Reunited and It Feels So Good

My mother was a Thibault.  She died young, but her family and my father's family had been close so that I was able to have connection with her clan as well as the one that had the primary influence in my growing up.  Mother had a sister, Lucy, who was the oldest while mother was the youngest. In between were five boys.  Of these seven there were only four who had children:  Henry the oldest boy; Felix, the middle child, Frank, just younger that Frank and my mother.  There were 14 grandchildren who lived although there were four who did not survive infancy and several miscarriages.  There are twelve of us left.  We have been talking about a family reunion for some time.  The last one was in the 1980's and a number of those folks have gone to their great reward.  Believe me the rewards have been handed out as these are pretty special people.

My cousin, Frank, a retired doctorr. who keeps his heart pumping by coaching a teenage tennis team, got roped into being the planner, host, chief cook(actually that job fell to his baby brother, Jep) and bottle washer.  He did a fine job and we had a great time visiting all those people we use to play with in the sandbox. It was also wonderful to meet new members as the newer generation married and is happily producing an even newer crop of Thibaults.

One of my daughters had had a mini reunion with one of her second cousin just a couple of weeks before this big one.  She has just recently moved to Florida for a new job and this cousin's wife was going to be there for a medical conference with him in toe.  When he sent out an inquirey as to good eating places, my daughter responded and they met for dinner.  What started out to be an obligation turned out to be a real connection for them.  They had not seen each other since early childhood, yet everything clicked into place.  As a result, they spent a good portion of their free time together over the next few days.  I know why my daughter liked them so much as I reconnected with them at the reunion and found them very likable and entertaining.

My Aunt Helen was there with her daughter, also a doctor. Do we see a trend here?  She is the last of our parents' generation and as always was loving and gracious.  She was able to meet her grandson's new wife and visit with all of the other family members she has missed over the last few years.  She is such a soft spoken Southern lady. I also loved seeing how different family groups had taken different tracks.  We had a wide variety of lifestyles represented with artists, computer techs, business people, doctors, house husbands, retired people, people from the movie industry, teachers, and the list goes on. Yet everyone seemed to have things to say to the others. Maybe we expect acceptance within families that we don't expect in the general public.  I think it would be so much nicer if I could go through the world with a family feeling towards all of my fellow humans.  This is not to say that I like everything about my family.  This reunion reminded me of all the things I love about being a Thibault, but it also reminded me of some of the things that annoy me about some of them.  The important thing is that the love over-rides the annoyance.  That's how it should be not just among the Thibaults but among  humans.

We're already talking about another reunion next year.  There are few people I enjoy being with anymore than these.  I didn't choose them.  They are just part and parcel of who I have become.  I am grateful to them for making the effort to keep me a part of this wild, whacky ( Didn't I mention the crazy-ness that exists in even the most staid of them?), wonder family.  They are smart and sassy and completely unique.  I loved visiting with them and I'm ready to do it again.

Just Tell the Story.

Well, what can I say?  I'm back.  After a long dry spell, which as most writers know sometimes happens, I have gotten my grove back.  Of course, some of the problem was that from late September most of my energy was spent on kitchen remodeling.  I am so grateful to report that it is done, and the results are both attractive and functional.  The kitchen was neither of those things prior to this change.  I am one of those people who love beautiful things all the more so if they also have usefulness and fulfill their purpose.

This absence from the real work of writing has given me a chance to think about where I want to go with my own writing.  I find that there are stories, some already written, which need to find homes.  I have been sitting on them far too long.  I was also reminded that we all have stories even if we don't see ourselves as authors; and when we leave this place, those untold stories go with us. 

Not so long ago, I was sitting in a good Italian restaurant waiting to be taken to our table when I overheard the party nearby discussing the merits of recording your life story for children and grandchildren.  There were several stories exchanged that could make great tales for children to read.  The problem was that none of the speakers felt they had the talent to do a good job of writing them down.I know that there are many degrees of compatency when it comes to writing--many levels of literary ability. That should not stop anyone from telling the tale.

I have a gut wrenching tale my maternal great-grandmother wrote down in journal form.  Believe me when I say there are no fancy words, no literary devices--just a straight forward recording of what she was seeing, hearing, and most importantly, feeling. It is stark and it is real.  Because of that, it is powerful. I was transported to her time and learned more of that family than any oral tales of land ownership, linage or traditions had ever conveyed.

I think it is a good thing to know your genealogy; to know where your family came from and what drove them forth to change their circumstances.  I like knowing who the children were and how they fared in their times. I like just knowing the aunts, uncles, cousins and how they connect. But the written story of individuals keeps them human, believable.  Without them, all of our ancestors would be founding fathers and heroes.  That's just the prideful way that people think. 

I had been told over and over of how illustrious my great-grandmother's family was, how glorious was their past; but it was her story in her own words-- raw and painful-- that told me who she was and who several others of those illustrious ancestors were.  That is what you can't find in land records or census rolls.  I cried for her pain, but I'm glad she wrote it down.  Most importantly, I'm glad I got to read it.

Body Parts

I was reminded the other day of one of those things that we think about from time to time and that is the importance of body parts.  While we all have been contemplating such things since we first noticed that the thing waving back and forth in our line of vision was actually a part of the whole, the hand, and that we could make it do pretty much whatever we pleased, people have noticed their body parts.  After getting acquainted with our own, most of us begin to compare ours with those of other folks in our acquaintance; and we notice some people's parts more than some others simply because they are well worth noticing.

I once had an allergic reaction to a pill I took.  The reaction came in the form of a hypoglycemic attack and didn't occur until I was sitting at my desk early one morning.  One of my co-workers noticed that I was looking decidedly ill and called 911.  The paramedics showed up promptly and got to work.  The one kneeling in front of me was listening to my racing heart and asking me questions.  All I could think of was that this was the most gorgeous face I had seen in my entire life with a perfectly shaped nose, black fringed baby blue eyes and a mouth like a ripe peach waiting to be tasted.  While I was sixty plus and he was probably half my age, I was thinking that if I weren't so busy dying at that moment, I would kiss the daylights out of the poor guy.  I think it is safe to say that we all notice the very good and maybe the very bad.  It is also a wonder that we are such diverse persons with such individualized tastes that there seems to be someone out there that is going to look mighty good to each other someone.

The other thing I wonder about is that each person seems to have a strong preference for some particular part to admire.  My dad was a leg man.  He once told me that a well-shaped ankle curving into a neatly rounded calf was a sight to stir the heart of any man.  Now days, lots of men seem to enjoy the going away view of women to the point that admiring the "junk in the trunk" has almost become a national past time.

My writers group got into this type of discussion on Saturday after critiquing a piece one of our members had written on all the changes that had been made to her original equipment, some of her own choosing and some chosen for her by circumstances.  She is a breast cancer survivor and has had a double mastectomy and reconstruction.  She doesn't recommend cancer, but she did have high praise for the boob job stating that it was much better than what God had given her as far as looks were concerned.  She was too old to care about function.  Several of the other women present also decried the idea that anyone could find boobs attractive since they were generally a burden to women requiring support that is awkward to put on and uncomfortable to wear. And the older one gets, the more grotesque the shape becomes unless a boob job has made them permanently perky.

My friend, Dennis, was sitting quietly beside me during the discussion; but I know Dennis well enough to know that his mental gears were whirling like crazy.  And crazy is exactly the word to use for most of Dennis' thoughts.  So, I leaned over and told him my own little boob story.  No, my boobs aren't little.   The story is.

Several years ago, I found a lump in my right breast.  Given my mother's early death due to cancer, I had always thought if the possibility ever came up, I would probably be found in the back of my closet, curled up in a fetal position and sucking my thumb.  Not so.  I was on the phone immediately getting the earliest appointment I could and got in to see my doctor in two days.  With the usual "It's probably nothing to worry about," he sent me off for a mammogram.  It was inconclusive.  On to the next step, a lumpectomy and biopsy.  For this, my doctor called in a young surgical specialist who was and is considered something of a genius.  Upon meeting him, I also realized that he was all business.  As Elizabeth Bennett said to Mr. Darcy, "That is a pity for I dearly love to laugh."  Over the next few days, I met with him several times.  No humor at all.

On the day of the surgery, I was draped and prepped for a local so that I would be awake when the report on the biopsy came back and would be able to discuss options at that point.  In came the surgeon dressed in his OR greens and with his usual serious scowl, looked down at the area he would soon be cutting on.  In an effort to lighten the mood while the nurses unrolled the instruments from their sterile casings, I asked the doctor, "So, who's the taxidermist on staff at this hospital?"

I was met with a startled and quizzical look as he came back with, "Taxidermist?!?"

I noticed that everyone else in the room was looking at me as if I had been given too much Demerol.  "Look," I said. "I need to know because while I a very certain that I can live without my boobs, I'm not sure my husband can."

While the nurses were practically rolling in the floor, Dr. Seriously Medical almost cracked a smile.  "It's OK to laugh," I told him.  "It's how we survive."  And the report came back cancer free.

For years, my sister and I have gone on yearly road trips to a predetermined destination just to see what is there. The secondary reason for these trips is to remind our overly complacent families of the work that we do in their behalf. We usually come home to expressions of great gratitude which last for a long time. They stay in line quite nicely until it becomes necessary to remind them again of what it is that we do for them. We love to go gallevanting about the countryside, enjoying the sights and the oddities that we come across either by design or serendipitously.

For a number of our most recent trips, I drove because I have a hybrid which gets great gas milage, and economy in one area means more money to spend in another. Since I had been doing most of the driving the last few years, I had forgotten what kind of driver my sister is. We are both notorious for our love of speed; or as my racing enthusiast husband says, our lead feet and singular disregard for the law. Speed doesn't bother me at all as long as I am the one speeding. However on or last trip, we took her new car, also a hybrid; and I had to confront the truth about her, myself and parts of our sibling relationship.

