Leaving Kentucky in the Broad Daylight

By Katrina Rasbold Text Copyright © 2013 Katrina Rasbold All Rights Reserved

All photography within this book is the property of the author. Table of Contents

Prologue I Was Born At a Very Young Age… Of Cows and Corn Escalators… The Big House and a Mystical Little Boy My Daddy & Mr Polk Daddy, You So Crazy (But Thanks for the Name) When 1967 Totally Changed My Life… Freezers Eat Children More Like Social Caterpillars Than Butterflies My Poor Aunt Patsy… My Granny and Martine and Her Attack Bird… Other Interesting Women, Including Mama… Mama’s Talents… More About Pa Mitchell (The Man With The Minners) and Granny… Then I Got Old and Went to School… Mary Poppins I - Am - Not That Time Delena and I Probably Broke Some Guy’s Hand Steppin’ Out Into the World… Job Openings in Both the Frying Pan and the Fire… My Rabbit Died 1978 Was a Very Big Year… Afterward About The Author Prologue

In a way, I wrote this book to write another one. I also wrote that sentence so that the first line of my book would not be “I was getting a pap smear one day.” Anyway, I was getting a pap smear one day, when my friend Vaughna, who was the one doing the pap smear at the time, off-handedly said, “Do you want to write a book together?” Vaughna’s comment was remarkable for a couple of reasons:

1) This was only the second time I’d ever seen Vaughna in my life. I rarely seek out medical care and my trip to her the year before to talk about a persistent vaggie itch and some mild insomnia was the first time I’d been in a medical facility since 1999 when my midwife insisted I have the required physician’s visit in order qualify to deliver my baby at home. By the time Vaughna was sweeping my cervix with her mighty OCedar cytobroom, that home-birthed baby was twelve years old, so you can do the math. One of the things I love about Vaughna is that she was never judgey about my chosen lack of medical care. It’s not really about a disdain for Westernized medicine; it’s just an attitude of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Vaughna gets that and so many other things and that is why she is my caregiver.

2) When she asked the question about writing the book, Vaughna had no idea I was a writer. That was one of the many things she did not yet know about me. Vaughna is just that way, which is one of the many reasons I love her. She just knows stuff and you have to have people in your life who just know stuff.

I immediately affirmed that yes, I would love to write a book on a year of flourishing health with her and together we set about our task, which involved meeting over lunch and talking about things we’d learned and thoughts we’d had on the subject and our side notes to the re-reading (for the 4th or 5th time) of Dr. Christiane Northrup’s amazing book, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. In the context of completing the exercises in the book, we went over our childhood memories and I casually mentioned that I had very few memories prior to the time when I left home in 1978. Vaughna pushed at me a little and I came up with two or three, but continued to insist that almost no other memories were in there. She insisted they were there and like I told you, Vaughna knows stuff.

Once, I actually spoke to a child psychologist and asked why I had so few childhood memories. I actually had some concerns that I was blocking out some kind of trauma or something. Laura, the lady I was asking, waved it off and said that most people have fairly sparse childhood memories not only because it was a long time ago, but also because as children, our brains are set on “experience” rather than “record,” so not a lot is retained in the same way it is when we are older. After that, I didn’t worry about it much anymore and let it go…until Vaughna questioned it. The next time I saw Vaughna, I plopped several typewritten pages down in front of her containing the beginning of this book; the rudimentary memories I was able to pull up in one sitting.

In her wonderful book The Red Tent, Anita Diamant puts forth the idea that in order to tell your own story, you have to tell your parents’ story. That option is lost to me. As you will see if you are brave enough to read on, I left home at the age of 16 in 1978. During the years that followed, I was so busy trying to sort out my own life that I paid very little attention to hers. We saw each other every 2-3 years, then every 3-5 years and then every 10 years. I never asked the right questions to get the information that would be important to me as I got older. I was well into my late forties before family stories had meaning to me and by then, it was too late to ask. This book is, in part, an effort to keep my children from having that regret. It’s all here, kids.

In 1986, my father died at the age of 51. My mother died in 2003 at 60 and all four of my grandparents are gone. It is incredible how untethered a person feels when they are orphaned and there is no upline on the family tree. No one shares your memories. No one validates your past. It is all subjective to your own patchy recollections. This book is my attempt to commit to writing what I can remember now so that I can keep that information close to me as I get older. Mom and Dad did not leave me words, but they did leave me photos and based on what they reveal, there was a time when they thought more highly of each other than they did for most of the time I knew them.

There was a girl, whose name was Lou:

And there was a guy whose name as actually Guy:

Apparently, they would canoodle from time to time.

They said they were eating potato chips

He went into the U.S. Army as a telecommunications engineer.

She finished high school.

He came back in time for her graduation.

And he put on her cap and gown

They were married on June 5, 1960 at Red Hill Baptist Church.

That is my mom’s twin sister, Sue, beside her.

And now you know what I know about my parents’ courtship. I woke up in the middle of the night once wondering where they met. Months later, I asked my aunts and uncles and none of them could remember. I have a memory stirring around in my head that they met at a roller skating rink in Livermore, Kentucky. Mom was there on a church trip and Dad was just there.

While Dad was in Germany, a friend of his was going to Kentucky and my father asked him to take my mother’s engagement ring to her. The friend agreed. For reasons unknown, the friend instead mailed my mother’s ring to her with note of explanation, so she got an engagement ring in the mail from a return address she did not know.

So many mysteries I can never unravel!

After Mom and Dad married, they moved to Augusta to live with my grandmother and grandfather. A very chaste and appropriate 15 months after they were married, I was born. That is where this story picks up. I Was Born At a Very Young Age…

I was born on September 5, 1961 and I have just learned that the number one song that week was actually “Michael Roll Your Boat Ashore” by the Highwaymen. Not “Rock Around the Clock” or “Peggy Sue” or “Runaway” or any other of the tremendously cool songs that ran barefoot through the sixties. It was a campfire song. I hate camping. One of the first things my husbands learn about me is I do not camp. In fact, it’s on “the list” that must be consulted before long-term relationships are considered. “Do you require companionship for sleeping arrangements that involve a tent?” It’s right up there with “Do you know which channel is ESPN on my satellite dish guide and do you ever have any intention of using it?” and “Can you fix my car?” It’s a fairly long list, but that’s a subject for another book. In fact, maybe one day I will write a book about all of the questions a smart woman asks before she ties the knot.

My mother and father lived with my father’s parents at the time I was born. I have no idea know exactly what my father or grandfather did for a living at the time (and Lord knows there’s no one to ask about it), but they both worked away from home. Home was Augusta, Kentucky, and my grandmother was the minister of a church there. I cannot say that I know the denomination, the doctrine or even the name of the church. What I can tell you, it was likely the holy rollingest church in that town in September of 1961. For the majority of the time I knew her, my grandmother considered herself to be of the Pilgrim Holiness faith, although I did know her to attend Wesleyan churches from time to time. She would never be caught dead in a Baptist or Methodist church, which is why she did not attend my wedding, and a Catholic church was even worse. Tolerance was not her calling card.

The parsonage of the church in Augusta was in the basement and some heavy rain caused a flash flood that washed out the bridge to the hospital. Right at that most inconvenient moment, my mother went into labor with me. The washed-out bridge not only kept her from getting to the hospital as planned, but also kept my father from getting home to her and to me for a while. In addition to her career as a minister, my grandmother was also a trained nurse and Dr. Marquardt happened to be on the good side of the bridge and came to the church basement to deliver me. Although my birth certificate says clearly that I was born at 12:05pm, my mother swears the noon whistle blew just as I slid out. She also said I was screaming to high heaven. Given the circumstances of my birth and all that was to follow in the coming years, let me just say, I. Am. Not. Surprised.

My grandmother was a very angry woman and I have never seen anyone ever weep so many tears in Christ’s blessed name. I am not even convinced that her namesake cried for Jesus as much as did my grandmother. I think if Jesus ever did meet Grandma, He likely would have told her to lighten up and enjoy the life He gave her a little more. She was one of the most miserable people I ever met, mostly because she simply could not get people to do what she wanted them to do, which was to follow the Bible absolutely to the letter and not vary from that process except as she saw fit. More than anyone, I understand the frustration of a world that will not do your bidding, but hey, I do not generally let that interfere with my happy. For Grandma, the general public’s lack of adherence to her extremely literal interpretation of the Good Book was a tremendous devastation to her. So was my birth, as it turned out. Seeing me pop out of my mother and hearing that loud whistle blow reminded her of the original sin of woman-kind and don’t you know, it was just written all over me.

Grandma always wore stockings; the kind that attached to garters on a very large girdle. Her hair had never once been cut in her entire life and she wore it wound up around a long, cylindrical, spongy thing and secured with hairpins; never bobby pins, which were the work of the Devil. Trust me, I have no idea what defined the hairpins as being the work of God instead, so we will have to ponder on that one together. By the time she got all that hair wrapped around the spongy thing and fixed into place with God’s sacred hairpins, it looked like a sausage roll curled from ear to ear at the base of her skull. She never wore jewelry, not even a wedding ring, because such adornments were an affront to the Lord. Her skirts were always modestly positioned below the knee and her sleeves were always below the elbow. She wore a slip, which she called a petticoat, and she smelled like sweat, cooked cabbage and old clothes. I remember my Mama telling me that Grandma would sometimes leave her hair up in that sausage roll for weeks at a time and when she took it down, all kinds of dried up, dead bugs fell out with it. That was plenty enough to leave me completely intrigued, so one time when I saw her with her hair down, I just had to look. She was brushing it out before she went to bed, but she caught sight of me looking in from the door and right away shooed me off. She was fully dressed, so I still don’t know what the fuss was about. Maybe she didn’t want me to see the bugs. All I managed to see was that her hair was very, very thin and came down almost to her ankles.

Me & Grandma decorating the Christmas tree. You can practically see the sin dripping off of me.

Grandma had a fiery temper on behalf of the Lord. Most people called her Mrs. Chapman or Reverend Chapman and only a handful of people called her “Mary.” My grandfather always called her “Wife” and she called him “Guy,” not by gender definition but because that was his first name. My father’s name was also Guy, but she referred to him as “Guy Allen” to distinguish the two. I saw her many times in the passionate throes of prayer or preaching or testifying and let me tell you, it was a sight to behold. If anyone could actually have physical tongue of flame of the Pentecost show up over their heads, Grandma would have earned hers and that was just when she was saying grace over Sunday dinner. We all knew that if Grandma got tapped to return the thanks, we were going to be eating food that was only slightly warm at best by the time we got to it no matter how hot it was when it hit the table.

My Pappaw – I’m betting the food on that plate was like cold (again)

My Grandpa, who we called “Pappaw,” was a whole different story. Pappaw was a man of tremendous integrity and was one of the kindest, gentlest souls I have ever known. Until his last few years of life, he was very stout with wiry hair coming out of all kinds of places on him, like his ears and his nose and such, not to mention his head. He had a robust laugh and a hearty giggle and he used both often and well. He loved his grandchildren profoundly; as deeply as one can imagine. He would take his fingers and tickle us on our neck and then collect the “sugar and tickles” to save for later when he wasn’t with us, happily stuffing them into his jacket pockets. I never saw him in jeans or overalls and as nearly as I know, he always wore dress pants and a dress shirt over a white t-shirt. Sometimes, he would wear a tweed jacket over that. He always had peppermint patties in his pockets for us. He was the antithesis to our stern Grandma and we were always thrilled to see him. He was wise and common and very easy to be around and therefore, beloved by so many people. When they lived in West Virginia, he came out to visit and brought a rubber rooster for me. I still have it packed away in my shed, but I am afraid to touch it because it is a touch or two away from disintegration.

Happy (?) 18th Birthday, Mom

Mama turned nineteen exactly three weeks after I was born and Daddy was 26 as of that previous February. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for Mom to be eighteen-years-old and essentially locked up in a church basement with my grandmother. It’s like the true enactment of some old, gothic horror story (my brain just cast Ali McGraw and the guy who played John-Boy Walton in it). My father was very devoted to his mother and so I doubt there was much support going on there. I do know that we left Augusta not long after I was born, so something must have broken down in the happy basement home. Afterward, we spent some time in Dayton, but that was long before I had any kind of self-awareness. I imagine Dayton, Ohio was about as far away from the hills of Kentucky as anything could possibly be for my parents. Daddy had been to Germany in the Army before they were married, but Mom had never left home that I know of and so even Ohio would be foreign to her. As nearly as I can tell – and no one who was there is alive or remembers – they came back to Kentucky pretty fast… and there they stayed. Not me. Oh no. Not me. I left as quickly as my wings would fly me away.

Of Cows and Corn Escalators… My first actual memory of a house we lived in was known as “Adrian’s house” because it was owned by a man named Adrian Wells. It was a gray clapboard house that had once been white before the weather and elements beat it down. Adrian was also our mailman, which I thought was just the most amazing thing in the world. He was married to Dean, the sister of my mother’s brother’s wife, and they had kids who I just loved to play with but didn’t really get to see very often. There were fields of crops around our house that Adrian still worked and one of my first memories is of me and his son, Ronnie, who was a year or so older, riding on a narrow escalator that would dump ears of corn into the giant silo that had to be twenty feet tall.

A baby belted into a chair. Welcome to the 1960s.

Before she died, one of the few questions I did manage to ask my mom was whether or not this was an actual memory or if I’d made it up or dreamed it or something, but she confirmed it was and that we’d ridden that sucker up to the top of the silo and gotten dropped right off into the corn. That broke my mind a little bit because I know we moved into our next house before I started school, so I had to be five or younger. I mean seriously, what were these people thinking? We would ride the escalator belt up and get dropped off the belt into the silo, which was likely filled not only with us and a whole lot of corn, but rats and snakes as well and all other manner of critters. Eventually, we’d climb back on the belt again and they would reverse it and bring us back down again, giggling and having a big old time. It’s such a wonder I’m not just plain dead from living in a land and time where the concept of Child Protective Services did not exist. (Most. Fun. EVER!!)

I can barely walk and I already look lost. I also still twist that foot into the same position when I sleep.

Some days, Mama would pack a picnic lunch and she and I would go walking out into the fields and plop down and eat our food on the ground. One time, a normally docile cow named Old Red got out of the fence and chased us all over the place. Mama was dragging me by the arm so hard that I thought it was going to pop right out of its socket. Clearly, Old Red was working out some serious cow–rage, but there was no sympathy to be had from us. Cows should know their place, I’m just sayin’. Other days, when we had less bovine drama, Mama would make mud pies with me and set up tables so we could have a store or a restaurant and proudly sell our wares to invisible people. They were invisible to me, at least. I’m not sure if they were to my mom or not.

Mom looks so bored. If this photo had been taken in the 2000s, people would think she was texting. I, however, HAVE A BALL! AYYYEEEE!!!

One thing I do recall with a degree of clarity is the time I bit my mother on the ass. We had one of those old black coal burning stoves and you would have to dig into a little door at the bottom to get out the ashes. For some reason, I took it upon myself to put all of our flatware into the bottom of the ash catcher and it melted into little metal, lumpy balls. I remember my mother crying and digging them out, all bent over. From my perspective, her bottom was quite large and something compelled me to lean in and take a chunk. Her frustration over the ruined flatware, which was likely a huge investment for us even though there was nothing silver about it except the color, married up nicely with her shock at the sudden pain and she sort of snapped. The resulting effect was that she turned around and whacked me so hard that I quite literally sailed through the air and hit the wall that was several feet behind me. I felt the plaster rain down in my hair as it fell out of the ceiling above. Afterward, she cried and cuddled me and put Vaseline on my bruises. The healing powers of Vaseline may be in question by some, but it did make me feel better after my very short flight and hard landing across the living room. I probably flew further than the Wright brothers did on their first flight.

I never set myself out as being a perfect child or even a particularly good child and I did terrible things with no real concept that they were securing me a seat on the Hell Express. You know how when you’re doing something wrong, you get that nagging feeling, even as a kid, that you’re doing something wrong and you either give over to it or start singing “Row Row Row Your Boat” in your head loudly enough to drown it out? I didn’t get that feeling. I walked past, saw her butt in the air and thought, “Hmm. Seems reasonable.”

It’s me, getting my cousin, Delena, ready to go outside and play (meaning: get into some mischief) and LOOK! In the left lower corner of this photo is my friend, MR. COAL STOVE!

Another abysmal thing I did was dress our three kittens in doll clothes and put them in the giant, unused buffet to take a nap like good babies. Once they were in there, I promptly forgot about them and they “napped” for three days before Mom finally found them. During that time, she was about to go crazy trying to figure the source of the mewling sounds she’d been hearing in the house. She pieced that together with the fact that the cats had not come into eat their meals of warm cow’s milk over bread and suspected foul play was involved. She finally found them and cried again while she carefully cut the doll clothes off of their little swollen bodies and nursed them back from the brink of starvation and dehydration. Thank goodness I had sturdy cats. Unbelievably, they all lived, no thanks to me whatsoever. Mind you, I was not a cruel child. I was just easily distracted.

You’d better believe those were the best behaved cats on earth by the time I was done with them.

Mom was enormously creative and would make doll cradles from Quaker Oats boxes, barns out of Puffs box and paste out of flour and water. She loved being mom to a little kid and kept me busy with fun things all the time when I was tiny. Every single day with Mama was like being in the best preschool ever. My brothers missed out on a lot of those miracles because by the time they came along and reached any degree of cognitive thought, she was already sick a good bit of the time, so I got the better end of that deal. I never take that experience for granted; however, the nurturing I received early on left me hungry for it very nearly the whole rest of my life once it was gone.

One of Mom’s barns made from a Puff’s box

I have always been grateful that I got to see what I feel is the best of both my mother and father. Money was a terrible issue for them and they scraped through year after year of unimaginable poverty. One winter, we ate beans and ham for every single meal. Most fo the few toys I had were either homemade or very, very used. Every Christmas, there was a fat navel orange in the toe of my Christmas sock and I would eat it like it was a delicacy, half a slice at a time, savoring every sweet and precious drop. Still, it seemed as though they were happy for a while and it would be several years yet before the whole world went sideways. My Dad worked at a car shop in town called Short Brothers, not because the owners were height challenged but because “Short” was their last name. Interestingly, he also worked with a man named Shorty Boone who was not in any way connected with the Short Brothers other than the fact that his nickname was their last name and he worked for them. When Daddy would shave before he left for work in the morning, he would intentionally leave a bit of soap lather behind his ears and it was my job to check for it and wipe it off when he kissed me goodbye. He did not use shaving cream, but had a shaving mug that was filled with the tiny scraps from the bars of Ivory soap we used to bathe. He would run warm water over his shaving brush and swish it around in the mug to make a fluffy lather, then over his face the foamy brush would fly. His razor was one of the old silver, double edged safety razors and the water he used to shave came from the same place as all of our water: the pump outside.

Since we did not have indoor plumbing at all, we had to go to the hand pump and draw up water from the well any time water was needed. It took forever to work the water up the system and into the pump, but soon it would spill over into the galvanized buckets, which we would bring inside. Even in the heat of summer, that water was cool and clear. The water had to be heated on the old, iron stove for cooking or bathing. I took my baths in a large, galvanized tub and Mom would have to bring in 4-5 buckets of water to heat anytime someone needed a bath. Yes, we used the same bath water and bathed very quickly. After Daddy shaved, he would use Old Spice after shave, long before it was marketed with a whistle. Each year for Christmas, Mom would give me a few dollars to buy dad a new bottle of Old Spice aftershave and he would grin as though it had never, ever happened before. Dad called me “Kitten,” just like on Father Knows Best.

Work, work WORK! All I *do* around here is work!

