Early Stories – Page 4 – writinghersense

Heat Wave

A modern-day air conditioning unit in Vicksburg, MS

My friend Ed observed the other day that the two forces which made the modern South possible are integration and air conditioning. The more I think about that statement, the truer it becomes. We obviously still have huge issues with racial tensions throughout this country–the sad case of Trayvon Martin makes that only too clear. Yet, as my African-American friend has told me before, things are a whole lot better than they were 50 years ago. I hope we can get still further down that road.

On the subject of air conditioning, the heat and humidity of this summer has led me to remember what it was like in the summer in Tennessee. When I was a small child we only had a big unit air conditioner in the dining room window, which was supposed to cool the entire house. It was not nearly big enough, so we had circulating fans on the floor in our bedrooms. The rhythmic hum of the fan was as good as white noise to help me fall asleep, while the movement of air washing over me made me feel cooler.

On the worst nights, when the air conditioner just couldn’t cool enough and the air was thick with humidity, Daddy would get out the car and we would go for a ride after dark with the windows rolled down. The sticky air didn’t help much but the breeze coming through the windows was better.

We spent one summer in an old, dilapidated house without enough wiring for air conditioners while the house on the farm was being built. It had thick walls which did keep it from heating up as much as it would have otherwise. But many a night I laid in bed, sheets thrown off, sweating even with a fan pointed at me from the floor.

Air conditioning in modern office buildings made it possible for industry to move to the South, which made city life and civilization preferable to farming for many people, and brought diverse populations to the area. Air conditioning in homes made it much more comfortable to live there. It was a big change which I am grateful for, even here in New York–the third heat wave of the summer began yesterday!

The Moving Wall

I went with some friends to a park in Hastings today to see the Moving Wall. It was an extremely hot day, but another friend who is a Vietnam vet was volunteering at the traveling exhibition, and his wife was working it as well. So we drove down in air-conditioned comfort to view it.

The Moving Wall is a half-size replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC and has been touring the country for almost 30 years. Even at half size it is somber and sobering. All those names, starting in 1959 and going forward year by year–it’s overwhelming in some ways. I have never visited the memorial in Washington, but I can see it would be an even sadder but fitting tribute at full size.

I was talking with Jose and some of the other volunteers as we stood under a tent to escape the sun. They asked if I knew someone whose name was on the memorial. I started to say no, because none of my family members had died, and my high school class was the last one to experience the draft, but none of them were called up.

Then I remembered. I had a POW bracelet when I was in high school, and I remembered the name on the bracelet. It was Col. Gregg Hartness, an Air Force pilot, shot down over Laos and missing in action. Had he ever come home, or was he on the list? I looked in the directory, and there he was. Jose helped me find his name on the wall.

It really took me back to those dark days when the war was winding down, but people were still dying, still going missing. I had sent off to get a POW bracelet to make my stand clear–anti-war for sure, but remembering the soldiers who were sent off to fight a senseless war. I was so grateful that my own family members were spared. And I was in high school, so I had that unpleasant adolescent smugness about making a noble gesture. I remembering thinking, “Well, the war will be over soon and he will come home, so I won’t have to wear it long.” Then I found out Col. Hartness was missing in action. He never came back.

I still have the bracelet with his name on it. It was strange to stand in that sweltering park and see his name again.

Definitely Summer, or, the Mockingbird

At four o’clock every morning for the past week, I have been reminded that it is indeed summer. That’s when the mockingbird begins singing. He starts around four, and he doesn’t finish his repertory until the sun starts getting hotter around 8 a.m.

He perches on top of a parking lot light and sings and sings and sings. Somewhere in the distance is another mockingbird, so they engage in this duel to establish their territory. Sometimes he’ll tune up again in the evening, but usually it’s a morning routine.

The mockingbird is a very inventive musician and does mash-ups of other birds’ songs, getting faster as he goes, and sometimes rearranging the sequence. I think of him as the Glee chorister of the animal kingdom. I wouldn’t mind the early morning chorale if I could just sleep through it, or at least roll over and go back to sleep.

Mockingbirds remind me of where I grew up in Tennessee–they are the state bird. As a child and a teenager I could sleep through a bomb going off, so the pre-dawn concerts didn’t bother me. My dad was known to chase a noisy bird away–see my archives for the story of the whippoorwill. I learned the lesson, however, that birds are crafty, and will wait until you are back in bed to start up their song again.

So I am waiting for the height of summer, when the mockingbird will have proved his manhood to his mate and will quiet down again except for running trills just before dark. I like the way he flicks his wings and tail to show the patches of white, then covers them again modestly. I agree with Atticus Finch that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, “because “they don’t do one thing for us but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us”.^[38]

Even if they are singing long before I want to get up!