The first thing that became obvious to us is that I love control, not some of the time, all of the time. Since control is, intellectually speaking, an illusion, you can see that I was going to face some issues on this trip. My sister, on the other hand has a fatalist's approach to life in that she expressly lives as if whatever occurs is predetermined to occur so you might as well take the risk and die in some heart stopping( pardon the pun) exciting way. When a trip takes you through the Rocky Mountains on blue highways(our favorites), the opportunities for such an exciting demise increase dramatically. Add to that her almost gleeful enjoyment in seeing how fast she can exceed the posted limit on tight winding curves, and you can see why I became better acquainted with prayer as a bargining tool. I am sure that I have promised God far more that I can ever deliver just so he would get us back on a long straight stretch of highway. My glutes did profit from the ride as I used them to grip the seat as we flew around 20 MPH curves at, at least, twice that speed.

The other thing that I began to see was that my sister suffers from a serious case of road rage. She carries on a constant barrage of derogatory remarks on the eneptness of her fellow road warriors and seems to take their assinine choices as a personal affront or an attempt on her life. While she is perfectly o.k. with dying from her own risk taking, she is sure she will be truly ticked off if someone else takes her along on their own failed exploits. She calls total strangers names that imply that she has intimate knowledge of their chatacter, and she uses names that I know she would have never learned in the household in which we both grew up.

Another thing that I learned was that she does not use good judgment when it comes to dealing with people in traffic and assumes that those parties are going to act appropriately whether or not she does. I digress to tell you that my sister has inherited the Roberts vocal cords. Althought I am a Roberts, I seem to have inherited the Thibault gene for an almost too soft voice. She, on the other hand, has a voice which can be heard from one end of a football stadium to the other without the aid of a microphone even when she thinks she is speaking normally. When raises her voice, it is a phenomenally booming thing
that has been know to cause ear pain especially when heard insde the confines of a closed car. As we were returning to the United States after a day in British Columbia, we were caught up in the morass that is the American border crossing. For some reason, the three lanes approaching the crossing narrowed down to one lane just short of the gates where they spread out again to four lanes with a guard at each. The merging process was very slow but polite until we went from two down to the single lane. There the unwritten rule seemed to be that a car from each lane would go in turn. This was fine until it became our turn, and the car that should have given way surged forward causing us to have to swerve sharply to miss getting hit. Instead of waiting for the next opening, my sister pulled up beside the large offending SUV and yelled in her loudest voice, "Damn! Be Rude!!!" To my surprise, the driver slammed on his breaks and let us in. I was nursing my nearly ruptured eardrums and thinking that he was pulling in behind us so that he could get a better bead when he shot us for interfering with his progress. As you might imagine, I was huddled in the passenger seat, praying that he would realize that I had nothing to do with her attact. I finally got my thoughts together enough to ask, "What do you think you're doing? Are you trying to get us killed?"

Her reply, "It worked. He let us in. Besides, I didn't think he could hear me since the windows were rolled up."

"Lord, girl," I said. "They could hear you in Vancouver and that's 20 kilometers away." Notice that in less than 24 hours, I had begun to think metrically. Needless to say, we were happy to see armed guards just ahead who could protect us from assault if need be. The real kicker came as we were at the crossing gate answering those silly questions as if anyone would be honest. You know the one like, "Are you carrying any weapons?"

"Sure, here's my AK47 right here under my seat."

"Why are you coming into the United States?"

"Because we want to blow up some big buildings."

The SUV had been directed to the gate next to ours where I was sure he was going to report us as possible lunatics. Instead, we heard the guard say in a loud and incredulous voice, "What do you mean you don't have passports?"

So that poor boob was pulled over and read the riot act. For him, it had been a really bad day. He had just come from Vancouver where everything was twice the US price. He'd been verbally attacked for his bad manners, and now he was being interrogated as a possible terroist. At this point, he probably would have shot himself if he had a weapon; or of course, he might have been rattled enough to tell the guard that he had a gun or bomb or, God forbid, a collection of illegal conifers and fruit.

We, on the other hand, drove peacfully on our way. Will I go on another trip with her? As soon as I can, and my family irritates me enough to press the need.

Climbing the Walls

Some things are generational. I don’t remember ever teaching some of the things my children did nor do I recall that anyone else taught me those things. In our family, which has some adopted children, the message must have passed by osmosis. It would not be genetic. One of those strange lessons that they all seem to have learned, excepting one, is climbing. I was a climber from an early age and so were the other children in my family. I would climb just about any structure that I could get a hand grip on or a leg over. We had a long fence that ran across the width of my grandmother’s front yard. It was a frame made of 4x4 posts and 2x4 caps and braces. The rest was a decorative woven wire with scalloped edges along the top. At the driveway end of that fence was a mulberry tree. I loved to climb that thing then drop down onto the 2x4 cap of the fence and run the length of it, leap over the gate area and keep on running to the other end. That leaping over the gate scared my grandmother half to death. Since the gate was directly in front of the huge double dining-room windows, it was not unusual for me to be in mid-flight and hear her rapping sharply on the panes of those windows. The message was clear. “If you fall and break your neck, don’t come crying to me.” My father’s take on this was that kids do these things, and that she should relax unless there was actual bloodshed. Grandmother was rarely in a relaxed frame of mind. She had taken on the mothering of the three of us as a deathbed promise to our mother, and she was determined to see us grown or die trying. I have to admit we challenged her dedication to the limit, at times; and it was mostly by the grace of God or shear dumb luck that we actually made it. It wasn’t until I was a parent myself that I understood the sacredness of this trust and the fears it engenders. Both my sister and I loved to read and we had a pear tree with a lovely configuration of branches that made it a perfect place to tuck into with a good book. I read Anne Of Green Gables in that leafy perch. There was a large fork and an upright limb just off one side, and the whole thing was high up but almost perfectly parallel to the ground. I have never seen another tree with a similar spot although I hope that there are others out there somewhere. I would tuck my book inside my shirt and swing myself up by way of a large branch then go on up several more steps to reach that special spot. In the depth of summer, the leaves were so thick that I was completely hidden from view. By being very quiet, I could avoid being found even when Grandmother was out calling for me. When she finally learned about this spot, she would head for the tree first and demand that I come down immediately. My sister found this spot as well; and although I never told her what I used it for, she saw what it was meant for and became a tree reader as well. My children didn’t have access to such trees as that, but they all climbed the trees that were near our home and which had branches low enough to reach. The oldest was the most adventurous as he would go far higher than was really safe and then sway the whole upper part of the tree by rocking his body back and forth. Sometimes it looked like he was standing on twigs. The other thing which the children all climbed, were the hall walls. I didn’t do this as a kid since the only hallway in my grandmother’s house was far too wide. I do remember climbing inside of door frames which are similar. I don’t know why Geoff came upon this idea that you could brace your hands and bear feet against the walls of the hall; and in a series of small hops, propel yourself up to the ceiling. Each child, in turn, learned the same trick. It did not surprise me when the oldest grandchild and only boy did the same thing. The second has not done this and is probably too old at 16 to even want to try. She is also very ladylike and would probably not be interested in the first place. She's so well behaved that I sometimes wonder how she got into the family at all. This last week, my younger daughter came home to find her then 7 now 8 year old climbing the walls quite literally. Neither her parents nor older brother admit to having taught her this. She figured it out on her own. However, her mother, an expert wall climber in her day, skyped her sister is Florida and let that one’s child watch as her cousin showed off her new skill. That’s all it took for that one to take off up her walls. The issues there are that the dad doesn’t like the footprints on the wall and their hall has 12’ ceilings. That granddaughter is six and already doing advanced gymnastics so is probably better prepared than most to handle the climb. She also has some knowledge of how best to dismount without hurting herself. I can just see the scores going up. 9.4; 9.6; 10. Many families have traditions that they pass down generation to generation. I have a friend whose family always sneaks a potato into the suitcase of whoever is traveling. No matter how hard the traveler tries to prevent it, somehow the potato is always there when they reach their destination. When her father and mother died, the children insisted that potatoes go with them on their final trips. That’s what her family does. My family members climb the walls.

Reunited and It felt So Good

One of the things that I have often thought about is why it is our brains can store away events or memories so deeply that we will not think of them for years, indeed, not even be aware that they are stored there until some scent or color or word hurls them to the forefront of our brain as vivid as the moment they happened. Such a thing happened to me this past weekend. I went to my 50th college reunion in Conway, Arkansas. I had graduated from Hendrix College; and except for two short visits to that campus, never given much thought to my experiences there. However, the school honors its fifty year alumni by inducting them into the Half Century Club by draping a medal around the alumnus/alumna’s neck and allowing them to speak briefly on their educational experience. Actually, the person introducing the process stated that we could talk about our life or the school or tell an anecdote. They began this process alphabetically so that as a Roberts (maiden name), I was pretty far down the list of speakers. While I waited, I heard a lot of serious speeches on the value of the Hendrix experience and the gratitude of those who received such a valued education. I, however, had only one thing that came barreling into my brain as soon as the word anecdote was spoken. It was something that I had not thought of even once since leaving the school but was as clear as if had happened the day before. The picture in my head was of Cleave Want who was an English professor back then who, among other things, taught a course in Victorian Literature. He came into class one day at the last possible minute, went to the front of the room and began his lecture. He must have talked for ten minutes or more before he noticed that our riveted attention was not on the context of his lecture but on the fact that he had a three inch diameter, perfectly circular, reddish-purple hickey in the center of his forehead. It was then that he felt compelled to tell us his story. Cleave and his wife had a young child, still an infant; and the previous day, the wife had left him in charge. In order to entertain his child, Cleave had removed a mobile from the crib which had been attached to the head of the crib by a large suction cup. He took it and the baby to the living room and lay down on the sofa with the child on his chest and stuck the mobile to his forehead. By bobbing his head around, he caused the child to giggle gleefully. Babies being babies, however, the child soon became bored and fell asleep. Cleave followed suit. An hour and a half later, his wife came home and found the two loves of her life still on the sofa; the child asleep on his father’s chest and her husband asleep with a weird, unicorn like projection in the middle of his forehead. He said that it had been a bit painful to remove. The most unusual thing about this story was that Cleave had somehow convinced himself that if he acted as if everything was normal, no one else would notice. That was what I talked about. What I didn’t get to and what I wish I had added was that I didn’t disagree with anyone about the value of my education or the friendships I had made in those four years. However, during those years, there had been some monumentally crazy things that happened at that school; and not for one minute did I believe that I was the only witness to them. All of this happened because the word anecdote was spoken in a long ago place among long ago friends. I had a great time connecting with some that were close friends then and getting acquainted with several people who were on the edge of the radar screen of my callow days. Some people had lives that were filled with travel and excitement. Some led lives of service. Some may have felt ordinary in the face of some of the achievements of others. Whatever they felt, we had survived for 50 years beyond that shining world marked by the election of JFK and the unconquerable spirit of Camelot. And more importantly, none of us discussed any of our ailments. We were happy to be alive to tell our tales; and I, for one, was happy to hear theirs.

