As I stepped outside today, a strong memory of my grandfather came over me. And I was grateful for this:

Whenever he would come in from the cold, especially on a snowy day, he would say, “I’m wind-whipped, I’m wind-whipped, do you hear me?”

His phrase was family legend. And I am sad that I had forgotten but glad it returned to me today. I myself feel wind-whipped. And, I hear you Grandpa Joe.

No Christmas would be complete without my brother Johnny and I watching “March of the Wooden Soldiers” on Christmas Eve. This 1934 Laurel and Hardy movie was a holiday tradition in my family. Johnny and I began watching it together as children and this continued throughout Johnny’s life. We both enjoyed the fantastic Mother Goose characters that were inhabited in Toyland. We both loved Laurel and Hardy, the bumbling toy makers employed by Santa Claus. At the end of the movie, the Wooden Soldiers march to the rescue to save Toyland from the evil Barnabas and his bogeymen. This tradition has continued in my family. Every Christmas since Johnny passed, I leave an empty spot on the sofa with a gin and tonic on the table. I believe Johnny will be there with us.

At 6’4”, our father John Carnes stood taller than most people we knew. Of course, everyone in our house was tall, so his stature did not stand out to my sister and me. His two grandsons, my son Connor and my sister’s son JP, stand even taller than their beloved Pop. When these cousins stand next to each other, it looks like John planted two Carnes cornstalks in the family garden, tall enough to sprout to the heavens.

My dad’s cousin told me that he was 6’1” in the sixth grade and that he was the tallest kid she had ever seen. His stature caught the eye of the high school basketball coach, Lloyd Mullins, who talked my shy, gangly dad into trying out for the basketball team. Mr. Mullins, a teacher at the old Mt. Washington school, taught my dad how to catch a pass, how to shoot a la- up and how to believe in himself.

My dad loved school and wanted to go to college, and as a poor boy growing up on a dairy farm in Mt. Washington, Kentucky, he believed his only way was to get a basketball scholarship. Every morning, he would wake up, milk the cows, then practice his shooting on an old goal on the farm. Next, he would go to school, then basketball practice, and then walk from town back home to the farm in the country. He said Mr. Mullins would often drive by and say “Hey, I was driving your way, would you like a ride home?” My dad said he knew his home was nowhere near Mr. Mullins’s home, but his tired body was grateful for his coach’s kind gesture.

Mr. Mullins and his family loved my dad, and he loved them. Mr. Mullins said he never had a son, but if he did, he would want him to be just like John. When my dad was ready to graduate high school, he wanted to wear a suit underneath his graduation gown. Mrs. Mullins owned a restaurant, so she let dad work there so he could earn money to buy a suit. The young Mullins daughter Jill said my dad would make corn dogs especially for her when she came to the restaurant.

Later in life, our dad retained his knowledge of food and would cook my sister and me the most delicious homemade warm vanilla pudding, stirred patiently to smooth perfection at the stove and served warm as a bowl of love to comfort us when we were sick, or fry us cornbread in pancakes so thin and crisp that the butter would melt into the holes like pools of molten gold. Not only did he cook comfort food, but he also channeled his talent into making cakes so breathtaking they were works of art. Several times at Christmas, he made a yule log cake filled with cream cheese icing, rolled into a cylinder and adorned with leaves from his holly tree outside. He once made a chocolate mousse cake with crushed Oreos on the bottom and sides, iced with homemade whipped cream and decorated with chocolate leaves he created himself. He melted chocolate and painted it on leaves from one of his indoor plants, then froze them so he could peel off the leaves. He then positioned raspberries like flowers next to the chocolate leaves on top of the cake. I remember literally gasping at the beauty of his creation and insisted upon taking pictures, long before the advent of photographing our daily meals with a smart phone.

Initially playing basketball at Berea College, he transferred to Western Kentucky University. Since he no longer had a basketball scholarship, he worked many jobs to put himself through school. One of them was working as a host and cook at The Branding Iron, a steak house in Bowling Green. Later in life, he knew how to cook a perfectly delectable steak using butter as he learned on the grill at The Branding Iron. My mother, an education major herself and daughter of a professor at WKU, lived at home with her parents. Granny Bib, Daddy Bob and my mom would eat at The Branding Iron on Sundays because it was cheaper. My dad would seat them. My mama, who was 5’9”, said her mother would kick her under the table and say “Becky he’s tall and he’s looking at you!” Two and half years later, the two teachers had married on a snowy day at the First Presbyterian Church in Bowling Green and then moved to Mt. Washington to start their lives and their careers together.

Our dad wanted to return to his hometown to inspire and help others the way Mr. Mullins had helped him. He started as a high school health and PE teacher and basketball coach. However, when a principal job opened up in Lebanon Junction (another town in Bullitt County), he applied and learned how to lead students and teachers together. By 1976, a brand-new elementary school had opened in the spring in Mt. Washington. My dad accepted the position as principal at Mt. Washington Elementary for the first full school year, 1976-77. It was truly a homecoming and the beginning of the core of his life work.

He started his job, and I started first grade as his student. Other kids would ask me “Is your dad a giant?” Or “Is your dad the president?” His tall stature towered like a lighthouse above the little ones. People often asked me if it was hard having your father as a principal. I always told them it helped me, because people liked him. My dad’s educational and community vision spread grandly over the whole town. Luckily, he had an incredibly talented and organized assistant coach/assistant director on the Homefront. Our mother was a middle school librarian and supported him behind the scenes with organization and discipline to enable him to bring his story to life.

