09/05/2026
I Just Kept Going
My Story of Hard Times, Hard Work, Family, and Never Giving Up
Chapter Twenty-Two
My Pride and Joy
Well, she was finally here.
I thought I had a lot going on before Maria came along. I had the store, the rental houses, customers, bills, and something that always needed my attention. But now I had something that was going to be constant—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
My daughter.
Maria was my pride and joy.
All parents brag on their children, and I’m no different. But from the time Maria was a baby, there was just something special about her. She was a happy baby. Most of the time, the only time she really cried was when she was cutting teeth.
Those could be some long nights.
Barbara would be up with her, trying everything she could to ease the pain. Sometimes it would be one or two o’clock in the morning and Maria would still be crying.
Then I found something that seemed to work.
I would get up, take her downstairs, put her in the little minivan I had bought, buckle her into her car seat, and start driving through town.
At first she might still be crying, but before long she would start looking at all the lights outside.
I would keep watching her in the rearview mirror.
Little by little, those eyes would start getting heavy.
Then they would close.
Finally, she was asleep.
I would ride around for twenty or thirty minutes and then head back to the store and the apartment above it. I would carry her upstairs, put her in bed, and think we had finally made it through another night.
Then twenty minutes later she might wake up crying again.
So we would do it all over.
I don’t know how many nights I drove through Bardstown with that little girl asleep in the back seat.
At the time, all I could think about was how tired I was and how early morning was going to come. But looking back now, those are memories I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Barbara was getting up with her too, and then she still had to get up early in the morning. We were both tired, but that was part of being parents.
When your child needs you, you get up.
After a while the teething got better, and Maria went right back to being the happy baby she had always been.
No matter how busy I was, I tried to make sure I got home at a decent hour every night. My idea of a decent hour might still have been late, but I wanted to see her. I wanted to spend time with her and do the things a daddy normally does.
Maria practically grew up inside Olde Delaney’s.
When she was small, we could put a blanket inside an RC crate and lay her down behind the counter. She would sleep there while we worked.
Customers would come through the door and see that little baby behind the counter.
Before long, she became part of the store just like the rest of us.
Then she became a toddler.
That was the end of laying still.
She was into everything.
We kept crayons and coloring books around the store for her. Some of the customers who came in and sat around the back counter would sit there and color with her.
I can still picture Wayne Collins doing it.
Ronnie Lyvers did it.
Julian Thomas did it.
There they were, grown men sitting around a country store with crayons in their hands, coloring with my little girl.
Everybody started buying her toys.
First it was Barney.
Then she started singing.
We could turn almost anything into a game.
Those people at the store watched her grow up right along with us.
Eventually Barbara had to go back to work, and we had to find childcare.
At first, neighbors and friends offered to watch her. I kept telling Barbara that I thought we needed to put Maria in daycare.
At first, neither one of us really wanted to do it.
But I wanted her around other children. I wanted her to learn to play with them, share with them, and be around everything that comes with growing up.
Eventually, we enrolled her at Children’s Universe.
That’s when I really started noticing how fast her little mind was developing.
By the time she reached preschool, she knew her colors.
She knew her ABCs.
She could count.
Then came kindergarten.
Then elementary school.
Some of her teachers would stop by the store from time to time.
One of them told me one day that she had to give Maria extra work because Maria would get bored.
I didn’t think a whole lot about it at first.
To me, she was just Maria.
She was my little girl.
But as she got older, it became pretty clear that she liked to learn and could handle more than what was normally expected of her.
After elementary school, she went on to middle school.
Then one day the superintendent called me.
She told me Maria had been identified as gifted.
Nelson County Schools had a program for gifted students.
The students could begin taking high school classes while they were still in middle school.
If they made an A or a B, they got credit for the class and didn’t have to take it again. If they made a C or below, they would have to repeat the class later.
We let Maria sign up.
So while she was still in the seventh and eighth grades, she was already taking high school classes.
Several of her friends were in the program too, and they all kept pushing themselves.
When Maria reached high school, she kept going.
She started taking AP classes.
But schoolwork wasn’t the only thing she was interested in. Maria loved to read.
There were nights she would stay up half the night reading. We couldn’t get her to go to bed.
I would wake up, walk down the hallway, and see the light still on in her room. I would open the door and look in, and there she would be sitting in bed with a book in her hands. Her eyes would be red and watery from being tired.
I would tell her, “Maria, you’ve got to go to bed. You’ve got to get up for school in the morning.”
But my talking was usually useless.
Once she started reading something that interested her, she just couldn’t quit. She wanted information. She wanted to know how things worked. She wanted to learn about all kinds of subjects, and when something caught her attention, she would keep reading until she understood it.
We would go to Half Price Books, and I would let her load up on books.
She accumulated so many books over the years that after she graduated from high school, we took five totes full of them back down there and sold them back. Even after that, she still had plenty of books left.
She was fascinated with reading and learning.
What amazed me even more was her memory. She could read something and retain the information. She seemed to remember just about anything she took the time to study.
Looking back, I guess all those nights when I was telling her to put the book down and go to sleep were telling us something about the person she was becoming.
Then she began taking college classes online.
By the time she was a senior, she already had a number of college hours behind her.
Then she started talking about scholarships.
She told me about different schools she might want to attend and different scholarships she could apply for.
One day a gentleman came into the store, and we got to talking about Maria and her college plans.
He told me, “Tell her to apply for every one of them. Just because she gets a scholarship doesn’t mean she has to go into that field.”
