Anything's Good If You Like It

He was my grandfather, William Edwin "Mac" McGinnis. Today is his birthday, though he has been gone eleven years. My son, William Elias, was named for him.

He liked golf and he played regularly although he wasn’t all that good at it, I don’t think. He liked to be with the ones he played with and he liked to be outside.

He liked going to church and “fellowship.” He liked to visit people. He tithed.

He liked good hard work. He had a garden and he worked in it daily. He mowed the lawn. He filled up the wheelbarrow and pushed it from one side of the yard to the other. He did what my grandmother told him to do and then he rested. He smelled like sweat, and earth, and freshly cut grass, and iced tea.

He liked to build things: picture frames, bookshelves, homes, churches, tree-houses, little play-houses for the back yard for my sister and me to play in. He was clumsy. He broke things and then he fixed them.

He liked homemade peach cobbler and ice cream. He liked to pick fresh fruit off the tree and eat it right away. He liked bologna. He liked to eat most anything really.

He once ate dog treats in the shape of little bones because someone had placed a handful on the kitchen counter without thinking. A few hours later, he very politely said, “Those cookies weren’t very good.” When we explained they were not cookies but dog treats, he thought about it, frowning, and I'm sure he wanted to know, "What in the Sam Hill..." dog treats were doing on the kitchen counter. But he never got angry at those things.

He did not like rice, but when my grandmother made it, he ate it anyway.

“Papaw, how can you not like rice?” I would ask him. “It’s just rice. It barely tastes like anything. But it’s rice. It’s good!”

“Aw, sure it is. Anything’s good if you like it. But I don’t,” he would say. I had no idea what that meant. It made no sense to me at the time. But it always made me smile.

He liked Kate Jackson and he thought she was the prettiest woman around. He watched Charlie’s Angels and Scarecrow and Mrs. King and when she appeared on the screen, he pointed out how pretty she was, and how smart she was, and he said my sister and I would be like that: pretty AND smart.

He liked to play with us, and when we chose our play names, he insisted on being Goober Snapper. We begged him to be Bosley instead, to our Chris and Kelly (never Sabrina, mind you – who wanted to be Sabrina?) but he would be Goober Snapper and if we were especially persistent and kept pushing the importance of choosing an appropriate name, he would digress into a seemingly endless monologue of “I’m Puddin’tane. Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.” And so we inevitably gave up and made do without Bosley. We instead gave our investigative reports to a tape recorder balanced on a TV tray representing Charlie with the help of our wily cohort, Goober Snapper.

He liked to tell the story of Pete and Repeat and we never tired of hearing it.
"Pete and Repeat got up on their horse. Pete fell off. Who was still on?"
"Repeat!" we cackled.
"Pete and Repeat got up on their horse..."

He liked to talk and laugh and play dominoes and take us riding in his old blue truck and sing to us about Bill Grogan's goat. We liked to do all of these things with him.

Sadly, my children never knew my grandfather. So I do my best to reproduce him. I will be Goober Snapper and Puddin’tane as soon as my children give me the opportunity. Sooner, maybe. I will introduce the ubiquitous Sam Hill into their every day vernacular in place of the other, lesser words I used before my children arrived.

I will play with them outside and teach them how to plant things and watch them grow. I have already taught Eli to notice how good the earth can smell. I will offer my children fresh fruit right off the tree as often as that is possible and teach them how to make homemade peach cobbler and homemade ice cream. And I will tell them all about their great grandfather when we enjoy those things.

But I will not eat bologna. You might like it. After all, anything’s good if you like it. But I don’t.