Girl Comes Home

Remembering How to Laugh (c) Nita Walker Boles

2015-09-15T15:50:00.016-07:00

When I was a child, my life was just like Robert Lewis Stephenson said: The world is so full of wonderful things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings!

In my kaleidoscope of delightful experiences were the Rocky Mountains just a 20 minute drive away, the plains of Kansas and Missouri on the way to our Grandparents Walker for Christmas, all covered with snow. There were Museums and Dinosaurs, school and Brownie Scouts and then Girl Scouts. There was Church and Bible School, and there was the Symphony in the park and every book available to me from the library. I could go on with the richness of life, full of so many wonderful, wonderful things.

But growing up in the nest of our family's love was the best thing ever. Our parents always shared their own Aunts and Uncles with us, and we had to reach adulthood to realize that they were Great-Aunt so and so to us in truth. And while most of our relatives were in Texas we had a special Aunt in Denver who happened to belong to our father. Aunt Jessie was a twinkly, delightful woman, married to Uncle Smitty who died when I was about 4, so young that I just have a few memories of him.

They had a daughter, my father's cousin, Barbara, who happened to be deaf and who married a man who also was deaf. So our Second Cousin had a daughter, Laura, who is probably one of the foremost American Sign Language teachers in the US. She grew up bilingual, with a grandmother who helped her straddle the two worlds. Laura and I were close to the same age, and she and her family frequented the bigger family gatherings at Uncle Rufus and Aunt Esther's. Uncle Rufus was brother to Aunt Jessie and our Grandmother Walker.

On Sundays, we would often gather for a wonderful meal of friend chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and green beans and unequaled Granny Johnson rolls. (They were made by Aunt Esther's mother, Granny Johnson, while she was still living.) We children were always expected to help clean up.

When I was not big enough to stand at the sink to wash or rinse dishes, I was allowed to stand on a chair to help out, and one particular day when I was standing next to Aunt Esther, who we all well-knew was blind, I realized that not only was she blind, but that she could not see whether or not the dishes were clean. Yet as I rinsed them, none were dirty and none needed to be sent back for another going over, even though that might occur at our house, where Nobody was blind.

So, to my mother's consternation, I asked Aunt Esther how she could tell if the dishes were clean. Blind Aunt Esther could easily hear my mother's humph at my social faux paux, but she good-naturedly said, "Here, honey, now close your eyes and I will show you" and she guided my hand over the surface of the plate. I learned that day that seeing wasn't always necessary to see.

But in Sunday School our story was about a blind man and Jesus. Although those wonderful miracles occurred when He was on the Earth, seldom in our times had many really heard of the blind being healed. But there was at least help nowadays for the blind, including a special way of reading. And to prove it, they gave us a memory verse both in printing and in Braille. I was too excited as I shared it with Aunt Esther the next time I saw her: Now she could read!

Of course it was disappointing to know that she had only been blind for a few years, and that while she could read when she was sighted, she didn't automatically learn to read Braille when she lost her sight. I was no help but I tried to learn from the little Braille verse in hopes of someday helping her.

Meanwhile, Aunt Esther went on countless outings to the mountains, where I gloried in the beauty of God's creation and reported it to anyone who would listen, including Aunt Esther, who would probably rather have heard it all for herself. Somehow I did learn to be quiet and appreciate the gentle growning of tall Aspen trees in the wind, and the rattling of their coined leaves.We were greeted with the sounds of the birds, and the rivers and streams. And with the goodness of simple foods prepared by our mother with Aunt Esther's assistance, and cooked over fires in the campsites at Evergreen and Estes Park.

Laura was there many times with her parents, and with Aunt Jessie. Her mother and father could not hear the birds or the rushing water, but they could feel the breeze that rustled the leaves and enjoy the cold running streams. They could appreciate the beautiful landscapes and skies, and share our company. I was so lucky but I really thought everyone had both the blind and the deaf, whom Jesus blessed, in their families as well. Signing wasn't easy, but over a few years both me and my sister learned to sign a little, and then, we moved further away, and except for a few words, and an occasional letter in the alphabet, I forgot most of it from lack of use.

Time went by. Aunt Esther, Aunt Jessie, and all of the older generation were gone. I was now a young mother with four children. It had been a walk in the park with the first two, Beckie and Tim. But during my third pregnancy I was impressed that she would be born with some special needs, and that it wasn't going to be any walk. I felt resolute that there was nothing that God and I couldn' t handle. When she was born it was obvious to me that we had some problems, but it was as though every doctor could not see her needs. I had to become a warrior, a crusader to get basics like speech therapy, eye surgery, and occupational therapy for her.

I slowly became a less than happy mom. Maybe I was an angry mom. I had truly forgotten how to laugh. When she was about 3, I told my husband, well, it is time for number 4. And it was. As soon as Deborah arrived on a sunbeam, smiled directly at her dad, locking eyes with him and him alone, I began to stand back in awe. She was a dynamo in our household. Everyone delighted in her company. She kept us in stitches, and she would never allow Rachel to sit back as she had before she came, observing the neighborhood playing in our front or back yard. She was one of the Little Rascals once Deborah hitched onto her, and watching, I remembered, oh, yeah. Laughing is good. Laughing is GREAT!!

But Rachel's future was uncertain where we lived. As of that time New Mexico had not yet passed Public Law 94-142,which would have allowed schools to accept matching funds for Special Education if they complied with certain rules.They were the only state in the union not to have met the needed changes for the sake of impaired children. We became part of a parent support network, and met a number of other families whose children included a variety of special needs, but many were on the Autism spectrum. We educated people locally, speaking to the Lion's club, the Kiwanis, and others about the need for more funding for special needs students.

The law passed, and I attended the first annual New Mexico Governor's conference on Children with Chronic Impairments in 1985. As a delegate, I worked on a committee that determined that parents and families would be the first line of priority in determining what was best for the affected child, not the state.

Over a 3 day period I heard many stories and learned so many things that could be done. But getting to know others who dealt daily with chronic impairments that so far exceeded my own experience gave me some perspective on the difficulties our own family was facing.

I could see one thread very common in many, many of the affected families It was not hard to see the wear and the abject fatigue on the face of the mother whose child lived at home on a ventilator, knowing the inevitable outcome would be an early death. Yet for the majority of us whose children would certainly live, we mourned the quality of their lives both now and in the indefinite future. And every day it would seem, some families would wake up, put on sackcloth, and walk quietly and mournfully around the Altar of the Diagnosis they were dealing with. They seemed never to be far from that altar, in a track that prevented them from having serendipitous joy and the spontaneous lives they had known before.