The Gathering Place

My husband and I are getting ready to remodel our kitchen. When we bought this house, we loved everything about the layout and grounds, especially the huge attached garage and detached garage across from the house. It meant that the husband, a car buff, would have plenty of room for his toys and accompanying gear. The house needed some work as it was covered in dark wallpaper and had colors that were not to my taste. I know that one of the reasons it had not sold before we came along is that most people walk into to a house and are turned off by the owner’s taste or lack thereof. I am not one of those people. I have been blessed (or cursed) with the ability to see potential in the structure and layout.

One of the things that struck me was that while the kitchen looked “cute”, it was deceptive in its layout and function. There is plenty of room in the space, but it is all negated by poor arrangement and absence of essential function. The cabinets are few and there is a huge island with little cabinetry under it. Most of the island is table height and blocks the flow of traffic. There are deep soffits all around the perimeter that eat up valuable storage space. That huge island extends so deeply into the work area that there is barely room to squeeze around the dishwasher door when it is opened. In spite of that, folks walk in an immediately say, “What a nice kitchen.”

WRONG! There is almost nothing nice about it. For a while it bothered me that I was so unhappy with this space. I am not by nature an unhappy person, but this kitchen has been driving me crazy. I have pondered this for several months now and had an insight recently into the real problem.

We had a mini family reunion about a month ago when my cousin, Lenita, brought her mother, my Aunt Helen for a visit to Little Rock. They were going to visit all of Helen’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren because she is getting to the point that she doesn’t get around as well as she once did. We met at Helen’s daughter-in-law’s home in North Little Rock. This house is modest, but at some point had been expanded to include a large family room across the back. You would think that that would be the place for everyone to sit and visit. But you guessed it, we all sat or stood in the eat-in kitchen. No one complained that it was crowded or that there were not enough chairs to go around. You see, the kitchen is the hub of such gatherings whether they are joyous as this one was or sad as post funeral family gatherings are. In our family, kitchens are where decisions are made, gossip exchanged, arguments settled and lots of love shown through an abundance of food and drink.

My kitchen is hard to feel cozy and familiar in. It seems to close in rather than embrace. We like to prepare meals where there are as many cooks as there are folks sitting down to eat. And we like to micro-manage the cooking of all the other cooks. You can’t do that in a cramped space. This kitchen doesn’t have enough room in its business area to swing a cat; and while I am averse to swinging the cat, I like to think that I have the option.

So we are ripping the place out to the walls, recessing the refrigerator into part of the pantry, replacing soffits with tall upper cabinets and diminishing the size of the island and moving it out of the hub of the work area. I have drawn up the plans, and I like what I see. We will be able to party and cook and hug and laugh and boss each other around when it’s finished. However, for the next couple of months, I’ll be needing your heartfelt prayers for my sanity. We’ve done this before, and my children remind me that I don’t deal particularly well with chaos.

Hopefully, I’ll have before and after pictures to share. And I might even invite you over to join in the fun.

The Gift of Joy

I was reminded this last week of something that I have known for a long time but had lost touch with in a busy life. Some people are born with the gift of joy. They are happy by nature even when they suffer the events that come to all human beings: loses , disappointments, estrangements. They seem to carry with them the ability to focus on the positive and move forward . In fact, it has been my experience that they come at life full tilt, devil take the hindmost. My father was one of those people. So was my friend, Dave.

Life was not easy for Dad, but he refused to be daunted by it. In fact, he seemed to embrace even the most devastating experience and grow from it, always choosing joy over sorrow. He fell in love with my mother on first sight when she was fourteen and he was sixteen. There was never anyone else as far as he was concerned. They both finished college before getting married. We children were icing on the cake for them. She died when they had been married seven years. He was broken hearted yet he focused on his children and the plans they had made together for us. I recall a childhood with a father who knew how to set boundaries but was accessible, even playful with us. He seemed to always be smiling. I recall that the worst I ever felt about my own rather outlandish antics was when he looked at me with disappointment.

One of the things that I recall is that both he and Mother played the violin. I have no recall of hearing her play, but my father would take out her violin, the better of the two instruments, and play for us. They were always lilting tunes. He especially liked Dvorak’s Humoresque for its playful syncopation. I like knowing that that violin is still in our family in the hands of my cousin, Lenita, a doctor and herself a very talented musician.

My father didn’t live as long as we would have wished, but he saw every day as a gift. He’d grown up hearing about the fight it took for him to come through the first day or so of his life. He always said that he wasn’t meant to be here; but since he was, he intended to enjoy ever day he was given and he did.

It could be that my young friend, Dave Richards, reminded me of him from the beginning. I met Dave because he and my older son, Geoff, swam on the same team and seemed to connect from the first. Theirs was an odd friendship as they were not very much alike except for the swimming thing. Our Geoff tends to be serious and somewhat dark by nature. He is highly gifted intellectually; and, like many people with that kind of intelligence, he has difficulty relating to most people. Dave, on the other hand, had the gift of joy. Because I know that any friend of Geoff’s had to be smart, I assume that Dave was; but that is not what made him noticeable. It was his spirit. He came at life with exuberance and high expectations that each day was going to be a blast. I don’t think I ever saw him frown. That is not to say that he didn’t recognize when things were not what they should be. We talked about his life a lot over the years. He shared some of the worrisome moments, but there was always that hopeful quality even when things were tough. He was zany and quirky with a grin as big as all outdoors. I would defy anyone who knew him for more than a few minutes not to fall under that spell of carried joy. He loved his family and would share with me his tales of his nephews and their accomplishments. He almost hero worshipped his older brother, Doug, and saw him as the ideal he hoped to achieve although he laughingly admitted that that was hardly likely given their very different approaches to life. I was reminded this week that he called his mother, “Mumsey,” a name she cherishes. It’s whimsy fits his personality and lightened her life.

Even after our son left the area, Dave would come roaring up in our driveway riding his latest motorcycle, a mode of transportation he loved. He would bounce up to our door; and when I opened it, he would sweep me into a great bear hug and bless my mundane day with his latest tales that always sounded like great adventures. And he grinned.

I learned this last week that Dave had died suddenly. I attended the visitation and spoke with his family and some of the friends he had made over the years. We all agreed that we were helpless in the wake of his personality. We loved him deeply because we all appreciated the gift that he brought to us—sheer, unapologetic joy. His mother shared with me that that is the way it was from his birth. As I looked at photos of him from his early childhood, I could see that she was spot on. His grin dominated the room even then.

And did I mention, he played the violin. He was an accomplished musician who tended to downplay his talent; but for someone who grew up hearing violins, I was impressed when I heard him play. His mother told me that he played violin the way he lived, with energy and verve and astounding talent. Why not? That was Dave. I will miss him, but I will also be grateful that he saw me as a friend and shared his life with me. That is, indeed, a gift to treasure.

The Gift of Family

With the holidays being what they are for my family, I haven’t had much time to write so my blog has suffered. But all of the out of town gifts are mailed, the cards will go out tomorrow, the cookies are in their assorted tins, the tree is standing in its splendor and there is a wreath on the door. This doesn’t even cover the church activities and the volunteer groups that have special activities. While I have not been writing, I have been pondering the season and some of the things that are part of the family traditions.

I consider Thanksgiving as the beginning of the holidays. It is my favorite because there is not all of that crass, commercial hoopla; and it is a great family time. We do a big meal with slow talking conversations and lots of trading of family stories. I have to admit, I do not identify with the cooks who complain that they cook for two days, and the meal is over in fifteen minutes. I did not grow up with that sort of rapid consumption of good food, and I have refused to let my children and guests do it either. We eat leisurely and enjoy the feast. We generally don’t do dessert until later in the day so there is plenty of time to visit and relive some of the old blessings. This year, we got into a discussion on silver wear.

My younger daughter, whom we affectionately refer to as the speaker for the house because she always said what everyone else wanted to say but were afraid to, has teased me over the years for trying to enforce gracious manners and charm in a rowdy family. I have had some success as all of my children know very well how to behave in any social situation. They do what my grandmother always said we should do. They show up appropriately dressed and behave with consideration of others, which is the basis of all good manners. The other thing that was drummed into me at an early age is that there is no excuse (nada, zero, zilch) for rudeness. Armed with this knowledge, one should be able to function well anywhere. The fact that I enjoy coupling this basic knowledge with the family heirlooms and setting a beautiful table does not make me a snob, or etiquette Nazi.