Remembering Daddy: The Denim Jacket

I have Daddy’s denim jacket hanging in my hall closet. It is an old, faded Wrangler’s denim, lined with red plaid flannel, in the classic style worn by farmers and cowboys. When I came home from college in the fall or winter, I would borrow that jacket from him and wear it every time I went out while I was at home, unless he needed it to wear on the farm.

Daddy always seemed the right size to me, not too big and not too small. He would be considered barely medium height now, barrel-chested, with strong shoulders and muscular arms and legs. He wore khaki work pants and shirts when he worked at Clarksville Base, and he wore them to work on the farm. They were heavy cotton and were a pain to iron, but I learned to iron on those work clothes.

When the weather was colder he put on heavy, lined coveralls which zipped up the front and were dark green or dark grey. All these clothes were meant for hard outdoor work, mending fences, herding cows, digging postholes, the work that couldn’t be done from a tractor or a truck.

When it wasn’t cold enough for the coveralls, he wore that jacket. Many times I saw him put it on as he headed out to drive the school bus (when he had that job) or feed the cows just as the winter sun was coming up.

So after Daddy died, when Mother was cleaning out the house, that jacket was the only thing of his I wanted, and the only thing I brought home to New York with me. I have never worn it again. I guess I was afraid it would wear out. It is quite frayed, and, I just realized, more than 30 years old. But it is a last bit of him, and of frosty mornings when the cows patiently waited for him, lining up at the barbed-wire fence nearest our house, their breath making clouds. “Hello, babies,” he would say, and they followed him at a stately pace to the stable, to be fed.

Happy Father’s Day to all fathers, and to all of us who love and remember them.

A Few More Things About My Mother

Here are some more things I remember about Mother. As I wrote last week, I wrote these in a notebook as I rode the Metro North train home from Manhattan a few years ago. It was a sad time in my life, and writing seemed to help. I only wish I had written more while the memories were fresher.

14. When we lived in town, Mother had flower beds with four o’clocks in back of the house. The blossoms only opened in the evening and closed at dark. She had huge beds of tiger lilies in the back yard in summer, and every color of iris in the spring.

15. She kept every drawing or story I ever gave her. She kept every letter my brother wrote from the Air Force. She kept the ugly pottery owl with a flat head that I made in 7^th grade art class. She kept boxes and boxes of photos and an old family Bible.

16. She liked to talk on the phone a lot. When she lived in town she spent hours on the phone every day, it seemed. It was a sad day when my sister Glenda had to take the phone out of Mother’s room in the nursing home. Mother couldn’t hear it anymore and had forgotten how to dial. She and Aunt Elsie always talked every day until Mother moved to be near Glenda. Then they talked once a week, until Mother couldn’t hear anymore. That was one of the first things the strokes took away.

17. Mother was a good, old-fashioned Southern cook: fried chicken, boiled country ham, vegetables cooked down with fat meat, creamed corn (a little bit stuck to the skillet, the way Daddy liked it), stewed tomatoes, cornbread. Her biscuits were not reliable. She made wonderful pies: chocolate (no meringue, because my sister Juanita didn’t like it), chess, pecan. Cakes were chancy things and might or might not fall. She also liked recipes from her Sunday school class members or Good Housekeeping, especially Jello salads. When Daddy had his first heart attack her cooking changed completely. No more sausage and biscuits or fatback—only as a treat.

I was thinking of Mother’s fried chicken recipe this week. It turns out her method was just featured in Southern Living recently, and they increased the minutes you cook it because chickens are so much larger now. Her recipe is in this blog’s archives.

Enjoy the week, and enjoy Memorial Day weekend!

Remembering Mother on Mother’s Day

I still miss Mother a lot. We made each other crazy when I was growing up, and I got as far away from her as I reasonably could. But I never left for good and I always came back. Following are some excerpts from a story I wrote for a writing class. It wasn’t really a story; it was a list of recollections. So here are some random memories of Mother, for Mother’s Day.

1. Her eyes used to be dark brown, very big. Uncle Hoy said she was the prettiest girl in the community where they grew up, which was Blooming Grove, Tennessee. In her old age, they faded to almost tan-colored.

2. She wore print cotton dresses in cheerful flower patterns. She didn’t wear pants until after Daddy died in 1977, I don’t think.

3. She fell and cracked her kneecap chasing my dog Whitey around the yard when I was 8 or 9. She was trying to throw away sticks blown off the trees by a storm. He kept fetching them back, and she yelled, “You stupid dog!” and chased him with a stick. I laughed and laughed, until she slipped on the wet grass and fell.