One of the homemade toys Mom would make for me was beanbags. She would buy dried pinto beans or navy beans and pour them into a sewn square of feed sack material, which was also often used to make my clothes. Back then, dried foods like flour, corn kernals for chickens and beans would come in a soft, cotton bag that had flowers or other designs on it. Mothers across the nation would cut the bag open and use the material to sew clothing. Mom also made beanbags and let me tell you, there is no end to the fun you can have with a number of beanbags. Mom did not appreciate the fun I was having the day I put one of the beanbags into the back of my panties and told her I’d pooped in my pants. I was young enough that she did not check beyond my word, so out she went to draw up and heat more water for my bath after she’d already done so earlier that day. When she undressed me for my bath, I thought she would be thrilled to find that surprise! I wasn’t messy after all. She wasn’t. Not at all. Did I mention that it was snowing and icy out at the time? Yeah, it was. I was not very forward thinking as a child.

They told me it was a toy car. Liars.

Daddy would sometimes work at the car shop on Saturday afternoons and when that happened, Mama would sneak and watch American Bandstand on the tiny black and white TV we owned. She would dance in her bobby socks on the old living room floor and we would swoon over the bands that would play. I look back now and realize how young she really was and how sad it was that she had to watch Bandstand on the sly because Daddy just could not abide that rock and roll music.

I was raised on country gospel and country and western music and my father was a walking encyclopedia on both. He would quiz me endlessly about terribly important points like what year Loretta Lynn had her first top 10 hit (1962 – “Success”) and the song “I Ain’t Never” was the result of a bet between Mel Tillis and what famous singer (Webb Pierce, who was the first to make it a hit) and was written on what (a restaurant napkin)? That kind of vital information may not seem like much now, but back then when there was on Wikipedia at your fingertips, it was downright magical. When I was growing up in Kentucky, you were either a Marty Robbins man or a Stan Hitchcock man. Both men had popular TV shows on at the time. Both were famous country singers. Marty Robbins had a bit of an edge on the hits machine. My father was a Stan Hitchcock man. He used to talk about how he liked Stan’s style and then would look thoughtful and say, “Marty Robbins is, I dunno, kind of p’tenshus or somethin’.” Neither Dad nor I could say whether or not Marty Robbins actually was pretentious, but in Dad’s mind, he was and that was all there was to it. I still think of Dad when I hear Stan’s version of “Back In Baby’s Arms” and when I posted a blog entry lamenting the fact that I could not find it on MP3, Stan Hitchcock himself emailed a copy to me.

Daddy, outside my Granny’s house

The first 8-track tape I ever owned was Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits. I gave a whole dollar for it at a yard sale and I thought it was the finest music I’d ever heard in my life. Although I had a love for my used Simon and Garfunkel tape, my father absolutely did not and would yell at me through the walls to “turn off that hippie shit music.” I didn’t. I turned it down instead. Although it did not cross my mind back then, I now smile when I consider that had Conway Twitty recorded “Cecelia” or “Homeward Bound” or “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” in exactly the same words and tempo, but with a steel guitar accompaniment instead, Dad would have liked the songs just fine.

A friend gave me a copy of “The Eagles Greatest Hits 1971-1975” on vinyl and those two treasures constituted the full extent of my rock and roll record collection until I married my first husband in 1978. The degree to which my father was an expert on country and country gospel music is rivaled only by the vast expanse of knowlege my first husband had about expert on rock and roll music. As a result, my brain is bursting at the seams with music trivia from those genres and yet I cannot right now tell you where I left my car keys. Something tells me that “I’ll take ‘Country Music Trivia” for two hundred, Alex,” are words I am just not destined to utter.

But I digress…

The Big House and a Mystical Little Boy After living in Adrian’s house, we moved up the road a piece into “the big house” which was alternately called “Mr. Coke’s house.” Mr. Coke owned the general store down in Livia and was our landlord, as well as one of the wealthiest men in town. The big house was a two story farm house and I was terrified to go upstairs because wasps were crazy up there during the summer. This was a tremendous disappointment because having stairs was fascinating to me. The stairway was very narrow, both in depth and width, so I felt a little claustrophobic going up even with my little feet and tiny body. The heat was stifling and I could barely manage to breathe in the few times I was there. Mr. Coke’s house, however, had a hand pump to the well right there in the kitchen sink! You’d better believe that we thought we were kings not having to walk out in the ice and snow to get water anymore. We could just walk to the kitchen sink and pump! I started school when I lived in that house and it is also where I experienced my first magical event.

This ensemble, in fact, was righteously magical.

I had an imaginary playmate when I was growing up and his name was Jeanie. My mother first told me with some degree of confidence that a boy’s name would not be Jeanie, but I assured her that it most certainly was. I can see him clearly to this day in my mind’s eye and he was around literally for as long as I can remember when I was little. He was my constant companion and was only ever around when my mother and father were not, which made validating his existence rather challenging.

Unlike classic imaginary friends, Jeanie never did things to get me in trouble. I would set a plate for him at the table each night, even though he never showed up. My parents would talk to him as though he was there and I would look at them like they were morons and ask, “Who are you talking to? He didn’t come again.” I would sometimes wake up at night to feel him creeping into bed with me, shivering and cold. I would pull him close in my arms and kiss his tangled blond hair and ease the covers over the two of us until he warmed up. Sometimes, he would whisper stories to me in the dark about people who used to live in the town and things that happened to them. He never talked about himself or his family except in the most general of terms and I never asked. To me, his life began and ended when he was with me and it never came into my mind to question beyond that.

That creepy doll’s name was Sally and she was filled with sawdust. I rarely had the “Bad Seed” look I was sporting here. Jeanie was fascinated by marbles and we would play a game where we would roll marbles down the textured floor mats my father had scavenged from some old cars. The mats were rubber and had deep, wavy lines in them for design. The marbles would absolutely fly down them if you angled them just right. Jeanie loved marbles more than any other game and one day, he told me he’d hidden his own bag of marbles in the back yard. I became a girl-child obsessed with finding those marbles. He would step off the paces from an old tree stump and we would start digging with anything we could find. My father would fuss and cuss like crazy when he would try to walk in the back yard and step in new holes every day. We dug with sticks and spoons and our hands and it took a couple of weeks before we finally unearthed a glass jar with the lid rusted shut. He grinned like a possum and promptly bashed the jar against the edge of the porch. Inside, sure enough, was a little grass sack that was bursting with marbles. The sack was so old that it fell apart when we touched it and the marbles spilled out into our hands. There were shooters and cats eyes and spheres of ever color. I shrugged and gratefully added them to our collection. It was just another day in the life.

One day, about two weeks before I was to start first grade (no kindergarten or head start for me!) we were actively trying to shoot the marbles as far down the deep, rubber raceways of the floor mats as we could. There was nothing special about that since it is pretty much what we did every day. Since he’d found his own marbles, Jeanie could not be bested and sufficient practice had given him the right angle to flip the marble so hard that it would not only run the wiggled shape of the ridges in the rubber, but would *bump* at the end of the map, jump the edge and continue on its way. We made flags from old paper and the last of my mother’s toothpicks and shoved them into the ground where the marble finally came to rest. I quickly got bored with the flags because I could not even get my marbles all the way down the mat, much less beat Jeanie’s mighty thumb, so we were basically charting the dexterity of his pitches than there being any real kind of competition.

All of a sudden, Jeanie got a stricken look on his face and rose up from the game. He crooked his head and listened and soon I could hear a vehicle coming down the road. Our road was a dirt road with only a few houses past our own before it ended. It was rarely traveled and really, you had to have a reason for being back there to be moving to or from that direction. We were far enough in the boondocks that people did not often get lost enough to get to us. Hearing a vehicle coming down the road in the middle of the day was a rarity.

Jeanie put down his marbles, looked at me and said something I had never heard him say before. He said, “I gotta go” and off he went. An old pick-up truck with wooden sides was coming hard down the road. Men were in the truck and were laughing and talking loudly to one another. Two were in the front and several were in the back, holding on to the sides of the bed. Jeanie flew across the yard at break-neck speed and to my complete horror, ran right into the road in front of the truck. The truck hit him so hard that just like in a Stephen King book, it knocked him right out of his old leather shoes. I remember seeing the buckle on his shoe very clearly, glinting in the sun as it flew through the air yards from me right after the sickening thud of the impact. I screamed and screamed and screamed.

The next thing I knew, I was in my mother’s lap. She was sitting on the ground and had a cold, wet washrag, wiping my face down with it. I promptly started screaming all over again and all I could hear over my own screaming was Mom saying over and over, “What?? WHAT?! Why are you SCREAMING? Where are you HURT?”

Pretty soon, I noticed that she was also crying hysterically and my throat was starting to hurt so much that I couldn’t scream anymore. I managed to say, “Jeanie” and point to the road. I thought she was crying because she had seen what happened as well, but then she asked me what happened to Jeanie. I told her he’d died. The truck had hit him and he died. She kept telling me over and over, “Honey, there is nothing there. Nothing happened. There is nothing there.”

I asked her about it later and she said that she’d been washing dishes and watching me play through the kitchen window. One minute I’d been rolling marbles and the next minute, I’d just been screaming my ass off. She thought I’d been stung by a bee and so when I passed out, she was sure I was having an allergic reaction.

She picked me up and carried me into my bed and I stayed there for several days, not even having the strength or the will to get up. She and Dad finally took me to the doctor, who checked me out head to toe and deemed me to be just fine. Mom asked him about the fact that I had not eaten anything in 2 or 3 days and even though I was only 5 and kind of woozy at the time, I still remember what he said to her. He scratched his head thoughtfully, tilted it like a curious bird and then said, “Whall, you know, Mrs. Chapman, it takes the average hunger striker almost 90 days to die and 30 before they even get sick. I reckon if she hasn’t eaten anything in 25 days or so, bring her back.” I believe Mom was sorely disappointed since she’d spent the afternoon threatening me to take me to the hospital and have me fed with a tube if I didn’t eat something.

I did start eating again, but not right away. Once the doctor said there was nothing wrong with me, Dad started to get frustrated, so Mom shifted her attention off of me and onto him to soothe the savage seas of matrimony. I went to my room and slept some more. The next day, I got up and went outside and found the buckle from Jeanie’s shoe from where I’d seen it fall to the ground. It was dug down deeply into the ground, but a tiny corner was sticking up and I managed to pry it out. It was old and discolored. I took it into the house and put it on the table where Mom and Dad were sitting and went back to my room again. The day after that, I found an old Ball jar and put all of the marbles into it, both mine and Jeanie’s, and buried them in the place in the back yard where we’d found his. I went back inside and asked my mom if we had any applesauce. We did.

I saw Jeanie again many years later, of all places on Guam. Paul, my first husband, was stationed at Andersen Air Force Base and we lived in the base housing there. My oldest son, Joe, was turning three and we were having a birthday party for him. I guess that means I was all of 19 at the time. We had 7-8 children over and as we were serving the cake, I saw a child playing out on the lanai. Since that is where the toys were located and was the designated area that served as the playroom in the home of absolutely everyone we knew, I wasn’t surprised and I automatically went out to round up the little lamb who had strayed away from the party. I remember looking back at the table, where another parent was pouring punch and registering that all of the chairs were filled. No kids were missing. I opened the sliding glass door to the lanai and there was Jeanie, playing with a little toy car.

I recognized him immediately and my breath caught up in my throat to the point that I could hardly swallow. He looked up at me and smiled and said, “I remember you” then went back to playing with the car. His hair was blond and tousled, just as it was in my memories. It had always been dusty and dirty, but I’d loved his curls and always wanted ones just like them. His eyes were big and blue and he wore the same sailor suit he always wore. I used to tell him he looked like the Cracker Jack kid and without fail, he would yell out at me, “Do NOT!” His Buster Brown type shoes were back on his feet and the buckles were askew and worn. This was one of those moments where you think you would know what to do or what to say and you just don’t. All I could do was stand and stare. Now, as I write this, just like about a thousand times before now, my mind can rattle off hundreds of questions I should have asked. Instead, I was so overcome by the moment that I could do nothing more than gawk.

True to my form, when words did come, I said something stupid. “Would you like some cake?” I mean seriously, “Would you like some cake?” Really? Of all the things I could ask, that’s what came out of my mouth. He grinned at me and at that moment, one of the other moms opened the lanai door and asked if I was OK. I turned for just a half- second to tell her I was fine and when I looked back at him, he was gone. I never saw him again. Now, committing this to print for the first time (the birthday child having that birthday turns 34 this past January), my skin still tingles to think about it and I have to admit, my eyes are stinging a bit too. My Daddy & Mr Polk One of the things I remember clearly about living in Mr. Coke’s house is a man who lived in one of the few houses down the road from us, Mr. Polk. In case you are wondering, yes, my parents could see Mr. Polk just like I could. Mr. Polk used to walk from his home, which was about a mile down the road from our house, all the way down into Livia every single day. To my kid mind, that was a very, very long way. I would love to go back and see how far it really was, but I doubt I could even find the house now and there’s little hope it is even still standing since it was threatening to come down around our ears when we lived in it in the early 60’s. It could have been 2 miles or it could have been 10 miles. Regardless, Mr. Polk walked it and would go down to Mr. Coke’s general store and sit on the porch and talk to the other gentlemen who liked to visit there.

Mr. Polk was the only African American man I knew who lived in our town. He was tall and thin and whistled when he walked. I could hear him coming for a long way before he got there. If my father happened to be in the yard as Mr. Polk would pass our house on his way to the store or home again later in the day, Dad and Mr. Polk would spend a few minutes talking. Their conversations always started and ended exactly the same way. My father would call out from where ever he was in the yard and say, “Good mornin’ (or Good evenin’), Mr. Polk!” Mr. Polk would leave the dirt road and come over and shake my father’s hand. As he was shaking his hand, Mr. Polk would say, “Now Mr. Chapman, I already done tol’ you, people ‘round here just call me plain ol’ Nigger Polk.” My father would then say, “You know, I think I’d just like to call you Mr. Polk.” At that point, they would go into their conversation of the day, whether it was about the weather, the tobacco crops of that year, cars, dogs or what have you. They would always close with, “You have a good day/night now, Mr. Polk” and then Mr. Polk would smile and point at my father and say, “You too, Mr. Chapman” and that would be that. They must have had that same conversation hundreds of times with only the middle ever changing.

I was always very grateful to my father for giving me that foundation of equality. I had no idea I was growing up in a nation that was, at that time, rocked to the core by racial turmoil, discrimination and social reform. I did not even know that there were people who had a problem with other people because of their race until I was into my teens. When I first heard about racism, I thought it was a really terrible joke. Soon, I found out it was real and the stupidity of it stymied me. Talk about a protected life.

My Daddy, Grandpa and brother outside of Southside Wesleyan Methodist Church in Owensboro, Ky. It was one of our nomad church stops along the way.

In retrospect, I have often wondered how old Mr. Polk was at that time. I have only my child-mind to draw from and he could have been thirty or he could have been ninety. This is one of the great losses of being the oldest surviving member of your family. If you don’t have the answers and did not have the presence of mind to ask the right questions before everyone else died, then you are just shit out of luck.

My mom would never have said, “Shit out of luck,” by the way. She, like so many other Southern women, operated under the assumption that God could neither spell nor figure out acronyms, so she would say, “S-O-L” in very deliberate syllables and she would lower her voice significantly for the “S-O-L” part. There are many behaviors and phrases particular to the South and that is one reason I love being from there. It took me a long time to fully embrace my Southern heritage, but now I wear it like a fancy tiara.

Daddy chasing Mama around a tree to take her photo. She lost. She was S.O.L.

Daddy, You So Crazy (But Thanks for the Name) Dad was a colorful character and certainly had a way with words. One of his favorite dismissals of a person was, “Well he can eat shit and howl at the moon for all I care.” Sometimes, he would elevate that to, “Well he can shit and fall back in it for all I care.” That one always made me wince a bit since the visual was fairly stunning to contemplate. He once told my aunt, speaking of her ex-husband, “I would tell you that he had a trumpet up his ass, but you’d blow it.” (?!) The ultimate horrible thing my father would say to write a person off was, “Well, he can just root, eat woodchuck or die for all I care.” Given the formidable choice of those three options, I’m not sure which would be more foreboding.

His favorite song to sing at the top of his voice was, “She’s got freckles on her but(t) I love her.” He never finished the song or went past that one line, but he would trail of melodically. He also had a tremendous appreciation for bathroom poetry such as:

Listen, listen! Cat’s a pissin’!

Where? Where?

Under the chair!”

Hurry, hurry!

Get my gun!

Never mind, he’s already done.

As with the freckles song, there was apparently no more to the poem than that as far as Dad was concerned. He would burst into verse, and then resume what he was previously doing as if he’d never stopped.

The one thing I have always thanked my father for doing was saving me on my name – well, sort of. My mother was determined to name me Lydia Jane and folks, if you and I have ever met, you know I am just not a Lydia Jane. When Daddy was in Germany in 1958-59, he had the opportunity to watch a woman named Caterina Valente perform. Knowing what I know now, I would love to see how that came about. He later told me that she was a dancer and was the most talented person he’d ever seen. When I researched her, I learned she was much more than what he knew her to be. As of now, she is still performing, is still beautiful and is still so very talented, so you know what? I’ll take it! Dad either heard or remembered the name wrong. He thought it was Katrina and was determined that if he ever had a daughter, he was going to name her after this woman who had impressed him so. Thankfully, he got his way.

Dad in Germany dressed up like a G-man. Yes, I am old enough that the car behind him was not yet “vintage” when the photo was taken. For some reason, my dad was always dressed like a stone cold pimp in his Germany photos.

Dad’s style of dress was so bad in later years that my friend, Joyce, called him “Peter the Tramp.”

Dad never talked much about his time in Germany except to tell us that he was once sick enough that he’d been taken to the infirmary and happened to be there at the same time as Elvis Presley. He said it took forever for him to get any kind of medical attention because everyone as up on another floor trying to catch sight of The King. He had a girlfriend in Germany, much to my mother’s chagrin since they were engaged. He brought home pictures of the girlfriend and her daughter when his overseas tour was done. One of them was named Heidi, but I do not remember which one it was and there’s no one I can ask! It’s another one of THOSE things. In all of his photos from his time in Germany, he always looked very happy, which was not common for him.

Dad was totally unrepentant about having a German girlfriend. It was just what was. Her photographs were in our family albums for as long as I can remember and now, they are in mine.

Mom was not eager to talk about it, so the subject was not broached.

Aw, c’mon. Tell me. Which one of you is Heidi?

By some means or another, Dad won the “name the baby” game and I was called Katrina Marie, or rather, that is what I was legally named. I believe I was likely called Katrina no more than once or twice before they realized that it made them tired to say it. The ink was barely dry on the birth certificate when it was learned that come hell or high water, my dad’s father, my Pappaw, could not pronounce my name. After several failed attempts on his part, my parents just started calling me Kathy, despite what was on the birth certificate. Even then, my Pappaw could not say, “Kathy” and it came out “Kaffee,” so he called me “Treenie Ree,” an abbreviated version of Katrina Marie. Other than his affectionate nickname, I was not known as Katrina until 1994.

In school, I was called “Cantrina’ and “Kafrina” and many other interpretations of the name. It is quite a mouthful for little ones. “Kat” is a nickname I have always deplored and people scurry to call me that for some reason. When I worked at McClellan AFB, so many people called me “K” that people thought I as a “Kay.” This started when I worked for the military police at McClellan Air Force Base. Whenever I would need to leave a memo for my boss, I would just sign it “K,” so that is what he started calling me. I found I liked that just fine. It has a certain anonymity to it in its brevity; sort of an “Agent K” feel. In 1994, I relocated to Idaho after I remarried my ex-husband and followed him to yet another Air Force Base. By that time, “Kathy” was someone who had did not have a very happy life to the point that I just didn’t want to be her anymore, so I embraced my legal name and have been Katrina ever since. Having a new name, even if it’s an old name, is very liberating and cleansing.

