Jaki Jean & Jean & Rush & Communion & Memory

So, this afternoon, watching a James Cagney flick (Blood on the Sun, circa 1945) with Jean, as I am battling what I am sure is a case of Shingles & Jean is dealing with all my battles & complaints & groans, Jean brings up the Lord’s Supper.

You know, the other day when Doc Price & Pam came to have Communion with us, & Doc Price was talking about how Baptists have traditionally served Communion once a quarter & how Catholics & other churches serve it more often, I wanted to tell them about my Daddy.

For those of you who read me who don’t know, Jean’s Daddy Rush was a Church of Christ minister.  I imagine it was a very intense meeting between Rush Sims & my father, a divorced man, when Jack wanted to marry Jean. 

So I asked Jean, What did your father say about the Lord’s Supper?

He said, & her voice deepens to mimic Rush Sim’s amazing, engaging, authoritative,  voice, Every first day of the week.

So we talk, my mother & I, about why something so amazing, something done in remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice, of God’s sacrifice, is not celebrated every moment of every day.

I tell her that I have never understood, even as a child, why a sacrament so essential to Christian faith, would only be celebrated once a quarter.

And Jean says, Every first day of the week.

I ask Jean about something she told me a few weeks ago, that her mother Luna was not raised in the Church of Christ.   About how she always thought her mother smoothed the way with Rush when Jean joined the Baptist Church.

She doesn’t remember that conversation. 

This afternoon, I don’t weep.  This afternoon, she remembers that her father Rush believed in & celebrated Communion with his congregation every first day of the week.

I will weep later – for not realizing the wealth of text & stories & insight my mother houses in the filing cabinets of her brain. 

Tonight, I hear not for the first time, about when she dated J.R. Rambo, a friend of her sister Melba’s eventual husband, Robert, when she was in Dallas.

And then she tells me she had to return to Canton to finish high school.  That part was new.

That part she has left off over the years.

Now, she no longer intentionally leaves out anything.

Now, she searches & retrieves.  I see it, as her brow furrows, searching for what she wants to remember, for what she wants to express.

So, emulating  Roland Barthes’ braid of text, compiled from all text before, present & to come, I try to braid together the text of my mother’s memory & memories.  And all those pieces.

Gotta wonder what happened to J.R. Rambo.