4. The only time she ever went to Florida, I took her. I drove from Atlanta in September 1981 and picked her up. We drove to St. Augustine and Daytona Beach. It was the coolest September on record. But she finally saw the ocean, the red and orange sunrises and sunsets, walked in the edge of the surf, and sat in a beach chair on the boardwalk with some other people, who seemed elderly to me. We went to Marineland, and she was too tired to walk from one show to another. That’s when I knew she was sick, not just getting older. She was sick ever after that. Mother must have been about 62 years old.

5. She stayed with me in the hospital for a week when I fractured a vertebra in my back. I was 10 years old, and had been thrown out of a swing when the chain broke on my side–six kids in a porch-type swing in a frame, trying to see how high we could go. I was so bored, because the hospitals didn’t have TVs then (1965?), and she couldn’t drive, so she couldn’t get to the library. She bought me every children’s book in the hospital gift shop, all the ancient paperbacks—Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Elsie Dinsmore. I read them all. I hated Elsie Dinsmore. What a little priss!

6. When I was in high school, she made a trade with Aunt Eunice Settle (Daddy’s sister). We would can a bushel of Kentucky Wonder beans for her, and Aunt Eunice would slipcover our couch. It took both of us an entire day. Aunt Eunice’s work was done in about three hours. Aunt Eunice always got the best of any bargain going.

7. Mother’s hands were always big and knobby-jointed. She said they were like Papa’s (her father, Herman Bowers), while mine were long-fingered and thin like Mama’s (her mother, Blanche Collier Bowers). Papa and Mama both died before I was born.

8. Mother never learned to drive, ride a bike, or roller-skate. She liked to play Rook, a sort of Southern Baptist card game with no “face cards.” Good Christians didn’t play cards when she was a child.

9. Aunt Elsie was Mother’s best friend from the time they were five years old. One day when they were children Mother had a new dress, a rare occurance, and Aunt Elsie wanted to wear it. They switched dresses on the way to school so Aunt Elsie could wear it. That’s how much Mother loved her, that she would do that. Aunt Elsie was an aunt by marriage. She and Mother married brothers; Mother married George, Aunt Elsie married Jesse. Aunt Elsie’s brother, Uncle Floyd, married Mother’s sister, Aunt Mattie Lou.

The entire “story” is “50 Things About My Mother.” I wrote them in a notebook as I commuted by train to Manhattan. I’m glad I got them written down. Happy Mother’s Day to all my family, friends and readers!

Earliest Memories

My book group read a fascinating book this month–not an easy read, but it led to a lot of questions and a great discussion. “Austerlitz” by W. G. Sebald was the book, a novel ultimately about a man searching for his origins and his lost family, a child of the Kindertransport.

We talked about a number of themes in the novel and how it was structured and narrated. It had a dreamlike quality, but also conveyed the destructiveness of buried memory and lost history.

One of the members of our group raised the question–what is your earliest memory? She is a psychotherapist, and she said the stories people tell about their earliest memory often encapsulate all the issues they deal with throughout their lives.

I thought this was amazing. One of our group members had clear memories of being in the hospital at age three, and how frightened and abandoned she felt. Most of us had no clear memories before age four or five.

I started thinking about it, and realized I just had an impression of emotions before I was four or five (and a clear memory of the family’s cocker spaniel, Janie, who died before I was five years old.) Between four and five I learned to read, and I clearly remember the moment when I was sitting on Daddy’s lap, looking at the Sunday comics. He was reading them to me, and I suddenly realized I knew what the words meant. It was like being struck by happy lightning! I started reading to him, and he was so proud.

Hence my lifelong love of words and books. I felt warm, safe, happy and loved, and my brain was totally charged up. I ruled the world! What could be better?

What do you remember? What is your earliest memory? I hope it is warm and happy.

A Trip to Beech Bend Park

Anyone who grew up in middle Tennessee or southern Kentucky is familiar with Beech Bend Park. In my childhood it was the nearest amusement park and also had a raceway. Beech Bend is where I learned that amusement park rides don’t agree with me.

This would have been in the late ’60s, I guess. I don’t remember the exact year, but I know I was not yet 12 years old. Daddy’s boss at Clarksville Base, Earl, was a college-educated engineer from somewhere in the midwest. He thought a lot of Daddy, and occassionally our family would socialize with his family. His wife was a little uptown for Mother’s tastes, but she knew better than to offend the boss’s wife. Their daughter Ruth Ann was a year younger than me. I thought she was a whiner and disliked her pretty much, but I’d been brought up to be polite, so we would play together every now and then. We all went to First Baptist Church as well.

Earl invited us to go with his family to Beech Bend Park on a Saturday. We dressed up in our best clothes that weren’t quite for church, and Daddy wore his new grey Stetson hat, sor of a pork-pie hat as I recall. The boss and family picked us up in their brand-new Cadillace, and we set off for the park.