All of my aunts, uncles and cousins back in Kentucky still call me Kathy and I have to tell you, I like that just fine. My kids aren’t used to it and wonder who “Kathy” is every time one of them calls, but they’re getting used it.

At the time of this writing, I have been with my current husband for just over 15 years and he never refers to me by my name. If he is speaking to others in reference to me, he says, “My wife.” If he is speaking to the children, he says, “Your mother.” If he is speaking to me, he calls me by one of many terms of endearment. He once told me that Kathy is a “PTA mom’s name” and that it just doesn’t fit me. When I am visiting in Kentucky, it’s impossible for me to feel like a “Katrina” and I enjoy the feeling of reclaiming that part of myself as a strong survivor and not as a victim.

Of course, there was some negative association with my name after New Orleans was destroyed. I took the ribs and punches as headlines such as “Katrina Squats Over the Gulf Coast” and “Highways Are Jammed As Victims Flea From Katrina.” A little boy named Bubba who went to school with my youngest sons looked up at me with his big, liquid brown eyes and said, “Did they name you after the storm?” I said, “No, sweet baby. They named the storm after me.”

My Uncle Delmar, who is my patriarch since Dad died in 1986, calls me, “Now, Kathy…” He tells me the most wonderful things when I get the rare chance to spend time with him and he always starts off, “Now, Kathy…” That’s when I know the good stuff is coming. If he gets to, “Now, Kathy, let me tell you…” then I know we’re going to get to the gold.

This is exactly what my uncle looks like seconds before he says, “Now Kathy, let me tell you...” and gives me the goods. To tell you how we raise’em in our family, in this photo, Uncle Delmar had just cut his two fingers off (yes, off) in a table saw accident and he STILL pulled a bow a few days later to hunt deer.

When I last went back to Kentucky for a visit, my Uncle Delmar asked me to look at his belt, which he happened to be wearing at the time. I thought he was going to show me a nice belt buckle or something since that is always of keen interest in Kentucky. Instead, he told me that the belt he was wearing had been my father’s belt. Mind you, by this time, my dad had been dead for 25 years and here was my uncle still wearing his belt. You’ve got to admit, that’s one hell of a belt since there is no telling how long Daddy had it before he died. I still wonder how it came about that my father died of a ruptured heart ventricle in the hospital and my uncle said, “Can I have his belt?”

Uncle Delmar also told me that he broke the original buckle on the belt when he used it to pull a deer. I should probably repeat that: He used it to pull a deer. You can’t pay for those kinds of stories.

What I was thinking of was all of the times I’d watched my dad pull that belt out of his own belt loops just before it laid resoundingly across my legs or my bottom. Forty or so years later, I was in my cousin Delena’s kitchen looking at a piece of leather that had too many times been laid across my tender flesh with a good degree of heft. It gave me chills to see it. When 1967 Totally Changed My Life… Two things of importance happened in 1967 and not a single one of them had to do with the Summer of Love. One is that we moved out of Mr. Coke’s house and my mother and father bought their first home for the princely sum of $36,000. They purchased it from a woman named Mary Ann Powell who lived in it with her mother.

The most fascinating thing about it was that it had indoor plumbing, a porcelain bathtub (I’d always bathed in that galvanized metal tub) and the water even came out of a faucet in the bathroom and kitchen! No more pumping! The floors were covered with beautiful linoleum and there were little divots all through the linoleum that Mama told me were from the tiny points of Ms. Powell’s high heel shoes (oooooh!).

There was a grated furnace right there in the floor that heated the whole, entire house. That furnace would prove to be the cause of many grid-shaped burn marks on little feet over the next many years. I used to love to straddle the furnace and let the hot air whip up my dress like Marilyn Monroe. One can be nudged into dangerous living by a fast draft of warm air, let me tell you.

We moved to a very small community about two miles south of Pleasant Ridge, Kentucky, down Highway 231. As far as any map of that time knew, we were not really anywhere. A little road ran behind us and that identified the tiny town of Buford, but we weren’t really in the Buford gang, because we were highway people. In Kentucky in the 60’s and 70’s, there were some interesting societal distinctions going on. You can’t really call them “class distinctions” because God knows none of us had any class at all. It was more of whether or not you were in the club and we just simply were not. The house was small, but Dad eventually built onto it, no doubt an non-permitted addition

This is what the house looked like when I lived in it. To the left is the addition my dad built. You can see Dad’s prize PDL-2 Quad beams in the back. They took signal to his elaborate CD radio set up. That’s my mom going inside. That tiny attic window on the top right was my room.

This is what the house looked like when my brother, Allen, had it torn down in 2004. Quite a difference. The trailer was his, pulled to the back when the main house became unlivable. He went inside the main house to get water.

There was also an attic that ran across the width of the house and Dad finished it into a very long, very skinny room with eave pitches on each side that forced anyone not standing in the dead center of the room to crane their neck most painfully. That was my room for a few years and I decorated it with old Christmas lights just to be totally mod. It had no heating or cooling, which posed a problem in the middle of winter or summer.

The old house took a lot of abuse over the years. It was always green and when we moved in, I had never seen a green house before. Dad later painted it a darker green than it was originally. That was in the 1970’s and I seriously doubt the house was ever painted again. There was also a gas main in our front yard. For some reason, it became the place where people always had their photos taken. “Go stand out there by the gas main so I can take your picture” was said more than once in my home. I have no explanation for that at all.

When Dad died and my mother eventually remarried, the house fell into terrible disrepair. Her second husband was not given to home repairs and my brother, who lived in it until it was destroyed, was even less so. The house became quite a source of family contention after Mom died. She had a will, but it conveniently disappeared. My brother, Allen, insisted on keeping it, which created financial hardship for everyone except him, particularly, my other brother, Eddie. That’s just how Allen rolls and that is a story for another book.

Going back to 1967, the other thing that happened to change my life completely is that Allen, he of the probate contentious nature, successfully ended my enjoyable reign as an only child. I do not remember much about Allen’s birth. My Uncle Delmar showed up (Even though my dad was there) and Mom was whisked away before I even knew things were changing. Of course, I knew a baby was on the way, but I was not yet at the point where I had much interest in how it would arrive or when.

The one thing specific to Mom’s pregnancy that does stand out in my mind is that she was horribly ill and could not stand the smell of cooking. As a result, I spent many months eating foods that did not involve heated preparation it came from school. Most often, it was toast and applesauce, which Mama informed me was the food the Lord Jesus always ate as a child, so I gobbled it right up and asked for more. I still have a warm place in my heart for cold applesauce and cinnamon toast. What has two thumbs and knows Jesus is a Musselman’s fan? (THIS GAL!)

1967 was NOT a happy haircut year for me

My mother’s labors were typically spoken of in hushed tones and often accompanied by wild expressions and rolling eyes. I never heard the full stories, but the segments I caught by eavesdropping involved hallucinations and forceps and a thin line between reality and terror and/or medication induced fantasy. I never went to visit my mother while she was in the hospital after having either of my brothers and back then, you were under hospital care for 5 days after the birth and that did not include your laboring time. Both times, Mom just showed up a few days after she left holding a bundle of baby. In the case of Allen’s birth, she also was sporting, at the age of 26, a fashionable shock of white that had not previously been in the front of her dark brown hair. The nurses said it was because the ice packs they put on her head (?!) during labor had killed off the hair follicles, which sounded like a bunch of malarkey to me even at the tender age of five. Clearly, it was a harbinger. I’m just saying.

See? There is a shock of white hair that had not been there previously!

People don’t normally just up and have a big patch of white hair show up on their head and this did not escape my childish attention. Through the years, she often had people ask her who did her frosting (we did not have “highlights” back then, your hair was “frosted”) and she would gladly tell them her story of how she came out of the delivery room with that one part of her hair white as snow.

Allen was a fearful child and would cling to Mom’s skirts whenever she was around. Photo evidence of this does exist, as you can clearly see.

My memories of him as a child are limited. Of course, he and my brother, Eddie, were 8 and 10-years-old when I left home and during my last few years living with them, things were going on left and right, so I can’t really say I was plugged in to any real degree. My relationship with Allen could be, I suppose, classified as contentious. I never “got” him and I doubt he ever really “got” me. My parents knew my affinity for dolls of all kinds and promised me that he would be more fun than a doll. They were wrong.

He took a while to learn to walk and would take a step or two, then promptly fall onto his butt and look up at us with a constipated expression like we were expecting him to explain Pythagorean theory. Mom finally handed him a spoon one day and Allen thought he was holding onto something to keep him steady. For a few minutes, she held onto the other end of the spoon and led him around the house while he trucked on like a little walking pro. She let go of the spoon and he continued on, his arm stretched up in the air like the Statue of Liberty, holding onto that spoon for dear life as he toddled around. It took him a couple of months before he realized he could walk without the spoon and even then, he still kept his arm up in the air sometimes. I curse the photographic negligence of my parents for their failure to capture such an important family moment on film.

Trying to take my cake. I mean seriously, people.

A memory I have of Allen as a child was of a time when Dad kindly built a sand box for us out of two by fours and filled it with river sand. For those who do not know, river sand is not fine and soft like the play sand normally used in children’s sandboxes. River sand is heavy and has tiny pebbles and shells in it, but is still quite fun when you’re a kid. Dad hammered together a containment box and filled it with the sand and Allen and I would play in it using Mom’s good colander as a sifter and her cookie cutters as molds. One day, Allen suggested that I let him bury me in the sand and I agreed, having never been buried in sand before.

We dug a hole the length of my body and after I stretched out in the trench, Allen covered my body with the heavy, damp sand. I was completely immobilized with only my head sticking out. Inspired by whatever demons posses him, my brother managed to find a baby snake that was really no bigger than a very long worm, and held it so that it dangled over my mouth saying, “If you yell for Mom, I’m dropping it in.” He was likely around 5 at that time, which would put me at 10. I was completely terrified. I had no doubt at all that he would follow through on the threat and I also knew that even if he did not drop it “in” per se, he would, indeed, drop it and the snake would be on my face, if only for a moment. Snakes, drowning and falling (as opposed to heights, of which I am not afraid) have always been my big terrors except when I was very small and was temporarily scared to death of wolves (thank you, Brothers Grimm). The other three fears are still with me as a grown up.

Allen is quite patient and he stayed there, kneeling beside me, holding the squirming little snake in the air, for quite a while. This was in the old days when moms would hurry you out of the house right after breakfast when the weather was nice and not expect to see you again until it got dark. Knowing that told me Mom wasn’t coming and would not look for us for a very long time. A very long time it was indeed, because after he became bored with tormenting me and the snake, he left me there stuck in the sand and wondering what he’d done with the snake. Luckily, (I guess) Mom came out at some point to hang laundry on the line and heard me yell for her, so she came over and dug me out. Allen was always unabashedly Mom’s favorite child, so when I stayed in my room for the rest of that day and into the next, she was probably relieved that the situation did not have to be addressed at all. And it wasn’t.

Yes, YOU, punk! You know what you did! Freezers Eat Children Mama liked to be social and not long after we moved to the Ridge, she joined a group of ladies called “Homemakers.” They would get together once a month and make endless crafts of decoupage, purses from upholstery straps, Christmas trees from carefully folded Reader’s Digest and Lord help us all, marzipan. When they made fruit shaped marzipan, Mama cleverly hid the Tupperware container full of miniature sweet deliciousness in the bottom of our old chest freezer. I feel for her because she really thought I would not find them there. Mom always underestimated or overestimated me. Now let me repeat that: What she did was hide them at the bottom of our old chest freezer. The stepstool was required for me to lean over far enough to dig out the little sealed container from under and between the many butcher paper-wrapped packages, loaves of bread and bundles of laundry.

Apparently, 1968 was also a very bad year for haircuts.

Yes, I said “bundles of laundry.” Back then, people ironed clothes to remove the wrinkles and make the fabric smooth. It was quite a revolution when “wash and wear” clothes were produced because they did not require ironing to look nice. We now call this “polyester” and understand that “look nice” is subjective to the time and current fashion trend. Most of us would still hang wet clothes on the clothesline to dry. Technology is wonderful, don’t get me wrong. I am a techno-enthusiast to the nth degree. Technology, has, however, robed today’s generation of kids of the amazing experience of running through long rows of cotton bed sheets hanging on clotheslines and the incredibly fresh smell that comes from line dried clothes. As most people know, clothes come from a dryer warm and soft and wrinkle-free. Many folks don’t know that clothes come off of a clothesline smelling lovely, but stiff and wrinkled. This was where ironing came into play.

Ironing was something that all housewives did when I was growing up, most while watching television because while it is a rewarding job in that your clothes look great afterward, it’s also the most godawful, horribly boring task imaginable. Steam irons were not yet the norm, so you “sprinkled” clothes. You “sprinkled” with a tool that looks like this:

…which was jammed into the top of a Pepsi bottle. You would then shake water from the bottle out onto the clothes and let them sit for a few minutes to absorb the water. This was not intended to saturate the clothes, but merely dampen them a bit. Once they were all loose and damp, you would begin the ironing process, which brings us back to our marzipan story.

If you did not get all of your laundry ironed that day, you would bundle it up in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer so you did not have to sprinkle it again. You just pull it out, set it on the porch in the sun in the bag, and 20 minutes or so later, you’ve got damp clothes again and you resume your ironing. If you leave the clothes out without freezing them, you have to either re-sprinkle or risk mildew on your clothes or both.

That is how I ended up nearly dying in the chest freezer on a Sunday morning.

I knew those marzipans were in the freezer somewhere because the previous day, my mother emerged from the back porch with one in her hand, pretended to me that it was something else. I’d already searched everywhere on the back porch except in the freezer, so clearly, that was where they were.

I woke up early before everyone else and my craving for marzipan was overwhelming. I slipped out of bed, still in my ‘jamas, and dragged the yellow step stool over to the chest freezer. I opened the top, leaned over and started digging.

If we had a year that was not quite as poor as the other years, Daddy and Uncle Delmar would buy a pig together and our freezer would be filled with pig pieces wrapped in white paper labeled in black grease pencil, fresh from Field’s Packing Company. Mom made her own ice by freezing water in waxed cardboard gallon milk cartons and let me tell you, those things are heavy.

I pushed away tenderloin, pork butt, bundles of laundry, bricks of ice and finally, I saw the blue bowl at the bottom of the freezer. I leaned in and my fingers grazed the edge of the burping sealed lid and that was when I lost my balance and fell straight in.

There was just enough room for me to slip into the tunnel I’d dug out as the lid dropped onto my calves. I had no wiggle room to try and ease myself up again even if I could have gotten a grip on anything to my sides. I quickly realized that struggling would do me exactly no good at all. The most I accomplished was scraping up my arms on the packages around me. I pushed with my hands, but had neither the upper body strength nor the angle advantage to move my body enough to escape. It was very cold. It was hard to breathe, both from the inverted position of my body and the fact that I was in a semi-closed freezer with only my lower legs propping the lid open. I did what I believe any child in that position would do. I called for my Mom. Since Mom was sleeping across the house and my head was in a freezer, she could not hear me. When I realized that was in vain, I did what I believe any child in that position would do. I ate the hell out of that marzipan.

I have no idea how long I was in the freezer. It could have been hours or it could have been 20 minutes. When Dad came in and pulled me out, my teeth were chattering and I was shivering. My jaws ached because frozen marzipan is hard to chew. Mom made a cup of hot tea for me and wrapped me up in a blanket.

Once I warmed up and it appeared I would live, she spanked me for eating the marzipan. I hated catching a spanking, but my attitude was smug. I’d DONE the Sullivan show and that marzipan was not coming back. Except that it did. A couple of hours later, I vomited it all back up again. To this day, my stomach rolls if I eat marzipan.

More Like Social Caterpillars Than Butterflies We went to church on Sundays and would stick with one until Mom managed to offend some key pillar of society and then it would be time to check out a different church until things cooled down. My mom had a lot of things going for her, but a filter was not one of them and she would always eventually step over some tactical social line and say the wrong thing at the wrong time and end up in a sticky situation. We became church Nomads, shuffling like refugees from one to the next to the next. Fortunately, in our neck of the woods, there was no lack of churches.

Thankfully, Mom had plenty of family who were all very forgiving folks and this blessed me with the gift of a plethora of cousins and aunts and uncles, so we weren’t usually lacking for companionship. Dad was an only child and as a result, his contribution to the family collective was minimal. It was likely a good thing Grandma only had one child since Dad’s childhood amounted to a series of years of abuse, neglect and abandonment that is too horrible to even see print outside of psychological case studies. It’s a wonder Dad was not more broken than he was.

The big social event of the year was always the Hardin Family Reunion, which occurred the Sunday prior to Labor Day. That was the day we got to see family we never got to see the rest of the year, as well as a whole bunch of family members we did not even know and just mostly ignored. The Hardins were the family of my grandfather’s mother, Grandmammy. Grandmammy died at somewhere in the vicinity of age 100 and the family continues to meet even now on that same date. The reunion was always at a park in Owensboro at one of the pavilions and involved tables and tables of potluck dishes. There was always enough food to feed an army and an army we were. The Hardins were very fertile, so cousins and aunts and uncles a plenty would gather with their hands full of coolers, Frisbees and green Jello with carrot shavings.

The park would be Legion Park, Chatauqua Park or Ben Hawes Park. All three parks had plenty of play equipment intended to cause children grievous bodily harm.

I look at it and I can still hear the screams of children as their bones cracked and splintered.

There were merry-go-rounds powered by fathers trying to outdo one another in strength and stamina, which always, invariably, resulted in sufficient centrifugal force to fling children into the air and onto the ground with a sick thud. I once painfully dislocated my thumb from just such a flight and subsequent landing.

At least one large slide would be in the area and it was high, high, high in the air with ups and downs in the metal slide surface, which was always hotter than the hammered down hinges of hell. The scariest part of the slide was the transition from climbing way, way up the narrow ladder to settling into a seated position at the top. The height and angle of the slides were such that we would fly down the slide surface and sail off of the end of the slide, desperately trying to establish some kind of footing on the landing, each of us fervently wishing that having a parent catch us was not just for babies. At some point, “tornado” slides became popular and the twisting, enclosed versions of slides were added to the parks, which put friction burns on the list of potential injuries for the day.

The Witch’s Hat. Also known as “Death on a Stick”

“Witch hats” or “Flying Jennies” as they were called further north, were cast iron poles thrust into a large iron ring which was suspended from the top of the pole with iron chains. The idea was that several children would grab hold of the ring and run hard then let go at once and spin around in a sort of pseudo-merry-go-round fashion. If one of the kids let go (or were flung to their death, let’s say), the child opposite the victim releaser would suffer an immediate weight distribution that would send him or her careening into the iron pole now in front of them. Rarely was this device used for good instead of evil and rarely did I ever see any group of children navigate it and not have someone end up with a goose egg. Still, we flocked to it as though our embrace of its iron arms was some kind of badge of courage. Inevitably, the sick *thump* would come.

Seesaws. Keeping chiropractors and osteopaths wealthy for decades.

Seesaws were wooden, splintery and the beloved playground equipment for bullies who would lure you into several fun moments of see-sawing once the weight distribution was established by who would sit where on the board. At some strategic moment while you were high in the air, the bully would exit the seesaw and you would plummet to the ground with your coccyx now rammed upward into your brainstem. Seesaws were great when they worked, but were subject to tremendous degrees of trust, typically unwarranted. My friend, Karen, describes it this way, “What I remember is the person who would slowly, slowly scootch forward, then slide back, plummeting themselves to the ground where they would absorb the impact with their prepared feet as you, poor fool, would be hurled into the air.” That is exactly how I remember it too.

Provided we survived playing with all of our cousins at once and working through any brewing family feuds that might be worked through via playground malice, we would eventually be called to eat.

