The Delta’s Girl

For B

             Barbara Jane Hillis leaned forward and rested her chin on her arms. This gave her a steady view of the endless cotton fields in front of her. She stared across the rows carved into the flat land and bounced a twig held between her teeth up and down several times. Then she removed the stick and turned her head, holding her long auburn hair to one side so it didn’t cover her face. “Well,” she said. “What do you think?”

            David Kearny glanced between his legs to see if the grass was staining his trousers. “About what?” he asked.

            “The Delta. It’s great isn’t it?” She reached into a shirt pocket and produced a barrette that she opened with her teeth. She slipped it into her hair on the side facing David. This exposed her face and with it that expectant freshness he found so unnerving. An ancient cowboy hat covered the top of her head.  She locked her eyes so as to trap him into the truth.

            He shrugged. “It’s okay.”

            “Just okay?”

            “I’ve lived too long by the ocean, I suppose,” he said. “I guess I miss the smell of salt air in the morning.”

            “Makes things rust. That’s what salt air does.” Her eyes bored deeper into him. “This air makes things grow.”

            He shrugged again.

            “Look here,” she said, twirling around so she faced him on all fours. Then she pointed at the ground between his legs.

            He obeyed without thinking and looked at the patch of grass between them. He looked up at her face, lopsided now with one side of her hair nearly touching the ground while the other remained in place, held by the barrette.

            “What’s this, do you think?” she asked, spreading a group of longer blades of grass to reveal a single, frail, green–topped stalk quivering in the spring breeze.

            “I have no idea,” he said.

            “It be Lespedeza,” she said laughing. “Everybody knows that.” She let the grass cover it again. “My granddaddy always said you had to spread Lespedeza seed on the snow for it to put up right in the spring. Bet you can’t do that by the ocean.”

            She turned back to a seated position on the warm ground and looked across the new-plowed field again. He had the impression that she was finished talking for the moment.

            He studied the soft curve of her back contrasted against the long straight furrows. The silence unnerved him so he said, “It’s okay here.” She didn’t respond so he added. “I guess next to the sea, I like the mountains best.”

            She turned and looked at him the way a teacher would look at a student who had failed to solve the easiest problem of the day. “That’s just it,” she announced as if announcing the solution.

            “What’s what?” he said.

            She smiled and the smile completely unmanned him, a trick he had learned to dread.

            “You see, here you have to create your own mountains.”

            He fought for time. “Your own mountains?”

            “Yes,” she said and her eagerness and certitude kept him unbalanced. “That way, you don’t suffer constraint.”

            “Constraint?”

            “Yes, constraint. Your mountains can be as big as you want or as small. They can be covered with snow or even have a giant cherry on top like that one there.” She pointed to a thunderhead on the horizon, topped by a round black cloud that did indeed seem to radiate a red hue in the late afternoon sky.

            He laid his arms across his legs and rested his chin on them the way she had done. They both watched the fields spread out before them like charts drawn to illustrate perspective.

            “How do they plow them so straight?” he asked.

            “They have a marker on an arm of the tractor that they use to measure from the last row plowed,” she said. “Like this land itself―each generation is built upon the values of the last.” She paused and then added, “Daddy’s been doing it so long, though, he really doesn’t need a marker.”

            He looked back at the fields and he felt a breeze that swept him forward for a fraction of a second—not really long enough to register fully— and pulled him into those long rows and he saw the tedium of, year after year, coaxing life from this fecund land. Her voice jerked him back the way a young calf is jerked as he comes to the end of the roper’s lariat.

            “It would be truly sad, wouldn’t it?”

            He focused on her and processed what he thought he heard her say.

            “Sad?” he said.

            “It would be so sad to know that you had actually to be where the mountains were in order to have them. That you couldn’t just do it whenever or wherever you chose.”

            She turned away from him and became quiet again. He knew not to speak, so he stared at the falling sun on the horizon. The bright orb burned his eyes but he neither blinked nor turned away. He continued to look directly into the sun’s fire and, finally, he saw the mountains. His mountains. They soared with a comforting majesty from the delta to heights only possible in one or two spots on the planet. Snows whipped from their peaks and circled the vast jutting rocks. Their pristine beauty broke his heart but he continued to watch them.

            Confident that his mountains would endure, he looked toward the girl. The sun had blinded him, though. He only saw streaks of fire darting like hummingbirds before him.

            “I’m blind,” he said.

            Barbara turned toward him. “No, you can see now,” she said.

            Sure enough, she came into focus. The barrette had fallen from her hair and the long strands hung from both sides and framed her face the way the evening sky had framed the sun. Now her face, always tinged with the ruddiness befitting a farmer’s daughter, glowed as had the sun in the distance, almost raging in its self-assurance—at once both fearsome and motherly. He could see her clearly and also the mountains behind her and the long straight rows between them.

He sat without moving and loved her with a fierceness that mocked the power of the earth itself.

Monday Memories

How does one stay as busy as I at my age? It’s not hard. Just quit saying, “no.” Actually, I sort of like it. I pass a golf course every once in a while and ask myself, “What the hell?”

One of the things that keeps me busy is my continued relationship with Arkansas Municipal League. Not only are they fine people who do good work, but they pay me to visit some of the finest cities you can imagine. This week, they are paying me to go to north Arkansas and visit with the folks at Eureka Springs, AR. Going there, I get to pass through some towns where I’ve worked, including Harrison, Berryville, and Green Forest.

Harrison was the first vacation destination for our entire family, along with my Sainted Mother’s brother’s family. We took it when my little brother got old enough to travel, a long time ago. I can still remember, as we flatlanders hit the hills, my cousin JoAnn (Harris) Jacks singing “She’ll be comin’ round the mountain.” Good memories.

Berryville fostered a folk song based on a self-initiated travesty many years ago. Seems a prisoner in the town's old wooden jail devised an escape plan that involved setting his bunk afire without realizing that the entire local law enforcement group was off with a posse, I still remember the line from a tape I heard in college: “I’ll weep and wail, in the Berryville jail, Carroll County, Arkansas.”