That sounded like good advice.
So she started applying.
About the same time, Maria wanted to get her driver’s license.
Now that scared me.
I had been through a lot of things in my life, but putting your child behind the wheel of a vehicle is a different kind of worry.
A vehicle is a big piece of machinery.
One little mistake can change everything.
But I knew she had to learn.
So in the afternoons and evenings, I would go home, pick her up, and we would head out on the back roads.
A lot of times we would drive to the truck stop. I would get myself a cup of coffee, and she would drive there and back.
The whole time I was talking.
“Watch the edge of the road.”
“Slow down.”
“Stay in your lane.”
“Watch for deer.”
Some of those country roads didn’t give you much room for error.
I told her, “If you get off the side of some of these roads, there’s no getting back up on them. You could flip this car.”
I don’t know how many times I pushed on an imaginary brake from the passenger side.
My foot would be pressing against the floorboard, and I’d have one hand holding onto the handle.
Finally, I told her, “Maria, look. You can see another car coming because of the headlights. You don’t have to ride the very edge of the road. Stay closer to the yellow line. When you see another car coming, slow down, stay in your lane, and give yourself some room.”
That was something I had always done myself on those dark country roads.
Little by little, she got better.
And somehow, I survived teaching her how to drive.
But those drives became about more than learning how to drive.
We talked about everything.
A lot of times I would just sit there and listen and let her tell me what was going on in her life. Those drives gave us time together without the store phone ringing, without customers coming through the door, and without somebody needing something from me.
One day while she was driving, I asked her what she thought she wanted to do after she graduated.
She started telling me about some of the different careers she was thinking about.
I listened to her and finally told her, “Whatever you decide you want to do, we’ll make it happen.”
I wanted her to know that I was behind her.
I was always trying to encourage her. Every once in a while I would look at her and tell her, “Maria, someday your signature is going to be an autograph.”
I don’t know if she ever thought much about it when I said it, but I meant every word.
I could see how hard she worked. I could see how much she wanted to learn. I wanted her to know that I believed she could do something special with her life, even before any of us knew exactly where that road was going to lead.
Then came high school graduation.
Around graduation, Principal Wes Bradley walked up to Barbara and me.
He asked us, “What did you all do to that child?”
I looked at him and said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “I’ve never seen anybody like her. She’s just eager to learn about everything.”
I thought about it for a minute.
I told him, “You know, I really don’t know. But when she was little and got off the school bus, the first thing we would tell her was, ‘Get you a snack, and then let’s sit down at the table and get your homework done.’”
That was every day.
There were no arguments and no fussing.
She would sit down and do her homework, and after it was finished, she could go play all she wanted.
Somewhere along the way, though, it became more than just homework.
She got to the point where she wanted to learn all the time.
The more she learned, the more she wanted to know.
I looked at Mr. Bradley and said, “I guess she’s got a God-given talent. Maybe He’s got plans for her.”
By the time Maria graduated, she had received more than $100,000 in scholarship offers.
One of those scholarships paid her full tuition.
It paid for her dorm.
There were even semesters when, after everything was paid, she received money back.
I couldn’t have been more proud.
Her journey continued at the University of Louisville, where she completed her undergraduate degrees before going on to pursue her medical degree to become a physician.
I watched her keep pushing herself year after year. The classes got harder, the hours got longer, and the responsibility became greater, but she kept going.
Today, she is continuing that journey as a UofL resident, dedicating herself to her medical training and growing into the physician she has worked so hard to become.
Sometimes I think back to that conversation with her principal.
Maybe God did have plans for her.
Sometimes I think back to that little girl sleeping in an RC crate behind the counter at Olde Delaney’s.
I think about the little girl I drove around Bardstown at two o’clock in the morning because she was cutting teeth and couldn’t sleep.
I think about the little girl sitting up in bed half the night with a book in her hands while I stood in the doorway telling her she needed to go to sleep.
I think about those nights on the back roads when I was teaching her to drive and listening to her talk about what she might want to do with her life.
And I think about all those times I told her, “Someday your signature is going to be an autograph.”
Now I get to watch those dreams become real.
I had raked leaves as a kid.
I had worked on farms.
I had worked construction.
I had worked two jobs at the same time.
I had slept in my car.
I had bought Olde Delaney’s and worked from morning until night trying to make it successful.
I had bought old houses that needed work and rebuilt them.
For years, I had been trying to build something better for my family.
Then I stood there watching my daughter graduate and continue on toward becoming a physician.
That made all those long days and long nights mean something different.
Maybe all that work had never been just about building a business.
Maybe it wasn’t just about buying property or making money.
Maybe part of it was making sure my child had opportunities I never had.
I was proud of Olde Delaney’s.
I was proud of the houses I had bought.
I was proud of what Barbara and I had built together.
But nothing made me any prouder than Maria.
She was my little girl who had once slept in an RC crate behind the counter.
The little girl I drove around Bardstown at two o’clock in the morning trying to get her to sleep.
The little girl who colored pictures with the men sitting around the back counter.
The little girl who stayed up half the night reading because she couldn’t get enough knowledge.
And now she had grown into a physician, still working, still learning, and still moving forward toward the future she had worked so hard for.
Maria was—and always will be—my pride and joy.
Maria is now engaged to be married to Spencer Bowen, a Metro Louisville paramedic, in May 2027.
I’m happy for both of them, and I look forward to seeing where their life together takes them.
But there is one thing Spencer needs to know.
I loved her first.