This is what our family reunions looked like. Mind you, this was not a Hardin Family Reunion. This was my Granny’s birthday. But the Hardin Family Reunions looked like this.

Some reverent soul in the family would lead a lengthy blessing of the food and the day. It was intended to garner a feeling of family unity and bestow an opinion of supreme holiness onto the person chosen to say grace. As soon as that “Amen” hit the ground running, so did we. We would descend upon the feast like locusts, sampling bits of everything here and there, popping up like whack-a-moles from our blankets or picnic tables to get a bit more of this dish or to recommend that dish to everyone. By the end of the meal, we were all stuffed and wanted to make room for more.

The best part of family reunions for me was getting a chance to see Aunt Zula and Uncle Joe. Aunt Zula was my maternal grandfather’s sister and she and my Uncle Joe were two of the kindest people I ever met.

Uncle Joe and Aunt Zula

At my mother’s funeral, coming back as an adult, I spoke to my cousin, Nancy, who is their daughter and asked if my memories of them affected by childhood filters or if they really were as special as I remembered. She assured me that they were and an inside part of me glowed to know that there really are people in the world who are that wonderful. Around the time my mother died, I was in a very jaded and angry mindset a good bit of the time. This new gave me hope and I believe is part of what led me to a better emotional place for the long term. Aunt Zula was a nurse and Uncle Joe was an engineer at NASA. When I later worked on an F-16 prototype plane at Edwards Air Base for NASA, I thought of my Uncle Joe. I even named my first son after Uncle Joe. They live in far off Alabama, so I see them even less often now, but my admiration of them remains. I was so fortunate to have really good people in my mother’s family to offer role models for how to be a good person.

Aunt Betty and Uncle Delmar… Parents v2.0

My Uncle Delmar and Aunt Betty (Mom’s sister) were like a second set of parents for me and now that my parents are gone, they are my mother and father figures. My Aunt Sue was my mother’s wombmate and I will always feel connected to her in a special way because of all she shared with my mother. Then there is the person to whom I can never say, “I’m sorry” enough…

My Poor Aunt Patsy… Mama had, well, let’s see… Ann, Lindley, Nell, Sue (my mother’s twin sister), Jimmy, Betty and Pat. So that’s seven siblings, plus the oldest, Minnie Mae, who died when she was a young girl. That means my Granny (not ever to be confused with the aforementioned “Grandma”) had nine children, including one set of twins, and let me tell you, as nearly as I could tell, she was good at it. All of her babies were born at home, as were most of mine, and I am told where delivered by Dr. Jenkins.

Pa (Granny’s husband) died when I was five from Black Lung Disease from working in the coal mines for years. He had his own coal mine, in fact. By that time, most of Granny’s kids were grown up and on their own with only Patsy still at home.

After Pa died, she never remarried or dated, so she was a widow the whole time I knew her. She and Aunt Pat continued to live in the house Pa built for his family for many years to come. When Granny died, she had lived in a long term care facility for a long while. When she moved out of the family home, my Uncle Delmar and his boys pulled it down because parts of it were falling down on its own.

He said that the main structure of it, however, was still completely sound and just a devil to pull down. When they went through the attic, they found all kinds of bazillion year old stuff up there. What I would have given to be the one to go through it! Something I did end up with when Mom died was a tiny box with dried little fish inside that says, “Daddy’s minners.”

When Pa Mitchell would go fishing, he used minnows for bait and would keep them in his tackle box. He called them “minners” and it still makes me smile to see them there.

My Pa and my Daddy outside of the indestructible house that Pa built.

Let me tell you, my soul sister cousin, Delena, and I tortured the complete hell out of our poor Aunt Pat. She graduated high school shortly before I can remember anything at all and went to a business school in town where they taught her how to stand right and how to put her hair into an updo and how to put on her make up just right because, you know, that’s what ladies going to business school needed to know in the 1960’s.

Business Executive, circa 1969 or so Of course, this meant that Aunt Pat’s room at Granny’s house was an absolute cornucopia of make-up and perfumes and things that little girls whose ages were hanging around the single-digit zone were just dying to get into.

She also had one prize possession that just tore us apart because we couldn’t get to it: her beloved “Easy Money” game, which was basically a knock off of Monopoly. Aunt Pat kept her Easy Money game as far from us as she could which, of course, not only made perfect sense, but also caused us want to mess with it all the more. Neither I nor Delena had one clue how to play Easy Money, nor did we have any interest in actually learning. We just wanted to fool with it because she said we couldn’t, rendering it somewhere on the level with the Holy Grail in terms of things that absolutely must be in our hands.

To me and Delena, Aunt Pat was everything that was grown up and sophisticated and special in the world. She knew how to stand like a fashion model and she drove a cool car and she went to college. I remember waiting for her school bus to come, so around the time we were thinking that about her, she was barely out of her teens. It’s amazing the different perspectives we have as children.

Hugging... Strangling... It is such a fine line. Aunt Pat loved me when she didn’t have to, that is for sure. My cousin, Delena, lived just right down the hill from Granny and my mother did not drive, so whenever Mama got lonesome, she would have Daddy drop her and me off at Granny’s house on his way to work in Owensboro at 0 dark thirty in the morning and then pick us up on the way home again. At some point in the day, Aunt Betty would bring Delena up the hill and the ladies would visit while Delena and I raised nine different kinds of hell. She was my absolute partner in crime. Playing with Delena are the happiest times I can remember in my childhood. She was my NeeNee and I loved her.

By the time early afternoon rolled around, just about everybody was fed up with us and we knew it was around time to start poking at Granny as to whether or not she reckoned we could go screw around in Aunt Pat’s room. To us, it was a veritable wonderland just waiting for our little hands to explore. Looking back now as an adult, I can’t imagine what that kind of violation of her privacy was like for her.

Sgt Delena, reporting for duty. Our mission, and we always decided to accept it, was to get into as much trouble as possible. Nevertheless, I put all that on Granny because she was the one who would, maybe two or three time out of five, tell us to just go on back there, but don’t make a big mess. Of course, we just trashed the ever lovin’ crap out of her room every single time, dolling ourselves up with her make up, trying on her wigs and hair pieces, wearing her pretty dresses and pointy toed pumps all over the place. I know we must have made her just flat out want to kill us dead. When I close my eyes, and I can still clearly see that room in my mind’s eye, just as I am sure Aladdin could see the cave of the 40 thieves when he closed his.

Yes, that’s how it was. The expression on my Aunt Sue’s face says it all.

“Lord, help me.”

I want to take this moment and apologize to my cousin George, who is Aunt Pat’s only begotten son who came along almost a decade after we serially ransacked her room/sacred space. He’s almost forty now and has a family of his own and hardly knows who I am, but George, honey, if your mama was bitter, suspicious or mean by the time she got around to having you, there’s a really good chance that Delena and I had a little (or a lot) to do with that. Sorry, little bro. My Granny and Martine and Her Attack Bird… My Granny was a pistol, as anyone who knew her would tell you. She was one of the finest women I ever met and truly embodied what I envision the word “Christian” to mean in its nicest sense. She was dedicated to God and had a kindness about her that permeated her every interaction with others. She was from that sturdy stock of independent, strong people that you rarely see anymore. I don’t recall that she ever had an indoor bathroom. If she got one, it was after I left home. It is important at this point to frame up that “Grandma,” who I discussed in very early chapters, was my father’s mother. She was the minister who wept on behalf of Jesus a good bit. “Granny” is my mother’s mother and was a sweetheart. Unfortunately, they were both named “Mary,” so that’s no help at all.

My Granny. The sweetest woman to ever inhabit our world.

She had what we in Kentucky called a “slop jar” or a “pot” and even had a modified cane chair that held the pot so when you went potty on it, you were actually sitting and not squatting over it as was usually the case. Granny actually had a giant plastic cabbage rose on top of her pot and some gold rickrack around the edges of the lid because that’s just how Granny rolled. When Granny asked if you were “on the pot,” she was not referring to marijuana.

This was all the height of luxury, especially when you considered the alternative, which was the outhouse or “toilet.” The toilet sat a good and thankful distance away from the house and believe me, there was no cute little moon carved into the door of this sucker. Your followed a winding trail almost into the woods and by the time you were carefully edging your tender white bottom onto the splintery wooden seat, you’d battled everything from wasps to snakes to any other form of wildlife to get there. When you were done, there would be no downy soft Cottonelle waiting for your befouled hiney. There was a Sears catalog and you would tear out one or two of the noncolored pages (there were many at that time) and wad them up over and over until they was soft and then wipe-a-doodle-doo. I imagine I do not have to coach you to consider the smell of such a place.

Granny by the road in front of her house; the road that led to Martine’s house where I would routinely get eaten by a bird. Sometimes, likely to save me from my very own orneriness with Delena, Mama would set off walking and the two of us would go visit some of the people who lived around Granny. Red Hill, Kentucky, much like the non-town in which I personally grew up, was not and still is not a huge metropolis by any means, but Mama knew a good many people around there and off we’d go.

One of the women, Martine Troxel, lived in a house that was, to my young eyes, a museum of Cool Stuff. She evidently traveled a good bit because there were all kinds of interesting paintings and figurines and other kinds of knickknacks around just dying to be felt up by little fingers just like mine. Being in Miss Martine’s house was like being in church, though, and I treated her things with considerably more reference than I did poor Aunt Pat’s belongings. I thought Martine was beautiful. She had her jet black hair styled in a trendy, ever-so-smart shorty bob and wore the most fashionable black rhinestone cat- eye glasses.

Martine had a dog named Tippy who could do tricks and I thought that was just about the finest thing I’d ever seen in my whole life with the possible exception of – we must pause for a moment of silence – her mynah bird. Her mynah bird could TALK and I found the thing fascinating beyond belief.

Proving itself to be a perfect judge of character, that bird hated me more than life itself and would give me the stink eye from the minute I’d get in the house and I want to tell you I never did anything to that damned bird to make it act that way. After making rounds through the open rooms looking at Maxine’s Cool Stuff and seeing all of Tippy’s tricks, I would inevitably make my way around to The Bird’s cage. While I should better remember the name of that bird, it escapes me, now that I am old and such. Having been duly fascinated when Maxine would take The Bird out of its cage and let him tool around on her shoulder for long periods of time and eat things she fed to him directly and such, I became determined that this bird would do my bidding as well. Every single time I saw the bird, I would work up my nerve up and go over to its big old wrought iron cage and gingerly extend my little finger through the vertical bars of the cage. I never knew exactly what I expected to have happen beyond what always did actually happen. Was a bird almost as big as my head going to hop off of his steady perch, light onto my dinky little finger and sit there for a spell, reciting poetry and telling me what I good girl I was? Would the bird lean over, irritated as all hell, and bite a plug out of my finger?

Let’s just say that The Bird never really got around to using my tiny digit as a resting place. Every single time, eyeballing me the entire time, that bird would bite my finger and every single time, I’d start wailing like I’d been mortally wounded, waving my finger around and running into walls in a fit of sheer hysterics.

Mama and Maxine would roll their eyes and give me a cold washrag to wrap up my most recent battle wound. Mama would ask me some rhetorical question about when I was ever going to learn to not put my finger in the bird’s cage and I would stare hate dangers menacingly at the bird from across the room with my face half-buried in Mama’s ample, though now wet-with-tears, bosom.

The next visit, we would do it all over again.

Other Interesting Women, Including Mama…

Sometimes, we would go visit Cousin Tiny. I don’t know whose cousin Cousin Tiny was exactly, nor do I know what – if anything different - Cousin Tiny’s real name actually was. Tiny she was; a little bird-like woman with a shock of gray, wiry hair. I remember being terrified to go into her house, but I have no memory of why or even if I had ever actually been in her house at all. I was also scared to death of Cousin Tiny herself for reasons I cannot recall or may not have even known at the time. By all accounts through the family, Cousin Tiny, who died before I ever even hit ten-years-old, was a delightful woman, full of stories and kindness. She was a wonderful cook and would try to lure me into the house with treats of all sorts. As she’d get close to me, I would scream like all daylights until she’d finally retreat back into the house again. Mama told me she cried because I was afraid of her, but I’m not sure how much of that was true and how much of it was Mama trying to push my guilt buttons.

When we were walking, Mama would always tell me stories. Sometimes, she would point out the house of the lady who lived down by the railroad tracks right where they went around the bend. The house was big and old and falling in and Mom would tell me about how much that lady had loved her animals and had them in the house with her all the time, even her chickens and her cows! This was fascinating to me. Even more so was the fact that she was rumored to be a Witch, which I found to be positively delicious and Mama told me that when the train came around the tracks and ran into her cow as it stood on the tracks and killed it dead, she swore out her revenge. She bought up cans and cans of lard and went out and greased the railroad tracks and cursed the train and do you know that train derailed right off the tracks? That was always one of my favorites of Mom’s stories and she loved to tell it almost as much as I loved to hear it.

Mama soon after she was married, no doubt spinning a yarn of epic proportions.

Another one of Mom’s favorite stories was about a woman she knew who put up with years of abuse from her husband. “No one liked him,” Mom would say with great assurance, “and his wife was the one who always spoke well of him even though everybody knew how he treated her.” She told me that one night, the man came home drunk and was about to beat her again when he found he had trouble standing up, so he went in to the bed and collapsed onto it, passed out cold. The woman decided in that moment that she’d had plenty and enough of his fists, so she took out her sewing kit and spent a good bit of the night stitching her husband into the bed sheet by hand. She knew that once he passed out drunk , there was no way he would wake up for several hours, so she put the other side of the sheet over him and started sewing as close to his body as she could get in tight little stitches. By the time he woke up, she had him trussed up to the point that he could not move, all inside that bed sheet. She waited until he was fully awake with him cussing and fussing and threatening her, then she started grabbing anything she could find like a fireplace poker and a baseball bat, and commenced to just beating the complete crap out of him. He went from telling her he was going to kill her to begging her to stop. She assured him that if he did anything to her again, he’d better kill her because she knew he had to go to sleep again at some point and she had plenty of bed sheets and thread. In Mama’s version, he was good as gold after that, but I never had that much faith in people changing.

Mama had a really unique way of seeing things and expressing herself, which I appreciated even as a child. A young woman of questionable virtue, for instance, was said by Mama to have “round heels,” which I did not fully understand until I was in my twenties and it finally dawned on me what she meant while I was watching a television commercial for Weebles. Hmmm. I could never look at a Weeble the same way again without imagining them as having some kind of tarnished chastity.

Mama experienced life a little more fully than the rest of us did, having her own interpretations of the things that went on around her. Never mind that her version often well exceeded what any of the rest of us might take away from the same experience. Mama’s recounting of anything that happened to her was always bigger, badder, brighter and far more exciting than what any of the rest of us saw. I won’t say she lied, but she could surely extrapolate and work a story until it fit whatever she needed it to be. My Uncle Delmar, who became the patriarch of our substantial family after Pa died, once said that if Mama was telling you a story and you wanted to know what happened, just divide by three and you’d be in the right neighborhood. Mama just lived life bigger than the rest of us did.

If there was one thing my mother hated more than the boring old truth, it was housecleaning. About once a month, Daddy would go on a rampage and decide the house needed to be cleaned. He’d start in the back of the house and begin sweeping, under beds as far as he could get, behind doors and in every nook and cranny he could access and whatever got into his path, fell to the broom. He’d sweep everything right into the living room floor in a giant mound and there it’d sit. It was the job me and my brothers to go through the mound and get it cleaned up. Rarely was that completed during the same day as it was pushed there. Most times, it was a process involving several days. To my mind, that was how everyone cleaned house.

If company was coming over and it had been a little while since Mama had washed the dishes, she’d start hiding stuff. You’d be surprised how many dirty pots and pans you can cram into an oven or under the broiler. If the dishes really got away from her, she’d spread out towels on the bathroom floor, run hot soapy water into the bathtub and bring all of dirty dishes in there. They’d soak in the tub for a while and then she’d drain the water out, get a pitcher and continually douse the dishes in hot water from the faucet until the soap was cleared off of them. After that, they’d be spread all over the bathroom floor on the towels to dry.

Mom and Granny, clowning in front of our house. Mom, bunny ears... You’re doing it wrong. When I turned ten, Mama began a series of trips in and out of the hospital that would define the rest of her life. For the next thirty years, it seemed like she was perpetually either in the hospital, usually for surgery, recovering from surgery or getting ready for surgery. I can’t imagine how much money her surgeon ultimately made off of her. He must have had a Chapman wing on his house is all I know. She had an amazing array of things wrong with her at any given time and it seems like the times when she was up, healthy and capable were few and far between.

Much to everyone’s surprise, in the 1970’s, Mama did ultimately get her driver’s license. As long as I knew, she always closed her eyes as she drove over a bridge, no matter how long that bridge might be. She had to have a car with electric windows because anytime she was driving and tried to “roll” the window down or up, she would automatically turn the steering wheel in the same direction as the window handle was turning and drive into the other lane or edge off the road.

Mama evaluated landscape in terms of its photogenic fitness to be a jigsaw puzzle. One of the great pastimes for my Mama and Daddy was to “go for a drive.” We’d pile into the car and Dad would just drive around, no destination in mind, commenting on this or that, pointing out things along the way. This is not to be in any way confused with a “road trip.” We were simply driving around the area where we lived or where other family members lived. Sometimes, we’d end up on someone’s doorstep to see if they wanted to visit for a while. To me, “going for a drive” was some kind of fresh hell. I am still not a good car passenger and would rather set myself on fire than travel by car unless it’s a short distance. Kentucky is a beautiful state and Mama would inevitably, at some point in the drive, find the landscape mental snapshot she was looking for, look wistful and say, “That would sure make a pretty puzzle.”

Mama loved a good jigsaw puzzle. She had a folding table that was her puzzle table and on it at most times would be a puzzle in some level of completion. She was a puzzle snob. There had to be reasonable amounts of distinct color blocks represented. Sky. Water. Grass. Building. People. No huge piles of jellybeans or Where’s Waldo crap for Mama. She also had to have fully interlocking pieces (no oddly sloping sides on the pieces to cozy up to other pieces without actually locking together) and they had to be of a particular thickness. To pronounce a sunset, a farm scene, a view of the Ohio River or a forest as potentially making a “pretty puzzle” was the height of compliment.

Mama also loved to drive, in the days when homeland security simply meant having a .22 rifle and a shotgun side by side near the front door, to the airport. She’d park the car someplace close by and just sit there for hours, watching the planes land and take off. To the best of my knowledge she never got on one, but I’ve often wondered what she was thinking about or wishing or regretting or grieving as we’d sit there forever, watching those big metal birds do their thing.

Mama loved board games and she would often say, “I play’em ‘cause I’m BORED, get it? That’s why they’re called BORED games!” Yahtzee and Parcheesi were her favorites, but she would play just about any other competitive game. The ultimate threat when Mama was in the heat of a show down was to tell her victim, usually some boyfriend I’d managed to drag home who was wishing he was anywhere else at the time, that she was going to “Woe his soul.” We never knew exactly what all that entailed, but souls were woed. Oh yes. Souls were woed.

Mama’s Talents… My mother had two specific talents that occupied a good bit of her time: poetry and sewing. My father once remarked that if he needed a particular car part, he could describe it to my mother and in fifteen minutes, she will have sewn him up one better than he could buy in the store. That was the only time I ever heard my father give credit to the phenomenal gift my mother had as a seamstress. She handmade our clothes until I was well into high school, a fact I sorely resented at the time. I got my first pair of blue jeans my sophomore year and I was proud as all get out. Dad got a box of clothes from a thrift store in town and lo and behold! There they were! They fit me like they were made for me and Mama sewed some patches over the holes in the thighs and I was loaded for bear and walking tall. Lord have mercy! Baby’s got her blue jeans on! My second proudest clothing moment was when Dad managed to procure a navy blue pea coat. The jeans and that coat became my teenage uniform.