I made it fine as long as I stuck to the carousel, the bumper cars, and the little-kiddie train which wove around a track. We ate hot dogs and cotton candy, and it was a fun day.

Then Ruth Ann cajoled me into getting into one of those spinning cup-and-saucer rides with her. I knew immediately this was a mistake. Everything whirled around, my stomach and my head went different directions, and I felt really dizzy. When the ride finally stopped I managed to walk over to my parents and try to look normal.

“Are you all right?” Daddy asked me, in Ruth Ann’s hearing. “Fine,” I said with clenched teeth over the rising nausea. I was determined to hold on.

We got into the Cadillac and set out for home. I felt worse and worse, really carsick. I was sitting in the back between Daddy and Mother. “Daddy, I’m going to be sick,” I whispered to him.

“Baby doll, you can’t be sick in this new car,” he said.

“I’m going to throw up, NOW,” I said.

“Well, get sick in this, then,” Daddy said, and handed me his new Stetson hat. I threw up in it. His boss immediately knew something was wrong–it was hard to miss. So he pulled over, and I was sick some more by the side of the road. And Daddy threw away his new hat.

Ever since then I’ve avoided amusement park rides. Disney World holds no appeal for me!

The Mystery of Owls

Growing up on a farm, I was familiar with the sound of owls calling at night. Most owls really don’t hoot, in my experience. Screech owls were the most frightening–they sounded like a woman screaming in the woods. Many a night I heard them shrieking to one another in the distance.

We had a tobacco barn that was about two stories high, at least. It was used for firing dark tobacco. There were beams running across from one side wall to the opposite wall, spaced so racks of tobacco could be hung to dry. When it had dried enough, Daddy would build a smouldering fire with sawdust and keep it going for days, firing the tobacco. Climbing up in the barn was perilous work but had to be done. Usually the younger and stronger ones did that and hung the tobacco.

In the spring and summer the tobacco barn was empty, and that’s when the barn owl came to hunt mice, and sometimes just to perch. One day Daddy called me to come with him and “see something special.” We trudged down the rocky dirt road to the tobacco barn, trailed by my dog, Dusty. I named him that because he was the exact color of that dirt road.

Daddy opened the smaller door within the big doors so we could go in, letting a little daylight in to the shady, cool interior. “Look up in that corner,” he said. There was a huge barn owl. It slowly turned its head and stared down at us with yellow eyes. Dusty was nosing around the dirt floor of the barn, and the owl watched him intently. Then it spread its wings and flew out through an open hatch on the side wall. It seemed to fly in slow motion, as if you could see every feather moving precisely.

When I saw this Audubon print it reminded me of that owl. I can see why owls were Athena’s bird and associated with wisdom. That level stare implies knowledge and intuition beyond what we know.

In My Easter Basket

When I was a child, Easter meant dressing up for church on Easter Sunday, maybe even with a hat and gloves in my youngest years. Daddy gave each of us girls a corsage to pin to our dress. In good years it was an orchid, and in bad years it was a carnation. So the celebration involved spring and going to church, as we did every Sunday, but with extra accessories.

For me the best part of Easter was the Easter basket which the Easter Bunny left for me. Mother and I would color eggs with one of those Paas kits, robin’s egg blue, bright pink, pale yellow. But these didn’t go in the basket. The basket was always a surprise, even when I got to be a teenager.

Mother loved any holiday and believed strongly in special food and decorations. One year she made an Easter cake for my nephew John B. which she had seen in Good Housekeeping or some other magazine. It was a from-scratch white cake in graduated pans like a traditional wedding cake, with coconut frosting, and little nests of coconut dyed green holding multi-colored jelly beans. It was really cute, except the cake was too “short” (i.e., full of butter or, more likely, Crisco) and the layers crumbled as she tried to frost it. John B. loved it anyway; I think he said it was an “Easter mountain.”

Mother in her guise as the Easter Bunny got the ingredients for the basket and put them together–colored fake grass, jelly beans, and a chocolate rabbit. The rabbit was always hollow and not huge, because chocolate rabbits were expensive. She never had such treats when she was a child, growing up on a farm before the Great Depression. I never questioned why the Easter Bunny used the same basket every year!

But the best treat to me was the stuffed animal. I loved stuffed animals and collected them, sleeping with my favorites. Even as I got older Mother got me one. One year she let me pick it out from the offerings at this old drug store in town. It was a rabbit, but a brown one with longer fur that looked like a real rabbit, and was soft and squishy. I loved that one dearly.

Happy Easter to everyone. Spring is here at last, after an awfully long winter.

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