Those family heirlooms were the topic of one of our discussions. My silver ware is a combination of pieces that I inherited when I got married and pieces acquired later. My mother and father chose their silver as all young people of that day did in 1936. They liked the simplicity with just a little ornate design of Candlelight by Towle. My father split the set between my sister and I so that I had four complete placements and acquired several more as wedding gifts. Over the years, I have added to what I have so that I now have service for twelve. This is not the only pattern I have as there are tablespoons from my maternal grandmother in a lily pattern and six large dinner forks that were made by my three greats grandfather, a Philadelphia silversmith, in 1810-1815. They were the subject of our discussion. I let the grandchildren know that after I am gone they will go to their parents and on to them. I hope that the family can keep them for many generations to come. My table settings will be divided between my girls and so the tradition goes on. The grandchildren were able to see that the Thibault name was stamped into the backs of the forks. That was my mother’s maiden name. They also saw that the original four place settings were engraved with an “R” for my maiden name.

My grandchildren see all of this as novelty right now; but as the grow, I hope that they will recognize that these are not cherished for their monetary value but for what they represent, a family linked to its history. I think most people cling to some treasure that speaks to them of whom they are and where they came from. Some of the things I have tell a special story. One of those are my paternal grandmother’s sherbet spoons. These were given to my grandmother and grandfather when they married in 1905. They are about 6 inches long with a delicate round bowl. The handles are twisted and the top is a flattened moon shape with a tiny art nouveau design. The thing that I cherish most about them is that there are eleven of them. People have told me that I should try to find the twelfth one to complete the set. That how many there were in the original gift. What they don’t understand is that that absent spoon is a treasure to me and to my memory of my grandmother. Wessie Dickie was what some would call generous to a fault. I don’t agree. She loved to entertain. In fact, I had the impression growing up in her house that I was living in Grand Central Station. There were always folks about at mealtime and they always stayed to lunch or dinner. At one of her lunches, my grandmother served ice cream with her dainty spoons. These little spoons charmed one of the ladies whom she was entertaining that day so my grandmother did what was typical for her. She gave her one. That absent spoon represents my grandmother’s generous heart; her clear understanding that people are more precious than things. I want my children to get that as well.

We may bring out the china, crystal, and silver for these lavish dinners; and we may rehash their stories until the children roll their eyes; but what I want them to get is that family is what is important. I have preserves these bits for them so that when I am gone, they will remember the stories and me and the links to their own larger family. By telling these stories, my children and grandchildren have come to know my father, mother, and grandparents all of whom were gone before any of them were old enough to remember or were even born. They, too, are learning, as I did, that we are all links in a great chain. My hope is that they will not break it.

Grandmother and Demon Rum

The holiday season is approaching, and it has me thinking. This is about the time that my grandmother would make her fruitcake. She made it ahead of time, usually about six weeks, to give it time to “cure.” That fruitcake is what caused me to stop and ponder just how it is that people rationalize their behavior especially when it both defies what they generally stand for and makes little sense as well. We’ve all known people who live one way then act out of character, and we probably fit the pattern ourselves at times. I have one child that has pointed out my inconsistencies to me on more than one occasion. In fact, she delights in it.

My grandmother loved fruitcake as did many of her generation. I think it was because sweets were a luxury, and a fruitcake could be made to last for such a long time. It was economical and with a little help from John Barleycorn, could be preserved until the last crumb was consumed. Grandmother would cut her fruitcake on Christmas Eve, and the family would nibble on slices for the next few days. Grandmother, on the other hand, would indulge in this treat for the next several months. My Grandmother was raised British although she would never see England for herself. Her mother had been born on the Isle of Wight and came to America when she was in her teens. She was forever a Brit who raised her daughters as good English girls. The kind who pampered their complexions, faced crisis with a stiff upper lip and were unfailingly courteous. No matter how busy her life, my grandmother stopped at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and fixed herself a cup of tea. Since Grandmother was a devout Christian, she spent that thirty minute break in Bible study while sipping her tea as she sat in the dining room window seat. My siblings and I have discussed the fact that we were never told that that time was sacred to her. However, we all knew intuitively that blood had better be coming in spurts, a face turning blue, bones protruding from skin, or the house on fire if we needed to interrupt that time. During the winter months, Grandmother added a delicate slice of fruitcake to her tea ritual.

I have said that Grandmother was a Christian, and she was. She was a Methodist, the kind with all the letters capitalized…A METHODIST. She was Wesleyan through and through; and as such, she was a teetotaler. At least that was the impression we got from hearing her decry the evils of drink and the terrible havoc it wrecked on the loved ones of drunks. I never saw her drink a drop, not even any of the pink champagne that toasted my wedding. But come November, my grandmother sent my father to the store for a bottle of Wild Turkey, Jack Daniels or Southern Comfort as she prepared to make her fruitcake. Once all of the spicy flour had been stirred into the creamed mixture of butter, eggs, and sugar, she would add in about a fourth of a cup of whiskey and fold in pounds of flour dredged, dried fruit and chopped pecans. She baked the cake in a large tube pan in a moderately slow oven. I like to think she, at least, contemplated her next step and perhaps asked for forgiveness of the inconsistency to come. As soon as the cake had cooled, she took clean white feed-sacking, tore it into wide strips and soaked it in the whiskey. She then wound the fabric around the cake so that each surface was dampened. She then placed the cake in a tightly closed tin. Every week, she would take out the cake, unwind it, soak the cloth, and rewind it before returning it to the tin. By Christmas Eve, a person could get lightheaded just sniffing that cake as it was unwound for the first cutting. By then the bottle of whiskey was gone. It had all been absorbed.

Years later, when I was in college, young people went through a craze for folk music. During that time, I heard a parody on the old song, “Away, Away With Rum.” There was a verse that said,

“ I never eat fruitcake because it has rum,
and one little taste turns a man to a bum.
Oh, can you imagine a sadder disgrace
than a man in the gutter with crumbs on his face.”

When I first heard that, I fell down laughing and thought of my grandmother who could preach and, for the most part, live a life of absolute sobriety but, with great relish, could eat a fruitcake that had been saturated with alcohol.

What I really think is that we all compromise somewhere, and we rationalize the compromise. You can’t be a drunk if you chew up the alcohol before you swallow it. As I see it, this is a small thing. I doubt that my grandmother even gave it a thought. She certainly didn’t seem to fret over her soul on it’s account. I see her inconsistency and cherish it as a fond memory of someone who was almost but not quite perfect. I can only hope that my own inconsistencies are as small and as harmless as hers.

Life's Little Embarrassing Moments

I took part in a conversation today about life’s embarrassing moments. Everyone there had one. It seems to be a universal truth that just when you think life is grand, something trips you up. People who know me, know that I have had a goodly number of literal trip-ups. I’ve been falling down as long as I have been walking. I have fallen at home walking across a perfectly level uncluttered floor; but most frequently, I fall in crowded public venues. Like the time I slipped on a grape at the supermarket and tore a ligament in my leg. Fortunately, for the crowd that gathered, I had become use to such accidents and spent my time on the floor waiting for an ambulance to cart me off for treatment in assuring the onlookers that I would, eventually, be fine. The people who should have been embarrassed then were the young Indian couple who saw me fall in an otherwise empty aisle. They came running to my aid. When I told them that I was injured and needed help, they ran through the store shouting, “Help! Help! She needs the doctor!” They caused such a commotion that the entire staff and all the customers came to gawk.

I am so well known for these incidents that I could pick up the phone right now, call almost any one of my close friends, and ask if they could guess what I just did and the answer would be, “You fell down.” While that may seem embarrassing, it is not the thing that came to mind as I tried to think of the most humiliating thing that ever happened to me. The thing that popped into my mind was not only disheartening but it lasted for a whole school year.

In a town as small as Scott, Arkansas, nothing happens that isn’t common knowledge within a few hours. When I began the fifth grade, I was looking forward to being in Miss Ellison’s class. She was young, cute in a plump sort of way, full of energy and adored kids. She had only been at the school one year prior to my being in her class, but the word was out that she was the best teacher around. I liked school and I was good at it. Aside from one ongoing difference of opinion on penmanship in the second grade, I had perfect report cards. ( I still say that teaching kids to write those big, two line high letters is ugly. So I refused. Fortunately, at the end of the year, the national penmanship test was on miniaturized lined paper. I aced it because I had been writing small all year. It probably made Mrs. Templeton choke to have to give me an “A” after all of those “C's” ) Anyway, I was ready to impress this new teacher as the star pupil.

Those of you who follow me, know that my mother died when I was very young. I was growing up in my grandmother’s home in the company of my brother, sister and father. My dad was a handsome man and knew a number of ladies who hoped that he would look their way. He was also smart as a whip, well educated, funny and fun loving. In other words, he was a good catch except for the three kids attached to his coattail wherever he went. To this point, he had not shown much interest in dating. He and my mother had been childhood sweethearts, and he grieved her loss deeply. That was before his first encounter with Miss Ellison. They hit it off right from the start. She had all the same qualities that he had, plus she wasn’t in the least intimidated by a trail of children. Just as I was taking my usual place at the head of the class, my father began to date my fifth grade teacher. From that point on, nothing I did was accepted at face value. All of my classmates decided that every “A”, every appointment to monitor, every time I was called on, was because I was the teacher’s pet. She didn’t help the matter much as she always smiled sweetly at me, or touched my shoulder as she passed my desk. That year droned on forever. I got to where I dreaded getting up on a school day. I slouched in my seat and cowered from being called to the board. At the end of the year, I raced from that room hoping to never have to live through such an experience again. For reasons unknown to me, Dad and Miss Ellison parted company after my sixth grade year and she moved on to a different school.

For years I thought that that was as bad as it could get. Then I met up with Sam and Sarah.* We lived near each other in the St. Louis area and had kids the same ages. They had boys and were into scouting. Sarah and Sam are an odd match with him being staid and humorless while she is vibrant and quirky. In fact, she is one of those people that craziness seems to follow. I don’t think I would have believed this story except I was right there when it happened.

