Butterflies and Memories Part 1

I have decided that memories are quite a lot like butterflies. Some flit in and out again, darting between receptive brain cells but never staying long. However, others sit for a while and leave permanent impressions, light and airy as they may be.

It's amazing how many butterfly memories one can recall, given the opportunity.  Having recently undergone an extensive period of quiet, restful sitting and slumbering,  I have remembered quite a number of things that have occurred during my lifetime.  It's not that I've just remembered them, nor has my life "flashed before my eyes"; most have been floating in my brain cells for many years. However, I've been putting them in an order of sorts.

Most of these remembrances have no historical significance whatsoever, and will be boring in the extreme to most who read them, but they are occurrences that have shaped my life. Some memories are of historical happenings, and readers of similar age will have similar memories -- when I finally get to the historical stuff (H) -- but there is only one (H) in this Part 1.

My earliest memory (don't laugh or doubt) is of my first (as in one year old) birthday party, cake and all. At age 6 or 7, I began to describe it to my mother. She told me there was no way I could have remembered it, but my description of the room and the view from the window was so exact that she finally had to agree that it truly was a memory, as there were no photographs of the occasion, and our family lived in that house only a few months past that date.

I have lost any memories of things that happened from then until I was about 4, except discovering my first pet, a cat named Black Pepper, doing his "business" in a bushel of peanuts on our back porch. I must have been about 3 at that time.  

I have only  "snapshot" memories of happenings from age 4 to 6 when our family lived in El Paso, TX.   These include:

       * Mama taking me to the first movie I ever saw, starring Deanna Durbin. I still remember the melody and some of the words to a song she sang in the film.
       * seeing the lit-up 1938 community Christmas tree in downtown El Paso after we left the movie; it was a thrilling sight for a 4 year old, and seemed to reach to the vaults of the sky.
       * moving from a room in a rooming house to a big house on Hill Street, which had about 25 steps from street level to front door (I recall I fell down them several times).
        * visiting the little girl across the street even after Daddy told me not to (my little friend had German measles, and although I didn't know it at the time, Mama was pregnant with my baby sister, born 1/1/1939).
        * the spanking I got (with a razor strop) from Daddy when he found out I had played with my sick friend.
         * seeing my baby sister's bald head in bed with Mama.
         * my two year old sister putting Black Pepper in a dresser drawer, where he stayed all day. We could hear him crying, but didn't find him until bed time.
        * playing with the boy next door and getting stuck in the cactus bed between our houses.
        * losing my first tooth in a piece of apple during a supper with my parents' friends, Mr. and Mrs. Pollard.
        * Mr. Pollard teaching me to eat the skin of the potato because that's where all the vitamins are (I still do that);
       * Mrs. Pollard, "Podough," giving me the Minnie Mouse quilt blocks.
        * going to Juarez, Mexico on the bus with Mama when she went shopping for  groceries (Mama told me when I was in my 40's that Juarez was the only place she could afford to buy meat, and she didn't know if she bought beef, pork, horse, dog or cat, or something else entirely, and she didn't care - meat was meat).
      * seeing wild canaries nesting in the trellises over the patio of our home on Montana Street.
      * eating stucco sand with a spoon with my friend, Edna (is that called pica?)
      * starting kindergarten and my first school book, which was in Spanish, "Juan y Maria en Casa" (I've written about my first day in school in my diatribe against a certain brand of canned evaporated milk.)
      * a strange landlady who stood on a chair in our kitchen and stuck her finger in an open light socket -- on regular basis (I think we didn't live there very long).
       * packing up to move to Las Vegas, New Mexico, and Mama crying because she couldn't take our furniture.

I was almost six when we moved to Las Vegas. I don't remember the move at all, and I don't remember my first day at school, first grade, but I do remember:
       * my teacher, Mrs. Kole.
       * my good friend, Cherry, the only black girl in the class, perhaps in all of Las Vegas.
       * a boy named George, who called Cherry the "N" word and made her cry, and I punched him in the nose and made him cry, and bleed, and Mrs. Kole sent me home with a note.
       * Christmas of 1940 when I got a pair of roller skates and a doll with jointed legs and arms, held together inside with rubber bands. The doll was dressed in a red dotted swiss dress with a white apron, and had long black braids, tied on the ends with red ribbons. On that same day, my younger sister "wound up" her legs and arms until the rubber bands broke and the arms and legs fell off. Mama couldn't fix it. That was the last doll I ever got as a present. When I get to heaven, I want long black braids and a red dotted swiss dress with a white apron. Do you think God will let me dress that way, or will I be content with what I get?;
       * Mama accidently pushing a fine crochet hook through the palm of her hand, and having to cut off the hook end to pull it out.
       * getting a new baby brother in April, 1941.
       * having to move from our furnished apartment because the baby cried too much to suit the landlord, who lived upstairs.
       * our wonderful new landlords, Mr and Mrs. Carpenter, who loved all of us and the baby; we loved their big house, where we lived in the entire upstairs.
       * Daddy coming home from the CCC camp on a Friday night after dark and Mrs. Carpenter's Chihuahua bit him on the leg, tore his pants and drew blood.
 (H) * December 8, 1941. I sat on the stairs and listened to the radio when President Roosevelt announced that Congress had declared war on Japan.