But it’s Eureka Springs that can make my heart beat a little faster. That’s where my first serious girl friend was raised. Her name was Margaret (Moke) Hull. She stole my heart and I didn’t get it back until Brenda Cole sashayed by me in a parking lot in Little Rock eight years later.

In the interim, I passed Moke’s childhood home on a business trip to Eureka Springs once and saw her parents sitting in their front yard. I couldn’t help but stop and visit. They were kind enough to say that they might could have remembered me were they younger. "Mokie" achieved a PhD after she saw through me and practices somewhere in New York City. So much for common dreams. Things work out for the best. My clearest memory of Moke was of the time she and a college friend dressed in their best plaid skirts and silk blouses and performed Woody Guthrie’s “I’ve Been Doing Some Hard Traveling” at a gathering during the folk music craze of the 1960s. I don’t know why, but I still think it was kinda funny. I mean, hard traveling?” Really? Well, it was the 60s.

Anyway. I’m gonna have a fun week. Hope you do.

Ahh. Going to Eureka Springs.
Tough job, but somebody must.

Dreams

My father was colorblind, or so my Sainted Mother always said. He had another trait. He didn’t much give a rat’s ass about what other people thought of him. Oh yes, and finally, he regarded an automobile as a tool, that’s all. It was just something to get you back and forth. Like a real cowboy (not the movie ones) and his horse, a car was just a car. It wasn’t a best friend. It wasn’t a status symbol. It wasn’t something you talked to. It was useful only as long as it got you places.

Considering all the above, it didn’t come as a great surprise when he came home one day, when I was in about the 11^th grade or so, driving a purple-on-purple Pontiac sedan. He said, (no surprise) that he had gotten a “real good” deal on it.

We may have found ourselves embarrassed, but not surprised. But, there was a popular song out about that time called One Eyed One HornedFlying Purple People Eater. (Yes, children, mark the spot so you can respond the next time some old fart like me tells you that our music was better than yours.) It became quite a hit at our high school.

I don’t have to tell you what the kids named our car. At first, we were temped, Sis and I, to have someone drop us off a couple of blocks from where we were going. Then she started driving. I won’t say that she had Daddy’s same sense of indifference, but she was one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known, so she just sailed past any embarrassment. Soon, the old “Purple People Eater” sort of became a celebrity, or at least I thought so. My pals thought it was neat as long as I would take them where they wanted to go in it. I graduated more from the attendant shame that I couldn’t be a football star or play the guitar like Duane Eddy than the fact I had driven the school’s oddest car.

Daddy had it painted green and white after I left home. I think Sainted Mother made him do it. They never talked about it. As for me, I never thought about it until years later, after college, after the war, after sea duty, and after I found out that military life might have been better than business life, and before I met Brenda, a funny thing happened.

I was walking home from work one day (I’ve reported before how my colleagues at the office couldn’t imagine someone walking to and from work) and met a girl I had adored from afar in high school and had thought of many times during lonely military watches. She was as beautiful as ever. I stopped her and reminded her who I was. After a long stare, it finally registered. She smiled, and my hopes soared like an eagle topping a snowy peak.

“Oh yes,” she said. “The thing I remember about you was that you drove a purple car.”

Such are the ways by which ephemeral thoughts crash headlong from mighty heights.

Gratitude

I had this red bicycle once, and I hated it. Yeah, it’s hard to believe I know.

It happened this way.

I was maybe six or seven, and Christmas was due in a few months. I desperately wanted a bike, come that wonderful day. My dad was a poor grocer. Well, he wasn’t exactly poor, like the families of my friends were poor, but he wasn’t wealthy, like the families of my classmates were wealthy. Besides, he had two other kids, and spending all his Christmas money on one of them didn’t seem fair. Besides, I was far from the favorite child.

In a quandary I suppose, he and my Sainted Mother came up with an idea. I guess it was mutual. I wasn’t in on the conversation.

But here was the deal. There was a cotton gin over near Grider Field, our local airport in Pine Bluff. I guess my dad knew the owner since he and SM had sharecropped a spot a few miles from the airport before they walked into an opportunity to buy the store.

Anyway, Daddy worked out a deal with the owner of the gin. I think maybe his name, the owner, was Chambliss. Maybe not. It was cotton-picking time, so the gin was operating full time. Daddy would leave the store after the last truckload of pickers had passed, then go to the gin. He’d put in a few hours and come home for a little sleep before the trucks hauling the pickers to the field came by early in the morning.

That’s how he made enough money to buy me that little red bicycle.

Can you imagine, Dear Reader, the joy with which I met that objet de désir on Christmas morning? It sparkled and cried, “Ride me. Ride me.” I just looked on it and wept.

Of course, I had no idea how to ride it. Daddy fixed that later in the day by holding me until I started and fell maybe 30 times before I decided that riding beat falling and sped out of sight. It was a love affair of cosmic proportions.

Then it all went to hell.

I guess the reader knows by now that my father was a good, good man, one of the best I ever knew. History never quite canonized him like it did Sainted Mother, but he was a fine American, an honest man, and a good provider.

He had this annoying habit, though, one he picked up from a stern old German, who picked it up from a stern old German, who picked it up from … you get the picture.

In the South we call it “throwing it up to you.” I don’t remember when I first heard it. I imagine I was with the Hester twins, Robert and Bobby Joe, and I must have laid the little red bicycle too irreverently against the porch of the store. That’s the first time I heard it.

“Be careful with that damned bicycle. I worked nights at the cotton gin to buy that for you.”

The luster wore off our love affair more each time I heard reference to working at the cotton gin nights to buy me the bicycle. At first, I just hated the cotton gin. Then the hate began to spread like a covering fog over the little red bicycle. I’m afraid that it eventually spread to bicycles in general. I still don’t care for them.

The sad thing was that Sainted Mother even, once or twice, threw it up for transgressions unrelated to the bicycle. “Now think about how hard your daddy worked at night over to the cotton gin to buy you a nice Christmas present.” It didn’t cost her Sainthood, but it did place a couple of notations on her heavenly “Hard Card.”

I tried to learn, but things learned from a stern old German prove hard to overcome. Still, I do cringe whenever I hear myself say something so odious as, “Think about all the nights I’ve come home off the road near midnight from being out making us a living?”