The famous pea coat and my one pair of jeans. Evidently, I was also having some kind of Napoleon crisis.

Mama made all sorts of things over time. Her favorite things to make as gifts were star pillows. She’d take 15 diamonds of equal size and put five together into a five pointed start to make the top, five to make the bottom and then use the remaining five to piece them together in between. She’d stuff the star, sew the opening, then cover a big button to match the material she’d used for the diamonds and run it through the middle and voila! Star pillow.

My first son, Joe, on one of Mama’s star pillows.

She made little dolls she called “Gremlins” by using two pieces of triangle shaped material for a body and then fashioning little tubes of material for arms and legs. Fringe made hair up and down the top of the triangle and she would embroider or paint a face on the middle of the triangle. She made gorgeous doll clothes and hated to find a Barbie doll or baby doll in a thrift store or at a yard sale that was naked. Before long, it would be in her basket or arms, ready to go home and have its hair trimmed up, its face washed and a whole new wardrobe made.

The wickedly creative sewing talent she inherited from Granny. Both of them started out on “treadle” sewing machines that were non-electric. The machine was powered by a flat, cast iron filigree treadle on which you placed your feet and moved with a rocking motion to rotate the flywheel. Mom eventually graduated up to the electric variety. I’m not completely sure Granny ever did and I do know for a fact that my Granny’s old treadle sewing machine now sits in the front room of my cousin, Delena.

The native mom in her natural habitat (when she was not in the bed sick).

Both Granny and Pa crocheted. Granny made toilet paper covers of crocheted yarn that looked like everything from a poodle to a doll in a fancy dress. One year for Christmas, she gave everyone beautifully made, oh so delicate white snowflakes she’d crocheted and starched to high stiffness. She tatted her own lace, an art I’ve never seen duplicated by anyone else in my life, where by some grandmotherly magic, she could get a little bone shuttle flying and beautiful lace would appear out the other end. I cannot imagine even for a second the mechanics behind “tatting” and you know, I’m not completely sure I want to know because I liked it better when it was just magic.

Pa was a crochet master himself, but instead of using the dainty, metal hooks Granny favored, he whittled his own large sized hooks out of wood. Whenever any of the kids or grandkids would outgrow clothes, he would take them and rip them into half inch or so strips, knot them together and crochet them into beautiful, multicolored, super- sturdy rugs. His many grandkids would sit on the floor beside him and wind those endless knotted rag strips into the biggest balls of, well, knotted rag strips you ever did see. What I wouldn’t give for one of Pa Mitchell’s oval rag rugs now. I am blessed to have a wooden doll and a hair barrette that he carved for me. Mama had a biscuit pan that he had hammed out himself and no telling what happened to that.

Granny in the 1960s

Mom’s other talent was writing poetry. She wrote a poem when my son, Joe, was born and it was published in our local paper. She wrote poems about almost everything. Not long before she died, my Aunt Pat copied all of her poems, which were written in longhand, and put them into page protectors, then clipped them into a binder. Several of us got copies of that binder and what a job it must have been to put all of that together! There were poems about nature, about God, about her sisters, her parents, her husbands, her sons, her grandchildren, her stuffed bears… There were poems about everyone and everything…except me. Most of her writing was done after I left home, so I excitedly poured through the book, reading with pride the words my mother had written and tracing over her handwriting with my finger. She had such lovely penmanship and I always enjoyed how easily it flowed, one word into the next. I tried not to take it personally that I was so blatantly omitted because I do not believe Mom would ever intentionally hurt me. It was just…odd.

No one’s muse would this child be. No poem or sonnet or ode to me.

All I can do now is speculate as to why. I did not have the courage to ask her about it for the handful of months that she was alive after I received the poetry book. I knew she would be mortified by the oversight and would quickly write up a poem on my behalf.

Instead, something deeper was at work and I can only guess as to what it was. Maybe the other people in her life were safe. Her husbands had died. Her sons were devoted. I was the one who abandoned the family and rarely visited. I was the one with whom the dynamic was tilted when circumstances forced me to take over a lot of the day- to-day housework and family care while she was stuck in the bed a good bit of the time. Our roles reversed early on and we never recovered from that shift.

When it comes down to it, I think that the blatant omission is a symptom of a problem that affected our relationship from the time she started getting sick forward. The fact is that when the mud pies were put away and all the stories were told, my mom had no idea what to do with me or make of me. As hard as it is to think about it, my basic instinct on the situation is that my mother just didn’t like to think about me very much.

There is still plenty of story to be told before we get to the sick mom and the turning point where the world seemed to slide of its axis a bit. Suffice it to say, Mom could really write some nice poetry.

More About Pa Mitchell (The Man With The Minners) and Granny… I don’t remember a whole lot about Pa Mitchell, but I remember what he looked like. His face was long and drawn, but his smile could light up a room when it did come out. His skin was leathery and tough from years of work and the natural swarthy complexion that all of the Mitchell men plus my Aunt Nell inherited. He rolled his own cigarettes from a can of Half and Half tobacco right up until the day he died of emphysema and Black Lung Disease. When he would get fed up with us kids gathering around his big overstuffed arm chair pestering him, he would reach into the side of the chair and pull out some of the white stuffing and tell us that the “polie bars” who lived in chair were going to come get us and we’d better hide. He would offer to stay there and fend them off and told us to go on and save ourselves. It was a long time before I realized that polar bears did not live in Kentucky, much less in my grandfather’s arm chair. I mean, to our credit, we did have the evidence and all.

Pa Mitchell was a genuine coal miner and that was where he got the Black Lung Disease. He would go off into the mines to dig out coal and sell it. Mama used to tell a story of when a big lump of burning wood rolled out of the old coal stove and sat one of his rag rugs on fire. The kids flew into a panic, but Pa calmly picked up the burning rug and threw it outside and peed on it to put out the fire. No one else remembered this but her and somehow, I think that’s something that would kind of stick in your mind. My only thought when I heard the story was, “Tell me you did not re-use that rug.”

My Pa at Mom and Dad’s wedding.

Like my mother was given to do, my Granny said funny things from time to time. Instead of telling us she was going to spank us, she’d say she’d “paddle our canoes.” One day, my younger cousin, Randy, looked around and told her, “Granny, I ain’t got no ‘noe” and she started laughing so hard she forgot what he’d done to make her want to spank him in the first place. One of my best memories of my Granny was when she would kiss us ‘round the neck. I don’t remember how it came into being, but for as long as I could remember, she’d say, “C’mon over here and let me kiss you ‘round the neck” and we kids would run flying to her wide lap, crawl up into her warmth and she’d cover our necks in kisses. We’d be giggling and going mad because it tickled so much, but we would be absolutely immersed in her love and there was just nothing better.

Only in the South do you get something as wonderful as a “hug around the neck” and my Granny was just an expert at such a thing. We are very specific with our hugs and far from the chaste “back pat” hug (exactly 3 pats) where the lower bodies never touch, the “hug around the neck” is just about as close as you can get to another person and not know them in the Biblical sense. With a hug around the neck, you get right down in there and just love’em up. We’ll even sometimes ask permission by saying, “Come on over here and let me hug your neck.” This also removed the idea that we were actually going to make the effort our own selves to get up and go to them to do our hugging. If they wanted that hug, they could damned well come and get it.

That sort of thing is what I love about being a Southern woman and let me tell you, I would not want to be anything else. I just eat it up. I mean, where else can we say something profoundly horrible about someone else and completely vindicate ourselves simply by adding, “Bless his/her heart” afterward? We can talk mad shit about someone as long as we just add that codicil at the end and give a weak, sympathetic smile. Here’s how it works and you can tell me what you think:

“That Mike Garvey, you know, he goes out ever Friday night and drinks up all the rent before he comes home to Melinda and you know she’s been dealing with those emotionally disturbed kids of hers until she’s a frazzled crazy woman her own self, so here he comes back with no paycheck and drunk as a skunk asking Melinda if she’s got dinner ready at eleven o’clock at night and I was telling Dewayne that if Melinda had any sense, she would just up and kill him in his sleep… bless his heart.”

(See how that works?)

Anyway, Granny’s home was a place of cookies in a cookie jar shaped like a ceramic space ship, of grainy, unsweetened cornbread, buttermilk and baked chicken. Her Bible and crocheting always sat side by side on the little table by her chair and she loved to watch the ministers on TV on Sunday morning if she couldn’t get to church. Later in life, her arthritis got bad and the crocheting helped for a long time until the pain was so she couldn’t do it anymore. I can’t imagine what it was like for her the last time she put down that crochet hook. She was a dear lady and as nearly as I can remember, never had a bad word to say about anyone. She would admit that some people could be “hard to love,” but Granny always found a way and let me tell you, she hugged a lot of necks and blessed a lot of hearts in her life.

Granny doing some weeding. Dad couldn’t manage to get a photo of Allen walking around with a spoon in the air, but he got one of my Granny’s ass. Go figure.

By the time I was born, Granny was already 52 and retired as a school teacher. She worked as a cook at a place called the Mary Kendall Home for Girls in Owensboro. Mama and I would sometimes go visit her there at work. For reasons I cannot explain, I recall that the name of her boss was Mrs. Tergent. My Grandma, on the other hand, cleaned house for a wealthy Greek woman named Mrs. Panagos. Her husband owned the Owensboro Canning Factory where my Pappaw worked. I can remember the name of the people who were employers of my grandparents in the 1960’s. I can remember that my Grandma and Pappaw lived on Bolivar Street in Owensboro. I can remember that my phone number growing up was 502-275-4004. Granny’s phone number was 502-275- 4531. The combination to my locker in 8th grade was 18-24-36. I cannot remember my grandchildren’s birthdays or my own license plate number. That is just 9 kinds of wrong. On one of our visits to the Mary Kendall Home to see Granny, I was absolutely starving. Mom was talking to Granny and I wandered into the storeroom for the kitchen which was filled with food. I spied some delicious looking bananas and went back out into the kitchen and asked Granny if I could have one. She told me I could in that dismissive way that adults tell kids anything to get them to leave and so I ate a banana. Apparently, those bananas were inventoried and numbered because the second I finished up the banana all hell broke loose. My mother was distraught that I had stolen a banana from the poor girls at the Mary Kendall Home. My Granny was wondering what they were going to do without that banana. I have never in my life seen so much drama over a banana. Because of my heinous crime, my mother forced me to empty my piggy bank and take the entire contents to Mrs. Tergent and apologize for “stealing” the banana. I cannot imagine what the inflation index would do to mark up a banana that cost me over $8.00 in the 1960’s.

Granny outside of the Mary Kendall Home for Girls - a.k.a. “The Scene of the Crime” Then I Got Old and Went to School… I was eager to start school because I knew there was just a big ol’ world out there waiting and I was not even close to being involved in it from where I was at home. I knew my success would likely come through the art of competitive baton twirling or being the world’s greatest female country singer ever and I expected I would refine both of those talents at school. I started out in Mrs. Tanner’s class at Utica Elementary and then when we moved to Pleasant Ridge, I went to the little school there. It was a beautiful building that later turned into a printing shop after the school was closed.

The school experience for me turned out to be less of me taking the world by the tail and more like ten and a half years of misery for me. Whether it was my homemade clothes or the fact that my parents raised chickens or the way I talked or well, heck, just pick something, I was a target and I think I was probably teased every single day until I left school the middle of my junior year. I was a good student and enjoyed learning. I loved being around other adults and hearing them speak. I loved the way they controlled a classroom and how orderly things (usually) were.

The kids, on the other hand, were a nightmare. They were pros and honed in on any weakness, any fault, any frailty and just hammered it to death. Looking back on my school time, that is when my memories really begin to fade. I am forced to wonder if maybe I was just a strange, unlikeable kid. There are so few actual, contextual memories and past the age of 9 or 10; there just abstract feelings associated with situations like home, school and church. Teasing seemed to follow me where ever I went. I was a magnet for and I had no idea how to make it stop. Now, I can look back and see a pattern of helplessness and lack of support, but when I was in the moment, all I could do was hunker down and pray it would stop. In memory, it feels like it just never, ever did and there was no safe bunker in which to hide.

The teasing went on for the rest of my school years in one form or another. Sometimes, I don’t feel like it ever really stopped. I can’t imagine what it is specifically about a young child that sends out the “victim” energy, but whatever it is, I sure had it and we’re talking I had it in spades. Some of my kids had it and some did not. Even as an adult after taking many psychology classes and specifically, child psychology classes, I still can’t imagine what causes a certain segment of kids to descend like ravenous dogs on the kid who puts out the victim energy. It’s like some bizarre, Lord of the Flies thing that happens anytime more than three or four kids gather in one place. Maybe it’s preparation for the way most adults insist on dealing with politics or religions. If it’s different from you, kill it.

Professional Victim

In the time of my elementary school days, I remember three girls being good to me. Maria Atkins was quiet and smart and all the teachers loved her. She was kind to everyone and anytime the teacher arbitrarily decided the whole class needed to get a spanking because she’d heard noise from the classroom while she was in the office, Maria was spared. She knew Maria had been sitting quietly at her desk while the rest of us were cutting a rug in the class. She was right. In 4th and 5th grades, Debbie Forsythe and Charlene Greer, who were a year younger than I was, were also very kind to me. It was hard to have an actual friendship when my mother didn’t drive and they lived a good distance away from me, but it was so great to have at least a few people who were not picking on me. Rather than my great escape, school became just one more place where I did not want to be.

Pleasant Ridge Middle School

As a result, I quickly discovered I was not a fan of school. It was far from the beautiful escape I’d hoped it would be, nor was it the training ground for my future career in professional baton twirling and the winning of country music awards. I made friends with some of the teachers and they were the people I admired most. In the third grade, we had a lovely teacher some in from the city. She lived in Owensboro, which was our closest big town, about twenty miles away. She had a bodacious updo and wore pretty clothes and her name was Martha Curtis. I admired her tremendously and thought she was every bit as classy and mod as Marlo Thomas from That Girl, which any child of the 60’s can tell you was saying plenty.

My only photo of Ms. Curtis, tattered and worn (the photo, not Ms Curtis).

Other than her tremendous sense of fashion, I remember Ms. Curtis (she was the first “Ms.” I knew) for three specific things. One was that she kept me after school one day when I was running for the bus and pulled me into the tiny school library. She told me that if I missed the bus, she would drive me home. She held my hands in hers so that my nails were up and looked at them for a moment and then said, “I want this to stop.” I know now she was talking about the fact that my fingernails were always completely ragged and chewed down to the quick and my hands shook all the time. I thought at the time that she was pissed that I’d used a red Crayola to color on what little remained of my fingernails so that I could have a splendiferous manicure like she had. She held onto my hands, which made me extremely uncomfortable, and waited until I made eye contact with her. She held my gaze and said, “It’s not always like this. It will get better. We will find a way to make it better.” My heart soared when she said that and I still had no idea what she was referring to specifically, but just the mere spark of an idea that “it,” whatever “it” was, could somehow get better was like stepping out of the darkness and into the sunlight for me. She told me to hurry for the bus and I did and I made it and went home to the exact same life and went back to school the next day to the exact same life and nothing changed for probably a little over thirty years. She didn’t lie though. It did get better. It just took a lot longer than I believe she thought it would. When I look back now, I have to wonder what exactly she envisioned would be different. She never spoke to me of “it” again and I now have no idea what exactly she was talking about. I cherish that moment, however, when I had the courage to believe things would be better.

The second thing I remember her for is that third grade was when we had to start using a pen instead of a pencil and had to write in cursive instead of printing. I have always had a tremendous affinity for the written – as in from a pen – word and I was a prolific letter writer in other times of my life. Now, if a person does not have an email address, they rarely hear from me. I still enjoy seeing my many lists (I’m a Virgo and lists are part and parcel) written in longhand and sometimes I will journal in it as well. Ms Curtis ordered plastic pens for us that were long and had the figure 8 shape of a woman near the grip, tapering off to a slender tip at the top. Mine was bright green. They were easy to hold and wrote beautifully. I became addicted to a steady, lovely flow of ink at that age and it persisted. There’s nothing better than a really good pen. In case you are wondering, my favorite right now is a Pilot Precise V5RT. I buy them by the case. I also, as you may have guessed, have exceptionally nice handwriting. Get me to autograph this book for you and you will see for yourself.

The third thing I remember her for is the other bit of culture she attempted to bring to a ragtag group of little country kids. She, Goddess bless her heart, tried to teach us Spanish. In Pleasant Ridge, Kentucky in 1969, we did not have one soul who spoke Spanish. (That would all change for us in a couple of years – well, sort of) We were a bunch of little hillbilly white kids who could not have even told her in what country Spanish was spoken. She would roll a big TV on an audiovisual cart into the classroom a few times a week and we would watch a show where a Latin gentleman who made my little girl hormones swoon (because he looked so much like Ricky Ricardo) would teach us how to say the words. You have not lived until you have heard the sounding out of the Spanish language by children with a Kentucky accent. It is glorious.

Two years later, we were mesmerized when a young man named Lauro P. Quizon, Jr moved into our neighborhood, followed closely by a young woman named Elizabeth Lane. Lauro, or “Jo-Jo” as he preferred to be called, was Filipino and we were enchanted by him. He quickly became the most popular boy in school and we exploited him to the extreme, begging him to say words for us in his native language and to let us touch his hair and his face. He was so accommodating of us and everyone loved him as nearly as I could tell. We thought what he was speaking was Spanish as we had learned it and it was not until I got to Guam many years later that he was probably speaking Tagalog.

Elizabeth and her sister Dorothy were the first African American family to move into our school district as far back as anyone going to the school could remember. Liz had beautiful freckles and big poofy pony tails and a sweet little girl stutter. Funny? Oh my word, Elizabeth was funny. Dorothy was younger than Elizabeth and was a little more serious than her gregarious sister. Elizabeth loved candy more than any child I have ever known. With the arrival of these two, Pleasant Ridge was now officially “ethnically diverse.” Booya!

That was the same year that I was dying to win the Fall Festival Queen title. The plan was that the kids would collect donations for the school and every dollar was a vote. The boy and girl who pulled in the most votes, got to be the Fall Festival King and Queen. It is similar to our current American government system in which cash translates out to votes. Somehow, I managed to get a little over $6.00, which was enough to get into the top three, but I had to have my votes turned in by the end of the school day before the Fall Festival that night.

My mother convinced me to leave my votes at home that day because my grandparents were coming by with another dollar for me. She promised she would bring my votes up to me before the end of the school day. She didn’t come. I moped around all day waiting for her to come and by the time I got onto the bus, I was a mess of hysterics, devastated that my dreams of being Fall Festival queen had been crushed. My teacher, Miss Ward, leaned into another teacher and said, “Isn’t it pathetic?” I overheard her and stuck my tongue out at her. She looked shocked, but neither of them did anything about such a flagrant show of disrespect. I liked Miss Ward too, but by that point, I was so jaded and distraught that I did not care about much of anything.

When I got home, I flew up the driveway and into the house. As soon as Mom saw my face, she remembered, looked all abashed and somehow managed to get a ride up to the school to turn my jar into the office. I was still in the running for Fall Festival queen, but by then, all the joy had been sucked right out of the experience.

The photo below is from the actual Fall Festival. I did not win. I imagine my chances were lost as soon as I disrespected Miss Ward. I did, however wear my first Queenly outfit in public. That is a can-can petticoat and yes, a pink polyester drapery safety-pinned around my shoulders. You can see from the expression on my face that I was just emerging from a nervous breakdown of queenly proportions. That outfit would be as close as I would get to being queen of anything until I was in my 40’s.

No sadder thing from up or down.