I have posted earlier about my Daddy going to the Army sometime after Pearl Harbor. In reviewing some old documents just this past week, I discovered that he did not actually go to the Army until May, 1942.  He was sent to an Army base at Grand Junction, Colorado, to teach automotive mechanics.  Mama and the rest of us moved to Albuquerque, some 75 miles away, where Mama had obtained employment as a bookkeeper/secretary at a large electrical wholesale company, as there was no employment available in Las Vegas.  My memories of the actual move are sketchy, at best, but I remember that we "moved" on a Southwest Trailways bus, all of our household items (no furniture) in boxes in the luggage compartment. We rode together on the back seat of the bus, and my poor mother, who all her life suffered from motion sickness, had to manage 4 children age 7 and under and be sick at the same time. I cannot imagine how she did it.

End - Part 1

If you have endured this far, your reward is a photo or two of my 2010 day lilies which, for the most part, have bloomed without benefit of my hovering presence. Several varieties have already "shot their wad" and I'll have to wait until next year to enjoy watching them bloom.

       "H-14"

My Mother - Part One - Post 53

Photo - Circa 1921

Today would have been my mother’s 107th birthday. She was born on August 8, 1901, in Temple, Texas, 2nd child and first daughter of her parents. There were nine more children born into this family, but two died in childhood, one in a tragic accident -- a subject for another post, someday. The youngest, and last surviving, of my mother's siblings, my uncle Truett, died only a few months ago at the age of 85.

I don't know how old my mother was when the family moved from Temple to Victoria County, in South Texas – that’s South with a Capital S! Not the farthest south one can go in Texas, but only 20 miles or so from the Gulf of Mexico. Mama's father bought a farm in a place called Crescent Valley. There they raised cotton, chickens, and the children, six boys and five girls.

Mama graduated from high school in Victoria, a nearby town, and then attended Baylor Female College in Belton, Texas (now Mary Hardin-Baylor University) for a year. Mama always called it "Baylor-Belton." It was while she was in college that she learned to play Bridge, a card game she continued to enjoy for years. She also became 'modish' to the point that she, and most of the other young ladies, bound their breasts so as to appear flat-chested -- which was all the rage in 'flapper days.' She said it was quite painful, and absolutely forbid her younger sisters to do it. In all my memory, Mama never had a 'bosom.' Her breasts were droopy and as flat as pancakes, while her younger sisters all had nice figures.

I don't know if it was a matter of funding but, as mentioned above, Mama completed only one year at Baylor-Belton, then taught school in a small town for a term (one could do that in those days; a college degree was not required). I think she discovered that teaching was not what she wanted to do for the long term and went to work in the accounting department of the Woolworth store in San Antonio. Somewhere along the line, she had completed some secretarial courses and I remember well her trying to teach me Gregg Shorthand (I learned to write my first name, Pat, and the word "dray," not a word I ever heard used in anyone's conversation.)

Mama's father died in, I believe, 1924. Mama left San Antonio and went back home to Crescent Valley and to work in nearby Victoria. As the eldest daughter, when not at work she helped her newly-widowed mother with the younger children, and her wages also helped to support the family. The youngest child was only about 1 year old when Grandpa died, and there would have been several more young children still at home. One of Mama’s brothers, my uncle Talley, quit school when his daddy died, and became the “man of the house” -- at age 14.

Mama told me that she bought a small car (she called it a “koo-pay”) with part of her earnings, and drove over the country dirt roads into Victoria to work as a secretary/bookkeeper for the Gross-Parish Company, where she was still working when she met my father. (I wrote about that in Post 20 - My Father.)

Mama was almost 32 years old when she and Daddy married, on July 24, 1933. They moved around quite a bit to wherever employment opportunities for my father arose. The Great Depression was still in full swing, and jobs were hard to come by. I was the first-born of four children, arriving on this earth in Yorktown, Texas; my sister Meg was born in Kingsville (home of the famous and h.u.g.e. King Ranch); and the youngest daughter, my sister Carol, was born in El Paso. Mama's last child, and only son, my brother Eddie, was born in Las Vegas, NM. I wrote about the day of his birth in Post 6, April 10,1941 . Mama told me in much later years that she was horrified to learn that she was pregnant and worried a great deal about how she and Daddy were going to provide for themselves and four children.

Then -- World War II

End of Part One