They had forgotten how to smile, let alone laugh.

When I came home, my husband, Eddie, and I talked at length about this experience. We knew what we needed to do. The support group had helped us make a choice to be effective and to become involved. We had a big family and not so much outside time if we were to see that our son got into Boy Scouts and our eldest daughter got to piano lessons. And I was in school to become a nurse.

Although we cared deeply for our friends who needed to stay, we knew we were ready to leave the support group. We chose not to build the altar. Whatever it was in the end that could explain Rachel's learning differences and small motor difficulties and a boatload of other struggles she had, we were going to be able to say that all of us went together to the mountains, camped, fished, hiked, sang in the car, and had a good time.

So we went across the nation to visit grandparents. We went to ballets at Christmas, visited Santa, played Ding Dong Dash to leave brownies and other goodies at our friends' homes, and attended innumerable school and scout functions. We visited orchards to pick apples for winter pies, and grew vegetables in the ample garden that we canned and froze. We visited potato and onion sheds and put them away for winter as well. We did just exactly what we had always expected we would do: we lived and loved and laughed.

My youngest brother had married a beautiful, wonderful girl, Allyn--right after her recovery from having surgery on her pituitary to remove a tumor. She brought a little son, Ian, just adorable, to the marriage, and we were glad for Rob, since they knew she could not have children while taking the medicines she always would have to take after her surgery. No problem, they would adopt, we all knew, and meanwhile we would welcome our new nephew and grandson and cousin into the big, rambling family.

Subsequently we transferred to Texas in search of a better educational and medical environment for Rachel. Work brought Rob and Allyn as well. They built a life, a successful business and a house together in anticipation of the children they hoped to fill it with.

Our family had expanded exponentially in the 20 years since the picnics in the Rocky mountains. They rolled right along with the rest of us into a happy mob, glad to be together often, most all of us in Texas now. Finally the day came when two beautiful children arrived to complete their dreams. We all shared the joy in our brother's household.

But within months of bringing the babies home, our sister-in-law was having sudden, blinding headaches. She was admitted to the hospital where she learned her pituitary tumor had returned. The surgery involved untangling its' tentacles from her ophthalmic nerve. She lost most of her vision her right eye immediately.

A truthful doctor did not give her long chances on retaining vision in either eye. Rob was at a loss for what to do. Her surgery had saved her life but her new life would be far different. Allyn thought mostly of her family and how her disability might affect her ability to care for a newborn, a one year old, and a young teenager.

She told me, "I'm afraid they will take the children back!" For a millisecond I could understand her fear, and then with clarity I looked through the prism of my early childhood. "No, that would be ridiculous!" I assured her. "The government does not take children from their biological parents who happen to become blind, and you can be certain that will never, never happen here."

Rob called me, weeping with sorrow over her lost sight and their lost life together. They had done so many things and now she was blind, he said. Now they would never have the joy they had had before. "Oh, yes you will," I said. "You are going to do everything you did before, only she is going to be blind. Remember Aunt Esther? Remember Dick and Barbara?"

They all knew how to laugh. Neither we nor they were diminished by their presence on our adventures. We were all, in fact, enriched by sharing the time together.
My brother did learn how to laugh again, but it required some considerable thought, planing, and effort. He shortened commutes to and from his outlying territories by learning to fly, and then bought a plane. Then he went further, making travel for work in the summer a family affair by purchasing an RV that brought the whole family together for trips that took them all over the nation. Just like at home, Allyn had good and bad days, but she was there, and when the days were bad, her bed was right there, too. Nearly every picture we have of Allyn shows her damaged eye, yes, but it is eclipsed by the big, genuine smile of the moment.

Learning to relish the joy in life didn't make the serious problems of life go away, but it tempered the prism of light through which he saw his burdens. It was not all sorrow, and there was a lot of fun and a lot of pure joy along the way.

Life continues to offer each of us challenges, many of which we feel inadequate to face, because we lack experience. Yet after we become experienced, we cannot help wanting to ease someone else's path. Finding the everyday fun is one of the best things we can do for one another It doesn't have to be slap-happy, just happy. Banish the altar of woe. Watch the Blues Brothers or a Youtube episode of Bat Dad. Make room for fun, plan for family time and guard it carefully. Bring friends along if they lift you up.

Don't be afraid. When I started laughing again, it felt funny. I mean it felt weird to have the corners of my mouth turned up in a smile. I felt almost foolish, because I had grown so serious and resolute before. God is GOOD. He wants us to enjoy our lives. Trust that He has this difficult, challenging situation, and that nothing bad will happen if you don't have all the answers now or later.

It will be like this: You are going to do whatever it was you had planned to do before the challenges of life seemed to derail you. But God does have it. You can go ahead with your plans, resume your beloved activities that brought you close before. And you are going to do it all while your loved one has health, mental health, or learning differences. None of those things is going to take precedence in your life or the lives of your children. What matters is the laughter and the love and belonging you will

make along the way.

In loving memory of Deborah. She taught us all how to laugh..

My Grandfather Walker's Barn (c) Nita Walker Boles

2015-07-11T13:32:00.003-07:00

When I remember Missouri, my mind touches only briefly on the road trips back there from Denver, to see our grandparents. It wasn't the trip we cared about. From the moment we entered the long, low burgundy Hudson Hornet we anticipated that final turn leading past a virtual hedge of irises down the long, graveled drive, past the tall canopy of a tree. An empty wooden swing beaconed a turn before we ascended the steps of their little cottage with two front doors.

Our grandmother kept a clean home, adorned with hand embroidered and crocheted table toppers, chair arm protectors, and pillow slips. There were always sweet cakes, and good, garden grown and canned food.The bacon and eggs served for breakfast were gathered and procured from the chicken coup and pig pen.

She and our grandfather raised and put away nearly everything required to sustain themselves, and even into the early 1950's did it all without running water. A hand pump rested outside on the stump of a hardwood tree that must have been 15 feet in diameter, just outside the barn.

Before our grandparents installed indoor plumbing, I required an escort to keep the geese from biting me as I made my way to the outhouse. It required someone old enough to assure that neither the geese nor the chickens escaped through Mamaw's gate.

A few yards to the right as you entered were the wooden gates that defined the pasture and coral area of the farm. Within a few steps was the massive and perfect barn, painted just the right shade of red rusty red. The door was open if Papaw was doing his work, which was nearly alway, during the day.