The two of them were involved with the Boy Scouts and so was I as a den mother. Each year the big (I mean really big) United Methodist Church where we lived hosted Boy Scout Sunday by having all the area troops participate in an opening flag ceremony and awarding God and Country badges to those who had earned them. This particular Sunday, Sarah, a good Catholic, came in to sit next to me while Sam helped get the boys ready to march in. Almost as soon as she sat down, I noticed that she reeked of wood smoke. I leaned over to ask her what was going on. She explained that Sam had closed the damper on their fireplace thinking that the fire was out. I had smoldered all night filling their house with smoke. She had no choice but to wear clothes that smelled of smoke. She was confident that I smelled it only because I was so close. Sam joined us and at Sarah’s insistence I sniffed his shirt sleeve and confirmed that he, too, reeked of wood smoke.

Eleven O’clock came, the church was packed, and the choir was in place. The organist was playing the pre-service music, and we noticed that ushers were walking up and down the outside aisles, bending over registers and moving on. Five minutes passed time for the service to start, we turned around to see if something had happened to our kids who were suppose to be up the center aisle by now and leading the ceremony. Just as we looked back, a half dozen firemen in full garb came through the doors and began checking registers, especially those on our side of the church. The whole church was abuzz by this time. Then it dawned on Sarah what was happening. She left her seat and approached one of the firemen who went out to the vestibule with her. We all watched as she explained what she thought was the problem. To the whole church's amusement, she allowed the fireman to sniff her clothing then motioned to Sam to come join her. He was sniffed as well. The pastor came and sniffed them as did all the ushers. The other firemen joined in until everyone was satisfied that there was no potential fire hazard just two people who had not had anything else to wear on the day their son was to carry the flag through a huge church full of people. Sarah was sure it was the low point of her life. The rest of us just thought that it was hilarious and were grateful that it wasn’t one of us.

I have pondered this often. Humans are the only creatures who suffer embarrassment. Rude noises don’t upset those other creatures nor do bad choices. They just muster on. We, on the other hand, blush and stammer, make excuses and even blame others. I actually think that a lot of the things that should truly embarrass all of us, don’t. The only fairness about this is that, sooner or later, we all have a moment that we cringe to remember. Some are just bigger than others. While I may fall on my face, knees or butt and my dad dating my teacher was a lesson in public humiliation, I still haven’t been thought of as the reason to call out the fire brigade.


*Names changed to protect me from libelous law suits.

Getting Cozy With the Grim Reaper

This last week when the WSB met, we talked about death and cemeteries. Before you think that this was a morbid discussion of such things, let me assure you that the WSB can find humor in almost anything, and they didn’t fail on this occasion.

We all ruminate on death and dying; and at our ages, possibilities rear their heads regularly. In the last year or so, several of the gals have lost a friend or family member. Pasty has been to the local big funeral home so often that they now greet her at the door. That is not a good thing as she has buried a father and brother in that time.

One of the things we were trying to come to terms with is how does a person get comfortable with the loss of a loved one and one’s own inevitable demise? The issue was raised Wednesday because we did not expect Lucy Scarlet to show up. Her elderly father is has been placed on hospice. She has a very close relationship with her dad, and this is a tough time for her. As in many families, one child bears the burden of providing most of the care. That person is Lucy Scarlet. She has been running her parents to one appointment after the other and has been ignoring her own health in the process. We’ve been trying to encourage her to demand some down time. Like that ever works with dedicated caretakers.

Well, she showed up anyway, but she had to pay attention to any incoming calls, as she might need to leave at any time. She also got to talking about her father’s seeming acceptance of what is coming. He has been terrified about dying for several months now, but has found peace with this in the last week or so. She is glad for that, but she still needed to get away and lighten up a bit before what she knows is coming.

I told her that I am surprised at how well some people deal with their own dying. I teach a Sunday school class of older adults; and one of the members, Ann, is a fellow writer buddy. She has just published a book on her West Virginia Appalachian upbringing where death and haints (ghosts) were treated as quite ordinary. The previous Sunday’s lesson was on the Book of Ecclesiastes, which makes three big points.
(1) Life is unpredictable
(2) God is unknowable
(3) Death is inevitable

Ann commented, in class, that she and Elmo, her husband, have already ordered their tombstone and it is in place over their plots. It has everything they want on it already engraved except for their death dates. They decided to go out and inspect the final installation just recently. It was a lovely day and their hillside site was so inviting, they decided to lie down in front of their stone to get the feel of their chosen resting place. And they did just that. Lying side by side with their arms folded as they would be for eternity, they gazed up at the clear autumn sky passing overhead and around at the “view”. They enjoyed every minute of it so Ann tells us, and she saw nothing odd about this at all. The class was divided between those who were falling out of their chairs laughing and those whose mouths were hanging open in astonishment.

I got to thinking about that and wondered how I could pull off the same thing. I have told my family that I think cremation may be the way for me. I suppose I could go to one of the big nursery and landscaping places around here and climb into one of their giant concrete urns to see if I like the feel of that. Of course, trying to explain how an old lady got in the urn and why might be almost as comical as what it would take to unfold me and take me back out.

Tallulah is the only widow in the group. When her husband was dying, he wanted to take part in making his own arrangements. When they went to look for plots, they were told that they could share. They would bury the first to die, at nine feet while the second would simply be buried above the first in the same plot. Since her husband was the first to be buried, she promised him that, since he was face up, she would be buried face down. Make of that what you will. We were screaming with laughter.

Years ago, I lived on a large southern farm that had the first owner’s family cemetery on it. I remember this place well as it had two big long needle pines growing inside its wrought iron fencing. We would go there before Christmas and get lovely boughs and cones for our fireplace mantel. My grandmother’s sister-in-law, Rose, had taken over upkeep years before. Rose’s home was one of the most beautifully decorated in the area as she had a good eye for color, proportion, and design. One day returning from a shopping trip, my grandmother happened to see Rose’s car and a pick-up truck parked by the cemetery. She stopped to see what was going on. There was Rose with two huge black men cleaning the grounds and rearranging the stones. Rose, you see, had been incensed for years by the randomness of the stones' placement; and she was out there moving them into a much more pleasing design. My grandmother reported to us that the two men looked at her as is to say, “She’s paying us to do this job; but frankly, this is one crazy white lady.” Those stones have never been moved back because no one had a record of who was buried where. I have to say it is one of the prettiest little cemeteries I have ever seen.

After all, of this discussion of death and burying, we went to lunch at Ginghams. We got there just as two buses were unloading folks from local nursing homes for Ginghams once monthly “Seniorpoluza.” Tallulah, whose turn it was to choose out lunch spot, had no idea that we would have to navigate a “walker maze” as Lucy Scarlet called it or that we would be trying to get the hostess to understand that we were not with the old folk’s home people. It didn’t help either that we were sitting where we could see one old gentleman slumped over his food in a nearby booth. His boney knees were sticking our of denim Bermuda shorts. He was wearing thin, beige men’s nylon dress socks pulled up to the knees paired with mustard gold loafers. There may be some things worse than dying.

Competition

Growing up, I felt the pangs of sibling competition and reacted in both negative and positive ways. On the one hand, I felt out-classed in the area of mathematics and science by both my siblings because, quite simply, they were better at those things than I was. On the other hand, I could write better and read people better than either of them. As a result, they went into the sciences; and I was first a teacher, then a social worker, and, finally, a writer. We use to say, at work, that we were social workers because we didn’t do math. Oddly enough, the genius husband of a good friend, while watching me do some necessary record keeping for an organization we both belonged to, pointed out to me that I was really quite good with numbers. Once that possibility was opened to me, I found that he was right. It has taken a silly turn in my household where my husband, an accomplished mechanical engineer (a breed known to be non-verbal) does the crossword puzzles while I work the Sudoku.

Not all rivalries are sibling in nature. In our family, competition was everywhere. It seems to have been born out of a sense of self that dates back for generations on both sides. My great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Meader Johnson Rixie was born on the Isle of Wight just as the US was recovering from the Civil War. She and her family were my last immigrant ancestors to come to this country. She soon learned that among the old settlers, you needed something that set you apart and made you worthy of attention.

She was fond of telling her story to her children and grandchildren. The Isle of Wight is located off the southern coast of England in the English Channel. Its rolling meadows and quaint sea towns made it right for sheep herding and tourists. The most famous of the latter was Queen Victoria. She loved the little island and visited often coming across from Hampshire on the royal yacht. When she arrived, the schoolchildren would come to the pier in Ryde and greet her. One child would be chosen to go forward, present the queen with a bouquet and make a curtsey. In 1874, that child was my great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Meader. It must have made quite an impression on her as my father said that she acted like she was on a first name basis with the queen for the rest of her life.

Her daughter, my grandmother, was widowed when her children were young and she had to go to work to support her three children. The oldest boy, Charles, went to live with the paternal grandparents. Sarah took over the care of my Aunt Stella and my father. Sarah didn’t care much for boys. She found them noise, dirty, and difficult. Sarah had only girls whom she had raised with good English manners and equally good English sense regarding skin care. She jumped at the chance to pass on her expertise to her granddaughter. As a result, Aunt Stella grew up with a rather inflated idea of who she was. It didn’t hurt that she was also petite, cute, and a great dancer. She could Charleston well into her 70’s and did at the slightest hint of interest. This attitude was accepted in the family as just being Stella.