Fortunately, the object of my “stern old Germanisms” pays no more attention to what I say than a cat being scolded for resting on a kitchen table.

If you'll tell me what he said,
 I'll try to remember how I reacted.
It's doubtful, though.

Choices ....

A long time ago in San Francisco, I worked with a man who was born in Indonesia and went to sea at an early age. He worked his way up from able bodied seaman to the next higher position and then the next. Finally, through hard work, education and eons sailing into the kind of ports Joseph Conrad wrote about, he reached a point where his next berth would have been ship’s master, or captain.

At that point, he met a woman ashore, fell in love, and married. Not long thereafter, his sweetheart informed him that he could have her or the sea, but not both. He chose, and when I knew him, he worked as a draftsman in a building in the Mission District of “The City.” I occupied the desk next to his.

When a ship would sound its mournful horn as it steamed through the bay toward the Golden Gate, he would stop his work and stare out the window toward the sound. Then we would all, for the briefest second, smell the salt air, feel the sting of spray against our faces, and feel the deck roll under our feet, sensing in our beings the chance of a sudden squall, rogue wave, or some other vagary of the vast ocean. Sometimes, on a morning like this, I still do.

A last goodbye ...

Not much this morning. Going to the service for my niece, Candy Morgan Jones. Lord, you should have seen the folks who showed up for her visitation time yesterday. A solid line filed by for two hours straight, a fitting testimony.

I've said about all I can think to say about this lady. We'll let her rest in peace. She deserves it. Cancer sucks., but she is beyond it now.

Don't know why, but as I saw the crowd file by yesterday, I kept thinking of one story. Candy had started grade school and would stay with my folks after school let out. The female portion of the country was going through a "Granny Dress" phase, and of course she wanted one. She kept badgering my mother, her grandmother, to sew her one. Grandmother protested. She didn't even know how long to make it.

No problem, according to Candy. "You just start sewing on it and I'll let you know when it gets long enough." She found life simple. You just start doing right and things would work out okay.

Maybe that would be her last message to us. Just do right. Let us love one another as the Galilean would have us do. When we've done it enough, she'll let us know.

Did I ever tell you
she was beautiful, too?

A sadder world ...

They say that men don’t cry in public. Anyone who says that never met a man who knew Candy Morgan Jones as a friend, a colleague, and a beloved uncle. She left us on Thursday, May 2, 2019 and our world will never be quite the same again.

I knew her longer that about anyone still living except her mother, my sister. My first meeting with her was through a glass panel covering a metal container where they laid newborn babies out to be ogled by happy family and friends. For her, one had to ease in through a crowd. People who had come to see other babies drifted over to see this one who displayed that something that just drew attention.

She was always something special. First grandchildren often are.

Two nephews and two nieces have blessed my life and they were all wonderful. Candy and I formed a special bond, though, since I grew from part-time babysitter to employer in the course of some 20 short years. I was managing a branch office of an engineering, architecture, and planning firm in the mid-1980s when Candy was pursuing a degree at our local university. She’d been working part-time at an ice cream parlor and sought something more preparatory for a professional life. I offered her work as an after-school helper.

In those days in particular, firms depended upon grants to create the projects requiring the services we offered. The grant application process was demanding and the grant administration process both exhausting and intricate. We had five people involved in this segment of our work. The part timer in this group was Candy. One day, I did some analysis and discovered that something like 80 percent of the output from the group was coming from 20 percent of the input.

That 20 percent was Candy, just finishing her degree.

Being only a bit slow on the uptake, I fired four of the five and brought Candy on full time as the sole producer. Output increased, and the quality of the output improved.

She never looked back. She did that form of work as a professional for more than 30 years, as an employee of a consulting firm, as owner of her own firm, and as a public employee. At the end of her career, she was, without argument, the best at her work in the state of Arkansas. Then fate fell upon her. None of life’s adversities had ever slowed her, but cancer did.

She left us. As I sit alone and think of this remarkable life, I can’t help wondering how many nights she spent in a lonely church building in the Arkansas Delta, the only white face in the crowd, holding a public hearing to listen to the needs of those the Galilean loved as much as she did.

I can’t help wondering how tired she must have been returning on those nights with a film of bugs on her windshield while we sat in comfortable rooms with full stomachs.

I can’t help wondering how many mornings she arose before all of us and put those needs in a form so that someone, maybe someone, would offer solace to those whom fortune passes by in its race to reward the greedy and selfish.

I can’t help wondering how many families in our state tonight have safe drinking water, or indoor plumbing facilities for their children because of the time she spent away from her family.

We saw one another, she and I, at both family and professional gatherings. The smile was always the same. She bragged on my being her uncle. I bragged on her being my niece. She led a blameless life. I was, well, just me. At any rate, folks claimed to see a family resemblance, and that made me feel awfully proud. As close as we were, I never knew, or asked, about her politics or religion. She didn’t have to ask about mine. I’ve always worn them on my sleeve. I could have learned more from her.

And yes, dealing with old-time male politicians in a southern state, she encountered her share of improper overtures. It wasn’t her style to brood for years over them and then get even one day by ruining a person’s life. She handled such things on the spot with a “Now you just cut that out right now. If you do, (or say) that again, I’ll tell Miss [wife’s first name] and she’ll know how to handle you.” I never knew her to dwell upon such things or have extended problems.

She was one of a kind, my niece, friend, and colleague. If one believes in a Heaven after this life, it is a livelier place today. The world, not so, but richer still for having once held her in its arms.

I miss her and always will.

Practicing her "Now cut
that out," look.

Seeing true ...

It's Fiction Friday. Here is a short piece I did some time ago. The reader may judge personally as to the degree autobiography might be involved.

The Delta’s Girl

By Jimmie von Tungeln

For B

            The girl leaned forward from her seated position and rested her chin on her arms. This gave her a steady view of the endless cotton fields in front of her. She stared across the rows carved into the flat land and bounced a twig held between her teeth up and down several times. Then she removed the stick and turned her head, holding her long auburn hair to one side so it didn’t cover her face. “Well,” she said. “What do you think?”

