It was Hemingway, I think, who said the best early training for a writer is an unhappy childhood. While I expect there is some truth to Papa’s observation, it is not the training regimen any of us would choose for ourselves or our offspring.

A letter in response to a recent column I wrote about playing baseball (with tennis balls) with my grandson got me to thinking about childhood.

“At some point,” the letter writer wrote, “I came to see that one of the saddest things is a childhood without dazzling, unimpeded happiness, delight at everything that’s pouring down. Through the column, I see Benjamin dazzled in this way, drenched in your love, with a huge smile … ”

He then went on to recount a similar account of him playing baseball with his sons on the field behind what was then Demonstration School on the Mississippi University for Women campus.

How different a world this would be were there more childhoods drenched in someone’s love. It’s not always an easy thing for a parent to do, the demands of everyday life being what they are. That’s where grandparents come in, I suppose.

The reader’s letter brought up the memory of my grandmother.

As the oldest of six children born in quick succession — my dear mother gave birth to six high-spirited children in as many years — I spent quite a lot of my early years in the care of my father’s mother, Eunice, who lived exactly one block from where we’ve raised our children and have lived for more than 30 years.

And while I don’t remember her ever lobbing tennis balls for me to hit with a bat, she did shower me with love as only a grandparent has time to do. She had cataracts and had to read to me using a magnifying glass, mostly from a musty set of books modestly titled The Book of Knowledge. I suspect she read to my father from that same set of children’s encyclopedia.

We sat on a screen porch for hours and played canasta and bridge. Once we rounded up bricks and mortar enough to make a goldfish pond. I purchased fish to stock the pond from Bryan’s Records and Pets, then located on Forth Avenue South between Cille Andrews Kiddie College Kindergarten (of which I am a graduate) and the Mississippi State College for Women campus. My masonry skills were such that the pond nor its inhabitants lasted long.

The old house on College Street was a child’s wonderland. There were derelict manual typewriters (still in working order) in every room, it seemed. In the attic there were old army uniforms from long ago wars — I once insisted on wearing a World War I steel doughboy helmet on one of my jaunts to Woolworth’s, a ten-cent store at the corner of Market and College. This was before I was old enough to make that three-block-long journey alone. My escort had to carry the headgear home, the weight of it too much for his young charge. In those days, downtown Columbus was an endlessly fascinating place for a curious boy, and Eunice’s house on College was an ideal staging ground for my explorations.

The late Carleton Billups, a childhood friend of my father’s, used to regale me with stories of a younger version of my grandma taking a carload of boys to a local gravel pit for an afternoon of swimming.

“We called ourselves the Imes Gang,” Carleton would say, pausing: “Your grandmother was a boy’s mother.”

I never got tired of those stories and Carleton never tired of telling them.

The experiences of our early years, of course, have much to do with who we become. And while “unimpeded happiness” describes few childhoods, the memory of what happiness we do enjoy during those formative years stays with us through life. We are fortified by that love and the memory of those who bestowed it upon us.

Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.

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