Is the sight of a queen without her crown. Mary Poppins I - Am - Not As I mentioned, there came a point when my mother began to have frequent visits to the hospital. With Mom, it was a challenge to know what was really wrong with her and how much of her illness was attention seeking behavior. I do not believe she ever pretended to be ill or was intentionally manipulative. I have mulled this for several decades and I believe she was lonely and wanted more attention than what she was able to get. She was grieving something essential she lost along the way and it literally made her sick to not have it, whatever “it” was. Anyone who knew her would tell you that my mother was a lovely, kind, sincere woman who thought the world of her family. I believe that if she knew what she was doing to me, things may have been different. I want to believe that, at least.

My brother, Fast Eddie

My second brother, Eddie, was born in September of 1969. He was a stark contrast to Allen, who was intense and angry, even as a little boy. Eddie was quirky and funny with a sideways smile and an easy going nature. As was her way, Mom had a tough time delivering Eddie and he actually had some nerve damage to his eyelid from the forceps that were used. It was the misfortune of my brothers to be born during what is arguably the absolutely most abusive and shameful time period for birthing babies in American history, not to mention the toll it took on my mother and the other women who had those terrible experiences.

10 candles. Instead of “Happy Birthday,” my cake should have said, “Brace yourself, kid.” I remember I got a kickin’ watch for my birthday that year. In retrospect, I realize it was likely because I was retiring from childhood.

About a year after Eddie was born, Mom started an ongoing series of medical problems that continued until she died in early 2003. The old saying is true and “the show must go on.” Since Dad worked all the time and my brothers were considerably younger than I was, taking care of the house and family fell to me. I look now at my son, who is twelve, and I try to imagine him doing what I did from the time I was 10-years-old until I left home. Dad’s contribution to anything house related was limited to the “clean sweep” I mentioned before. He was a meat and potatoes man and expected a full supper each night when he got home and really, it did not matter to him who made it as long as he was not the one to make it. If you put a bowl of soup or a salad in front of Daddy for dinner, he would want to know what happened to the rest of the meal.

Mother taught me to cook very early on. I remember clearly when I was around 6 years old that she picked me up, sat me on the yellow metal stool with the fold out steps at the bottom that lived right next to the stove and told me, “Honey, you aren’t much to look at, so if you are ever going to get you a husband, you’re going to have to learn to cook.” Later, she swore to me that she never said such a thing and knowing her as I did, I can tell it was out of character, but my memory of it is crystal clear and I know that a child does not manufacture that kind of destructive memory out of thin air. I also know that for the next several years, every time she cooked a meal, I was sitting on that stool beside the stove or standing at her side helping her cook. I got there somehow.

As a result, by the time she was in and out of hospitals on a regular basis, I was able to cook many Southern meals in their entirety. I would wake up in the morning and decide what to make for supper that night and take it out of the freezer (usually without falling in). When Allen was old enough to go to school, I would get him ready to go, feed both boys breakfast and then bring Eddie into my mother’s bed where she could watch him for the day (I hoped). Before Allen went to school, I would bring both boys, fed and dressed, in to her bed with books, blocks and toys to keep them amused.

In my every memory of my mother spanning many years, she looks like this.

Allen started first grade the year I went to middle school and that presented a whole new logistical set of challenges because I had to catch the bus before he left. Most days, Mom was able to wake up and get him on the bus and then go back to bed again. When I came home, I would do my homework and get Allen started on his. The house would get just a cursory clean and I would start supper for the family. The next day, it started all over again.

The year I started high school, Eddie was beginning school, so Allen would help him get ready and on the bus as well. When I think of those days, there is little to remember but a blur of activity and always feeling tired.

Eddie and a cat named Sam

Along the way, Dad’s work got shaky and he began to change jobs, finally leaving the car repair and detailing business altogether. His next job was as a night watchman for Green Coal Company. He left for work at dark, driving away in his Ford Ranger that had an odd, boxy camper on the back of it. He would come home in the very early hours just before I got up. His job was to spend the night guarding the tipple and ensuring that the area was secure. This amounted to him going into the camper, reading, sleeping, and doing things that amused him in some way until his alarm went off several different times in the night. He would get up, make his rounds and back into the camper he would go. Once he changed to this job, I was able to occasionally cajole him into helping with the boys in the morning. Dad was old school and housework and parenting were just not his cup of tea. He didn’t even like tea.

If it happened today, that camper would have been Dad’s man cave... except for one time when it wasn’t. That was the time Delena and I inflicted bodily harm on someone. We just have no idea who it was. That Time Delena and I Probably Broke Some Guy’s Hand Over the years, my cousin Delena and I saw each other often. When our families would visit into the evening, we would work hard to go to sleep hoping that the parents would just let us sleep over. Delena was my best friend and that continued well into our teens. One night, when we were probably around 10 and 12, Delena was staying over at my house for the night and my parents agreed we could sleep out in the camper for the night. The camper was a really hideous thing, really.

The camper is to the left on its stands.

Staying in the camper was a party for us. It had a gas stove (popcorn!) and a little ice box (cold Dr Pepper!) and a fold out bed (room to sprawl). At our age, it was heaven. We decided we needed decorations, so we secured my dad's industrial strength staple gun and his ball peen hammer drape Christmas lights around the inside of the camper. My dad teased us all though dinner about how he was going to scare us during the night.

After we were fully sated from the snacks and drinks, we giggled ourselves to sleep. We were never any good at staying up very late, even as we got older. Around 2:00am, we woke up to the sound of the camper door rattling. It was on one of those little weak flip locks for screen doors, as well as a chain lock. We watched as the door popped through the simple flip lock, leaving a space where the chain lock was holding it. A man's hand appeared in the space and began pulling on the door, trying to get it to open, pulling it back hard over and over. We looked at one another and said, "Pfft, Dad” and decided to give him a show, so started screaming like mad, trying hard not to laugh. The man's attempts on the door intensified.

As if with one mind, we flew to the door. Being the biggest, I pulled back on the door handle during the few seconds of space between his pull backs on the door. This squashed his hand in the door and he howled while I held the door firm. Delena went to work with the ball peen hammer and the staple gun, wailing on his left hand (we had no mercy). Somehow, I held the door tight on his hand. We did not even think about the serious damage this would do to my dad's hand.

After what seemed like 5 minutes but was likely only about 15-20 seconds, the guy got his hand back (amid much very loud swearing) and we pulled the door closed again and relocked it. Afterwards, we went back to sleep.

When we got up the next morning, we hurried across the dew-wet grass to grab breakfast from my mom, who was known to make the full boat breakfast of bacon/sausage/ham, biscuits/toast and eggs when anyone slept over. Sure enough, she was busy at the stove. We started eating and I wondered where Dad was, thinking that maybe we hurt him more than I thought She told us that Dad had been called into work at 11:00pm and wouldn't be home until later that morning. Say what?

Dad got home right on time and his hand was just fine. Needless to say, our sleepovers did not happen in the camper from that point on. Steppin’ Out Into the World… Our little elementary school went all the way up to 6th grade by the time I graduated from it. It had only gone to 5th until I completed 5th grade and then they added 6th grade the year I was in it. For 7th and 8th grade, we went into town to Hartford to the big new middle school. I was terrified and I am sure most of the little PR kid were because we’d been together since first grade and to us, this school with over 500 students, was like New York City. The little school at the Ridge barely had 100 kids, so it was a little overwhelming. The concept of changing classes for different periods was completely foreign to us and little by little, we integrated into the student body without showing quite as much of our ignorance as we expected.

Just like when I started school for the first time, I hoped that a new environment would change my life experience and just like before, that did not happen. The only difference was that there were more kids to take up the bully gauntlet and a long hall of lockers I had to walk where they would hang out and wait. My attachment to teachers grew as I looked for adult role models who I could emulate. My favorite place in the middle school was the library and I would spend every free moment I could there. I fell in love with Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, Trixie Beldon, The Hardy Boys and read voraciously. I’d finally found my escape, even if it was temporary.

The high school was right next door to the middle school and transitioning to that environment was much less traumatic than going from elementary school to middle school. The summer prior to my freshman year, I met my first boyfriend. My hormones had kicked in with great gusto some time back and I was riding a wave of desire and drive that nearly took my breath away with its intensity. I was thrilled to have someone who loved me and seemed to want to spend time with me. He was not a very good boyfriend and I am not convinced at all that he even liked me. When we started school again that fall, he was quick to let me know that I should not acknowledge him in any way while we were at school and really, that probably should have been my first clue. He was two grades ahead of me and his status as an upper classman did not allow him the albatross of a freshman girlfriend. That relationship did not last long for obvious reasons. I wonder how many people can remember the first time that puberty grabbed them by the throat, threw them effortlessly to the ground and changed their life forever? I can. I was fourteen and at the birthday party of one of the 5-6 people who were actually good to me in high school, Marty (short for Martha) Canary. Marty was turning sixteen and so this was a party that was set up for older kids, but Marty was kind enough to invite me. God bless her. It was held at a hotel in Beaver Dam. The name of the hotel escapes me, but it was likely something original like “The Beaver Dam Hotel.” They had a nice little ballroom/dining room and it was all decorated and pretty and Marty looked just lovely and radiant.

I knew I was not Marty’s best friend. Everyone in school knew that and I was OK with it. Two other people held that distinction. One was Delona Smiley who was going out with Bobby Duvall and the other was Sherry Boone, who was exclusively dating Greg. I can’t recall his last name, but I think it was Nelson. There is, however, a really great chance that I am purposely making him a previously unknown son of Ozzie and Harriet’s since I was so fond of David and Ricky. Couldn’t swear. Anyway, Delona, Marty and Sherry were best buddies all through school and were in the same grade. I was younger and Marty was good to me and the other two tolerated me, but would never remember my name now.

So here I am with all of the older kids and we’ve open presents and had our cake and fancy punch in the punch bowls and now the lights dim and there’s dancing. Mind you, I couldn’t dance a lick back then and truth be told, I can’t now either. I have zero natural grace and no rhythm whatsoever. I was standing with Marty, the birthday girl, when Sherry and Greg danced up to us with Greg fussing a little bit about how Sherry was dancing, saying she was too rigid and needed to loosen up a bit.

The music was changing and I about pissed myself when he grabbed my hand and said, “Here, I’ll bet you can do it” and pulled me onto the dance floor. Greg, in general, looked as though light should be emitting out of every pore of his body. His skin was clear and smooth. His hair was curly, soft and blond. He had muscles and a downy smattering of arm hair. His eyes were the bluest blue ever. At least, this is what he looks like in my glamorized memory. He smelled like Marlboro red cigarettes, Ivory soap and peppermint. As he pulled me onto the dance floor, Marty and Sherry staring in shock behind us, he put his hands on the small of my back and brought me close to him. I put my hands on his shoulders and he moved me a little closer to him so that my hands fell behind his neck where a delicate little extension of his blond curls fell.

We swayed to the music, me breathing in the now intoxicating scent of cigarettes and Ivory soap and Starlight mints and him singing softly, every single, solitary word of the song, from beginning to end, into my ear, his warm breath tickling my skin deliciously:

“You’re here...so am I. Maybe millions of people go by [but he changed it to “dance by”], but they all disappear from view, ‘cause I only have eyes for you.”

What would in the next several years be called a “disco ball” reflected prisms of light all over the floor and the walls. I pulled in closer to him, wanting to savor the moment, knowing my current condition was 100% terminal, but never wanting it to end.

In a life where I was way in over my head and treading water in a sea of acid, this was one completely perfect moment that made me want to cry.

The song was too short, that’s for certain. As it ended, he kissed me on the forehead and smiled and we walked back to Sherry and Marty. He said, “That’s how it’s done.” My discomfort was immediate as I realized that my precious new memory was nothing more than a forgettable teenage power play as these people learned about the complications and challenges of love and relationships. He and Sherry went to get drinks and I never saw him again in my whole life...

...except for every single time The Flamingos sing that song...

...for more than thirty-five years now, when I see him in my mind and I smile. From that moment on, I was determined to get myself some of that. Not Greg in particular, but that feeling where everything else just melts away for a bit. I was on a campaign for romance. I only went to one dance when I was in high school. It was a Sadie Hawkins dance and I went with a young man who worked with my father, Karl Francis. We dated for a while until he moved to Florida and I just thought he was wonderful and looking back, he was. Despite my fervent appreciation of males, I was so naïve at that time that when we were kissing in the front of his Ford van and he whispered to me, “Do you want to get in the back?” I looked at him confused and said, “No, I want to stay up here with you.” Karl had recently graduated from Owensboro High School (rival school!) and I was still a freshman, so dating a much older man was delightful for me. We went to movies and out for pizza and I loved having a life that did not involved school or home. He was just precious and I finally felt as though I had a safe place to fall. I was devastated when he had to move away several months later and I have often wondered what happened to him.

Since that summer between 8th and 9th grade, I’ve always had ragey hormones and I have always loved looking at handsome men. Let me tell you, there were no lack of them in our high school (both teachers and students), but those kinds of aspirations do not marry up well to the kids who have the victim status. The one boy for whom I was completely head over heels quickly set me straight that he was too old for me (he was a senior and I was a sophomore at the time) and that just broke my heart. I dated our preacher’s son, made out with the local auctioneer’s nephew and had great evenings with other guys here and there. It never translated out into any type of long term relationship like other girls seemed to find. I was grateful that I had the good sense to not take the relationship to the physical very often. Dates were a welcome reprieve, but they were not plentiful.

I went through a religious period for many years and went to church often with a friend who would pick me up and drop me off. Church was a personal conflict for me because I was eager for the fellowship it offered, but I could not embrace so many of the basic principles that I always felt as though I was living a lie to get the love and acceptance I wanted. I would ask all of the wrong questions about why we had to reject this type of person or that type of person and if Jesus was so forgiving and loving to everyone, why should we not be as well? Since most of the churches around our area were fairly fundamentalist, my thoughts were not well received when I brought them up, so I tried to just keep quiet. I don’t imagine anyone I knew then would believe it if they were told I would grow up not only to be a licensed minister, but to have a Ph.D in Religion.

Please make me your sister wife.

I read the Bible voraciously and studied other sacred text to try and fill in the blanks I found. The paths people take to connect with God amazed me even back then. The pursuit of what I would call spiritual ecstasy was rivaled only my pursuit of romance in intensity.

One youth group with whom I embraced the enthusiastic ambition of converting as many people to Christ as we possibly could, gathered together to tell me straight out that I talked too much, which was apparently a liability for them. My cheeks burned, my eyes stung and I never went back again. Social rejection should have become old hat for me by then, but it broke my heart every single time. I never stopped being the weird kid who did not fit in and this was long before such angst would eventually become vogue.

My tradition of having few friends and being well removed from the popular crowd continued in high school, as did my obligation of taking care of the family at home. Mom had her good days and her bad days and very, very rarely, good weeks and bad weeks. When she was in a good period, it was such a blessing when she would cook or clean up a little bit. I felt like I was on vacation when that happened.

A few times, I got to go play softball with the kids in the neighborhood and I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven. I was good at softball and although I could not run fast, I could hit the ball far and practically walk around the bases. My friend, Susie, was my pathway in. Susie was dripping with cool and I could pal around with her and not be noticed much. Once Susie got mobile by borrowing her uncle’s Nova, she would sometimes take me out to cruise around with her. All of her friends where her age and I have always been grateful that she included me when she didn’t have to.

Job Openings in Both the Frying Pan and the Fire… When I was growing up in Kentucky in the 1960s-70s, vocational choices were minimal, especially for females. In my sophomore year, I took a class called “Distributive Education,” which was basically a glorified business class. A major project we did involved writing a research paper about our dream job. We were to find out the starting pay, fringe benefits, education required, room for advancement and such information. I wrote about being a wife and mother and made up crap for the information we were to find. Since I was already basically doing that job at home, I figured it was what I was intended to do. I never even found out what I got on the paper. He gave us a grade for the semester and it was factored in, but the paper was not returned to me. He likely lit it on fire and wondered why I took his class to start with. Long gone were my dreams of professional baton twirling and being a country music star with big hair and rhinestone clothes.

Sure, I still wanted the big hair (I still have an affinity for big hair), the tight, sequined clothes, the sultry, whiskey voice and the eyes with little dew drops of hardship tears about to splash down onto my big pink guitar. I used to rehearse my interviews with Ralph Emery, write out my Country Music Awards acceptance speeches and sing into my hairbrush. Since I possessed thin, wispy hair, not one sequin on my clothes, no pink guitar and a terrible singing voice, I eventually became a volunteer nurse’s aide’s aide (that is not a misprint because I only aided the paid nurse’s aides) instead and Tammy Wynette’s job was in no jeopardy, at least not from me.

Nashville doesn’t want me and hell’s afraid I’ll take over.

The coal mines, college and the military were the options available to most men who did not have a family business to inherit. Women worked as nurses, in retail, went to college or got married. My first job was as a volunteer at the two nursing homes in Owensboro where my mother worked. While I was in high school, Mama finally got her driver’s license after years of being taken places by other people. Once she was mobile, her health started to pick up a bit and she had more good days than bad. She got a little orange Gremlin and later, a purple Hornet and those were her cars when I lived there. She loved the freedom of being able to drive and when dad began to have trouble keeping work again, she got tandem jobs as a nurse’s aide two of the long term care facilities in Owensboro.

I would ride along with her sometimes and help out. I could do things like deliver the meals, answer call button summons and find out what the patient wanted, clean things like crazy, deliver mail and flowers and hand stuff to the nurses. I wanted a candy striper uniform, but they did not use anything like that, so I would tie on a facility smock and be done with it.

For quite a while, Mama worked on the psycho-geriatrics wing and we had some really interesting patients there. One gentleman thought my name was Ricky and would give me different kinds of farm orders to perform every day. I would walk past his room and he would yell out to me, “Ricky!! Boy, did you bring in those crates from the barn I told you I needed?” I would poke my head in the door, which in no way reminded him that I was neither named Ricky nor male, and say, “Yes sir, Mr. Carter. I brought them all up and they are on the porch.” He would smile and look satisfied and say, “That’s a good boy, Ricky. Now go on and get the corn put up before it goes bad.” I would say, “Yes sir, Mr. Carter” and off I would go.

A lady on our wing weighed less than a hundred pounds, but could easily throw me, my mom or any of the nurses across the room. Mom was a substantial sized woman and she often wore bruises from her job. If the job as a nurse’s aide’s aide was meant to better my life in some way, it failed miserably. It got me out of the house and gave me some quality time with my mother, which I appreciated. Since my mom worked the 3- 11pm shift, guess who got to get up in the morning before school, decide what to cook for her dad and brothers that night, come home, do homework, clean the house and make supper? That would be me. The reason was different; the result was the same. Mom would come home just before midnight, exhausted beyond belief, and sleep until mid- morning.

Since my mom worked the 3-11pm shift, guess who got to get up in the morning before school, decide what to cook for her dad and brothers that night, come home, do homework, clean the house and make supper? That would be me. The reason was different; the result was the same. Mom would come home just before midnight, exhausted beyond belief, and sleep until mid-morning. Throughout this experience, which is in no way as horrible as the experiences of other kids, even other kids I knew, I had no way of knowing that all of life was not this way. The idea that wove its way through my mind when I was going through middle school and high school is that life just sucks and there is nothing you can do about it.

The helpless, horrible feeling that Ms. Curtis picked up on when I was in the third grade took hold and I had no reason to discredit its assessment of my circumstances at all. Everything hurt. Everything was hard. I woke up in the morning wishing I could be someone else and I went to bed at night begging God to make things better by morning. God was otherwise engaged.

My Rabbit Died In 1977, my parents took on a boarder, a young man in his 20s who lived in our upstairs attic room. He was everything a parent fears their daughter will attract in a bad boy and I was completely smitten. He loved to be around me and my company seemed to be the best thing in his day. He favored me with attention and we began to spend all of our available time together. I was coming to the end of my sophomore year and he was my fourth boyfriend. None of the others had lasted very long. I was needy and the stink of desperation was all around me, which is not the greatest bait for quality Southern gentlemen.