            The young man glanced between his legs to see if the grass was staining his trousers. “About what?” he asked.

            “The delta,” she said giving him a look that a grownup might give a non-attentive child. “It’s great isn’t it?” She reached into a shirt pocket and fished out a barrette that she then opened with her teeth. She slipped it into her hair on the side facing David. This exposed her face and with it that expectant freshness he found so unnerving. She locked her eyes so as to trap him into the truth.

            He dodged her eyes and shrugged. “It’s okay.”

            “Just okay?”

            “I’ve lived too long by the ocean, I suppose,” he said. “I guess I miss the smell of salt air in the morning.”

            “Makes things rust. That’s what salt air does.” Her eyes bored deeper into him. “This air makes things grow. Besides, it was Uncle Sam made you live by the Ocean.”

            He shrugged again.

            “Look here,” she said, twirling around so she faced him on all fours. Then she pointed at the ground between his legs.

            He obeyed without thinking and looked at the patch of grass between them. He looked up at her face, lopsided now with one side of her hair nearly touching the ground while the other remained in place, held by the barrette.

            “What’s this, do you think?” she asked, spreading a group of longer blades of grass to reveal a single, frail, green–topped stalk quivering in the spring breeze.

            “I have no idea,” he said.

            “It be Lespedeza,” she said laughing. “Everybody knows that.” Then she ordered him “Feel.”

He reached and cupped a hand around the slender plant. He could sense the early struggling of life and had the rather sudden sense of a stirring within himself, weak but insistent like a thought bringing someone from a heavy sleep. He jerked his hand away.

She let the grass cover it again. “My granddaddy always said you had to spread Lespedeza seed on the snow for it to put up right in the spring. Bet you can’t do that by the ocean.”

            She turned back to a seated position on the warm ground and looked across the new-plowed field again. He had the impression that she was finished talking for the moment.

            He studied the soft curve of her back contrasted against the long straight furrows. The silence unnerved him so he said, “It’s okay here.” She didn’t respond so he added. “I guess next to the sea, I like the mountains best.”

            She turned so suddenly that he thought she might be angry. “That’s just it,” she said, as if announcing the solution.

            “What’s what?” he said.

            She smiled and the smile completely unmanned him, a trick he had learned to dread.

            “You see, here you have to create your own mountains.”

            He fought for time. There was a trap opening. He could feel it but, being on unfamiliar ground, he hadn’t a clue as to its form or origin. “Your own mountains?”

            “Yes,” she said and her eagerness and certitude kept him unbalanced. “That way, you don’t suffer constraint.”

            “Constraint?”

            “Yes, constraint. Your mountains can be as big as you want or as small. They can be covered with snow or even have a giant cherry on top like that one there.” She pointed to a thunderhead on the horizon, topped by a round black cloud that did indeed seem to radiate a red hue in the late afternoon sky.

            He laid his arms across his legs and rested his chin on them the way she had done. They both watched the fields spread out before them like charts drawn to illustrate perspective.

            “How do they plow them so straight?” he asked.

            “They have a marker on an arm of the tractor that they use as a guide from the last row plowed,” she said. “Like this land itself―each generation is built upon the values of the last.” She paused and then added, “Daddy’s been doing it so long, though, he really doesn’t need a marker.”

            He looked back at the fields and he felt a breeze that swept him forward for a fraction of a second—not really long enough to register fully— and pulled him into those long rows and he saw the tedium of, year after year, coaxing life from this fecund land. Her voice jerked him back the way a young calf is jerked as he comes to the end of the roper’s lariat.

            “It would be truly sad, wouldn’t it?”

            He focused on her and processed what he thought he heard her say.

            “Sad?” he said.

            “It would be so sad to know that you had actually to be where the mountains were in order to have them. That you couldn’t just have them whenever or wherever you chose.”

            She turned away from him and became quiet again. He knew not to speak, so he stared at the falling sun on the horizon. The bright orb burned his eyes but he neither blinked nor turned away. He continued to look directly into the sun’s fire and then he saw the mountains. His mountains. They soared with a comforting majesty from the delta to heights only possible in one or two spots on the planet. Snows whipped from their peaks and circled the vast jutting rocks. Their pristine beauty broke his heart but he continued to watch them.

            Confident that his mountains would endure, he looked toward the girl. The sun had blinded him, though. He only saw streaks of fire darting like hummingbirds before him.

            “I’m blind,” he said.

            Barbara turned toward him. “No, you can see now,” she said.

            Sure enough, she came into focus. The barrette had fallen from her hair and the long strands hung from both sides and framed her face the way the evening sky had framed the sun. Now her face, always tinged with the ruddiness befitting a farmer’s daughter, glowed as had the sun in the distance, almost raging in its self-assurance—at once both fearsome and motherly. He could see her clearly and also the mountains behind her and the long straight rows between them. He saw the rows and felt their precision, even smelled the soft rotten smell of the fresh earth. Then he smelled her—the smell of the earth and shampoo and soap and innocence and something else he couldn’t define, maybe strength. He reached and drew a bunch of her hair through his fingers. It was silky and pliant and offered no resistance, feeling cool to the touch. He watched the released ends bounce against her arm and felt the stronger growth of something within him. He drew his arm away and looked back at his mountains.

            She smiled at him and said in a low voice, the sound drifting by his ears like a spring breeze, “You’ll do. You know that don’t you?

He sat still in the silent expanse of his delta—the fresh earth staining his clothes—loving her with a simple fierceness that mocked the power of the earth itself.

Wakeup calls ...

Early in the morning, my Sainted Mother, particularly on a Monday School Day, would sneak into my bedroom, yank off the covers, and yell, “Wake up Jacob. Day’s a’breaking.”

Those times tested my undying love for dear Mother more than any I remember.

Over the years, I tried several of what I believe to be more gentle ways of waking someone up who has slept past my appointed schedule. To wit:

“Wake up and see the wonderful day given us.”

“All the other pretty little girls are up already.”

“Wanna take part in a wonderful day?”

“You said wake you up at Seven. It’s Eight.”

“I think Matthew McConaughey has taken up religion. He’s at the front door asking for you.”

