By Stanley Kitchen
My grandfather had one of the biggest arrowhead collections in eastern Kentucky. Some of the pieces rare enough for college professors to come have a look see. I have this hazy memory of going hunting with him, I went several times but this one time in particular sticks out in my mind. I’m around ten years old and we are somewhere on the Kentucky side of the Ohio river scanning a freshly plowed corn field for points or anything of interest the earth might have been hiding for the last century. We were down close to the river when I find this busted up piece of flint that some novice had hacked around on then gave up and discarded. I run it over to pap stumbling around on the loose mounds of fresh dirt, there’s a dog running with me but I don’t remember who’s it is or even if the dog of my memory looks the same as the real dog. Papaw is drinking water from the old Army canteen he brought home from the war, the same one I still have. He kneels down on my level and trades me the canteen for the flint. I drink and he admires the piece. He whistles through his teeth and says, “Boy….now that’s a real dandy. We’ll have to hang on to that.” He puts the flint in his satchel with a few pieces that he’s found and later after we get home he carefully places the flint in his display case among some of his best pieces. We smile at each other as he slides the glass door shut. We go inside the house and eat at the kitchen table and I tell my grandmother all about our day and I have no idea there will come a day when I can no longer do that. I don’t know what became of that piece of flint but I still carry around that memory of a man who made a boy feel like an equal over a scrap piece of stone, but that was my granddad, that’s just how he was.
