September 2, 2002
DOWN HOME:
Poor Fred's gone; yaba-daba-boohoo
___Joanna's body blocked my line of sight, so I couldn't witness the horrible accident. But I knew instinctively what had happened.
___My wife broke my Fred Flintstone glass.
___This wasn't just any glass. It arrived in the mail much more than a decade ago, part of a fast-food joint's campaign to commemorate the silver anniversary of "The Flintstones," the premier primetime cartoon of my childhood.
MARV KNOX
Editor
___I remember watching Fred and Wilma and Barney and Dino on the first TV I remember watching, a humongous console set in the Reading Room, the Santa Fe Railway-owned hotel Popo, my grandfather, operated for train crews in Waynoka, Okla. I'd sit in the laps of aged (or so they seemed to a small boy) railroaders and laugh every time the sabre-toothed tiger locked Fred out of the house.
___So, I took a shine to my Fred Flintstone glass tumbler the moment it arrived in the mail. I carried it home and drank my iced tea out of it that very night. It became "Daddy's glass" at our house. Almost every night at dinner, somebody filled it with ice and tea or ice and water and set it at my place at the table.
___Sure, we have prettier classes, even bigger glasses. But the Fred Flintstone glass became my favorite. Maybe I enjoyed the whimsy of drinking tea from a glass with a cartoon character painted on the side. Of course, I'm a creature of habit. For whatever reason, Fred was mine, and I hardly ate a noon or evening meal in our home for more than a decade without Fred by my plate.
___If I hadn't been watching Jo's face when she broke my glass, I might have accused her of demolishing it deliberately. It shattered the night before we left to take Lindsay, our oldest daughter, to college--at the very time my own heart was splintering in pieces. I could've accused Jo of smashing the glass to get my mind off parental pain. Sort of like dropping a cinder block on your foot to take your mind off your headache.
___But I saw the look in her eyes when she realized what had happened and when she knew I knew Fred was a goner. The love of my life never would hurt me that way, even for a noble cause.
___Nothing was left to do but to pick up the pieces, literally and figuratively. I gathered up the shards of Fred's remains and stacked them neatly on the cabinet. You can't throw an old friend in the trash just like that.
___You're probably saying, "This guy's nuts." You're probably right. But one of the reasons I liked my Fred Flintstone glass was it reminded me that some of life's treasures aren't expensive and can't be earned. They're gifts, just like God's grace.
___And, like all of life's possessions, they're not ours to own. We just use them for awhile. Our task is to be faithful stewards. And to appreciate God's goodness.
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