One of the favorite family stories of her volatile temper, she told on herself with great pride. When she married Uncle Jimmy, she had already turned down a number of suitors. He was an Irish Catholic with a biting sense of humor and the fatalism that haunts the Irish. They married in the midst of the depression. Wedding gifts were practical and much appreciated. It seems that Aunt Stella had warned her husband before the ceremony that she sometime had migraine headaches. He did not take the warning seriously. They came back from their honeymoon and were busy putting away their new dishes, a wedding gift. These were apparently depression glass and had been carefully collected into a complete set. As she stood on the counter putting the last of the dishes into the cupboard as he handed them to her, Aunt Stella said that she was glad they were finishing up as she was developing a headache. Uncle Jimmy said that he thought maybe those headaches were all in her imagination. You could have heard a pin drop for a second, then the dishes started flying. She slammed every one of them into the sink as she yelled at him that her headaches were real, and he better not forget it. Needless to say, the word got around to his family that she was a delicate lady who needed to be treated with kid gloves. This was accepted by all but one of the family, her brother-in-law’s wife, Beryl, who considered herself to be every bit as precious and delicate. So the rivalry began. While the two were openly friendly and enjoyed many good times together, the competition was always just under the surface. Whatever Stella did, Beryl would out do; and the same was true of Stella trumping Beryl.

Beryl never had children and Aunt Stella had only my cousin, Mary. When the two women were nearing the ends of their lives, Mary took them both in so that they would not have to go to a nursing home. In order to do that, Mary had to hire a daytime helper. The family agreed that Alice would be ideal. She was Aunt Stella’s house cleaner for years and knew the family well. She agreed to take on the job.

Things seemed to go smoothly until Mary came home one day to learn the truth. According to Alice, these two old ladies fought over everything as they each tried to vie for the most attention. Alice had had enough and wanted to quit. Mary asked for a few days while she addressed the issue with her mother and aunt. Alice agreed to give her a chance to settle them down. Mary sat the two women down and read the riot act to them. She let them know that they had tried Alice’s patience to the breaking point; and that if they lost her services, she would have no recourse but to place them in a home.

Miracle of miracle, it worked. Alice reported a week later that the ladies were behaving beautifully with a minimum of discord. She would stay on as long as they continued. Mary breathed a sigh of relief as she sent Alice on her way that evening. She also sat her mother and aunt down to tell them the good news and to compliment them on their good behavior. They accepted the praise with beaming faces. Beryl said that it was all true and that they had only had three little arguments that very day. Aunt Stella agreed then threw in for good measure, “and I won two of them.”

A Southern Lady Solves a Problem

This last week, I was out of town. The first part of my trip took me to West Plains, MO, which is almost impossible to get to from here. I was there for the Missouri State Poetry Society annual convention. As a member of the state board, I was expected to show up, and I was glad that I did since I was able to reconnect with some good friends in and out of state who also happen to be exceptional poets.

Since West Plains is almost on the Arkansas border, I decided that this would be a good time to go on down to visit my sister and check up on my cousin, Mary, as well. I wound up spending big chunks of time with some of the important women in my life and reconnecting to the stories of others. I have not always appreciated the terms steel magnolias or iron butterflies that are applied to southern women in the same way that the term iron fist in a velvet glove implies a hidden hardness. The women I knew and still know tend to have an inner strength that is tensile rather than rigid as those names imply. My children have accused me of being one of those women who can be unfailingly polite even when I am extremely irritated with someone or something. In fact, they referred to me as Julia Sugarbaker when such situations arose. You may remember her character in Designing Women, a sit-com set in Atlanta. Julia had a strong social conscience; and when someone riled her up, she could deliver a scathing speech that cut straight to the heart of the matter without raising her voice or losing her polite tone. In those speeches, she would outline the full nature of the offence and exactly what she thought about anyone who committed such a breach of good manners. The women I visited this week are just as polite and just as sure of proper decorum. They are also confident and capable and steeped in the family traditions that support those qualities.

My sister has a granddaughter who is a young mother who now wants to hear family stories. Since I seem to be the keeper of the lore of our family for this generation, I told her of our great-grandmother’s unconventional marriage and our grandmother’s vagabond life that brought her to her soul mate and her true home. So many young people think that their generation invented love and passion. It is always amusing to see the light dawn as they come to the universal truth that these things have been going on for centuries.

My father’s paternal grandmother, Frances Jane Roberts, was born on the eve of the War Between the States. (There was nothing civil about that war.) She was the first child of James Calhoun Kellam and Melissa LeFevre Kellam, and she was born on the LeFevre plantation just north of the Arkansas River. Her mother had an uncle who was not much older than she was. His name was Leon LeFevre; but for some reason, everyone called him Uncle Mimi. He never married, but he adored his niece and nearly worshiped the great-niece who became his sole heir. When she was three, Frances Jane’s father died in the Battle of Jenkin’s Ferry south of Little Rock, and Uncle Mimi sent the rest of the family to Texas to wait out the war. On the way, her mother lost the baby she was pregnant with; and one of Frances Jane’s earliest memories was of burying that tiny body beside a rutted dirt trail somewhere in north Texas. After the war, the family returned to the plantation. Since schools were crude in that area, Uncle Mimi sent Frances Jane to a fine girl’s boarding school in Memphis. Like many southern river towns and cities, Memphis was regularly plagued with yellow fever epidemics. The 1870’s, in Memphis had a series of yellow fever outbreaks that culminated in the horrific 1878 epidemic. When the first one occurred, Uncle Mimi didn’t wait. He hired a Captain Ward who sewed the girl into a gunnysack, smuggled her onto his cargo ship, and took her south to the mouth of the Arkansas River and north to the dock at the LeFevre plantation. After a short visit at home, Frances Jane was sent to a girl’s seminary at Cane Hill, Arkansas. Her mother had married a Carnahan in that same area so the little family was back together.

Many people may be surprised to learn that there was a girl’s school in the Ozark Mountains near Fayetteville before there was a college in the area. These settlers were almost all Scots who had come through the Cumberland Gap to claim land grants for service during the American Revolution. What many people do not realize about the Scots is that they have a long history of supporting public education. Seventy to eighty percent of Scots were literate several centuries before any other European nation even considered educating the general population. This is why Scots were at the forefront of the Protestant Reformation. About the only book that was available was a Bible. They read it, saw discrepancies in what was there, and what the church was teaching.

Frances Jane completed her education and became a schoolteacher. She returned to Uncle Mimi’s home and taught in a small school there. She also met the overseer of the plantation. This was still a class-conscious society, and she was far above this young man who was considered the hired help. In fact, he was a wild boy out of Georgia with a rudimentary education and a history of reckless adventures. Good girl meets bad boy and the sparks flew. Of course, her family put their foot down. Like that ever works! The two of them ran away leaving her uncle swearing oaths of murder and her mother wringing her hands. They were gone for a week when early one morning, Uncle Mimi spotted a campfire on an island in the middle of the Arkansas River. Taking two of his farm hands with him, he rowed to the island and brought back the disgraced couple. She was banished to the house; and he, to the barn. They couldn’t hang him right off in case they had to save her reputation. The young people were devastated by the separation, but it didn’t last long. Within a few weeks, the family gathered the minister and marched those two unrepentant sinners up the aisle. They stayed married for 63 years. She could make him smile just by walking into the room. Someone once told us that our great-grandfather was the meanest old man in Pulaski County. We heard many stories about his tough nature and his hard bargaining. What I remember is that anytime he began to get cantankerous around her, Frances Jane would look him right in the eye and say in her soft southern drawl, “Now, Charlie, that’s enough.” And he would smile sheepishly at her and behave himself for the rest of the day.

When I first told my sister this tale, she was shocked. After all Grandmother Roberts, as we called her, was the epitome of southern, lady-like behavior. Well, she was right about that, but Frances Jane was also a girl who knew what she wanted and she knew how to find a practical solution to an otherwise insurmountable problem. That’s what southern women do. While the neighbors may whisper and even look down their noses at some behavior, a true lady holds her head up, makes her plans and carries them forward. She doesn’t raise her voice, and she smiles sweetly as she gets her way.

Levee Hopping

One of the things that I have ruminated on over the years is the whimsy of who survives stupid childhood decisions when others do not. There were situations that some of my friends and I got into by choice that probably should have killed us. Yet, most of us are still here decades later; and those who aren’t, didn’t die from our antics.

Most of my friends and I grew up on large cotton farms or plantations, and most of those farms had airstrips with aviation fuel pumps nearby. They were used by crop dusters who were commissioned to poison boll weevils, armyworms, and spider mites that attacked the crops. A few of the families use those strips for private aircraft as well.

One of the families had two sons that were near my age. The younger one ran around with the group of kids I did while his older brother was too busy with the distractions of first love to run with us the summer I was sixteen. For the sake of telling this tale, I’ll call them Jack and Jamie. Jamie was the one who was a member of the gang, and he had two things that made him popular and fascinating. Jamie had the most mesmerizing eyes of the oddest color that any of us had ever seen. The girls described them as pastel green. The boys, who were probably a little jealous of the attention they brought him, called them pond scum green. The other thing that endeared him to all of us was that he owned an Army surplus jeep of World War II vintage. It was our favorite transportation because it could go anywhere.

Like most jeeps of that era, it had a ragtop stretched over a metal frame. At least, it started out the summer with one. The ragtop had been torn away when Jack and his girlfriend fell out of the barn loft where they had been, quite literally, rolling in the hay. Fortunately, for them, the jeep was parked right under the loft door and the ragtop broke their fall but tore apart from the impact leaving only the frame.

The other thing that the jeep had was a hinged front windshield that could fold down over the hood. Being young and impervious to such assaults, we usually drove around with the windshield down and ignored or cursed the bugs that flew into us. One or two people could sit on the hood and hold on to the dash or any knobs we could grab. That was my favorite place to ride even if it meant that I had my back to the road. From there, I could carry on a conversation with anyone else in the vehicle.

