I'm Going to Miss Me
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Larry G. Womack 900 19th Ave S #404 6155163218 [email protected] www.larrywomack.com I’m Going To Miss Me When I’m Gone Inspired by a true story By larrywomack.com October 17, 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 2 Chapter One: Standing Ovations 6 Chapter Two: Jesus is Lord 15 Chapter Three: Coming of Age 32 Chapter Four: My Expanding World 44 Chapter Five: Between God and Honky Tonks 61 Chapter Six: On My Own 71 Chapter Seven: A Summer of Choices 94 Chapter Eight: Not a Care in the World 107 Chapter Nine: Go West Young Man. Then East 122 Chapter Ten: Turning Point 149 Chapter Eleven: Setting the Stage 164 Chapter Twelve: Upwardly Mobile 174 Chapter Thirteen: Hanging with the Haves 195 Chapter Fourteen: Hitting My Stride 219 Chapter Fifteen: Top of the Heap 245 Chapter Sixteen: Going it Alone 269 Chapter Seventeen: More Than Life Itself 289 Chapter Eighteen: Loose Ends 309 Chapter Nineteen: Don’t Save Me a Place in Heaven 314 1 INTRODUCTION: The End And Beginning Of An Extraordinary, Ordinary Life You don’t know me, but by the end of this book you will understand why I will miss me more than anyone else. Mine was an extraordinary, ordinary life. At its end, my grandson Larry Arace will gift my carcass to Vanderbilt University Medical School and place my self-written obituary in the Nashville Tennessean, Sunday Edition. Obituary: Larry Gordon Womack died. The last people to see my complete remains will be a medical student with a scalpel and his professor. The student will say, “So that was his penis.” The professor will observe, “He evidently ate well.” The anatomical donation department at Vanderbilt Medical School asked if I’d like what’s left to be buried in a shoebox next to my donor wife, Diane. She died in 2004. I declined too much ceremony. My childhood was filled with dreams, fantasies and Jesus. My teen years were packed with silliness, music and Jesus. Early adulthood brought mind-legends, accolades, love, responsibilities and less time for Jesus. In mid-life, I became a pillar of the Episcopal Church, created children, riches, arrogance, gout, joy and gained respect for many ethereal practices. Maturity produced temperance, grief, grandchildren, exuberance, wisdom and contentment outside spirituality. Each phase and insight created my extraordinary, ordinary life. The difference between you and me is that while both of us were actively living the life, I was also obsessively observing it, usually from an obtuse point-of-view. A college friend said he always enjoyed my retelling of our shared experiences more than the actual events. He said it was not that I made things up; it was that I recounted the experiences with a unique flair and from an alternative perspective. Even in childhood, that alternative perspective attracted friends and acquaintance to come to me for advice. After years of intuitively guiding people through relationship issues, I turned that talent to helping businesspersons achieve management and marketing goals. That shift required me to add continuing education to my bag of tricks. Since making learning a lifelong quest, my mantra has become: An uneducated opinion is a dangerous resource, especially if it’s your own. I learned that success, whatever the endeavor, most often comes from learning something new. In this tome, I speak fondly, irreverently and sparingly of family, partners, loves, accomplishments, sorrows and vicissitudes. Using those relevant aspects of my life only to punctuate this book’s underlying theme, my inner journey. A journey that began in southern Methodism, moved through Episcopalianism, Eastern spiritualism and beyond 2 agnosticism. I have beseeched all my living and departed friends not to save me a place in Heaven. I’m not going. After six or seven decades of immersing (not sprinkling) myself in Christianity, other religions and ethereal practices, I concluded that my soul, like my DNA, is similar to the soul of an earthbound monkey. Not going anywhere. But, I get ahead of myself. Please note: I have not let facts get in the way of the truth. September 1942 – Glenn Miller was number one with Kalamazoo My grandfather, Walter Craddock was an imposing and influential political figure who served in a variety of government positions, including Vice Mayor of Nashville, Tennessee. He was an influencer rather than a man of power. Usually working behind the scene as a champion of the people. His favorite saying, I’m told, was, “Be a servant and live like a king.” A typical