“Candygram.”

“The fish are biting.”

“Momma always said that only bad girls sleep this late.”

“I think the house is on fire.”

“Your face is going to freeze like that.”

They always end the same way, though.

“Is that a baseball bat in your hand?”

Plenty of sleep is the secret to
a long life, and marriage.

For 90 days or so, I had religiously attended a daily routine of exercise at the Downtown YMCA in Little Rock. It was 1975 and the first time I had followed a healthy pattern of living since Navy Boot Camp. A wonderful fitness expert and trainer named Ersel Tillery was guiding me and I was making progress. You betcha.

At my 90-day checkup, Ersel and I were thrilled. My readings were fast approaching those of a 50-year old man, down from the early 70s when I had started. I had lost fifteen pounds or so, and you could see the vestiges of my chin again. Along the way, I had noticed my pants getting loose around the waist. I had even bought a pair a size smaller.

I was walk/jogging around the little 30-lap track for nearly a half-mile a day now. I was “born-again.” I had started projects around our old Victorian Home. I was on my way.

Then, I hit a bump on the highway to perfect health.

Getting ready for work one day, I chose an old pair of pants, the loose ones. I liked to wear them to work because I sensed that it made the other guys jealous.

Guess what? The pants weren’t loose at all. In fact, they were snug as could be. What happened? I re-traced my steps. I hadn’t been on a wild spree. I hadn’t missed a day exercising. I had even started walking on Sundays. There was no reason for bloating. Jeeez!

After donning some warmups, I trudged into the kitchen where my Trophy Wife (yeah, it’s easier just to marry one right off) was enjoying a bowl of cereal. I made me one and sat. I didn’t feel like talking.

“How are your pants fitting?” She smiled and spooned some cereal.

What the …? Now here was a nice philosophical problem. A Kantian Moral Imperative would demand that I tell the truth. A sense of “Pascal's Wager” would suggest that I take the route offering the least chance of future disaster. I discarded both and used my old standby that I call “The Lie of French Impressionism.” That is to tell two truths and let the listener mix them as the listener wishes. If the result is misleading, the fault lies with the listener.

“I’ll try them on in a bit,” I said. “You can’t expect overnight results.” I squirmed.

She nodded in that quixotic way she has of proclaiming a non-verbal “Bullshit.”

“I just wondered,” she said, “since I took them up two inches.”

Have I ever mentioned that she is a first-class seamstress? She smiled in that quixotic way she has of proclaiming, “Ha. Gotcha, you old fool.”

Would you like to hear about how I practically skipped into work that morning? At the noon exercise class, Ersel even found the episode funny. Brenda? After all these years, she still delights in telling the story. Did I ever mentioned that she has a bit of mean streak about her at times? I love her anyway.

Did I ever tell you how much
I like to mess with his mind?

I ponder care for others ...

My Little Buddy left on a jet plane yesterday for a much-deserved weekend of fun and relaxation in Houston with her cousin Phyllis Cole. Little Pal has been through a lot in the last few years, including the sale and subsequent demolition of her family home, built by her father’s hands on nights and weekends, after long days in cotton fields, when she was still just a twinkle in his eye. No two people ever doted on a child as Julius and Hazel Cole doted on their daughter. And she returned it stroke by stroke.

Then, a few days ago, she watched her last parent leave this life.

Regret? I suppose she’s had a few, but if there ever was a child who watched over and cared for her parents more loyally or faithfully, I’d like to know about it. It prompts me, this morning, to offer a few thoughts on final care. It is a particularly exhausting and trying experience to dedicate one’s life to a caring experience that offers no chance for cure.

To borrow a thought from Thomas Gray, the paths of final care “lead but to the grave.”

We never thought we would be placing the dear person I called “The Lady Hazel” in a nursing home. After all, her daughter was, by education and training, a Registered Nurse Practitioner. A person in her keep would have to be awfully sick before nursing home care would be required, wouldn’t they?

We underestimated things, including the process of caring for one who, because of the ravages of advanced dementia, had lost both the will and ability to move. Try assisting someone, who may appear frail, in meeting all the essential functions of life on a daily basis. After seven years, we made the painful decision to seek professional help. We opted for nursing home care.

Allow me to say a few words about it.

We had experience with two facilities in Central Arkansas. In both cases, we found the highest level of attention and concern. We found no fault with either. Perhaps we appreciated it all the more because we knew, first-hand, the trials of caring for, what the Galilean might have included as “the least of those among us.” Perhaps those who seek every opportunity to find fault with, and sue over, the slightest perceived neglect, have never experienced the necessity of removing a comatose patient from a bed for daily care.

Many of Hazel’s nursing home companions required such intimate care. Some didn’t. Some appeared to have been able to live at home with family if the family had been willing. One can only guess as to whether the unwilling were among the first to find fault with the care received. Me? I hypothesize a correlation.

It reminds me somehow of an experience I had as a young planner. For a project we had, the firm sent me to interview a young doctor of theology who was serving his ministry by managing an assisted care facility owned by his church. The talk turned to the topic of family visitation.

“Would you like to know?” he said, “who are the most pleased with, and who are the most heartbroken over visits from their family?”

I assumed it had to do with frequency of visits.

“No,” he said. “If a child says he or she can only come, say every two weeks, but makes that visit on schedule without fail, a parent is satisfied. But some promise weekly visits and miss half the appointed times. I’ve seen an elderly person sit with a packed suitcase waiting in the lobby for a weekend visit home, only to be forgotten.” That’s what brings heartaches, including to those who have to watch it.”

We’ll never know if Hazel even knew when her daughter visited. If she did, she knew one thing. She could count on it.

The Galilean knows that I am a “cultural Christian” and not a literal one. But I do believe in saints who walk this earth.

I’m married to one.

Yeah. I've been lucky.

My Redacted Life: Pets of all sorts

We had been married maybe six months and were enjoying the home we purchased on the GI Bill. My beautiful, long-haired redhead—no longer long-haired and no longer a redhead, but still breathtakingly beautiful—decided we needed a dog. Six months of marriage had been enough to teach me that total and complete acquiescence greatly trumped any attempt at Pauline male dominance.

