365 Days of Impacts

Father - Daughter dance at my Wedding! March 4th is my Dad's birthday and I am so thankful for the memories I have with him over the 52 years I've known him.  In the mid 70s, I was a tween and my dad taught me how to jitterbug.  He taught both me and Christy.  He and mom used to jitterbug all the time early on in their relationship.  Dad LOVED to dance.  It was in his blood.  And I LOVED to dance with him.  He could just feel the beat of the music and it made him want to get up and dance.  Dancing the jitterbug with Dad is one of the happiest memories I have of my father.  I swear if he could walk today he would be up dancing with me.  Learning the jitterbug was the first time in my life my dad had taught me something that I would end up enjoying the rest of my life.  I loved it!  It really taught you how to follow a lead and made you work together in lock step to make partner dancing look easy. The jitterbug was the ...

I never got to meet my paternal grandmother Ethel White. She passed away a few years before I was born. She was a classic beauty. My dad always told me what a lovely woman she was. She was as beautiful inside as she was out. When Harry left her, he left Dad and Uncle Bert to take care of her and they did until she passed away of an enlarged heart. I am sad that I never got to meet her, but she did an awesome job raising two fine men that raised GREAT families of their own. She was a great testament to perseverence in hard times. Though I never met her, the example she set made a big impression on me and how I handle myself when up against the odds.

I did not know either of my grandfathers. My mother's father, John D. Poteete worked for Ford Motor Company in Detroit. He took Nana away from Alabama to the motor city in search of work for the automobile industry in the 40s. Unfortunately, he liked to gamble at the Hazel Park Racetrack, and most weeks would blow his entire paycheck and drink himself silly. Nana basiically kept the family financially afloat, working during the days leaving Mom and Uncle Johnny to take care of themselves. Sometimes John D. would come home so drunk, mom would have to peel him out of the bushes and put him to bed.  Think about your childhood and compare it to that.  Mom grew up on 5 Mile road, an area of Detroit that is now not super desireable to live in. Nana eventually left him and went back to Alabama, but never divorced him as divorce was not an option in the 50s. It was frowned upon.  You could separate, but not divorce.  They remained married until he passed away on a bus i...

The first major death in my life was my maternal Grandmother, Wilna Poteete. This was the first time I dealt with the emotion of grief. Nana literally was my world when I was a little girl. Our lives revolved around her coming to visit or us going to visit her. When she fell ill, I was a Junior in High School. The reason I remember this is that she was able to come to Christy's high school graduation, but she was not alive for mine. This was devastating to me. When Nana got sick, Mom had to leave us with Dad and go to Alabama to take care of her for a few months. She had heart disease and had had a heart attack. While Mom was gone, Christy was in her first year of College at Wayne State University in Detroit, so she was gone all day. Dad worked from 5am to 6pm down at Highland Park for Chrysler. Needless to say, I had a lot of time on my hands to think. Sure I had a lot of after school activities, but I was by myself a lot. One of my "chores" was to cook dinne...

I believe that I got the love of funk from my dad. Back in his day it was Ray Charles. One of the best memories I have of my dad is a trip we took in Christy's convertible from Atlanta to Albuquerque New Mexico. We were delivering Christy's car to her after she had accepted a position during the dot com boom at a startup called Super Groups. She had gone out early to take the job, had her stuff shipped from Atlanta out there, and then we drove her car out so she could have it out there. I had taken road trips with my family before and short ones with my Dad in Michigan, but this was the longest road trip we had taken together up to that point. We rode with the top down listening to all kinds of music. A little known fact of my dad is that he LOVED Prince. Mainly because my dad couldn't escape a good beat. But the funniest thing was we were listening to Prince's song Sexy M%&F$@. If you don't know, that song has a killer beat, and one that drummers love...

George Edward White, my father. His boyhood nickname was ‘Nibs’. As a boy, he had two front teeth that made him look like a rabbit.  The biggest impact that my father has made on my life is positive attitude and perseverence.  This man has had hardship since day 1 and you’d never know it.  I have learned so much just by watching his calm, positive steadfastness.  He carries on, with no pity party.  As a boy, he was born with his hip out of the socket, and back in the 30s, the treatment was to put him in a full-on body cast, with a bent leg and stilted shoe.  How he learned to walk in this contraption with crutches is mind boggling.  All he wanted to do was be a normal kid and play baseball like the other little kids.  He rose above this disability, and went on to play baseball later on in high school. This was the first of five hip treatments he would have throughout his lifetime.  He had 3 total hip replacements, and on the 4th, there wa...

One of the things that I am most thankful for in my life is the lesson my maw and paw taught me about personal responsibility financial fortitude. I got this from my parents who lived on 50K a year for a family of 4 in 1983. Granted, this was almost 40 years ago, but that is still not a lot of money even back then. I cannot stress the importance of this lesson enough: When I drove their cars, I was to be respectful and not showboat or do stupid stuff (minus the time Rich Jolly put the red car in neutral at a light and slammed the car into drive, effectively dropping the transmission) - like let another person drive.   Their property, their money - it was to be respected.   We were not brought up on a "disposable" mindset. No matter what it was, when we purchased it, we were expected to take good care of it so that it lasted longer. When I went to college, they cosigned on a student loan that I HAD TO PAY BACK (thanks MOM).   When I turned 18, I went to college,...