I was not a classic beauty like the cheerleaders and my sense of humor was dark and sarcastic. The lightness of being that other girls carried with such ease and elegance I simply did not possess. I was the teenage girl version of Eeyore from the Hundred Acre Woods. The happy times I had, I was not yet smart enough to treasure.

This is a photo of my dad with his parents. With joyfulness like this all around, how could my heart not be singing?? As I look back on it now, even writing these pages, it doesn’t seem so bad. The feelings of that young girl are still in there and spring to life from time to time. The healed hurts bloom anew as I walk through those days again with you. Intellectually, however, I know that there are people who have far worse childhoods than I had.

Still, we only ever have our own perspective and I was awash in all that I didn’t have, all that I was expected to do, and all that I imagined I would never get. As if lifted from a page in a psychology textbook, my relationships mirrored the ones I created at home and that was a whole lot of what I didn’t want. I hurt all over, all the time, and just being me made me tired.

When we are lost in pain, frustration, and helplessness, everything looks dark and any ounce of light gets sucked right into the abyss. It all feels bad and that is where I was. I dedicated myself to finding an exit and as a result, I was no fun to be around. If only we’d had little goth kids back then! My pain! My angst! I would have looked outstanding in pale make-up and black lipstick.

I was a woman before my time cursed with a limited cosmetic stash and very few black clothes. I was so used to being tired all of the time that I hardly noticed when I literally became tired all of the time. As I got off the bus one day, I was so sleepy that I crawled up into that ancient, boxy camper and crashed out on the cushions without bothering to even come into the house. My mother found me about an hour later when it dawned on her that I never came home from school that day. Fortunately, I left the camper door open to let a breeze blow through, so she did not have to do any serious detective work to figure out what happened to me. She nudged me awake and asked me if I was sick. I blinked my eyes, did a quick inventory and wondered, “Hmmm. Maybe I am sick.” I sat up quickly and said, “Oh no! What if I have mono?” Back then, mononucleosis was the scourge of teens.

Mom had a different idea. She asked me, “Could you be pregnant?”

?!

Pregnant? Did pregnancy make you tired? Still groggy from my nap, I said the only thing that came into my head after that. “I guess it’s possible.” To say, “All hell broke loose” would be such an understatement. I have never seen anyone not live somewhere so quickly in my life. My parents had no doubt about who had violated their petit fleur and when my paramour arrived home from work that night, Dad greeted him at the door with a rifle in his hand and informed him that he had 15 minutes to get all of his possessions out of the house and be on the road. I believe he was out in 13, waving me goodbye as he drove away, and I was left sobbing on the porch.

My dad was mortified to have a daughter who was “in trouble” and Mom was more worried about Dad than she was about me. I think she was excited about the idea of having a baby in the house since she’d always wanted more children and one of her many surgeries had resulted in a complete hysterectomy in her late 20s. On the day after my baby daddy was chased from the county, Mom cashed in her dime with the local physicians and got me in for an emergency appointment. I had my first pelvic exam that day and the doctor told my parents that I showed no sign of pregnancy, but did the test anyway. Three days later, Mom hung up the receiver of the phone and said the four words that changed our family dynamic forever, “The test was positive.”

I was completely floored. There was no part of me that ever actually believed I was pregnant and hearing that confirmation took all the wind out of me. I was 15 and I was going to be someone’s mother. I was not worried about taking care of a child. Pfft. I’d been taking care of Mom’s children for years by that point. I was terrified of bringing a little baby into my horrible life. Convexly, the idea of having a tiny creature to love me unconditionally and be mine forever was exciting and reassuring. I was terrified. I was ecstatic. I was tired.

Dad could rage like no other and he ranted and fumed and stomped and cussed and threatened and avowed and shook his angry fists at the sky for days on end. Grandma nodded knowingly and prayed to Jesus on my behalf. Mother became worried since Dad showed no signs of getting over his fury, so she packed me up and sent me to Granny’s house to stay indefinitely. Mom had already purchased some tiny onsies by that point and she pushed them into my hands with promises of more to come. She had no idea how long I would stay with Granny; possibly until the delivery or beyond. Granny opened her arms and her home to me and held me while I cried my eyes out. She was completely doubtful of the pregnancy and kept assuring me, “I just know you are going to run a red streak here in a few days.”

I did not get my red streak. Instead, I got my dad driving into Granny’s driveway in his old truck, ready to take me home. I suspect he missed my cooking more than he missed me. I asked him if he would accept my baby into the home and be kind to it and he said he reckoned he would. I dutifully hugged my Granny, got my suitcase and crawled up into the truck to be taken home again. The closer we got to home, the more I could feel my heart sinking into the ground. April of 1977 was not my golden era. I wistfully hoped that my baby daddy would come collect me and together, we would ride off into the sunset. That was not to be. Once I was pregnant, I did not spend as much time in the nursing home. It was toward the end of my sophomore year and I finished it out after signing all of the appropriate waivers promising the school that it was not their fault if I fell and broke myself or my baby on their property. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life beyond the next four days or so. I only knew that I had something that was mine that love me without question. I also knew I was well on my way to fulfilling that dimly pessimistic career prospect I wrote about in my Distributive Education report.

Several of my teachers weighed in on their disappointment over how things had gone for me and more directly, disappointment in me. I could not give them any of the right answers because there weren’t any. I was educated about birth control, but did not use any, instead opting for the theory that I was bulletproof. I have since learned that this behavior is actually called “Personal Fable” where teens use the “it won’t happen to me” shield. I couldn’t say that I got pregnant my first time or my tenth. I couldn’t say I had a plan. My parents were so devastated they could not help me form one. They offered to adopt the baby, but I did not want my child to have the life I’d had. Somehow, I would find a way change that. I didn’t and I ended up making a lot of the same mistakes my parents made, plus some new ones on top of that. Above all, I figure, one must be original.

Mr. Farmer, my home room teacher, shook his head and said, “The CSU student?” I’d been involved with the Christian Student Union quite a bit and for some reason, that hit his radar. Mrs. Render, one of my favorite math teachers, asked me to promise her that I would go to college. I did, but much later.

After my sophomore year, school had been out for just two weeks when my dad peeked out of the living room window over the air conditioner and says, “There’s some long haired boys out here in the driveway.” I was busy folding a mountain of laundry on the couch and doing what I did best lately: feeling like crap. I sighed and said, “Well, they aren’t looking for me.” I was not yet showing, but the pregnancy was taking its toll on my energy level, my depression level and most assuredly, my self-worth level. Dad went outside to talk to them with that “Get offa my lawn” kind of demeanor and came back inside just a few minutes later. “They’re looking for you,” is all he said. I figured he had likely brokered some kind of deal to sell me off into white slavery, so I hurried outside to catch my ride since anything had to be better than what I was doing.

My jaw practically landed on the porch when I saw it was two of the people who’d been the nicest to me in high school, Paul and Ricky. I have always gotten along better with males than females (and not for the obvious reason because I get along well with gay males also) and these two, even though they were two classes ahead of me, were kind enough to pass the time with me in the halls during lunch and we always seemed able to make each other smile.

Ricky and Paul were buddies and pretty much came as a matched set like salt and pepper. Ricky was thin with pretty dark curls and intellectual glasses. Paul had long, flowing, wavy red hair. I’d told them both goodbye on my last day of school and had not expected to see them again. Since we lived pretty far out of town and these were both Beaver Dam boys, I could not imagine what they were doing so far off of their own grid. Regardless, I was about crying with relief to see friendly faces..

We chatted for a bit about dumb stuff to the point that I was really starting wonder what they were doing there. Finally, Ricky said, “Paul wants to know if you will go out with him.” I was just fine with going out with Paul because I really liked him and his quirky sense of humor matched up well with mine. I had a couple of questions, however, because when you are friends with someone, you know a little more about them than the average person who catches your eye.

My first question was, “What is going on with Connie.” Connie Franklin was Paul’s girlfriend for as long as I had known him and everyone just assumed they would get married as soon as school was over. He sadly told me that they’d broken up. I was friendly with Connie’s sister, Pam, and so I was real surprised to hear that since they always seemed to care a great deal for each other. I asked him if he was sure that break up was going to stick and he said he was.

With that business out of the way, my next question was, “What is going on with the Air Force?” The last time I’d talked to him when school let out, he was going to basic soon after school and yet, here he was. He said he was on “delayed enlistment” and would not be leaving until August. Since this was June, he thought I might want to spend the next couple of months having some fun. Fun was just what I needed and the idea that I could get out of the house with someone whose company I knew I enjoyed and then have them leave before I even started to show was just fine by me. We went out a few nights later and sure enough, I had a great time.

Paul and I saw each other about twice a week after that and every time I was with him, we had a really nice time. It gave me something really nice to think about during a truly awful time of my life. As we talked on our dates, I realized that word of my pregnancy had not reached him through the school grapevine before the year was over and he was clueless. I just assumed he’d known and I did not bring it up myself.

At one point, our intimacy went further than what I think either one of us expected, so at the next encounter, which was one encounter too late for common sense’s sake, he asked me what kind of protection I wanted to use. Back then, when someone talked about “protection,” they meant “birth control” as opposed to disease prevention. I figured now was the time to let him know because if I went beyond this point, it was outright deception.

I told him that we didn’t really need any kind of protection and he asked me why and I told him because I was already pregnant. He looked stricken and said, “How can you know so soon?” I quickly realized that he thought it was his, so I let him off the hook and told him what had happened. He was much more understanding than I thought he would be and then he let me know it wasn’t a problem. I told him my main concern was that since people now knew we were dating, “they” would speculate that it was his. He didn’t really care what anyone else thought and said that all that mattered was that he was fine with it. I took him at his word and gave it very little thought past that point.

I was sadder than I thought I would be when Paul left for basic on August 11, 1977. His mother and father were taking him to the bus station in Owensboro and they were kind enough to stop and pick me up on the way. They took us out to Pizza Hut and that was the first time I had a pizza that had never been frozen or lived in a Chef Boyardee box. It was about the finest thing I’d ever tasted up until that point.

Later on, I took my parents and brothers there with some money I got for my birthday and they agreed it was very tasty. Dad mortified me by reaching over and pick up two half full pitchers of Pepsi from tables near us that had been abandoned, saying with a shrug, “They’re just going to throw it away.” He filled his glass and chugged it right down. Allen went to the bathroom across the building and came back several minutes later with his hands full of dollar bills and coins, saying, “Look at all of the money I found on the tables over there!” Sigh.

Even that trip to Pizza Hut in Owensboro was not as sad as my first one, and I will confess to shedding a few tears when the Greyhound pulled away after yet another prematurely terminated relationship. I went back into my house and wondered if I would ever find someone who would stick around. At least this time, I’d known in advance that the relationship was terminal. Except that it wasn’t. Well, not for a long time, anyway. Shows what I know.

Paul and I exchanged letters all through his basic training and tech school. I looked forward to finding the envelopes with his slanty writing in my mailbox and would write to him about three times as often as he would write to me. Now and then, he would stand in line to give me a phone call. By the time he came back to Kentucky in November of that same year, I was big enough to pop. I was due in mid-January and time spent in my family home had been rocky, to say the least. If my parents were unsure how to deal with me before, now they were just beside themselves with anxiety.

Like my mother, I was sick for all of my pregnancy from start to finish; the most excruciating nausea I have ever felt outside of true motion sickness. I would get sick if a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial came on TV. I ate oyster crackers by the bagsful. Finally, I was given a drug called Bendectin that took the edge off enough that I could function. If I missed even one, I was in the bed dying.

In November, we were back at the Pizza Hut in O’town again and Paul was only in for a short time between technical school and his first real assignment, which was to Guam. I had never even once heard of Guam, much less did I have any flicker of an idea where it was. He told me it was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean way over on the other side of the world. I was breathlessly impressed and very happy for him. He would be gone for 15 months and then would have a stateside base.

It was great to see him, but I was physically uncomfortable and also sad that our visit was so short. While we were eating he told me he’d been thinking about it and if we felt the same way when he came back from Guam, he thought we should give my baby someone to call Daddy. I teared up, but it didn’t take much those days, and told him that I thought that was just fine.

Back home, I told Mama and Daddy that I was engaged and they took the news as bittersweet. They knew it would be a while before Paul was back anyway, so I don’t think they put a lot of faith in it.

Eight years later on one of our anniversaries, Paul confessed to me that he never actually asked me to marry him and that all he was doing was offering to stand in with the baby as a father figure. Marriage wasn’t really on his mind. I asked him why in the world we’d ended up married then and he said that I just seemed so happy about it that he didn’t want to take it away from me.

Many years later when we were remarrying after being divorced for two years, I made him actually say the words a few times because there was no way I was going to fall into that trap again. That was probably the first of thousands of miscommunications between me and Paul. For two people who loved each other, we were rarely on the same page or even reading the same book. In this moment, though, he was my knight on a white charger coming to take me away. For the meantime, however, he had to move forward into his own future on the other side of the earth and I had a baby I had to push out and get to know.

My junior photo. I vomited in the office as soon as she snapped the picture.

Mama and Daddy stopped taking photos when I became pregnant and I believe my junior class photo, which I took while on home school status, is the only photo that exists of me from this time period. Since I did not have a camera, I was completely dependent on my parents to document our lives photographically and well, they just were not in the mood. 1978 Was a Very Big Year… I did manage to have some unusually lovely maternity clothes for that time period thanks to my friend, Joyce Crowe, who worked in a lady’s boutique. Joyce was herself pregnant and being African-American, threatened her husband Kevin that she was going to name their son, O Black, so his name would be O Black Crowe. As it turned out, she named him Cortez DeMar and he was about the cutest little thing ever and such a cuddle bug!

Joyce worked with my mother at the nursing home, which is how she and I got to be friends. She was the first one to teach me that there are some women with whom I can get along just fine. Since she was a few months ahead of me, she gave me her maternity clothes (or “hatching jackets” as my father called them) as she outgrew them. The pacing was perfect. Joyce ended up being the Matron of Honor in my wedding that in theory should not have happened since I was never actually asked.

Of course, with my mother’s tragic history with childbearing, I had no hope of having a positive frame up for what was to come in regards to labor. I was utterly uneducated other than knowing how the baby got there and where it was going to come out. The nurses at the nursing home told me that what I wanted was a paracervical instead of a spinal, saying that would provide me with numbness, but not leave me confined to my back for days afterward.

I pre-registered with Owensboro-Daviess County Hospital and was all set to go. I had no way of knowing who would deliver my baby since I was limited through county care to whatever doctor happened to be on call when I delivered. I didn’t care who delivered the baby as long as they knew what a paracervical was and how to use it.

Joe was born in January of 1978 in the middle of the biggest snow storm in Kentucky’s written history. Snow drifted six feet high in the road and now, having lived in the very remote mountains of California for eight years, I can smirk and say, “Amateurs.” For us, however, it was intense. Much like my own thwarted hospital birth the roads to Owensboro were closed due to the weather, so I had to re-route to Ohio County Hospital, which was much smaller.

I felt a little crampy and noticed some discharge around 9:00 the night before, so I told my mother and she began organizing transportation for me to get to the hospital. I assured her I was not in any pain, but she was terrified that she would have to deliver the baby and with the roads bad and looking worse, she began petitioning the people she knew who owned a 4-wheel drive vehicle. She finally found a willing soul named Joe Whittaker from the list of Dad’s friends and he drove out and got us. In the meantime, Mom had to literally dig us out of the house. She did not own a snow shovel because in Kentucky, we rarely got blizzards. She used a regular shovel and her hands to dig a path from the front steps to the driveway.

By the time Joe picked us up, Mom’s hands were really hurting her from the cold, but I was still having no pain. When I later became a childbirth instructor, I knew that with a first birth, it can be weeks until the baby is born after the mucous discharge starts. It took us 3 hours to make the 30 minute drive to the hospital. A few hours later, fortunately, things did kick off.

Being so ill prepared for the birth, I did everything I could to work against what my body was trying to do. Nurses from three different shifts came in and told me to be quiet and stop scaring the other laboring moms with my screaming. The OB doctor who was in charge of my birth was of the new school and let me know right away that I would not be receiving a spinal block or paracervical block because of the impact they have on the baby. My progress was very slow and I was in tremendous pain. The only medication I was able to have was Demerol and it seemed to make the pain worse because I could never get awake enough to deal with the contractions. I fell asleep as soon as the contraction was ending and would wake up as the next one began, so to my own perception, it was all one big long contraction. I clawed at the walls until I had paint under my fingernails. I squeezed Mama’s sore hands and she told me that she knew how terrible it was. Twenty-five hours after contractions started, I was finally able to push. After such a long labor, I only had to push for an hour and there he was. I am certain that abbreviated second stage was because of the humongous mediolateral episiotomy I received which insured I would not sit comfortably for six months afterward.

There he was. Paul was certain that I was carrying a girl and refused to even discuss boy names. I looked down into his trusting little eyes and realized I had absolutely no idea what to call him. By the time we left the hospital, he was named Joseph Michael. Paul did not care for the name Joseph, so we called him Mikey.

Little Mikey mesmerized me. His fingers and toes were so small and dainty. I was terrified of his soft spot on top of his head, but I did love how comforted he was by my voice and my embrace. Since Paul was in the barracks and could not be contacted by telephone, he had to find out by mail that Mikey had arrived. As it turned out, he’d already had a psychic twinge on the day of his birth.

Living with my parents and also being a parent was an exercise that primarily about everyone involved looking for power and having none. The atmosphere was tense, especially since Mikey was allergic to regular formula and needed a special soy-based milk. Until we were told to change his formula, he had terrible colic and would cry endlessly. His lungs were in no way lacking power.

Mom was great with Mikey, but our relationship was strained more and more every day, it seemed. She was offended if I wanted to try any kind of parenting that was not on her agenda. I was still tired all of the time, but now it was because he had such a hard time sleeping at night. I treasured any minutes or hours I got to fall deeply asleep and stay there.

Babies having babies = Tiresome work

Since the school year started just a few months before I was due, I entered into home study and had a teacher who came to my house. I juggled studies and mommying, but had to leave a good bit of my mom’s responsibilities to her, which my parents saw as laziness. I saw it as having limited time and energy. Dad’s frustration was at a boiling point and at least one or two nights out of the week, I would wake up to him slapping me across the face for not doing all he thought I should do in the day. He still worked at the coal company until the early hours of the morning and when he got home, he would see what had or had not been done, hear Mom’s frustration over it and would come to let me know that I was letting the family down. There was no explanation that was sufficient. They were accustomed to a certain degree of performance from me and after the birth, it just wasn’t happening. They felt helpless and unable to cope with the changes that were happening. I felt helpless that I could not provide what they wanted and needed from me. It was just too much for them to manage and the frustration got to them.

In March when Mikey was almost two months old, Paul suggested that we get married earlier rather than later, I think in an effort to save me from my situation rather than any kind of practical plan. He saved up enough money for me and Mikey to fly to Guam and arranged for us to be married there. My father refused to give permission for me to leave and insisted that if I got married, it would be in Kentucky where he could see it happen and know I was not simply “shacking up” on Guam. Since this involved adding the expense of Paul paying to fly to Kentucky on top of air fare for me and Mikey to Guam, it took a lot more juggling. It would entail the two of us waiting until July to be together after we were married, but at least the plan would be in motion. We set the wedding for late April of 1978.

Dad began to get more and more squeamish about the wedding as it approached and finally told me after Paul’s tickets had been purchased for a week or two, that he would not sign the permission papers for me to get married. For one of the first times in my life (most assuredly not the last), I took control of the situation and bullied my mother into signing the necessary paperwork that would allow the wedding to happen.

