Looks Like an Angel to Me

As a person who loves words and has dedicated many years to verbal expressions of all kinds, this may be a first: a personal declaration that sometimes one single sentence can be enough for a lifetime. While growing up the men in my life included my father, two grandfathers and my brother– each of them “men of few words.” Though their conversations with me were not lengthy and sometimes infrequent, they were powerful in their simplicity and certainly lasting in impact.

How could I forget my Daddy’s frustrated plea– using my first and middle names — “Margaret Byrd, PLEASE be still!” Or my maternal grandfather Gramps’ favorite greeting during summer visits to Tennessee: “Hi, gal!” Every now and then my Lawhon grandfather, whom we called DeDe, would treat me to what he called a “DeDe dollar” for just being me.

With my brother, Tom, it wasn’t so much what he said to me that I’ve treasured all these years, as it is something he wrote about me – in a poem he called “Miss Bug.” (More on this in a moment.) Fourteen-years old when I came on the scene, Tom Lawhon was nothing short of gobsmacked by his baby sister. He was never afraid to hold me or play with me — and I adored him equally.

While attending Byrd High School in our native Shreveport, Tom bought me candy every afternoon from Glenwood Drugstore before heading home, purchased with his allowance money. I remember vividly him cutting off all the hair on my favorite doll, Punkin’ Eater — with my full participation and enthusiasm. If Tom did it, it was perfect in my book. I loved Punkin’ Eater more without her hair than with it!

Who would have imagined that this young “man of few words” could have — and would have — written movingly about me? As our treasured family friend and sister of my heart, Nancy Crawford, told me recently, “You know Tommy thought of you as his own — almost like his first-born!” Nancy was there, so she knows.

The love that prompted my brother to write, “Miss Bug” bowls me over to this day. It all started, as I’ve been told, the Christmas I was a year old. Mama had made me a red-and-white striped flannel nightgown to wear on Christmas Eve along with my knitted sock/moccasins. She was probably looking for ways to make me look girly with my still nearly-bald baby head. But that didn’t make a bit of difference to Tom, evidenced in his poem about me:

“She knocks over books and makes us all look,
Crawling toward candy or anything handy.
In her red and white gown she acts like a clown,
But she looks like an angel to me.”

My big brother remains a man of few words — fewer and fewer these days — but that’s okay with me. Because as the popular saying goes, “We know what we know,” and we know each other. I believe that when Tom wrote that precious poem for his baby sister, he saw me both on the outside and the inside. That matters more to me than anything I could come up with to say right now.

There are no words, Bub. No words necessary.