In between all the tripe, sometimes the Facebook delivers an actual nugget of beauty. My friend Ryan Smithson stopped me cold with this status update Thursday morning:
“I got my first PGA TOUR pin yesterday to mark five years with the company. My grandfather, Billie, wore his Genesco company pin every day and was buried with it on his suit, 16 years ago today. I really wish I had a guidebook to how he lived his life, because I'd follow it to the letter, except for the fried bologna he loved.”
That could be the first paragraph of the Great American Novel. It instantly brought me back to my trip to Ireland this summer and the little wrinkled men with a twinkle in their eyes and Michael Collins pins dutifully pinned to their lapels.
Ryan’s status update sparked a lovely little thread of comments on his Facebook page that spoke of grandfathers, hometowns, high-school basketball, golf and the merits of fried bologna. His cousin Susan offered an equally poignant memory, about their grandfather’s funeral, which could easily be the second paragraph of what was fast becoming a crowd-sourced memoir:
“I remember it was bitterly cold. They had just put crush rock down.”
Ryan grew up in Centerville, Tennessee, “best known as the home of Minnie Pearl.” He likes to play the role of simple country boy, but it’s just an act. His complex mind never ceased to astound me when we worked together at SI.com, where we would trade random lines from ’80s comedies and he would tell country-mouse tales that you were sure he invented but probably did not.
I asked him to tell me more about his grandfather.
“He had the same Bible for decades. One day, he put it on the roof of his truck and forgot it. Obviously, it fell off. A deer hunter found it by the side of the road, and kept it.
“One year later, he returned to hunt deer, stopped in a local store and asked, ‘Where does Billie Smithson live?’ They told him, and he drove all the way out (15 miles or so) and left it on the porch with a note. That return was worth millions to the man. The Bible was all scarred up on the outside now, and Pa kinda liked it that way.”
“I got my first PGA TOUR pin yesterday to mark five years with the company. My grandfather, Billie, wore his Genesco company pin every day and was buried with it on his suit, 16 years ago today. I really wish I had a guidebook to how he lived his life, because I'd follow it to the letter, except for the fried bologna he loved.”
That could be the first paragraph of the Great American Novel. It instantly brought me back to my trip to Ireland this summer and the little wrinkled men with a twinkle in their eyes and Michael Collins pins dutifully pinned to their lapels.
Ryan’s status update sparked a lovely little thread of comments on his Facebook page that spoke of grandfathers, hometowns, high-school basketball, golf and the merits of fried bologna. His cousin Susan offered an equally poignant memory, about their grandfather’s funeral, which could easily be the second paragraph of what was fast becoming a crowd-sourced memoir:
“I remember it was bitterly cold. They had just put crush rock down.”
Ryan grew up in Centerville, Tennessee, “best known as the home of Minnie Pearl.” He likes to play the role of simple country boy, but it’s just an act. His complex mind never ceased to astound me when we worked together at SI.com, where we would trade random lines from ’80s comedies and he would tell country-mouse tales that you were sure he invented but probably did not.
I asked him to tell me more about his grandfather.
“He had the same Bible for decades. One day, he put it on the roof of his truck and forgot it. Obviously, it fell off. A deer hunter found it by the side of the road, and kept it.
“One year later, he returned to hunt deer, stopped in a local store and asked, ‘Where does Billie Smithson live?’ They told him, and he drove all the way out (15 miles or so) and left it on the porch with a note. That return was worth millions to the man. The Bible was all scarred up on the outside now, and Pa kinda liked it that way.”
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