example of his service style was when one of his constituents placed several hundred dollars in her oven for safekeeping, then later turned it on to bake a pie. My grandfather sent the ashes, along with a well-crafted letter, to the U.S. Treasury Department. Within weeks, the grateful lady received seventy-five percent of her losses back from the government. She was one of the many people who came to my grandfather for advice and counsel. Walter Craddock always comported himself with dignity and in a confident and impeccable manner. He had beautiful dark blonde wavy hair, a winning smile and smelled of bay rum. My grandfather was also known as a fine, church-going man. When I was three, he took me on the streetcar to visit the courthouse to show me off to his cronies. My first real memory, however, is at four sitting on a daybed with him, in a little room off the kitchen in his home. He had just returned from his job as a city councilman. Grandfather Walter escorted me into that small room to teach the boy to play the harmonica. To my grandmother Lilly, he said, “The time has come to encourage his musical talents.” My grandfather and I sat there for almost an hour passing a harmonica back and forth with strains of She’ll Be Comin’ Round The Mountain mellifluously flowing from his lips and God only knows what coming from mine. I could see our images in a small mirror across the room. He complimented my progress, then asked my grandmother to walk me home. A few days later, he died in his backyard on his way to feed his chickens. The official cause was heart failure. My dad said later it was from a bourbon attack. February 2012 – Kelly Clarkson with Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You) number one At this writing, I am seventy-three years old and still do most of my own stunts. I am 3 retired from a fifty-year career in advertising, as a business/political consultant and as an author, with a little music thrown in for good measure. I know I have less than twenty percent of my life left to live. So in relationship to my tenure as a human being, I will die soon. All the arrangements have been made and will be executed by the capable hands of my grandson. My corpse will be hauled from my mansion in the sky, in Midtown Nashville, Tennessee, or elsewhere, to Vanderbilt University Medical School, as was my late wife Diane’s. (She always wanted to go to medical school.) I will miss me when I’m gone, as will a few others for a while. There will be no epilogue. No Saint Peter at the Golden Gate. No heavenly reunions. Like Diane, eventually I’ll just disappear into the compost heap of life to nurture new living things. Maybe even push up a daisy or two. Or even end up as the pistil or stamen in a beautiful flower or as the pit in a delicious piece of fruit. Larry Womack will exist only in the fading memories of loved ones and in the occasional anecdotes of acquaintances. Life will go on just fine. That is for everyone but me. I am ready for life’s biggest surprise . death. Knowing it rarely comes as one expects. Sometimes even out of order. My mother died before her mother. Diane died before her mother. And, Diane died before me. We didn’t expect that. March 2003 – Jennifer Lopez with All I Have is number one Two months before Diane’s cancer diagnosis, I was leaning against the refrigerator watching Diane wash the dinner dishes. “And another thing,” I said, “Don’t kiss me on the top of my head. The first time you kiss me on the top of my head, I’ll know my days are numbered. You’ll begin thinking about sending me to a home.” “I’ve never thought about sending you to a home,” she replied. “Remember, a couple of years ago, when Gus wasn’t feeling well and we let him sleep here in the kitchen instead of his doghouse. Sometime during the night, he crapped on the floor. That morning you made me clean it up. While I was doing so, I thought, first time I do this she’ll send me to a home.” Diane said, “Anyway, I think you’d enjoy living in a home, as you call it. For one thing, there would be a bigger audience for your routines, including some residents with Alzheimer’s for whom your old stories would be new every day. You’d like that!” “I wouldn’t like the smell,” I replied. “When I visited my mother in the nursing home, I’d sometimes hear my old college fight song, Smash Bang to Victory, in my head. At first I couldn’t figure out why; then one day it hit me. The nursing home smelled like my old college underwear.” 4 “That is gross! Tell me you didn’t wear underwear for weeks at a time when you were in college.