Richard was a good singer. Still is--I have a tape he made singing with a group when he was probably...oh, I'd say in his mid-forties. It's good country gospel. I remember Richard singing solos in church when he was very young. He just sang with no music.
In an earlier chapter in this blog, I told about a large family living near Bakersfield, the Guinns, whose wife/mother and four other family members were killed in a head-on collision in the first year that we were in California. At that time, Richard was only four years old. When he was nine years old we moved from Delano back to the Bakersfield area and eventually to Lamont where we attended church with the remainder of the Guinn family. By that time Brother Guinn, father of the family, had been a widower for about five years. Most of the Guinn children were grown by then. Several were married and had children of their own.
The church building was pretty small. I would have been surprised if we could have seated many more than fifty people in the "pews" which were benches with plank backs. Brother Guinn always sat near the back when he came to church. Most everyone was aware that he used (chewed) tobacco, which was against the teachings of our church. (No smoking, no dipping, no chewing...)
One Sunday night before the service began Richard asked the pastor if he could sing a special song. The pastor waited until it was nearly time to go home before calling Richard up to sing his song.
Young Richard went to the front and said boldly, "I want to dedicate this song to Brother Guinn."
He began to sing in a sweet, clear voice:
I chew my tobacco, and I spit my juice...
I don't try to quit 'cause it ain't no use...
Nobody knows but the Lord can see.
Oh, Dear Lord, don'cha tell on me...
I love my neighbor as good as my life.
I steal his money and I steal his wife.
Nobody knows but the Lord can see.
Oh, Dear Lord, don'cha tell on me...There may have been more verses that I don't remember. Daddy and Mama were "dying" of embarrassment. They had no idea Richard would sing that little ditty, and especially dedicate it to Brother Guinn. They were afraid the old widower would be hurt or at least embarrassed. Turned out he was very gracious, and appeared to think it was funny. I'm not sure, but I think he and Richard were pretty good friends after that.
Until I married a man who smoked I didn't know what a hold tobacco gets on a person. Dave told me he started picking up cigarette butts and smoking them when he was about twelve or thirteen years old. From the time he was grown and able to buy smokes, for more than forty-five years he smoked more than two packs a day of Camels without filters, the strongest cigarettes available. And all of us, his family, breathed the second hand smoke all those years.
During my pregnancies, I was very sensitive to smells, especially smoke. One whiff and my stomach emptied its contents automatically. So Dave smoked outside whenever I was pregnant. But once the baby was born, he was right back in the house smoking like a chimney. He didn't let the cigarette sit in the ashtray, either. He smoked it right down to so short he could barely hold the stub to put it out. People warned him of the dire consequences, and sometimes he would try to quit but he never could. I just knew he would develop lung cancer. I didn't realize smoking causes more deaths by heart attack than by cancer.
Dave died at the relatively young age of fifty-seven, of a heart attack. I became a single mom at the age of forty-seven. My philosophy is simple: tobacco is not a good thing. It kills people. On the other hand, I know it is very hard to quit. It is a trap. It is very difficult to get free of it, whether smoking or chewing or dipping or... whatever. Tobacco takes beloved people away from their spouses, children, siblings, parents.
So if you smoke, or chew, or whatever you do with that nasty stuff, please stop. Don't say "it ain't no use..." It will be hard to stop, but it can be done. Whatever it takes, just stop. Please.
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