Its' heavy beams seem to have emerged from the ground beneath them, a patina of age casting a golden hue over their sturdy wood grain from the light of the open stalls and doors..Those beams bore the hulking length, breadth. and height of what seemed to be an ancient inverted ark.

It could have been. Papaw's animals did as he bade them in his murmured tones. He seemed to have two of every animal it its' own kind, so far as a farm could need. The work area and the several stalls were purposed and economic. Papaw would tolerate neither filth nor disorder in his barn.

But we were city kids, so we did not frequent the lower half of the barn, except as access to the loft.where we spent as much time as possible. With our nephews, who were more country kids, we enjoyed more of Christmas or Thanksgiving in the barn than at the house.

We ascended the stairs to the mammoth second story loft. A shaft of sunlight followed the lintel through the hay door,* illuminating the same kind of hay that Rumplestiltskin must have spun into gold. High above our heads the gentle cooing of white doves assured the peace found there where the giant rafters came together as a steepled cathedral. Only a few times do I remember the boys ever being elsewhere when I stole there for sacred moments roo read a Louisa May Alcott book in that hallowed atmosphere.

But together, we were a troupe, and so far as we were concerned, the only purpose of the first story was so that we could reign above, and freely as kings and queens, or more often, as cowboys and Indians over our various territories. The bales of hay, with quite a bit of effort when we were very little, could be pushed around to define borders or to make rooms if playing house, or to make castle walls.

Since the boys were younger than we were we could sometimes coerce them into playing house with our dishes and babies. They would first agree, but couldn't seem to get our serving them pretend food on our new dishes while we held our babies around the stomach on one hip. They looked quizzically at us as though we had lost our minds. If we had been better planners, we might have begged some of Mamaw's banana bread or rum cake to make them want to play girl-stuff with us longer. .

If bows and arrows were part of the boy's booty, they would could work for a castle theme if we could persuade them. But the most exciting and action-packed fun was, of course, based on the old West. If we didn't want to have to do dishes for hanging around the kitchen with the grownups who just wanted to talk and make us work, we had to blend in with the boys.

So many a little boy and girl fell a casualty to gunsmoke. Although the boys might be the recipients of two pistols and a rifle complete with a hat and chaps, the girls made sure they lent what wasn't necessary to sustain their own lives in the gun battles awaiting. And considering the stakes---one could be kilt, shot daide, or at least wounded in the fray--all hands would be needed either as posse, gang members, or as Natives.

Our adventures took hours and even days. In one such battle, my little brother's gun fell from his hand into the baled hay, disappearing completely. Though I surrendered the second half of the pearl-handled 6 shooter set without his having to ask, his face showed his agony with tears held back.

We all abandoned our fun and searched for what seemed like hours. Finally we were called in for supper. When he told his tale of woe, no grownup offered to help find the lost treasure. Subsequent searches while playing never yielded the treasure, and years later when our grandparents had grown too ill to keep it, no mention of the gun was made on the sale of the Edenic farm and barn.

Just a few years ago, while reminiscing about that wonderful barn, my fifty-something, accomplished and successful brother looked wistfully into the distance and asked "Do you suppose anyone ever found that gun?"

Post Script.

A few years ago I visited the farm on an anniversary trip with my wonderful husband, who drove me to Missouri and helped find the farm. I have pictures fifty plus years after these events. The barn was made of wood and may have had tin over the roof--but I don't remember a tin roof, ever. But on our trip back, the entire barn enveloped in tin on the outside.

The property, while inhabited, was not the ordered place we knew. But I ventured a peak inside the barn. The wood skeleton, stalls, and pens, were as I remembered them, the same hard woods still preservered but showing more age than I expected. I didn't go into the loft. but looking up at the ceiling which would be the loft floor, it appeared to be again, the same wood, aged.

Without condemning the owners at that time, I have to say, Papaw would never have stood for the disorder and decay I saw. But had Papaw lived on, and on in that same place, that same age, and maintained his barn and his idyllic life, nothing would have changed, would it?

*Now, readers of the younger, helicopter generation, take heart.

The open door of the barn loft was not a danger to us. We never fell out one. In fact we never got near one because we didn't want our parents to kill us if we survived the fall.

Mary, my older sister, remembers there was a rope to swing from on a rafter above, but Papaw must have put it up with all of us coming, worried there could be a hanging in the next episode.

As for the cap guns, the grownups must have figured we would never make it from the house to the barn without discharging all the rolls of caps they came with. They seemed unconcerned that all that hay could catch fire up there. And they never helped us at all with loading them properly so they wouldn't go off most of the time anyway. Maybe that's why the barn is still standing.

So you see there is nothing to worry about here.

A stream of consciousness: My first awareness of how I fit in the universe. (c) Nita Walker Boles

2014-11-02T15:52:00.000-08:00

For various reasons, change was our constant companion as I grew up. Maybe we learned resilience because of it, but we considered it normal that we knew how to pack a house for moving. Within the first 8 years of my life we changed residences from the farm in Missouri to Kansas City, Missouri. Then we moved to a basement apartment somewhere in Denver for a brief stay before living for less than 2 years in the little cottage on Cherokee street, Then we moved to the house on East 12^th Avenue where we stayed about two and a half or 3 years, then to Josephine Street, where we lived for about two years before we moved on to Colorado Springs for the summer and autumn of my 3^rd grade schooling. But by Thanksgiving, to be specific, on my birthday, we had moved to Pueblo, where we would stay until the end of my seventh grade year. That is an average of once a year. It didn't seem so bad.

But my oldest sister, Nina, even as a young married woman, often stressed to us the importance of putting down roots. Beside God and our family, the only constant in our life was the beauty of Colorado. Over the years, reading the Bible as I saw my father do unpretentiously each day, and praying in my room at the end of the day, and when ever I felt the need for divine guidance, kept me close to God.

Church was an adjunct to this constant practice of what I instinctively knew to do. Church was a place to gather with like-minded individuals. And to sing hymns of gratitude and of supplication to our Father in Heaven.

We were rooted in our relationship with Him, and, so I suppose, all the early moving about was irrelevant.

We truly did have a rather nomadic existence. I was born on the farm in Missouri, near the Arkansas Ozarks.My earliest memory of Missouri, in fact possibly my earliest memory, was of the green beadboard shelf on the back porch where the hand pump supplied water and my mother pumping it up into a basin. The beadboard was a milkwashed green and was the counter upon which the hand pump rested. It is likely I remember it because it might have been a convenient spot to change diapers.