As a young boy growing up in a country community, he appreciated when others believed in him. He wanted his students to strive to fulfill their potential, here in our public school in a mostly blue-collar community. His creative mind sought ways to stimulate ours. He brought the Blue Apple Players to school for theater performances in the gym, and we children sat criss cross applesauce, an elementary theater in the round on the tile floor. He founded a literary club for children who liked to write. A music lover, he played classical music on records in the classrooms to help us concentrate. He valued the diversity in his student’s learning styles and sought to find ways to ignite creativity. Even though basketball had given him his start, he realized that sports were just one part of the school experience. He saw the whole school as his team and cast, and he wanted to plant the seeds for learning, creative expression and service to others in us all.

Charismatic and a team player, he would dress in costumes along with the kids on holidays: Abraham Lincoln on President’s Day, a Native American on Thanksgiving and a vampire on Halloween. Abraham Lincoln, a Native Kentuckian, was his cousin, and he also had Native American ancestry. I don’t believe we descend from any Bluegrass bloodsuckers. My mother, who supported him with all his grand and creative endeavors, ran away from him shrieking in terror when he dressed as the vampire!

Not only did he involve students, but he also cultivated togetherness for everyone. In December, he started the Christmas Festival as a community gathering. For a day, our school transformed into a winter wonderland filled with the sounds of students singing carols on the stage, the sights of sparkling booths filled with homemade ornaments and the smells of holiday food wafting from the cafeteria. People from all over the town, even if they did not have children, were welcome to come share in the magic and love.

Continued in Part 2

He loved to show his students that level of investment of in them, his most important audience, all year long. Every day, he walked to each classroom, and at one point the school had 900 kids! He took pride in his appearance and costumed himself daily in stately clothes, immaculately pressed by my meticulous mother, and spritzed himself with Aramis cologne. He wanted his students, the audience, to know that he viewed their young lives as worthy of his best effort. One little boy at the end of kindergarten said “When I grow up I want to be as tall as Mr. Carnes and smell like him.” Later, that same boy wrote an essay in middle school, about someone who inspired him. His teacher, Robin Miller, brought the essay over to show my mother, the middle school librarian. The boy said Mr. Carnes was his hero because “even when I was bad, he was always good to me.”

Long after his retirement from education, Dad continued to support his students after they left his school. He loved to encourage others from our hometown, or his family, or even the waiter or waitress in a restaurant. Remembering his days working in restaurants in high school and college to put himself through, his first question to every server at a restaurant was “Are you a student?” He would then try to encourage them to pursue whatever their dreams might be. My son Connor often accompanied his grandparents on Saturday morning trips for pancakes, and he said he really missed hearing that familiar question after he was gone.

Whenever our dad heard that someone he knew had accomplished something special, he would beam with pride. He would tell everyone he knew about his student/family member/neighbor who had created beauty to add to this world. Often, he would write them letters or emails of encouragement.

Four years ago, on November 21, 2020, those letters of encouragement stopped coming when our father took his final breath. He passed away from Covid-19 at Baptist East Hospital. He was vulnerable and at risk, due to his pulmonary fibrosis. He had part of a lung removed in 2017, and his stamina and stature had slowly diminished over the next few years. We could not see him due to social distancing, and he barely had the breath to speak. With some of his last words, he took the little breath he had to speak words of encouragement to his grandson Connor over a group family Zoom call to tell him how proud he was of his hard work in high school. The nurse called my mother on the evening of November 21, holding up the phone with a Face time call so that he could tell his beautiful bride of almost 54 years how much he loved her. I peered over my mom’s shoulder, and I could sense instantly the moment his spirit left Earth and ascended to heaven.

Years after his passing, one of his former students from Mt. Washington Elementary, Amanda Matthews created the Covid-19 memorial in Frankfort. On Facebook, I had been following her powerful and internationally recognized work as a sculptor. Not only is her work awe-inspiring in its beauty, but she also strives to represent social issues with compassion through her creativity. Trying to follow in the large footsteps of my father, I sent her a Facebook message to tell her how proud my father would have been of all her accomplishments. Her response brought me to tears: she told me that one of the human figures, the tall older gentleman, was inspired by my father. She said she wanted to represent vulnerable populations, and older people, who are not often shown in sculpture. Our family will be eternally grateful to Amanda for her inclusion of the spirit of our father in her memorial.

She rendered him even taller than his earthly height, almost 6’8”, which is almost the height of his 6’10” grandson. Circular shapes in the installation represent meaningful ideals. The larger globe in the middle of the installation, the smaller orb in the hands of each figure, the circular formation of the humans around the center –
all depict a Circle of Unity, showing the value of love, inclusion and community. Each human has a hole in their chest, representing the grief we feel in our lives once our loved ones have passed on. Inside each hole sits a bell, like the bells that Governor Andy Beshear would ask us to ring in support of our loved ones during the pandemic to know that we are all in this together.

If my father could have known that his former student and office assistant Amanda had used his spirit to inspire her work, he would have beamed as brightly as the sun. The orb in the tall older gentleman’s hands reminds me of my dad, humble and giving and inclusive, serving others comforting food for their bodies, hearts, minds and souls. And the bell reminds me of my father and his love for music and beauty, a song in his heart that will play for others from Earth and from heaven, to soothe our souls with encouragement and love.

This will be my 5th Christmas without my husband. Covid was a cruel thief. But I will honor him by putting up the Christmas lights outside. Mike would start December 1st and whenever there was space he would hang a string of lights.

I hope he can see our house sparkle and twinkle during this Christmas season …