking to our soul.
I know there was one night I was driving through the mountains on a road I knew like the back of my hand. Audibly in the cab of my truck I heard “Slow down!” There was no one to say it either in my vehicle or outside in the early morning hours in a sparsely inhabited area of the mountains.
As I rounded the next curve, just after slowing, there standing in the road were more deer than I had ever seen in one place in my life. I would have likely been killed at the speed I was going before, but the audible voice – changed the potential of my future.
Was it only in my head? Perhaps. Was it a woodsman whose voice cut through the speed, the radio, and the closed windows to be so audibly clear? Perhaps. I think it was one of God’s angels helping me thwart disaster.
There are many points in life an inner voice or an outer one could help us to steer clear of a place which will change the life we know in a negative way. I pray that we all hear it, heed it and hopefully make the appropriate choice.
Should you answer the phone? As Franklin Roosevelt said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear is simply – False Evidence Assumed Real. So, answer the phone, it may be good news.