My grandmother Walker's farm diaries, written scarcely half a mile from the place of my birth, mentions towns like Neosho, Cape Girardeau as shopping destinations, or places to get an ice cream cone. She references events I was there for not because we lived there, but because we had come back to visit after our moves first to Kansas City and then Denver.

My single memory of Kansas City was throwing my older sister, Mary's china out the second story window, and laughing as they made a tinkling noise when they shattered below. My sister had soft, dark, curly hair and a dimple to rival Shirley Temple. She was kind and absolutely beautiful to my eyes. A lot of my childhood was spent studying her face and ways, admiring her.

I don't remember more than the look of disappointment, not anger, that I had broken her dishes—at least some of them. She just looked ruefully at me and did not cry when our Mother berated her for leaving them within my 18 month old reach.

The next thing I remember was the basement we occupied in Denver briefly before moving to the house at 603 N. Cherokee Street. There was a sailor who visited us—a relative? The son of the house's owner?---in the basement apartment. I remember being charmed by his white cap and uniform.

But I seemed to blink my eyes to find us in the house on Cherokee Street, and my beautiful sister was gone to school. I surveyed the neighborhood from my rusty tricycle, noting the different architectural features of each cottage along the way. It was all mine, every tree and shrub memorized along with the homes they complimented. Other people might have lived in them, but they were in my world, and I liked every detail, every fragrance, every noise, city or train, voices or rain. It was all for my delight and exploration.

It seemed just that our mother and father were beautiful and handsome, respectively. Mother was tall, willowy, and had campaign blonde hair. Daddy was cool before Boogie was cool. He sported the same hat, the same business suit as he went off to work, a cigarette inevitably between his index and middle fingers.

Mother explored the tables of fabric within short bus rides or walking distance of our home not far off Alameda street, and made clothing that rivaled any designer's for us, and for herself. We starred as models for her sewing club in a television advertisement. I remember the blaring lights, and having her hiss from behind a curtain, “Turn around!” and feeling foolish.

I shouldn't have. We were beautiful children in a happy little world of our own. Before I could read Fun With Dick and Jane, my peers were dressed, lived lives like, and looked like the characters from the beloved first reader series. Mother was close friends with Mary Walsh who lived across the street from us, and who had two boys about our same ages.

Our mothers also shared babysitting from time to time, and we happily ran through each other's houses. It was on one of those occasions that our mother discovered that the youngest of her friend's children was sick with a fever and a dreaded red rash. When she returned from her excursion, Mother remarked anxiously about the signs of measles, and was astonished to hear her say she knew he had them when she left.

Two weeks later, Mary, Mother, and I were all very sick with the Red Measles. Mother never forgave her.

We lived on Cherokee long enough for Mother to have disappeared for a few days while we stayed at Mrs. Walsh's house, and for her to return with a baby brother in her arms. When she finally put him down on a mat, I climbed onto her lap, a big lump in my throat. I was so glad to snuggle against her. She wore a navy blue silk dress with black spider webs woven to make a consistent pattern. She was beautiful, her hair well set, but I noticed her red lipstick needed freshening.

Mother and Daddy had guests, relatives I did not know then, but now believe to be Uncle Smitty and his daughter, Barbara, as they look in pictures like the people in my memory. I don't remember Aunt Jessie—maybe she had gone travelling, as she so frequently did. They watched our new brother, David, as he performed a number of amazing tricks, like raising his head and turning his face from one side to the other, his arms and legs spread-eagle. After a couple of stunts like that netted him coos of delight and approval from the adults in the room, I remember thinking, “Oh, David, you show-off!” and retreating in disgust at his basking in adoration.

The easily-charmed adults left eventually and we resumed normal life, but shortly our growing family was installed in a beautiful Bungalow at 630 East 12^th Avenue, just a block from the Governor's Mansion, and a short distance from the Capital. The home had been built in the 20's or 30's for someone who would have moved in important circles within the Colorado Capital Hill society.

Azhar began renting from us, his quarters in the beautiful library upstairs, soon after we moved in. The warm wood that made up the bench, the stairs and landing, and all the railings and door and window frames also graced the shelves of the library.

When we couldn't go out front we played on the porch, which was enclosed the length of the living room, and bathed in milk-washed green paint. Both the outside front reception area of the porch, accessible from the entry, and the inside reception area were graced with benches to allow one to linger.

The side walks were made of red sandstone or was it slate? They made a sort of crunchy sound when you walked on them. David was soon big enough to ride a bullet-shaped vacuum cleaner that was, to him, his train, and the joints of the red pavement made just the right noise to affirm his fantasy as he clacked along.

The outside steps were our seats when we were not permitted to go beyond the front gate during our bought with Chicken Pox. I believe all three of us at once. We also gathered our family there for a photo when it came time for Azhar to leave us and return to India.

There was a preschool program at Dora Moore elementary school, and at 3 I began my education, going several days or half days a week. At some point I was deemed big enough to walk the 7 or 8 blocks home alone. I don't know how I failed to get lost because I remember the walk was long and making turns at the right place to go home was essential.

It was about that time that I began also to have a stream of consciousness in which I was at church on Sundays. Mr. and Mrs. Sommers taught the Sunbeam class. We were 3 and we met in a room upstairs I believe over the baptistery in the old main building of Broadway Baptist Church in Denver.

Lining up to follow the Sommers to our classroom in the sanctuary behind the podium, amber stained glass streamed a kind of blessed light from above our heads. I felt warm and loved, certain that God loved me, and I smiled back up toward Heaven, thankful.

We learned the Bible stories, like Samuel in the Temple, and sang the songs like Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam, and Tell Me the Stories of Jesus. I never, never doubted God's interest in me, His Personal interest. I understood that God was our Heavenly Father, and that Jesus was our Savior, to Whom we owed gratitude and allegiance.

As soon as I could read for myself, I began to review the actual record in the Bible of the little stories we were taught in Sunday School and during Bible School in the summer. Very early on, I knew as I read them that God offered to me the same promises He had offered to Abraham and all his posterity in exchange for obedience to His laws.

I don't remember when I started to pray privately, but I did, fully expecting answers to my prayers. I knew God could communicate through thoughts, dreams, and impressions from my own experience, and through stories that trickled in from the experiences of other family members during significant times of their lives. These were just facts to me, then a little girl of 3, 4, 5, 6 years old. Absolute trust and faith in God.

