Making New Friends and Building New Relationships for July 28, 2014

Oscar Crawford

Welcome to this Edition of Making New Friends and Building New Relationships. In today's edition, Part 5 of Traveling American and Going Home July 4th and introducing a new blogroll of interesting service websites, and Behind the Waterfall Contest. Love and Blessings to all who visit and share.

Oscar Crawford

Traveling America

and Going Home July 4th, Part 5

Clyde and Betty Crawford on left
Wedding Day July 4, 1951
Cora Bell and Oscar Crawford
Best Man and Maid of Honor on right

I have crossed the country to visit my parents for their 63rd wedding anniversary on July 4th. There I spent time with my parents Clyde and Betty Crawford and our family in Gamaliel, Kentucky. We shared our love for God and for each other through food, fun, and fireworks.

Pastor Joshua Hale

On July 5th, I traveled from Gamaliel to Franklin to be near Bowling Green to preach on the morning of July 6th in the church where I was ordained in 1978. Pastor Reverend Joshua Hale is the pastor of the Taylor Chapel AME Church. His father, the Reverend Frederick Eugene Hale had been pastor while I was there 28 years earlier.

In Franklin, I stayed at the home of my baby sister, LaSandra. I had performed her wedding ceremony to her husband Joe Woods years earlier in my parents’ front yard under the most beautiful maple tree. While staying with them, I learned something about the maternal side of my family that blew me out of the water.

First, I must tell you an incidental that will make the rest of the story work together. As a boy, my family would always visit my mother’s childhood church for an annual daylong event in the village of Settle.

Colored people, so called at the time, would descend upon the hamlet Greenville Church on the 4^th Sunday in July from the northern cities of Louisville, Indianapolis and Chicago to spend the day with family and friends from childhood. Preaching, singing, and shouting filled the church for the day and the church would raise enough money to manage its budget for the entire year.

Granny Gwen

Everybody in attendance was colored from the noted dark-skinned of us to the brown to the bright to damn near white, except one family. One family was always present under a tree with washtubs full of pop for sale on ice. They were white. As I got older I asked, “Is there no one colored who can sell pop?”

I would later learn these were my mother’s half siblings. No one had ever told me about them. My mother is an only child to a single mother, my awesome Granny Gwen. I named my first daughter after her. My mom is the offspring of the master of the sharecropper plantation and my grandmother.

I had always wondered who the white man was who would come to Granny Gwen’s house every Saturday afternoon when we would be there to visit. He always gave her a brown paper bag. He would talk to my grandmother for a moment. Sometime my mother would be looking on. I saw mother and the man look at each other but never a word passed between them.

Once my father, my brother Ronnie and I came home for midday meal from working the farm to find mother crying. Dad went to comfort her. We could only watch what we did not understand.

We ate something quickly and made our way back to the field. While we rode the tractor back to work, Dad told us mom had read about her father dying in the paper. Ronnie and I looked at each other with wide eyes. This was the man, who came to Granny Gwen’s house on Saturdays. We discovered a grandfather we never knew. His name is Eb Cockrell.

Now, back to what I learned while staying with my sister LaSandra and my brother – in – law, Joe Woods. When my sister told this story to Joe, another startling discovery emerged.

When she mentioned the name Eb Cockrell, Joe’s eyes got wide and lit up like a marquee of coming attractions. Joe’s family and Eb Cockrell’s family are the same family. My sister and her husband and all of us connect by a bloodline. While this may not seem so strange to the people who create narratives about southerners, it is a revelation to all of us.

Nowhere in Eb Cockrell’s wildest dreams could he have envisioned this future. I despised his existence for years even as I acknowledged my mother loved the father who never cared for her, as a father should.

She felt sorry for him. She believed he loved her and Granny Gwen in the only ways available given his social circumstances. For that, she honored him as the person he was to her. Over time, I have learned to love him too as I have watched God bring together a family in only ways God can.

No one is to be praised or blamed for the past. The present is all our responsibility to bring our best love and person to share. As a writer and as the grandson to the grandfather I never knew, I will search to know the story of Eb Cockrell without whom I would not exist.

Next time, the family and friends grow as I near the time I must go back to Arizona.

Service Websites

Visit and Share with Your Networks

Social Media Satisfied http://socialmediasatisfied.com/ At Social Media Satisfied, Lisa Mason will be your personal social media fitness coach, teaching you to treat your social media goals like your health and wellness goals, achieving success one day at a time.

God Doesn't Care........or Does He? Kindle Edition http://amzn.to/1o6SYBR

Paperback Edition https://www.createspace.com/4802055 There are times in life when things just don't seem fair. In fact, when Jesus walked this earth He told His followers that in this world there would be trouble. Does that mean that God doesn't care?

Shakonda Fontae Cloud and Blusky Travel http://bluskytravel.paycation.com Call this number it is the inspirational morning vitamin 530-881-1399 code 217644# This will enlighten you and ignite a spark of motivation inside you I promise!!! Shakonda Fontae Cloud looks forward to your follow up. Contact her @ 931-302-6417or email Fontae36@gmail.com.

Godiva's Secret Wigs Consultant http://on.fb.me/1pwXQ4z Whether you are interested in wigs for convenience, travel, career, romance or hair loss challenges because of medical treatments, you found the right place.

Behind the Waterfall Available August 1st

Adventure in the unknown with Ossana Mil to save Earth from the Priest Masters of Hell on Second Earth the Lords of Fear and Oppression. Walk with Ossana and learn to live with no fear in the face of insurmountable evil. Face the Lords of Hell. Get ready. Behind the Waterfall is no picnic. Love requires courageous hope.

My name is Ossana Mil. I am third heir in the line of my Mugud (moo GOOOD). What I am about to share with you has never been told. If you find my story to be of value and you believe in the ancient ideas of hope and love, tell and retell this story where ever you can as often as you can. People hunger for hope and love.

In the world of my people, our grandmothers raise us because the maturity of their wisdom exceeds that of our mothers. We know our mothers but our mothers apprentice under their mothers to prepare to raise the next generation’s children when we give birth to them.

I have been chosen by my grandmother, My Mugud to save Earth whenever the Earth is threatened. Join me as we venture to Second Earth where the Priest Masters of Hell want to control Second Earth through torture and fear.

Read the first three chapters of Behind the Waterfall.  http://oscarcrawfordmedia.blogspot.com/2014/07/behind-waterfall-first-three-chapters.html

Behind the Waterfall Contest

Get your free copy of Behind the Waterfall when you find the solve the two piece anagram puzzle. There are two clues. The first is on the cover of the book. It is a name. The second is the name of the capital city of the 11th largest economy in the world hidden in the first three chapters. Good Luck. 

Email your answers oscarcrawfordmedia@gmail.com. Submit as many answers as you want. Only one book per winner. Be the first to submit both correct answers and receive the FREE eBook and the paperback when it becomes available.