So she found a dog, and thus began a, so-far, 46 year-old family protocol. Feeling Biblical that day, we named him Jeremiah. He was a mutt, black with orange circles above his eyes, perhaps evolutionarily designed to convince predators that he was awake, when actually he was sleeping, which was most of the time.

Having grown to adulthood, he discovered the joy of eating, or attempting to eat, anything left within reach. He particularly enjoyed my treasured edition of Victorian poetry, but he shunned no potential meals. This brought him into contact with Marcel the Mystery Plant.

Marcel was a gift from a neo-hippy friend named Wes. With a gnome-like appearance and a taste for all things from the 1960s, he was a favorite with young kids who hung out at the Art Center. Thus, we understood it when he brought us a small container of soil and a mystery seed, explaining that some of the kids who gathered at his place were untrustworthy, whatever that meant.

We planted the seed and cared for the resulting plant. Of course, being good Methodists, we had no idea what kind of plant it was, but we nourished the slender young thing, awaiting our friend’s return for it. Going through a Gaulian phase, we named it Marcel.

It had grown to approximately a foot in height, with nice, long, serrated leaves when Jeremiah noticed it. It sat in a quiet corner of the kitchen where watering was simple and, since we feared there was something vaguely sinister about it, out of sight from most visitors.

Well anyway, Jeremiah quietly watched Marcel grow, giving us no indication of impending “planticide.”

Then one Sabbath morning, Marcel was gone, nipped down to soil level. Jeremiah lay beside it with the spots over his eyes doing a sort of “ping-pong” dance over the most innocent-looking canine face one could imagine. Every once in awhile, he would make this dog-moan, like Lassie had just walked by wearing a bikini.

It got worse. Brenda was cooking breakfast when her mother called to inquire about any intentions we had of attending church services that day. It took some time for her to employ her best prevarication skills and get us excused. When she returned to the kitchen, the remnants of an entire package of raw bacon lay scattered about the kitchen floor.

An emergency?

She thought so, and demanded that I find a vet who answered calls on Sunday. For once in our marriage, I refused a direct order, saying, “You call one and explain what just happened."

We compromised. I sat in a chair and watched Jeremiah for any sign of seizures or fits. He had none. Rather, he just belched bacon grease for several hours, hummed tunes like “Come on Over to the Other Side,” and from time to time looked up at me and said, “Far out man.” His eye spots danced in rhythm with the music and he would shake his head from side to side, especially when he did, “Don’t Bogart That Joint, My Friend.”

We lost a pound of bacon that day. Jeremiah lost his innocence. Marcel lost his life. Our friend Wes lost his safe house, and the 1960s lost some of the allure that had drifted with us along a smoke-filled path through time.

Jeremiah stayed with us, apparently un-phased by the experience, for 16 years. I don’t like to talk about the day he passed over the Rainbow Bridge, so we’ll leave him with the memory of moaning, “My Sweet Lady Jane.”

Yeah, I know. She's never
held me like that.

My Redacted Life

We had been married about six months or so, my redhead and I. Did I ever mention that she had fulfilled the major dreams of my life? That is to say a knockout girl with long hair, a sports car, a good job, and the opportunities abounding in civilian life. I was set.

Well, almost. As the ink had begun to dry on our marriage certificate, she, this knockout redhead, informed me of the immediate cessation of driving around with “the top down.” Seems that it caused tangles in her long hair. No problem. I immediately surrendered that small aspect of my dream-structure. I suppose I was, early on, developing an understanding of the requirements for a long marriage.

It did come as a surprise, however, when I received a call one day at work. “You should see,” a lovely feminine voice said, “my new haircut.”

“A trim?”

“A little more. You’ll like it.”

The afternoon proved as agonizing as the wait for a jury verdict. Later, I drove my Green Angel, with the top down of course, to the home we had recently purchase. Visions swam unimpeded through my head of “beehive hairdos” so popular in my formative years. My heart beat a slow tempo of anticipation guided by fear.

She wasn’t there when I arrived home. There was only one way to prepare for the tragic unveiling. I popped the top on a beer and put on an Otis Redding album. I waited. Maybe the scriptures would help. The only one I knew by heart was John 11:35.

“Jesus wept.”

A car pulled up. I finished the beer and waited.

What do you know? The most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life walked through the door. Of course I had figured by now that my new wife wasn’t a true redhead, but I was totally unprepared for what I saw. Outside the birds began to sing. My heart raced and my mouth went dry. I guess that throughout a long marriage, a person will fall in love numerous times. It’s best if is the same person. Worked for me as one might expect.

Decide for yourself.

We don't need no
stinkin' long red hair.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 39 (Cont._2)

We engaged a real estate professional to help find a house. He insisted on our spending more. We insisted on buying what we could afford. Knowing little about the market in Little Rock, we passed up a couple of deals that would have been quite lucrative as time passed. The fact of buying on the GI Bill limited our choices to a small degree. Some sellers opted not to face the additional paperwork. We held hands and observed in awe like a couple of kids in a candy store. The agent fed our excitement.

We settled for a housee in what might now be called “mid-town.” It was one of those “spaghetti subdivisions” with lots of crooked streets and dead ends. Ours fronted on a collector street, though, and provided a more or less clear shot through town, albeit much too far to walk to work. The street was called “Evergreen” and it was a primary artery in a subdivision known as “Leawood,” or “Leawood Heights.”

Churches sat to the immediate East, and diagonally across the street, so we felt secure from unforeseen developments. Or so we thought. Stay tuned.

We began the paperwork and immediately encountered a loan officer that had a bur in his saddle about veterans. That wasn’t unusual in those days. He seemed to resent the fact that we could purchase a nice home without amassing a large down payment like respectable couples. We ignored him. He threw a few stumbling blocks our way, but I had expert advice from those in the office who had been through a home purchase. We swept him out of the way without bother.

The folks at work, by the way, seemed happy for us. We were settling in to become settled members of the community. The house seemed large to us, although by later standards it would be termed tiny. We had no neighbors directly across the street. We met the two ladies who lived next door, along with a large Doberman named “Man.” We discovered later that the name implied that it was the only one, man that is, that they needed. They treated us graciously and life verged on the sublime.