A;though we were not spared adversity, we were blessed richly. Within a small circle from our various homes in the Capital Hill area of Denver were the Zoo and the Aviary, beautiful parks, such as Washington and Congress Parks, and the Museum of Natural History. Our parents took every opportunity to take us to these city places, and, no matter where we lived, to the natural refreshment found within the embrace of the Rocky Mountains.

The world, my world, was a beautiful place. There were mountains, blue and green in the spring and summer, gold and red in the fall, and graced with pure white snow in the winters. Streams and rivers, rocks and trees proclaimed there was a God in Heaven. Birds, flowers, rain, snow, all the wonders of the world were evidence that He cares and that we have beauty to walk in.

A Christmas At Thatcher Elementary School

2013-12-08T01:40:00.000-08:00

It was the second winter our family had spent in Pueblo, Colorado, and Christmas was approaching. Just in time for the approaching holidays, Mother had spotted an adorable pop-up paper scene, a Santa's Workshop complete with busy elves at work. Punch out tables and tools were put together with slots in sturdy card stock, and reindeer peered in the windows from outside. It was so cute, I couldn't quit chattering to my art teacher about it. When she asked to see it, my mother proudly helped me disassemble it and pack it for the trip to school the next day.

When she saw the delightful scene, Mrs. Griffin's eyes widened with pleasure. "You're such an artist," she smiled, "wouldn't you like to help us make some of these to decorate for Christmas?"

Wouldn't I?

It was true I was an artist in my own right.Three years before, my second grade teacher had given us a busy assignment just prior to Easter, and suggested we draw a lady in an Easter Bonnet. She had gasped when she saw my art work, and scurried off to find another witness to verify the discovery of a budding talent. But when she asked me to duplicate it for entry into a showing at the library, I was unable to satisfy myself with an exact replica. The nose wasn't perfect, the iris not identical. The joy of the first creation was lost in the quest for perfection in repeating the act.

After countless wasted starts on the portrait, the teacher had gently suggested it need not look just like the first, and I had sighed and produced what I thought was a much less inspired likeness. Neither picture ever made it home to my mother, and I never learned what might truly have happened to them. I had noticed, though, that no one else in the second grade drew the bridge of the nose along with nostrils, or the spokes of the iris when drawing the human face. And their flowers didn't look real, either.

It would be decades before I realized they were probably keeping me busy with the Christmas Project, and possibly hoping to pinch an early production of my work, whether original, or copied from an overhead projector. Since all the way through high school, my best work never made it home, I just thought it was the nature of teachers to snatch up the best portraits and renderings.

Getting done early with my classwork was the usual, so it was not a problem for the classroom teacher to lend me for hours for the big Christmas Project. It did take hours. The teacher would tape a 2 1/2 inch elf to the overhead projector and he would be 3 feet tall on the poster paper on the wall, where I first traced him and then filled in the details in complete duplication using tempera paints. I could mix my own colors, and they had to match as well as the details.

After several days of my need for perfection it became necessary to pull in a couple of helpers in order to complete the project before Christmas of that same year. While I lost artistic control, and exclusive credit for production, my eagerness to see the 3 stories of central stair railings populated by elves, my elves, made any problems caused by artists less disciplined minor.

Soon the vision of Santa's Helpers, tools and toys in hand, running up and down the school stairs against a backdrop of greenery was a reality. The season, in which no memorable academic was preformed, was celebrated, beginning with our return from the Thanksgiving holiday and a trip to the long basement lunch room that also housed the piano and a buxom, middle-aged redheaded teacher.

Her repertoire seemed made up entirely of military camp songs, some of which predated the Civil War. We dolefully sang with her as she took us into the foxholes with our grandfathers, and great grandfathers, "Many are the hearts that are weary tonight, looking for the war to cease--many are the hearts that are looking for the right to see the dawn of peace." Her time must have been spent during her younger years with the USO or she would not have taught us "Gonna Dance with the Dolly With a Hole in Her Stocking".

But approaching the Christmas Holiday, we could expect the full range of tradition and what Broadway had to offer. She banged out that chorus, "Ho ho ho, who wouldn't go" with finesse that Norma Zimmer would have been obliged to applaud from her piano stool on the Lawrence Welk set. And we were jovial and eager to do our part,

She led us in an endless procession of hymns and tunes that she played without a glance at the sheet music when we called out our favorites. For me, "O Little Town of Bethlehem" must have drawn its' scenic inspiration for beauty from the streets of our own little town. Blanketed in snow and dressed in street lights, it was the epitome of George's version of Bedford Falls. Everything good seemed to happen here.

After all the preparation and rehearsals were completed, we awaited that last, wonderful day before we would be dismissed for the Christmas break. Some semblance of work was made, using the numbering of ornaments on a page we had to color as an excuse for arithmetic. To facilitate our speedy exit from the building, report cards were handed out, and then we all gathered round the interior staircase that zig-zagged, looking down on the library at the first level.

The piano had been relocated for the occasion, the kindergartners gathered round on the library level, and our smiling music teacher awaited hands poised on the keys for the first chords of "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas." She looked up at us, gave a nod, and we were off! We sang through what must have been twenty carols and hymns before final announcements and good wishes were made. Then we were ushered to our rooms to await the coming of Santa.

By the forth grade, we knew perfectly well that Santa was not real, but we anticipated his coming with the enormous red bag over his shoulder. Inside were paper lunch sacks, filled by PTA and Room Mothers, each with a hand made red or green tinted popcorn ball, several hard candies, a single candy cane, and a hand full of peanuts, roasted in the shell. What a deal! We could take it home to enjoy later, or begin self-paced consumption of the candy cane or popcorn ball on the spot.

The volume of the shrieks of excitement were increasing as Santa and his Helpers made their way up the levels. Our wait was longer, but no less rewarding. When every hand held a gift, his work was done, and we were dismissed with the ring of that same bell that called us to the playground on balmy spring days. Today we would don our snow boots and stomp pathways through shoveled snow for the joy of going knee deep.

We burst from the building, a goodie bag in one hand and our hard-earned report card in the other. Snowball fights would erupt along the way home, and hot cocoa would warm our freezing wet hands, gloves lost or forgotten in the rush.

In the days to come, the Christmas songs we knew by heart played in stores and on radio. Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby competed on our televisions for the most beloved or memorable seasonal songs. At church we joined in hymns and listened to or participated in special choral numbers.. At home, we sang around the piano as my sister, Mary, played. Our father and mother looked on as warm flames danced in the fireplace, enjoying, truly enjoying some peace in their lives.