One evening, six of us were bumming around when Jamie noticed that we were running low on gas. We decided that we needed our money more for treats at the drive-in more than spending it on gas. Besides, Jamie had a key to his family’s aviation pump and we were near the airstrip. So, we went there and filled up the jeep on high octane aviation fuel. Since we were on the airstrip, someone suggested that we run the jeep as fast as we could down the strip to see if it would take off. After all, it was full of airplane fuel.

Needless to say, that didn’t work, but we were pumped up with the idea of a flying jeep. Then someone had a brilliant idea. We decided to go to the Arkansas River levee. We ran the jeep as fast as we could up one side of the levee so that as we went over the top, the jeep actually went airborne for several feet before bouncing down on the other side. We were all hanging on for dear life. It worked so well that we did it a number of times before we got tired and went off to the drive-in. Jamie would tell people for years afterward that he once flew a jeep. He loved to leave that remark hanging without further explanation. The rest of us came to refer to that adventure as levee hopping.

Why did none of us bounce out of that jeep? Why did the jeep stay upright? God only knows. Those six people went on to live productive lives. We became college professors and teachers, social workers and Jamie? He became a Presbyterian minister. When I wonder if this was just a stupid thing that God decided to protect us from, I am truly grateful. Other times, I think death just chose that time to look away.

The Awful But Unspoken Truth

This last week, the WSB was deep in discussion about our childhood antics. Talullah and Windy were comparing notes on the behavior of teenage girls. Since Windy was raised a Catholic she was far more aware of the nature of sin than the rest of us. There was no escaping it. I remember thinking just that as a child. My cousin, Mary, would tell me about all of the types of sin she had to deal with. It was hard keeping tract of whether hers were the more serious kinds that could have a person skidding straight down that terrible shoot to hell or were the type that would cause you to spend a few thousand years hanging around somewhere between earth and heaven in a place called purgatory. I wondered about this a lot then because my grandmother said that everyone sinned and that we were all at the mercy of God. She didn’t seem to think there were degrees of wrong. For her life was pretty much a black or white issue. You were born to do the wrong thing and you had better keep on God’s good side if you expected to escape punishment.

I thought that I had a pretty good chance of being on the wrong end of the judgment thing. It seemed that I was always the one to challenge the authority of just about anyone who acted like they had any authority. Looking back, I wonder if all children don’t see themselves as the center of the universe no matter what direction they are headed. For that reason, we tend to do what ever it takes to protect out hides. I know that I could lie with the best of them and honed my skills often.
That may be why I got such a kick out of Pasty’s story of one of those things that only a kid would do unless it was a hardened criminal with experience in covering his/her butt.

She was about eleven when she and some of her friends were spending a nice summer’s day playing in the woods near her home outside of St. Louis. In those ancient times, this suburb was out in the country; and kids could roam free most of the day without worrying parents. Pasty has a sister and had a little brother. The neighborhood kids had gone to great effort to build themselves a tree house. This was not a pressure treated lumber thing designed by someone with fifty safety features to protect every digit a child has. This was a structure made of whatever they could get their hands on from various wood piles and garages. I like to see these kids, in my mind’s eye, confiscating nails and swiping dad’s hammer to beat this thing together. From what Pasty says, they loved their handy work and spent long afternoons going up and down that tree. On this particular day, Pasty’s sister climbed up, but she didn’t climb down. She fell, landing in a splat on the ground. The other kids, including Pasty, rushed over to have a look.

To her horror, there lay her sister, dead on the ground. At least, that’s what Pasty and her little brother and friends thought. So they did what any smart kid would do. They left her there and went home. They did not tell a soul because who wanted a mother to go all ballistic about how you had allowed your little sister to get killed so foolishly. At home, they carried on as if this was any other day. Pasty remembers thinking it would be much better if her mother went out looking for her daughter and found her herself rather than Pasty having to tell her mother the truth. She doesn’t recall being in a panic about her dead sibling. All she could think about was, don’t let them blame this on me.

Then Pasty got the shock of her young life. In walked her sister. Pasty thought she must be seeing a ghost because she had left her less than an hour earlier dead on the ground under the tree house. Her sister never knew that she had been left as a corpse and may not to this day know that. Pasty and her brother sure never told the parents. In fact, none of the children spilled the beans. It turned out that her sister came to under the tree and after getting a second wind, got up and came home with no one being the wiser. Except that Pasty carried this story with her to this day as a reminder of how self protective we all can be.

I like to think I could have done the same thing or better yet made it my sibling’s fault. We all seem to have that self-preservation gene, and it seems some of us can call it forth without the least bit of hesitation or conscience. We were all in awe of Pasty’s gutsy approach to solving this dilemma. I wonder how it would have effected Pasty if her sister had been killed. Or what would have happened if she had simply told her mother the truth as she thought she knew it. Pasty, however, isn’t impressed by my ruminations on these points. She just knows that there was no way anyone was going to point the finger at her.

In the Summer, Mary Came

My paternal grandmother had four grandchildren, but I missed out on grandparents as a child. My maternal grandmother died when I was seven. Most of my memories of her center around her illness. She was soft spoken and gentle natured, but she had little strength for dealing with grandchildren. My grandfathers had both died before I was born. The only one left was Grandmother, the woman who was the mother in our household. She could not afford to indulge us as I do my grandchildren whom I can return to waiting parents full of sugar, gifts, and broken rules regarding bedtime and breakfast food. Lest you think I am whining about this, let me assure you I am not. These are simply the facts. My widowed father turned to his mother for help in raising his children, and she turned to him for help running her farm. Theirs was an unusually good relationship based on clear communication and respect. If they ever did disagree about how we should be treated, we never knew about it. They presented a united front.

The only grandchild my grandmother could indulge was our cousin, Mary. She was Irish and Catholic thanks to her father. She lived in North Little Rock and attended her local parish school. Her tales of the teaching nuns scared us, Methodists, half to death. My brother Luther was 14 months older than I, and Mary was six months older than he. The two of them had a tight bond that continues to today. Since Mary wasn’t there a good portion of the year, Luther and I were playmates. Our sister was several years younger and usually played alone or with Jackie, a black child of one of the sharecropping families.

In the summer, Mary came to stay most weeks. She came on Sunday afternoon and stayed until Saturday morning when she had to be home in time to go to confession and attend Mass on Sunday. Her family came for Sunday dinner or supper and the cycle began again. When Mary came, she and Luther paired up, and I found myself left out. I didn’t like that one bit. Mary shared my room and my big double bed when she was there but little else. When we were together, we argued, mostly about God. We’d been arguing, discussing, pondering God since we could both say the word. Otherwise, we didn’t spend much time together.

She and Luther had much more in common. They both loved sports. Mary’s dad had been a professional baseball catcher, even playing for the Cardinals for a season in the early 1930. She had inherited his natural athleticism. My brother excelled at individual sports such as bowling and golf. While he could shoot perfect basket after basket in our backyard and hit a mean long drive of a baseball, he seemed to have trouble coordinating his actions to those of a team. He and Mary spent hours playing flies and skinners, shooting baskets and pitching horseshoes.

It was a horseshoe game that changed Mary’s and my relationship forever. Luther and Mary had been playing for some time. It was not unusual for them to be neck and neck in any game with a score involved, and such was the case that hot July afternoon. Luther is pretty laid back by nature while Mary is passionate about…well, about just about everything she has any interest in at all. She doesn’t do anything half way. So, when Luther’s score topped hers, she wanted a chance to get even or better yet, to pull ahead. Luther, however, had had enough. Like I said, he’s laid back; but he is also stubborn. He decided to quit on his win, and Mary argued with him. His mind was made up so he walked away leaving her fuming. He hadn’t gotten far when a horseshoe whizzed past his head, and he did the sensible thing. He ran. The chase was on. Luther was just trying to get away. Mary, on the other hand, was bent on murder. The harder she ran, the madder she got. Not only had she lost the game, she was losing the race as well. She chased him across a cotton field where he lost a shoe. He didn't think it prudent to stop and pick it up. They ran through Grandmother’s vegetable garden, Mary crying hysterically and yelling, “I’m gonna kill you!”

Grandmother, Jane, and I heard the commotion and ran to the back porch. Grandmother called to Luther to get in the house. As he ran in, she directed him to his room and told him to stay there until she called him to come out. He didn’t have to be told twice. Grandmother turned just in time to block Mary’s entrance. Mary adored our grandmother above all other human kind including her own parents so there was no way she would do any harm to her. She stopped dead in her tracks. Grandmother led her to the kitchen and sat her down in a chair. She was still crying and muttering threats and her anger was high. Grandmother did what seemed to her to be the most dramatic way to put a stop to an uncontrolled outburst. She threw a cup of cold water in her face. As Jane and I gasped in astonishment, Mary’s tantrum came to an abrupt halt.

Grandmother drew up a chair opposite Mary and gently wiped her dripping, flushed and feverish face with a cool washcloth as she calmly talked her through all that had happened. Then she did the strangest thing. She assigned Mary and me to an afternoon together. I thought she had lost her mind. We had almost no similar interests except our religious arguments, but here we were, having to seek some common ground. And we did.

I don’t remember what all we talked about that afternoon aside from sharing our negative experiences of dealing with my brother. I do remember sitting for hours on the front porch swing, drinking lemony, sweet iced tea and talking and talking. It was a significant turning point for both of us—the beginning of a close and loving friendship and sisterhood that is still an important part of both of our lives. Mary eventually forgave Luther, but I have been eternally grateful for their battle of titanic proportion. It brought Mary and I together in a way neither of us would have ever guessed that it could. It made us sisters more than cousins. We still argue, discuss, ponder our varied takes on God, but we do it with love and connection, more than either of us would have ever imagined that July day. I can’t imagine my life without her.

