Okay.  This is it.  Time to end an off-and-on career in journalism that stretches back to high school days.  

I don’t wanna, but I gotta.  

During the past six months a series of health problems have eroded my capacity to live alone at home with the tools and resources necessary to contribute.

Thanks are due to Ms. Rhenetta Ward and the rest of the staff of the Statesboro Herald.  Much greater thanks must go to George Loper, my long-time care giver, and to Sandra Cordero, who keeps my house clean and smelling good.

I do not surrender this part of myself willingly.  I have countless stories to tell and some sad people to comfort, just as I have sermons to deliver that remain unpreached because of disabilities.   I dread the fate of institutional living, and facilities for the aged and infirm are cases in point.  Like other total institutions, they follow strict routines of waking, sleeping, eating, etc.  Post-retirement, I have followed an idiosyncratic pattern that suits me–late to bed and late to rise, reading or working until midnight.  Still, it is better not having outlets for my story-telling than to have dementia destroy the mind behind the story-telling.

The hardest part is leaving home, the place where Annette and I spent more years together than at any of the many others.  It is a lot like losing her again. I can’t take much with me and we had accumulated a lot of stuff in our decades together.

There are so many things that I don’t know what to do with.  There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of books but nobody wants them.  Most readers prefer e-books.  I have given boxes of books to libraries in the past but increasingly libraries do not need them or want them.  As a book reader from childhood, I find this almost sacrilegious.   I am surrounded by five bookshelves loaded with unwanted treasures.

Oh yes, Annette left behind shelves of books on cooking, quilting and crafts.  An excellent cook, she seldom used one of her cookbooks.  She did finish a quilt top and started on another but never got the first one quilted.  That’s okay.

I have records from university teaching and administration, ministry, regional history, genealogy–multiple filing cabinets full of them.  If called upon to provide information about weddings and funerals from my ministry, I must turn to these records.  Perhaps some of them still have value but to whom? 

There is lots of music in many formats and players thereof.  I have Annette’s thirty-three and a third rpm records from her teen years and hundreds of CDs from later times.  Then there are high school year-books hers and mine from times when folks danced to some of that music.

I also have some really old stuff.  There is the family Bible of my g.g. grandfather Allen Collins and that of his son, my great grandfather, James Madison Collins.  They cover a century of life in Tattnall County.  The trove includes financial records of my maternal grandfather, Alva Rudolph “Rudy” Williams.

Guided by Toombs County’s Home Demonstration Agent, Juanita Stevenson, Mother designed and decorated with etching a large aluminum serving tray.  She never used it, just kept it on display.  Truthfully, it’s too large to be practical and probably not dishwasher safe.

Annette and I earned seven academic degrees, three with honors, two with membership in national scholastic honor societies.  There are diplomas, a set of academic regalia and attendant plaques.  Then there plaques and cups given in honor of, or in recognition of services rendered.  They were very important to us, but...

Flags.  Annette got one to fly from a pillar on our front porch but never got the base to go on the pillar.  Under the leadership of my brother Jimmy, he and I arranged for the Veterans Administration to place a modest headstone on the grave of our great grandfather, John Branch.  Although he was a Confederate veteran, he was honored with an American flag.  In his case, the irony is appropriate.

Stuff from colleagues.  A set of small screwdrivers from Larry Platt, a straw hat from Richard Persico, books that we wrote together, books that George Shriver wrote and gave copies to me.  Arthur Sparks and Harris Mobley wrote memoirs and gave me copies. 

This could go on and on for many “tokens rest within my treasure chest.”  But I am getting tired.  

Like my beloved and lamented south Georgia buddies, Caroll Dadisman and Remer Tyson, who manned the helm of The Red and Black in 1954-55, I sign this with the reporter’s “30.”