A Place in the Sun 1966 (c) Nita Walker Boles

2012-02-15T09:22:00.000-08:00

If the New Mexico Desert had been a trial for us, the Yellow House Canyon and Lubbock, Texas was the matter-of-fact, unassuming and ample reward. It would be up to us to discover what the treasure was that lay there for us. For Mary, who never really lived there, Lubbock became the place where the rest of her younger siblings and parents lived as she entered her young adult life. She moved on to the green and graceful tree-lined streets of Ft. Worth and Arlington.

Our sister, Nina, and her husband, Donald, had a great 55 Ford ready for her to take to school, and they supplied the gas. They had just moved into a beautiful new home, so Mary had the use of a nice new room . Nina took on the job of seeing that she had the right clothes and shoes to wear. Mary took meals with them when she could, and went to school on a student loan.

The rest of our family moved first into a little two bedroom rental home near 34th Street, just down the block from our dad's sister. The dining room became my room with the addition of the curtain partition that had traveled with us from Pueblo. The boys had the small bedroom and my parents the large one.

It was the second semester of my 9th grade year. My two younger brothers were wearing clothes, so I know they had some, and they didn't look funny to me, so what they had must have fit. No doubt they had their share of donated pants and shirts from cousins and other relatives. Boys clothes were, at least for their ages, pretty generic: jeans and a tee shirt were adequate most places.

I had never thought of myself as a clothes horse. In fact, what I wore had been of so little concern to me that my mother had found it a challenge to get me to say what I liked. So I was beholden to her good taste for the nice wardrobe she usually sewed for me, and which I had once taken for granted. But as we began the new life in Lubbock there were no resources for new clothes, and the out-dated hand-me-downs fit, so I wore them.

I felt like a complete dork. I suddenly realized that Mod clothing had been my style. I had precious little of it now that I had grown out of nearly everything in the months since we left Colorado. What did fit was suited for winter in Colorado, and we were in the West Texas Panhandle. To offset the shortfall in current clothing, =I took a pair of scissors and gave myself a haircut rather like Twiggy's. I did fine with the cut, but I still had those Brenda Lee style dresses to contend with, and I looked as much like I belonged in them as Twiggy might have. I wanted to disappear.

Not only that, but my transfer in had placed me in a position to be the ONLY girl in a science class that covered how a motor for a car was designed to work.I quickly assessed that the boys in that class had developmentally arrested at the age of 12. I was, to them, a girl with a strange accent and clothes from old television shows like Leave it to Beaver and Donna Reed. Being the gentlemen that they were and finding me inexplicably on their territory, I suppose they did their best to make me feel at home. A freckled boy who had not hit his adolescent growth spurt sat in front of me. He disclosed to me the private name they had for our teacher, at the same time explaining to me reassuringly that she was really very nice. The other boys surrounding my desk nodded in agreement.

I was stuck on her nickname, and when I asked, Freckles gestured with his hands and nodded at her chest. I could see she wore a dress even older than mine, similar to those my own grandmothers wore, big and loose, covering her rather large bosom. I gasped in realization and put my face flushed, and I fell forward into my arms on the desk, humiliated for her and for me.

When my head came up I looked ruefully around me at the Martians, now focused on the firing mechanism of a piston. Someday, they would all pass for just a group of high school boys in a shop class. But for now, it was February and we would be done with the semester in June.

Freckles and the other Martians disappeared out of my field of vision as I focused on the clock. How many hours and minutes until June? I had learned to outlast the stuff you found incomprehensible, but this required going to another planet, and I was not prepared for that. Please, God, I prayed silently. I know they have requirements, but can you Please get me out of this class?

The girls at J.T. Hutchinson, down to the last one, were just as nice as could be, no matter how odd I must have looked. My growing list of kind and helpful friends expressed sympathy as I confided my plight during P. E. After conferring, they suggested I talk to the Science teacher~whose real name will forever be erased from my mind and supplanted by the glass Carnation containers that had once fit neatly into wooden compartments of the pale green milk box on our front porch in Denver~yes, talk with her about letting me take Home Economics instead.

Miss Carnation, an understanding woman who patiently tolerated and overlooked the boys' crudeness--all of which was intended, but failing to be out of her earshot--promptly insured that my wish was granted, and returned to her work of directing their lowly thoughts toward the mechanics of things. But not before I passed a test demonstrating that I could correctly identify all the parts and purposes of a V-8 motor.

Home Ec and Science were electives in the 9th grade curriculum. I had already taken home economics and was proficient, so the class was what we would call a 'yawner'. The teacher was clearly not from a savvy cooking background. My parents made their own biscuits, but canned biscuits were reserved for making home made doughnuts. And anyone knew you did not freeze canned biscuits for future use, but not our teacher. She had found them on sale and decided to freeze them to have them available for the unit. My id was coming into its' own now, realizing that not all adults had all the answers. I was grateful not to have to prove I could sew a straight seam using a sewing machine for the third time. This was the third Junior High School I had attended. I could not wait to go to High School.

The benefit of school, beside getting an education, was income. There was enough change after buying a little lunch to save a little. I could begin the day with our usual farmer's breakfast and last easily on a ten cent ice cream bar, making the rest of the money available for the purchase of Needful Things.

Mother's portable stereo record player had traveled with us from Colorado, and while located for anyone's use, it was used mostly by me. I had a limited number of Beatle albums, a few of my oldest sister's variety albums with top ten hits of previous years, and a growing number of 45 rpm singles. Although I don't remember ice cream bars as the lunch alternative, I do know that I bought a few 45's during the 6 months or so that we lived near Wayne's Records. Wayne's was only a few blocks' walk. We still had the old plastic radio and the hits of the '60's were not wasted on the home of Buddy Holly. Rock and Rockabilly embraced Folk and the British invasion in Lubbock, Texas, where music came with the West Texas pioneers.

At school I was for the first time beginning to appreciate Texas history. I still wrote my friends in Colorado, and less often my English pen pal, but life in Lubbock was beginning to busy us with Saturday milk bottle top movies and trips to the Library. And when that semester finished we very quickly moved into a home of our own, with much better living arrangements.

I had a real bedroom of my own for the first time in my life. I had the use of the nice French Provencal dressing table and drawers. The double bedstead had disappeared somewhere during the last two moves. . Mine was a nondescript twin, and I don't remember the bedspread, or the curtains. But at night I was alone in my own room with a door to close, where I could lay and pray up through the ceiling to the God who held my life and future in His hands. I knew He was in charge of the chaos that life was, and that from it He would somehow wring order and meaning to it all. I just talked and He listened. Although I didn't have big questions, sometimes I would get impressions about what I should do about something.