Now, if we only had furniture to fill an eleven-hundred square foot home. We also needed to calm my father, who thought it highly ostentatious to purchase such a mansion. Only millionaires and other deadbeats, he assured me, would live in a home costing $20,000. Were we crazy?

Yeah, at that time pretty much crazy, but just purely wonderful.

That's what I thought anyway.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 38 (Cont._4)

Here is what happened with regard to our company’s first development project, a charming subdivision in a thriving community. It started out well, four lots pre-claimed. We couldn’t sell lots until the Final Plat gained approval, signifying that we had completed all improvements. Ron McConnel and I went down of a Saturday morning and secured a sign to a timber wall at the entrance, announcing Wellington Heights. All appeared ready.

The city planning commission approved the plats and final closings took place on four lots, only 40 more or so to go and we would be in the pink. Interest was high. Building materials appeared on two of the lots. This would be the finest small subdivision in south Arkansas.

Then in happened. An African-American family purchased the fifth lot. The man worked for the local railroad line, a good job that assured his ability to pay for the lot and finance a nice home. Somehow word of the purchase got out, no doubt passed around by a local competitor.

Next day, four “For Sale” signs went up. Did I mention that this was south Arkansas? Everything stopped. Realtors in the area quit accepting phone calls or answering messages. The subdivision sat as deserted as a Jewish cemetery in Nazi Germany. We sat as dumbstruck as a deserted lover. What happened?

We didn’t know. There was some talk of sabotage by local developers. There were some snickers from those who knew secrets of land development of which we were unaware. Some hinted at a plot by a local advocacy group seeking to “universalize” human rights. What cheek.

The truth? I’ve always believed that it was an honest effort by an honest man to provide a decent home in a decent location for his family in a land, and at a time, that we didn’t tolerate such presumption.

Perhaps the man had survived the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, and felt that entitled him to respect.

Perhaps he had led an honest and productive life and felt that earned him a place in society.

Perhaps he just felt that his god blessed all people equally.

I never knew. The entire operation went into “top-secret mode” at that point and little news filtered down. What I did know was that no further action occurred in the subdivision until much later when the development was sold to a group of local African-American business men for pennies on the dollar. The financiers of the development absorbed the loss, and life moved on.

At home, I contended with my own struggles, albeit small ones. I was learning. One thing was that heaven help the man who woke my young “trophy-wife” up of a Saturday morning while she was enjoying her day off by sleeping late. Brenda looked like the very picture of a modern precious angel as she enjoyed her leisure moments. I knew though, from my brief experience, that her fractious sister Brendhilda lurked ever so slightly beneath that angelic face. She was, no doubt, ready to pounce upon the perpetrator of the slightest transgression.

One can imagine, therefore, my consternation when I slipped out of bed one Saturday morning to go into work to address a deadline that beckoned like a child needing a visit to the toilet. With a change of clothes in hand, I quietly entered the small bathroom in our apartment to witness a sight I had never, even the darkest days of my military service, encountered. There, hanging across the shower rod was a still damp pair of pantyhose.

What was a man to do? I chose circumspection and prudence. I needed to prepare for work, but feared unauthorized tampering. Seeking guidance was out of the question. Following a Methodist rather than Baptist approach, I chose sprinkling over full immersion and left the dangling garment in place to be attended later by the adult of the family.

After leaving a note, off to work I went, as refreshed as common sense allowed. On the way, I told myself that I was learning a lot about the world that might come in handy in the future.

And it did.

"Lord help the mister,
Who comes between me
And my sister." - Irving Berlin

My Redacted Life: Chapter 37 (Cont._4)

Not much out of the ordinary occurred during our first month of marriage, except the near annihilation of a Sears salesman. It’s true.

It happened this way.

I only had an ancient TV set my sister had lent me. It worked sometimes, in some manner, but we decided that a young couple, both professionals, needed a modern, working television that befit our new place in society. There were only three commercial stations and PBS available, so installation would be simple. We could retire the heavy metal thing that had served me, when it chose to, until that point.

So off to Sears we went. Why Sears? It was the “in” place to shop back then, It carried everything. Besides, Brenda, during her first year of teaching, had acquired a Sears credit card. We were saving all our spare cash for the purchase of a home, so paying a TV off over a few months didn’t seem like a bad idea. Despite our good intentions, though, the plan almost went to hell.

A middle-aged salesperson showed us the choices, beginning with the most expensive, of course. As he babbled, I foresaw storm clouds gathering on the distant horizon. As far as the salesman was concerned, Brenda was invisible. This was a transaction between two men. This particular set would be great for watching those Razorback games or the popular local fishing show hosted by Jerry McKinnis. Just look at those colors. “Sir, you can’t go wrong with this one.” I heard the unmistakable sound of steam beginning to rise. The man just kept talking, his face only a few inches from mine.

Just for the pure fun of it, I suggested that he might ask her what she thought since she was the one paying for it.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “I thought you were married.”

“Oh, we are,” I said. “But it’s her credit card.”

A curtain of clouds spread over the salesman’s eyes. I might as well have told him that we were arranging a loan from a far-away planet in a distant galaxy. “You mean,” he said, “that she has her own credit card? And you want to buy a television set for the both of you with it? With her credit card? She really has one? I’ll have to check about that.”

Brenda began to move toward him. A voice from behind us saved his life. “That’s Mr. and Mrs. Jim von Tungeln,” it said. “Whatever they want, let them have it.”

I turned to see a face I hadn’t seen in years. It was young Woody Bohannon, son of the elder Woodrow Bohannon, one of the true eccentric southern characters produced in such abundance by our state. I hadn’t seen young Woody since my high-school graduation. He was a couple of years behind me and had always struck me as one of the nicest young men on the planet. I would learn that he had attended college, graduated, and gone to work for the retailing giant, already reaching the role of senior manager.

We had a nice visit. The salesman sold Brenda a television set, thus assuring his continued life in the corporate world. Brenda maintained equilibrium, but it took a while for the steam to dissipate. Everyone finished the evening happy.

