“Let me hope you”

A Message From The Publisher

By Bobby R. Henry, Sr.

When my grandmother said, “let me hope you” it meant much more than I knew.

Coming from the big City Of Fortt Lauderdale, Florida to visit my grandmother in the country, I thought we knew everything.

Every summer we would go back to the first place we knew as the country with hogs , chickens, and outdoor facilities for relieving oneself in the biological way and plenty of mud get between your toes. There was no running water on our first trip that I could remember at seven or nine years old. It was the home that I was born in along five of my cousins and my oldest sister in Hallsboro, North Carolina.

As I think of those childhood memories, I can still smell that country air, and remember picking stove that produced some of the finest country cooking of all the different kinds of soul foods, homemade biscuits, fried chicken, field peas, and rice. I better stop because  I could write another story on that.

However, back to the term of, “let me hope you.” I used to laugh under my breath when I heard grandma and others use it. Because I thought it was so country, and my grandmother was so sincere when she used what I thought was a fragmented sentence. Her knowledge of the use of grammar and words was wrong.

When I heard my grandmother say to different people, “let me hope you” or “I wanna hope” you do this and do that, little did I know how free from pretense and how much love, and how much faith was poured into that simple word and that simple phrase. “Let me hope you.”

I’m pretty sure that I have said some things in such a manner that made my children perhaps cringe, take a second and even a third look at me as a father, as a person in leadership with a college degree, or as their hero. The English language at times does not give a clear picture, nor a great indication to the value of the sentence structure or the encouragement or even the corrective criticism of a phrase or word used.

Hope’s meaning in the Dictionary.com  is: to cherish a desire with anticipation : to want something to happen or be true; in the archaic: TRUST; as a transitive verb: 1. to desire with expectation of obtainment or fulfillment, 2. to expect with confidence.

What I have come to realize is that when my grandmother used that word HOPE, it was with so much faith, associated with it or tied to it, that she was bound by her integrity, and her self-worth that when she used it, it meant the world to her, and who she was and the principles she lived by.  Her word was truly her bond.

So  as we end one year and approach another, let us take the phrase that my grandmother used and put forth the best effort we have in assuring and believing that we all should be able to see and stand on with everything we got, “let us hope” each other in the coming year to be better and to treat each other with love.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!