The boys were out in the small converted garage with the gas water heater that had a faulty pilot light. While I knew my parents checked it frequently, and that my dad had tried to "fix" it, with the wind always blowing in Lubbock, I was constantly checking it. It was really the opening and closing of the outside door that frequently blew it out during daylight hours. I had a keen sense of smell and after bed time I would sometimes get up at night o make sure it was lighted. I suppose that must have driven the decision to call the gas company to have it fixed. There was a window exit, and after the gas company "fixed" it, the outside door remained closed and locked from the inside.

Mother would call a taxi that would take her, along with Rob if we were in shool, to her Avon territory She would prearrange a pick up time and place for later, if possible, and if not, Rob said, she would politely ask to use a phone to call her cab. Rob would sit reading or quietly playing with a pocket toy on the front steps as she sold her wares to the lady of the house.

In a short while she had enough money to buy a used car. With the means to get to a paying job, she added work at a doughnut shop for $1 an hour, where she brought home everything she could from the day-old rack. While it did not take me long to get tired of stale pastry, the boys devoured put in front of them. In a short while she was working at Montgomery Wards in the sewing department.

I became assistant, if not chief cook and bottle washer at the house that summer. After school if Daddy was not there to start supper, I cooked and cleaned and watched my youngest brother, Rob. David, just two years younger than me, had the freedom to roam the neighborhood and went about making friends. For myself and Rob, there were some trees to climb and a park nearby. And although we had little time to visit, I had gotten to know the girl across the street a little that summer.

I had moved so many times that I couldn't remember exactly where I knew people from, and their names refused to take a permanent hold in my mind. For the rest of my life, learning and retaining names became an embarrassing struggle. I had to associate closely with someone to feel I knew them and could remember their name. Perhaps if I didn't know too many people I wouldn't lose too many of them. Making new friends was slow for me.

A new school, Lubbock High School, was ahead for me. Everyone would be new in some way, since several Junior High Schools fed into the huge Spanish Revival building. So everyone would be making new friends. My one friend across the street so nice, and the kids at Hutchinson had also been so nice that I was sure that Lubbock High would be just fine.

God was in His Heaven, and Mother's job at Wards was a blessing to us all. Her deftness with a sewing machine, sophisticated look, and outgoing personality were just what they wanted in that part of the appliance department. She brought home some material for me to sew into a skirt and provided a matching sweater. I began to like looking at patterns and material for the first time in my life! The anticipation of anything nice and new to wear was worth the trial of figuring out how it went together.. And for the best backup plan, Mother was working feverishly to sew model outfits for the manikins to display that she would later buy at cost for us to wear. A few more additions to the wardrobe made sure I was Mod again! Transformed, tucked away into my own room at last, I anticipated High School, hardly guessing at the experience that waited ahead.

And every night I lay in bed, eyes directed into an unseen heaven, no longer weeping for the friends and home we knew in Colorado. Instead, I was talking about my day with God, content enough with where my life was to be happy and hopeful before falling off to sleep.

NBB, Queen of the Universe, or how our eldest sister saved us from ourselves (c) Nita Walker Boles

2011-09-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

Long ago, in a far-off land lived a family, a third family made from two others, in which older children were banished by cruel circumstances but not forgotten by either their families or by the Goodness of God, who makes all things to turn for good if we will just allow it. As children of that third family, we knew that among our older siblings, in the Hinterlands of Texas, lived an older Sister named Nina, who was, by all rights, Queen of the Universe.

Mary remembered her well, from the time before she went away. When she heard that Nina was getting married, she asked Mother if she could be the Flower Girl. Within minutes, Nina was on the phone, saying she and Donald had just gotten married. Mary was disappointed, but I had no idea what they were talking about. In fact, I was so into picking flowers on the way home from school that it was about the best I could do to find my way home. I was too little to really remember much about my oldest sister before I saw her again, but it seemed that when they did get together, she and our Mother were talking the entire time they were together.

And any time she was expected to visit, there was a cleaning of the house like no other time. Linens were pulled from the shelf, re-washed, organized, and replaced. Everything was removed from the kitchen cabinets, the cabinets washed out, and everything cleaned again and replaced. The usual Saturday cleaning was re-done five times over, and the refrigerator cleaned and the freezer defrosted.

You would think the Queen was coming. And she was! So while we were little kids going to school, she was a grown-up with a complete life that included being Hollywood Pretty while excelling at everything she did, having a Dashingly Handsome Husband, and maintaining a Stylish Home. Even their dog was named after a fairy-tale character, Wolf.

On her visits to our home, she periodically grabbed one of the younger of us and straightened a collar or skirt too far a-kilter for her to tolerate while continuing her grown-up conversation with our Mother. She seemed insistent that anything we do be done right, so a look of satisfaction or a little smile with a nod of approval from her was a great reward.

I remember one potato salad under production in our kitchen in which my job was to peel the skins from the boiled potatoes. I seemed to have trouble getting the skins to slip off, and after a while she quietly took them from me, still conversing with Mother, and magically slipped a manicured nail beneath the brown skins, zipping them off within moments. She could make ordinary tasks look amazing when she performed them with such ease!

One Christmas she came with bags and boxes we eyed with excitement, and on Christmas Eve, eager to get in on the still-proceeding conversation with Mother, I walked into the back bedroom to find them wrapping toys. I spied the Monopoly game.

“Wow! Who gets the Monopoly game?!!” I exclaimed.

Nina's hands became the wings of a White Hen, her clucking voice and waving arms shewing me from the room and blocking me from getting a view of the other treasures askew about the room. I sulked back to rearrange the ornaments on the tree, muttering that Mary Beth would probably get the Monopoly game anyway. But on Christmas morning, it was MINE! Nina's little smile of satisfaction was brief, but I caught it when I said enthusiastically, “Thank you!”

II.

When it came to clothing and hair, there was no higher authority (except, on occasion, our Father) than Nina. When there was a doubt about what to wear or whether something fit right, it was whether or not it required her tugging, straightening, arranging, or pulling that determined its' fitness. She was as confident as our Mother in what she wore herself.

Conversely, when she visited one year, her hair long but piled into a sophisticated 1960's bubble on top of her head I heard Daddy musing to Mother about her hair: “Whatever that beauty shop is using on her hair is stripping the color from it!” Like all parents who think their children are perfect just as they are, he hated to see anything change about her natural beauty.