That Saturday night, we watched a show that had started airing the year before, one called All in the Family. It was about, as we saw it, a bigot forced to live in an increasingly diverse and tolerant world. We thought it pretty funny at the time.

Do me a favor and don't
talk to me for a while. Okay?

My Redacted Life: Chapter 37: (Cont._3)

It all ended soon, the wedding that is. We enjoyed a nice reception and met most of the folks in Lonoke County who knew my new bride. That was nearly all of them, as Hazel had worked in the local doctor’s office for years. Also, the two families had been around for a spell, well-known if not infamous. Most inquired as to what I did for a living or what church I attended. A few wanted to know, indirectly, if I had completed high school or college. I could tell I had landed amongst people who liked to stay informed.

Uncle Roy took pictures. Vernell and her sister looked gorgeous in the gowns Brenda had sewed for them. The parents got to know one another, and I had a chance to visit Leland Bassett, down from Fayetteville. A lady who worked with Hazel had made a splendid wedding cake. We cut it and did the full routine. I do believe I behaved satisfactorily. At least I never received censure from the three harpies who had been retained to supervise my pre-wedding training.

It was a good sendoff. We flew to Denver the next day, then to Aspen, where I fulfilled my brief assignment. We rented a car and drove farther into the mountains. We shopped and ate well. So far this marriage thing was going well. Before we knew it, we were on the last leg of the flight to Little Rock, ready to face the reality of life as a married couple.

I soon discovered that she didn’t roll a tube of toothpaste correctly: from the bottom up, choosing, simply to squeeze arbitrarily.

She discovered that I didn’t always pick discarded clothes from the floor immediately upon dressing.

I discovered we didn’t have enough vertical storage area for all her makeup.

She discovered that I snored.

And so on. Maybe marriage wasn’t as simple as some imagined. Maybe one only masters its intricacies in a bleak classroom labeled “experience.” Unlike some other of life’s trials that must be overcome, though, it was a hell of a lot of fun trying.

I went back to work the next week and discovered that the company’s subdivision was progressing. We weren’t allowed to sell lots until the improvements were completed, or some sort of payment assured for their completion. Despite this, early interest bloomed and there were already “dibs” on some of the lots. We talked enthusiastically of selling the thing, enjoying the profit, and beginning another. What could possibly to wrong?

Have you ever gone to a skating rink and watched the tall, thin fellow with oily black hair, sideburns, form-fitting jeans, and a tight black tee-shirt with a pack of Lucky Strikes folded into one sleeve? Yeah, the one who glides around the floor with unbelievable ease and grace, making turns and moves so breathtaking that the girls gasp. Recall how easy he made it look? Anybody could do it.

That’s the way we felt about land development.

As I was trained to do.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 37: (Cont._2)

Robert Julius Cole, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge and the invasion of Germany, walked his only child to the alter for marriage. The look on his face suggested that surviving an artillery barrage may have been easier. But, he left her with me, and the preacher took over. Julius joined Hazel in the audience. Vernell was standing to our side and, I’m sure, took a deep breath and held it. My brother, on the other side, probably looked as if he might faint any second. I prepared to follow instructions. Brenda smiled. She was the only one who looked happy. Everyone else waited. For me, there was no turning back. The die was cast.

I had spent a year and a half of my new civilian life studying urban planning and, after I started earning a bit of money, seeking the ladies, all sorts of them. I had felt as thought a bright new world had opened for me and I was ready for a life of working, gaining respect, and chasing women. But, the latter was over now, no more looking for women.

I had found me one.

We went through the words flawlessly, I placed the ring on her finger and the preacher announced us “man and wife.” Whew. Time to flee the scene. Then Brenda reached up and kissed me full in the mouth, in front of that whole church full of people. I declare.

Have I mentioned that I had never been to a church wedding before? The Navy certainly never taught you about them. The service was your beloved spouse. Anyway, we kissed and it was over.

Then Brenda folded her wings, took my arm, and walked me down the aisle and out of the church. I think maybe the congregation applauded. I’m not sure. Maybe they were just laughing at my shoes. I didn’t care. The ceremony was over and I was living a dream.

Trust me. I was stepping lightly.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 37

The time came for me to get dressed, drive to Lonoke, and marry the woman who had sashayed by and grabbed my heart not 200 feet from where I stood, long ago in a bachelorhood now nearing its useful end. I set my mind and managed everything, ready in plenty of time. All was set. There was no backing out now.

I folded my suit coat over the passenger seat of the Green Angel, checked once more to make sure I had the rings, and set off. There wasn’t a great deal of traffic in those days. With plenty of time, I drove carefully, taking old Highway 70, where we, Brenda and I, had taken so many late-afternoon drives back when we were courting. I wondered to myself if I had ever thought it would come to this. Was I a lucky man or what?

Or what?

Folks had already started gathering at the Methodist church just south of the main business corner of Downtown Lonoke. I went around and parked across the street, heading north for a fast getaway. I locked the doors and walked across the street. Once inside the church, I was happy do see my brother, Ricky, who was to be my best man. Others stayed stashed away somewhere. They directed us to a room just off the front of the church. I could see the crowd beginning to gather. Then I saw Leland Bassett sitting alone on one side of the church. The ushers, one my brother’s friends and a couple of Brenda’s neighbors from her childhood, were busy. They were placing everyone away from Leland, on the other side of the aisle. What was that all about?

Have I mentioned that I had never been to a church wedding before?

Several hundred years later, the church was full and the ushers escorted Hazel and Sainted Mother down the aisle. By this time, there were a few family and friends on my side and the ushers had begun to guide the overflow toward them. I panicked at a wandering thought. What if I needed to attend the men’s room before things got started?

Then the piano hit a chord and a voice of wondrous beauty filled the air. I have no memory of the song, except that it was quite beautiful and expertly delivered. When the singer finished it was so quiet that I could hear my blood flowing. Someone told my brother and me to walk out and stand, side by side, facing the audience.

Oh my goodness. I looked out at all those faces and just wanted to take off running. We could still elope later. The piano started again, with a familiar tune. At the far end of the church, She walked in with her daddy, and I forgot all about running.