Who We Are

by Gene Shelburne

Yesterday for the first time in my life I looked into the eyes of my great-great grandfather.

He didn’t look back, of course, since he’s been dead now for 70-plus years. But in the photo my oldest brother e-mailed to me, there stood that old gent on my computer screen, ramrod straight, with a billowing beard almost down to his waist. He’s holding the reins of a huge horse that towers over his 6-foot frame.

With him in the blotched, 100-year-old photograph stand two more generations of Caudles strung out in front of a typical 1900 west Texas farmhouse. With two bedrooms inside and a narrow porch across the front, the house was made of unpainted, rough-hewn lumber.

My dad’s mother stands a bit apart from the family grouping.  She looks like she’s 6, or 7 years old at most. Five of her younger siblings are in the picture, including her twin brothers, still toddlers.  My great grandfather sits stiff in a chair, with my great grandmother standing behind him. The last half of their family was yet unborn.

As I gaze at that photo, I get goose bumps. The kids in it were old folks when I was a kid. And the old-timer with all the whiskers and the horse had been dead two decades when I was born. Today most of my grandchildren are older than my grandmother is in this picture.

With the new photo editor in my computer, I was able to enhance the scene. A bit more contrast and an added touch of brightness brought the dim and faded photo back to life. Faces lost in murky gray emerged once more alert and clear.

A few keystrokes is all it took to rejuvenate the aging photograph, but it would be hard to improve on the people in it.

I never knew those Caudle grandfathers. But I knew their faith, and their honesty, and their work ethic. I saw those qualities living and vibrant in their children, and thus I knew from an early age that God did right well when he picked out my granddaddies.

None of us gets to choose his grandparents, of course, so it’s not something we can rightly boast about. But nothing has much more to do with who we are than our choice of grandparents. We can’t choose our own, but it’s up to us what kind of grandparents our own grandkids wind up with.

How well are yours doing?