Paul flew back to Kentucky and we were married, the wedding being a story unto itself. He would be home for only 5 days since he had very little leave. Everything that happened in regard to the wedding had to happen during that 5 days. My mother made my dress from lace and white eyelet. The material cost $8.00. We found white shoes for $3.00 and I borrowed a veil from my cousin’s wife. My Aunt Betty cashed in a favor with a friend and got the cake made.

Delena, all grown up and looking fiiiine for my wedding!

Delena was, of course, my Maid of Honor, and she had bought her prom dress already, so we used that as a basic idea and managed to modify existing dresses for Sandy (my bridesmaid) and Joyce (my Matron of Honor). Their dresses were very close to matching, just in different shades of pastel. They were matching floppy hats, which was the style of the time.

Paul wore his dress blues, so no tuxedo was needed. Granny asked the people at Red Hill Church if they would mind letting me have the wedding there since I was on the membership roster even though I had not attended in a year or so. They agreed, but I have no idea how reluctant that agreement was since all I heard from Granny was “Yes” and that was all I needed to know. Paul’s father was a mail order minister and a quick check proved he was legal, so he did the ceremony.

That just left flowers, of which we had none. It was late April, so we were between the spring flowers that had just stopped blooming and the summer flowers that were not yet out. Mom thought about it and told me not to worry; she’d work it out. She did.

Two days before the wedding, Mama told me we were going to go for a drive to get the flowers. I asked her what she’d decided to do and she told me not to worry about it, it was all handled. She drove me to “a church” in the area. I say “a church” because there are many and I do not want to offend anyone who might be affiliated with that church. She whipped out a clip board and some graph paper and I asked her again what was going on. I suspected she was meeting someone at the church who was going to help us out. That was sort of true.

She and her clipboard of graph paper led me to the cemetery and she gestured broadly and said, “Pick any ones you want.” I looked at her blankly until it dawned on me what she was saying. Mom intended to full on steal the artificial flowers off of the graves.

“Have you gone crazy?” I asked her. “You can’t take flowers off of the graveyard, Mama!”

She looked at me the way she used to when she had to explain something very complicated to me when I was a child. “Kathy. They’re dead. They don’t need them. You do. Now get on up there and find some flowers you can use.”

I was so far past stunned that there is not even a word to cover what I was feeling. I stood my ground. “Mama, I am not going to steal flowers from the graveyard for my wedding. I’m just not. I’d rather not have any flowers at all.”

Mom waved the clipboard. “That’s why we’ve got this, sugar. We aren’t stealing the flowers. We’re borrowing them. Your wedding is on Friday and by Sunday night, I will have all of the flowers put right back where we got them. Now you go on up and start interviewing some bouquets for you and your girls and if we are lucky, we can get enough to decorate the banisters and the pews.” She was not going to take no for an answer.

We went through and picked some of the nicer arrangements and lose flowers and loaded up the back of her orange Gremlin with them. She carefully marked each grave and made notes and drawing about how the flowers had been placed. We took the flowers home and put them in the bathroom and ran hot water over them with a little dish soap. “See?” she said, “The flowers will go back even cleaner than before, so really, it’s like we’re doing a community service. This is so much better than having a bunch of real flowers that will die.”

We let the flowers soak in their bath for a while and wouldn’t you know it? Right when we were about to go in and start rinsing them off and arranging them into groups, Paul showed up. I knew he would be mortified by what we’d done, so I tried to talk to him outside rather than invite him in. Of course, he had to go to the bathroom and of course, we only had the one bathroom. I took a breath and hoped for the best.

He came out a little bit later and said, “I don’t want to know, do I?” I pushed my lips into a fine line and just shook my head. He gave me a kiss and was on his way, leaving me and Mom to our floral crime spree. I do have to say, she did a beautiful job of decorating the church, made lovely bouquets and got every leaf, stem and petal right back onto the grave it came from by Sunday morning.

The “what the hell do I do with this?” look Paul always got on his face anytime it came to dealing with kids.

My wedding pictures were taken by a family friend and they are currently in the bottom of a Rubbermaid bin in my storage shed where unburned or otherwise unmolested photos of your wedding to your ex-husband typically live. I would dig them out to share with you, but you would never ask me to do so if you ever saw my storage shed. That should actually read “storage shedS” because my current husband is very good about sighing heavily and building another shed for me when I begin to overflow. I currently have 3 and a half sheds. I say “half” because he has his tools and other manly things in one half of one of the sheds.

My kids are hoarders like me and I probably have storage from all 6 kids in the sheds in various configurations, most of it Delena’s. (Yes, I named my daughter after my beloved cousin).The wedding was lovely and very sparsely attended. I was a half hour late and I can’t even remember why. I was about a mile down the road at Delena’s house and stuff just took a lot longer than we thought it would. Paul was a little nervous thinking maybe I wouldn’t show up. I did and we did and it went well. We had a sweet little honeymoon at the Executive Inn in Owensboro. Joyce greased the doorknob of our hotel room with Vaseline. Paul bought a bottle of champagne for us to share, but neither of us liked it, so we poured it down the drain and drank Dr. Pepper instead. Engelbert Humperdinck was performing in the hotel and if we were outside our room, we could hear him sing.

One of the high schools was having their prom at the Big E that night as well and at one point, Paul was standing at the window watching the couples arrive with their fancy dresses and tuxedos. As I watched him, he started looking up quizzically. I asked him what he was doing and he said that people were standing on the sidewalk below, looking up and he wanted to see what they were looking at. I told him it was likely that they were looking at the naked man in the window. He laughed and said, “No, these windows are reflective. They’re one way windows. You can’t see in.” I told him I didn’t think that was the case and went over to the window with him to solidify my opinion. As I did, he said, “See?” and waved to the people below…who waved back.

Our next order of business was a move. After talking it over, we decided I should move in with his mother and father for the two and a half months until Mikey and I would go to Guam to be with him. I moved into his old room and saw my mother and father a couple of times a week. They were grieving me as though I’d died.

Living with my in-laws did give me a chance to get to know them better, but in retrospect, I am not sure it was such a good idea. It’s probably best that I just leave it at that.

It seemed like it took forever for July to get there. When I left for Guam, I had never flown on a plane before and, in fact, had never left Kentucky before without my parents and then it was only to Indiana or Illinois. The nearest international airport was in Louisville, 3 hours away, so my grandparents paid for me to fly from Owensboro’s tiny airport to Louisville in an eight seat little Buddy Holly killing plane. I wore a navy blue mini-dress with puff sleeves and white lace around the neckline and sleeve hems and a big white floppy hat. I warranted quite a gathering at the airport with my parents, brothers, Grandma and Pappaw and my cousin Delena seeing me off. I made my way down the line of hugs on my way to the gate. My grandmother asked me if I had the little figurine she’d given me for my birthday the previous September. I assured her I did and thanked her again for it. It was a statue of a little horned devil reclining on a chair and the caption on it red, “Good little girls go to Heaven, but bad little girls go everywhere.” Thanks, Grandma. You’re a peach. I’ll treasure it always.

I did fine, even through hugging my mama and daddy. I could tell they were dying inside and since then, I’ve told four of my own beautiful children goodbye as they moved out of my house and into their own grown-up lives, some of them far away. I know how that feels and it’s like your uterus is being pulled up through your throat, picking up your heart on the way and both of them getting squeezed by a giant hand until you can’t breathe any more. One of the most helpless feelings in the world is watching that young person walk away, wondering if you did enough, said enough, taught enough, sacrificed enough or told them you love them enough. The answer to all of those things is inevitably “No, you did not” because there is just never enough time. I did not have to experience that when any of them were sixteen and already a parent, but it was bad enough even under good circumstances.

In the instance of my parents, it was worse because I would later realize that they were not just telling me good-bye, they were, as I said, mourning me. Back then in Kentucky, if you left, you were gone. After that, I did not see my family very much, maybe once every few years. There were good reasons and not so good reasons for that. When I got to my Mama and was hugging her, I had a moment of panic and told her, “I don’t want to do this. I do NOT want to do this.” She squeezed me tight and said firmly, “You have to.” I can’t fathom what exactly she meant by that, but what went through my mind was the nights she spent parked out at the airport watching the planes take off and land. I have often wondered how different my life would have been if I had heeded that gut impulse and walked the other direction instead of to the plane. When I got to Delena, my cousin and closest friend for my whole life, I started to cry. Fortunately, she was last. She and I had been up and down in connection over our lives, but from the time she was born when I was about a year and a half old, she’d always been there and was my very best friend. She’d been my partner in crime, my co- conspirator where Aunt Pat was concerned and despite the fact that we’d grown apart somewhat as we got older, she was my childhood to me. I looked at her and thought, “She is so young” and when that went through my mind, I had an instant moment of clarity and right on the heels of that thought was the knowledge that I was “so young” too. The fear took me down and it was all I could do to not fall to my knees from the impact. Sobbing, I grabbed my suitcase in one and Mikey in the other and walked onto the plane and did not look back. That suitcase was the only wedding present I received and let me tell you, it is still in my shed and functional now thirty-four years later, so don’t think it wasn’t one hell of a suitcase.

The flight to Louisville was horrible with the plane literally moving up and down in great lurches. Mikey stiffened out and turned various shades of white and green and projectile vomited all over me for the hour it took to until we landed. Covered in baby puke and the stink of abject terror, I made my way to the ladies room and tried to clean us up. I had pages of Paul’s tight, slanted handwriting on onion skin paper giving me specific details of how to effectively manage my several flights from Kentucky to Guam which would take almost two days.

Finally, I was seated in the coach cabin and on my way to Dallas-Fort Worth. Mikey was passed out on my lap (flying was different back then and an “infant in arms” did not require a car seat to fly. I was in an aisle seat and I was extremely relieved to find that by miracle of miracles I actually recognized the man in the seat across the aisle who was also in an aisle seat. What were the chances that this far from home, someone I knew would be on the same flight? Clearly, it had to be someone my parents knew since he was in the same age bracket as they were, so I talked to him as though I knew him, trying to pretend that I had not misplaced his name. It was much more relaxing for me to have someone to visit with and he seemed to appreciate the company as well. We exchanged stories of our impending journeys and he mentioned that he was actually going to Sacramento for work. This meant that when we stopped in Dallas-Fort Worth, he would also be carrying over the flight to San Francisco with me as well. It couldn’t get any better than this and I finally was able to relax into the trip a little more.

By the time we got to San Francisco, I still had not placed his name, but I was extremely grateful for his companionship through the many hours of flying. He stood up before me and got down my suitcase and carried it for me as I walked in front of him. There was a lot of starting and stopping as people got down their own items from the overhead compartments and as we walked, he surprised me by offering to spend some time showing me San Francisco. He told me he’d been there many times and that it was a beautiful city, unlike anything I’d ever seen in Kentucky. I really wanted to take him up on his offer because who knew when I would get a chance to do something like that again? I reminded him that Paul would be waiting for me at the airport and my flight would leave in just three hours. He assured me that the same flight left for Honolulu every day at the same time and he would have me back at the airport in time for the flight the next day. All I had to do was get word to Paul that I’d missed my flight and was delayed a day. I wondered where Mikey and I would stay and he offered to get a hotel room. ?! Wow! As we walked and talked, I weighed out the idea and by the time we were standing at the incoming gate, I decided that since I had absolutely, positively no way of getting in contact with Paul, I should regretfully decline. How terrible would it be to be waiting at the gate for your new wife to arrive and have her not be there? He understood and walked me to my outgoing gate, gave me a kiss on the cheek and told me goodbye. As I watched him walk away, I was still torn on what I should have done.

I sat there marveling at the kindness of someone I barely knew taking such good care of me. I just wished I could remember his name and I was far too embarrassed to admit I didn’t. It wasn’t until probably twenty years later that I realized he was hitting on me. When I got onto the flight to Honolulu, still not even halfway through my journey, I already fancied myself a season traveler and opened up the in-flight magazine to read as we waited for the plane to begin to taxi. I did not bother with the magazine on my flight out of Louisville because I had been so engaged with talking to my new companion. In the first few pages, there were a series of ads and one of them was a promo for the upcoming season of a very popular TV show. As I looked at it, I realized that I had recognized the man not because he was a friend of my parents, but because I had seen him every week for several years on the show featured in the ad. Oh. My. I will decline at this point to state the name of the actor or the show he was on in 1978, mainly because he was married to a famous actress at that time and because I was sixteen and looked around twelve in my baby boomer outfit and there may have been felony charges incurred had I taken him up on his offer. Catch me drinking sometime and I’ll whisper it in your ear.

San Francisco was not even halfway to where I was going and the trip seemed to go on and on. Mikey’s formula spoiled along the way, even though the flight attendants said they had put in the refrigerator for me. He was starving by the time the plane landed at Guam International Airport. It’s such a pity for so many reasons that it never dawned on me to breastfeed him as a baby. I certainly would have gotten more sleep in the beginning.

When the plane landed, half-asleep, I scooped up Mikey and my suitcase and made my way down the aisle. I mumbled, “Are we really there?”

A man in front of me said, “Take a deep breath.”

I did and said, “I can’t. It’s hard to breathe.”

“That means we’re there,” he laughed. “Welcome to 100% humidity.” I stepped off the plane and through the gate to my brand new life.

Welcome to Guam, Little Girl Afterward That is, of course, only the first part of my life and at the time of this writing, I am almost 51. Of course, the name of the book is Leaving Kentucky in the Broad Daylight, not Leaving Kentucky and Everything That Happened Afterward. This story is how I left Kentucky and Over the 35 years in between then and now, a whole lot of life happened.

As I wrote out the memories that dominated the past many pages, I found myself mesmerized all over again, especially when I considered that in November when I had that pap smear with Vaughna, I could only remember 2 or 3 childhood memories. It’s funny the things we don’t think we remember. Once I put my mind to it, I had a book full of memories that I thought were gone.

This is my story. You have a story as well. Do you know it? A year ago, I didn’t know mine and now, by making a concerted effort to piece together all of the little segments that were free-floating around in the jangled up closet of my mind, it is all in one piece. Reclaiming my past was a powerful process and I look forward to what comes from writing the next book, which is using the working title of I Aim to Misbehave because that is exactly what it was. I Aim to Misbehave is now almost as long as this book is in its final state and it is just getting started. There is so much to tell about my marriages, my divorces, raising my six children, Mikey becoming Joe, living as a single mother, working countless jobs as we traveled the world as a military family, becoming a queen and eventually finding my way to a remote mountain top to write these words to you.

As I objectively look through these pages, I am saddened by all of the hurt and damage I see throughout it. There were too many times that a little girl was shown that what she wanted, needed and thought did not matter, both in the words you read and the ones I kept to myself because they are just too personal to share. Like so many children, I had to be a grown up before I was ready to be one, sometimes through my own choices and other times because it was forced upon me. What maturity shows you when you get to it is that sometimes, when you are really doing the best that you can, you can still screw up the lives of people you love. I did it. My parents did it. That does not mean that my parents were bad people. They were just utterly unprepared for most of what they experienced in their lives, which left them in a constant state of crisis. A person cannot effectively parent when they are in the process of working through their own “fight or flight” issues on an ongoing basis.

All of us come into our adult life with a tool box for dealing with issues like career aspirations, interpersonal relationships, and creating our own self-worth. Some people have the full top of the line Craftsman super deluxe master set, ready for any task. Others have the perfect set of screwdrivers ever, but not a wrench anywhere to be found and when you really need a wrench, that screwdriver that works for so many other things just isn’t going to cut it. It is hard to give tools to other people, including our children, if our own toolbox is lacking.

My parents came into parenting with their own toolboxes, but inside, there was a toothbrush, a rock and a piece of gum and not much else. It was not their fault that their lives failed to prepare them for the experiences they would later have. I’m sure Mom was not ready to be a widow twice and then to meet the love of her life in her final two years of life, all before she even turned 60. I’m sure my Dad was not prepared for the hardship of unemployment after years of being a solid and dedicated provider. Honestly, I think that is what actually killed him because he quite literally died of a broken heart. When we are not sufficiently prepared for what life brings to our doorstep and we do not have the tools to cope with those experiences, we do the best we can and there are times when, despite our best efforts, “the best we can” causes harm. Collateral damage.

We all have our crosses to bear and our pains to manage. I do not believe that conciliatory garbage about how adversity builds character and the things that don’t kill us, make us stronger. Sometimes, we all need to be safe and to have a place where we can go and be ourselves without fear of rejection or reprisal. In a perfect world, that is our home, but sometimes, it isn’t anywhere at all until you create it for yourself. I Aim to Misbehave will be my story of creating a life that is so far away from the pages you just read that it might as well have happened to someone else.

Now, I live the dream. I have a wonderful husband, beautiful children and a life where I do pretty much anything I want to do in my day. It took a lot of work to get here, but I am blessed to live a life that is safe and sacred.

This book told you how I started out. I Aim to Misbehave will tell you how I got here. It started on that last page, with a little girl who was brave enough or stupid enough, depending on how you look at it, to get on a tiny airplane and start a trip that first went across the world, then took her all over the world, literally and figuratively.

It took all that traveling, all that experience and a lot of hard work to find a place of joy and serenity. I had to learn how to heal my past and create a life that celebrates who I am. I spent a great deal of time locked into grief and anger over what I lost or never had in my life. A lot of teachers helped me along the way and I am grateful to every single one.

When I got on the plane in Owensboro, my life was just beginning. There was already so much behind me; a whole book of experiences that were shut away in my mind for decades. While I wrote this book, I relived those times and reclaimed them as my own. No one can thrive when they are divorced from their past because it is the foundation on which their present and their future is created.

When that foundation is hidden or clouded by unresolved pain, all that you have built on top of it is at risk. There was a great deal more pain to come before I found the joy in my story, but there were also many happy times. If I dare to say so myself, I have led quite an interesting life. I once heard the phrase “to live the ordinary life in an extraordinary way.” That is what I try to do every single day. I’m a different sort of person now and rather than making me stronger, whatever doesn’t kill me had damned well better start running for its own good.

If you liked this book, I hope you will read the next one.

About The Author Katrina Rasbold has provided insightful and guidance to countless individuals over the past three decades through both her life path consultations and her informative classes and workshops. She has worked with teachers all over the world, including three years of training in England and two years of practice in the Marianas Islands.

She is a professional life coach who holds a PhD in Religion and is working towards her MA in Psychology. She and her husband, Eric, are co-creators of CUSP (Climbing Up the Spiral Pathway), a program designed to manifest positive, long term life changes by following the ancient agricultural cycles throughout the year. CUSP has touched the lives of literally thousands of people since its inception in 1997 and is practiced as a life pattern and spiritual path all over the United States and in other countries as well.

Katrina was a frequent guest on the “Herb Nero Show” in Southern California and has been a popular presence at many festivals and speaking events throughout California for many years. She is a published author and freelance journalist who has distinguished herself with her no-nonsense approach and humorous, home-spun commentary in many different genres of reporting and commentary. Her workshops, classes and lectures continue to charm and educate her clients and students. She coined the phrase “bio- universal energies” to identify the measurable energy fields a person radiates when creating positive change, a combination of the personal energy inherent to each individual joined with the universal energies that are able to be accessed and channeled into perceivable manifestation.

Her passion for Women’s Wisdom studies began in 1980 when she became a certified childbirth instructor. She taught childbirth, prenatal and lactation classes in many locations around the world over the following 17 years and pursued practice in hospital, birthing center and home birth environments. Katrina has been an avid practitioner of the magical arts since the early 1980s and the study of all ways that humans enjoy congress with God is her passion. She currently teaches classes in the Sacramento and El Dorado County areas of California.

Katrina is married and has six children. She lives on a remote mountain top in California with her husband, two of those six children (the rest are grown), two cats, three dogs, a turtle named God, several chickens who are all named Helen, and Elvis, a slightly crazy shih tzu.