About 1955, maybe 1956, while my Daddy was serving the Midway Sunnyside charge of Methodist churches in near Griffin, Georgia, and either just before entering second grade or just after finishing it, I attended the Midway Methodist Church Vacation Bible School -- always one of the highlights of summertime. I loved the crafts we did. This particular summer one craft was a pennant project. Each child was to create a pennant, cut from felt, to illustrate the meaning of his or her name. We learned that many of the names in the Bible have a special meaning. Our teacher had a book of thousands of names and their meanings. I was thrilled to look up my first two names and discover that they each had grand origins. According to the book Charles traces back to the emperor Charlemagne and means "great man". Terry (or maybe Terrell?) means monarch or "ruler". Then came "Shaw". It turns out that my surname is actually in the unabridged dictionary as an archaic English word that means "grove of trees". Oh, well. I suppose that means those other "-shaw" names like Hanshaw or Crenshaw or Bradshaw, etc. must refer to some particular sort of tree "grove"?
Anyway I proudly produced this small pennant. Believe it or not I was right proud of it and have remembered it many times over the years and kept it now for about 70 years! I hauled it from Griffin to Ellijay to Rome to Wilmore, Ky, to Fairburn, to Huntington, Buffalo, and Eleanor WV, to Atlanta, and back to four different residences in the Rome area.
I am shocked (Shocked!) to realize that I need to explain that that squiggle of red paint above "Terry" is a crown to signify myself a ruler. My great heroes at that time (paradoxically) were Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln. I used Lincoln as my Great Man symbol. I am hopeful that my "grove of trees" is self-evident.
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