Granddad Writes of his Memoirs and Retired Life

G.M.C. Massey

My grandfather, G. M. C. Massey, wrote memoirs of his life in a series of manuscripts after he turned 80 in 1960.

One of his daughters, my mother Dell Buller, did an excellent job editing some portions of the material into Pappa’s Childhood, which I have posted previously on this blog.

His manuscript materials are tricky to work with. Even intact, they include repetition and loop back and forth in time as he tells his tales. Granddad acknowledges that in these passages.

We are amusingly shocked, as sometimes we are writing along very well pleased with the way things are coming to our memory; And at that very moment comes from out of the blue yonder, a remembrance of something that was very important to us when It happened; but we have not thought along that line for so long that it seemed so remote at this time: But when we are made to remember it; It seems very important.

Then is the time that we mention it in our memoirs.

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For when you are working for someone else You can’t do as you please, when you please.

Of course now since I am retired; I am able to do what I can do, anytime that I please, But I am crippled up now so that I am not able to get out and do whatever I might want to do; But the way I have been cut down, And trimmed up; I’m only able to do the things that I have always wanted to do “Writing;” And now when I am writing on my Memoirs, I am pleased; And then when a Scripture comes to me I always think that the LORD has probably brought that to me for my consideration; And usually I just sit down and go to writing on it and some other scriptures come and give me something else to write about; and then when I exhaust what I have stored up; I take the Bible and go to reading; and usually there are floods of new Ideas that come to me; and I very often write from four to eight Pages on one subject before I exhaust the Subject according to my ability.

Then probably I will think of something that I have not included in my MEMOIRS, And I will write a story or two before I will quit, and do anything else. Then sometimes I get busy working in the Yard or the Garden, and maybe in both before I get back to writing; And I give a lot of time to reading: I always read the daily paper; and Then I read form 20 to 30 Chapters to a hundred or more chapters each week. Well since the 20^th day of March in ’77 I have read the entire BIBLE through nearly 10 times, Just lack from Numbers to the End of the Old testament; So you see that I am always a very busy man.