Strippers and Southern Gentlemen

I was raised in the South, Arkansas to be precise. I grew up with people who believed in Southern hospitality and good manners. There were ways of saying things that got the message across without doing harm to someone else’s psyche. Those good manners were mandated in homes, churches, and schools and seemed to have little to do with economic status. Every boy I knew shot to his feet when a lady (we never used the word, “woman”) entered the room. All adults were answered with a “sir” or “ma’am” tacked on to the end. We also had that strange custom of addressing the adults of our acquaintance by their first name with a Miss or Mister precursor. My father was never Mr. Roberts but Mr. Luther. My grandmother was Miss Wessie. It was perfectly acceptable to have nicknames and hers was short for the middle name, Westfall. And on more formal occasions, children were addressed in the same manner.

I look back on those days with longing because I feel we have let things drift so far from good manners that it is now perfectly ordinary for adults and children to treat each other rudely without even causing that slight lift of the eyebrow that use to say, “Dear child, who is raising you, and why are they neglecting their duty?”

The boys I knew might tease a girl, but it was never suggestive or improper in any way. They could disagree vehemently with a girl’s take on things; but in discussing it, gentlemen used a moderated tone and listened politely. At home, my brother might tell me that one of my friends was as crazy as a Betsy-bug; but when he was around her, he treated her as if she were perfectly sane and had every right to her opinion. I have to say, I miss this.

The summer I was 17, I witnessed this form of chivalry applied to me. It is a thing I have remembered fondly since. I knew then that I would forever adore those young men I grew up with and hold them up as examples of what young men can aspire to.

One of my childhood friends lived in one of those old southern mansions that are sometimes referred to as working plantation homes. While they are huge and graciously appointed, they are comfortable and have an easy lived in look. This big house was on the banks of Old River Lake. The front door faced the lake, which meant that the driveway from the road branched off to go around to the front while the main drive went to the back. Like most working farms and plantations, the back of the house also had access to barns, tool shops, and multi-vehicle garages. Hers had a wide circular drive in the back with spoke going to the house and various buildings. The house was two stories with deep two story screened back porches. The top one was outfitted as a sleeping porch for those hot Southern nights in the days before air-conditioning.

My friend liked to throw a party each summer and the summer of 1957, was no different. This was a significant time for all of us as we were all students of the Little Rock School system by choice and the fact that our parents paid tuition. We were all college bound kids whose parents wanted us to have the advantages that a large school could give. That included foreign languages, arts, and music as well as advanced placement classes in all of the regular subjects. Most of my hometown friends qualified for those. If you remember your history, you know that that was the year Little Rock Central High School would become the most famous or infamous high school in the world. We all knew what lay ahead and most of us were being instructed to keep our heads down and mind our own business which was getting an education not a reputation.

Everybody I knew was at this party. We danced to Bill Haley and the Comets, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper. We were having a great time, and there was a new boy in town to make things more interesting. He was a distant cousin of one of the girls and was visiting from out of state. When he heard one of my girl friends mention that she was nervous about school, he joined the conversation. As always, I took the most liberal view of things and said I had no problem with the upcoming changes. After all, we had been playing with “colored” kids all of our lives, and we knew that some of them were plenty smart. In those days, “colored” was an acceptable word. This boy turned on me with, “So that makes you a N----- lover.”

You could have heard a pin drop. Then in one swift move, every one of my childhood male friends circled this kid and hustled him out of the room. He was back within five minutes, untouched but humbled and apologized in front of everyone there for his behavior. I could not have been prouder of those boys who came to my defense even those that I knew were probably as prejudiced as he was.

When the party was over, the girls stayed for a sleep over. We donned our baby-doll pajamas and retired to the sleeping porch. It wasn’t long before all of the boys came back for their annual drive through. They would come up the road and make a couple of turns around the circular drive and honk and wave as they yelled good-night. We girls would go to the screen and wave back. While our jammies were short, none of us was allowed to have anything immodest. This night as I waved to the boys, I bumped the wooden framework of the porch. I dislodged a wasp nest, and the wasps flew up under my little top stinging me as they fought to get free. I did the only thing I could think of while in pain and under attack. I pulled off my top. There I was with my lithe, 17 year old body displayed brazenly to all of these boys I had known for years. There was a moment of silence followed by hooting and honking such as had never been heard before. I, on the other hand, fled to the bedroom with friends who could see that I was in serious trouble. I began having an allergic reaction to the nearly 20 stings I had suffered, and after a quick phone call to my family, was transported to the hospital.

You might be asking how chivalry comes into this after those boys reaction to my strip tease. Well, the word spread quickly that I had been dangerously close to dying . To this day, not one of those young men ever mentioned to me or anyone else that I know of what happened that night. What they saw may be burned into their brains just as the experiences of that evening are burned into mine, but a true gentleman tells no tales.

My Street Acting Career

Entertainment in a rural community in the forties and fifties was often a thing of creative thinking and a willingness to be the subject of ridicule. The local school had a womanless wedding with my father as the bride. There were talent shows and musical recitals, square dances and carnivals. I often wonder if today’s children or their parents could come up with some of the things we did to provide ourselves with needed breaks from the hard work of cotton farming.

In the early 1950’s, our church, All Souls Interdenominational Church, called a new pastor. He was a full blood Italian whose parents had immigrated to Philadelphia from Italy. After a very bad experience with a local priest, they left the Catholic church and joined a Southern Baptist congregation there that was a mission to Italians who were fallen away Catholics. Their son, Michael Carozza, sought out our congregation when he heard about its interdenominational status. There were so few people in Scott that they decided to worship together rather than scatter their resources among several small churches. All Souls had a fairly wealthy congregation who built a beautiful example of turn of the 20th Century architecture as their house of worship. The building is now on the National Registry of Historic Buildings.

Mike Carozza brought some new ideas about ways to entertain ourselves. For one thing, all of our church dinner for the eight years he was our minister were Italian style. Among his talents, he was an excellent cook. Lasagna, spaghetti, and chicken cacciatore became standard fare. And who would have guessed how much Arkansas farmers would come to appreciate a pancake breakfast with side orders of peppers and eggs with salsiccia.

The other thing that Mike Carozza brought with him was a love of movies. We were near enough to Little Rock that we occasionally went to movies, but it was an infrequent treat. Mike found a movie distributor and set up Friday night movies in the church hall. Because they were being served up to good Christian people, the movies we saw were the classics, family fare and good westerns and war movies. We sat in folding chairs set up in rows with an aisle down the center. Some of the ladies brought desserts and made lemonade. Sometimes there was popcorn, popped in the church kitchen. It was easy to get the treats, as most of the movies were three to five reels long. Since we had only one projector, there were breaks between reels so that the new reel could be set up for viewing.

Here, I fell in love with Mutiny on the Bounty, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Norte Dame. It was this last one that led to one of the less than stellar moments of my young life.

My grandmother was a clotheshorse and loved to shop. My father, out of appreciation for all she did for him and us, indulged her shopping by taking her to Little Rock on many Saturdays. As we got older, we were allowed to go with her. By the time I was eleven, she would let me take my little sister for an hour or so to shop by ourselves at the Woolworths while she prowled the aisles of M.M. Cohen’s, Blass (later to become the flagship of Dillards), and Pfeiffer’s, all upscale department stores. The plan was always to meet at the side door of Pfeiffer’s at the designated time. My brother went with my dad. I had no idea that she ever went near any of the dime stores or the Rexall Drug where we could get a soda and listen to the tableside jukeboxes. Because of this, I thought I was perfectly safe playing a little joke on the good shoppers of Little Rock. We had just seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and I was taken with Laughton’s performance. I talked my eight-year-old sister into leading me around our usual haunts while I pretended to be mentally and physically challenged. I took my posture and movements straight from Quasimodo. Jane had nothing to do but hold my right hand and coax me down the street and I hunched over and limped and grunted along. I was getting quite a kick out of the pitying looks and comments although one woman declared that people should keep such children out of the public eye. Her companion replied that at least, I appeared to be clean and well cared for. When I wanted to go to Rexalls, I made a garbled sentence that was something like,” Woah gos geh ahh danck.” Jane had no idea what I was saying so I pretended to cry and pull her in the direction of the drugstore. To my horror and hers, my grandmother had had a yen for a cherry coke, something she sometimes allowed herself. There she was coming out of Rexalls as we were approaching. Jane saw her before I did because she suddenly dropped my hand and stepped away. It was a feeble attempt to distance herself from the titanic disaster she saw looming in my future. As I peered up from my hunched over position, I caught the full blast of my grandmother’s anger. She took one step forward and yanked me upright. Had the streets not been teeming with Saturday shoppers, I am not sure I would be here to tell this tale. She did what she always did when she was about to lose the generally well-developed control. She spoke quietly through clinched teeth. It is a trait that my children would say I inherited. I saw my life flash before me and I was certain that the future held some dire consequence if I could just live long enough to see what that would be. She informed me that I was not to leave her side and that we were going to march straight over to Allsopp and Chappel’s Bookstore where my dad was a faithful and well-loved customer.

When we got there, my father took one look at my grandmother and her hand digging into my shoulder and excused himself from his conversation with the owner. We all walked silently to the car, and silence reigned until we got home. My brother and sister peeked at me whenever they dared, but neither offered a sympathetic word of comfort. My grandmother and father conferred in the privacy of her bedroom before my father came out and told me that I was confined to my room for the week, and would miss the next month of movies at the church. He seemed to be right there with my grandmother, and I was ashamed that I had caused them so much grief. My brother and sister stayed as far away from me as they could for the rest of the day. Maybe they feared that some of my inherent evil would rub off on them. Just when I thought I would be forever a disgrace to my family, my dad came in to say goodnight. As he leaned over to plant the customary kiss on my forehead he murmured, “I would have loved to have caught your acting debut, but you’ll have to live with your grandmother’s decision.” Just before he turned out the light, he gave me a big grin and a wink while shaking his head in disbelief.