As for us, we were like a bed of unruly weeds with the uncontrollable habit of growing, and requiring a complete renewal of wardrobe every fall. When times were lean we were sometimes sent to her house for “outfitting” which might include both trips to the best department stores or finest dry goods places for purchase of the latest patterns and materials. Our school year was certain to go better when Nina had contributed to dressing us.

Although my closet was amply stocked with fine sewing done by our mother, I stood by with envy to watch the front yard photos of my older sister's fall wardrobe being made the year she entered Centennial High School. Mary came home after a visit to Nina's with a new wardrobe selected and sewn in excellent taste.

One summer when Six Flags had opened we went to visit Nina, then at her new home in Arlington. Upon inspection of our cut-offs and tee shirts, Mary and I were taken to Titches where Nina bought us cute little cotton-knit short shorts and tops by Aileen in colors that reminded me of sherbet.

Robert remembers being dressed in Bermuda shorts, a blazer, and a red cap and having the distinct feeling that he might look like a “Sissy” but also knowing it was futile when Nina had spoken to protest. Mary and I knew we looked good, so any noises Robbie made around us were going to be muffled because we revered the judgment of the Queen of the Universe. David must have had a shirt and shorts or pants that passed inspection, because he only remembers that it was hot when we went to Six Flags.

Before the start of my Junior year of High School I was lucky enough to spend a week with Nina. Among the prizes I went home with were two (Titches or Cox's) store-bought mini-dresses that our father would never have allowed me to wear. When I appeared in the the living room wearing one on the first day of school, Daddy said flatly, “You are not wearing that.” I looked straight at him and said, “Nina got it for me.” He blinked first. My poker face and bravado bought me the use of the dress until my sweaty friend borrowed it and I could never get her B.O. out of it again. The other of the two was worn again and again until it was too pilled to be nice enough.

III.

High school was a not a finishing point. It was well-rehearsed to us by our mother that while our father had finished high school, she had sorrowed all her life that the school bus had stopped coming near enough to her father's farm for her to complete her final year of public school. It was a foregone conclusion that we would not only finish high school, but make good enough grades to qualify for some sort of scholarship help to deliver us a college education.

Nina was the shining example for us, returning to school at TCU to complete her Bachelors' degree in Nursing. As teenagers we were acquainted with her college buddies, all nice girls, smart and savvy. They were, for us, a reference point that we could make for the kinds of friends one could choose for oneself.

She later proved to us that you aren't finished till you feel finished by completing her Master's Degree in Nursing at TWU. She taught, lead in her field, and finished her career working for the State of Texas certifying and investigating hospitals and home health agencies among other health care providers.

Watching the few years it took for her to complete her degree and then advance in a stellar career made us certain this was what we could and should expect to do for ourselves. Less than a college education would forever have been unacceptable to us, and we never felt finished with our education until we finished our education. So the four of us all went to college, some finishing with Bachelor's degrees and others with Masters, while some with lesser degrees but achieving success in our fields.

Some of us have served our country in the military. Some have owned and managed their own successful corporations. Some have worked in high level management positions, and some have addressed Congress and have spoken to Admirals, and international authorities as advocates for life-saving measures.

IV.

As a young girl, I watched as my older sister and her adoring husband bantered and played, always showing genuine and open affection for one another. They were the model of true love for one another. Good humor and tandem effort toward their individual and mutual goals showed us what was possible in a great marriage. If Nina was the Queen of the Universe, then Donald, the King, was the unassuming example of loyalty and hard work.

Good books, music, the arts, history, all a continuation of the home we were raised in were woven into the lives of our older sister and her husband. The love and acknowledgment of God was an undertone but never a lecturing point in their conduct. Their examples of grace as friends to others and as ever-present family members for us gave us the reference point we have for belonging to and helping others to belong. Nina often spoke about the value of having and “putting down roots.” How different our lives would have been without them to show us the way.

It is now many years since the first visit to Six Flags over Texas. Our sister, Nina, still reigns Queen. The home that she and Kind King Donald have made has been the gathering place for our family now for three generations.

Donald serves up grilled hamburgers and sage advice seasoned by wry observations with generosity to his nieces and nephews. He dons an apron to bake in the winter, cookies and breads, cakes and other delicacies to give to friends and families as they share the blessings life has brought them.

Nina's hands are never still. She embroiders and sews the fabric of our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren. No baby is born without something made beautifully for the day of their blessing. Heirloom stitchery is tucked away in tissues for generations to come.

With the coming and going of so many people, two dogs quiver for attention, afraid the parade of guests might take away the affection normally lavished on them when the King and Queen would be theirs alone to enjoy.

When we go from the Castle on Stagecoach Drive, we leave happily to return to our own homes, satisfied that we have at last met the Queen's approval, glad that our children and their children have had an audience and enjoyed a banquet of goodness within those walls.

Epilogue

Once upon a time there were two different families that became a third. Perhaps it was because among the children of the first two, there was at least one young Queen who chose to make a world for herself in which the children of the third family could also grow strong and happy, that the story ends Happily Ever After.

God on my Shoulder Part 2: Leaving Colorado Behind (c) Nita Walker Boles

2011-08-07T00:23:00.000-07:00

There are ways taught with nuances and without direct intention. Not that my parents would not have intended to teach me about God, because they did. But there were hundreds of lessons to learn in every day life, with reverence for life and all that was good in it. The scene that met us every day after school was the one of our father, who seemed never to be far from us, reading from the Scriptures. It was long into adulthood that I learned from my youngest brother that he had actually arranged life that way.

"No, no," Rob heard him talking on the phone. "I really can't meet at that time. I have kids that get in from school, and I need to be there." Oh, so it was no accident. "I can meet with you in the evening," he suggested.
Most of his appointments were made during the day while we were at school or during the evening when we were settled in and working on our homework. Mother was home from work by that time, so she took over from there as Daddy went out the door to meet some steel worker or ditch digger who wanted to be sure he could at least pay one day for his own burial. It was a burial policy, one that provided for the cost of a funeral, that my father sold. Poor men who worked hard did not want to become a burden, even in death, on their families.

Mother orchestrated everything to do with our extra curricular activities, including attendance at church and Girl Scouts. My sister and I walked a couple of miles to be at a choir practice when we lived in Colorado Springs to find they had cancelled and word had not reached us. Fortunately for us a nice brother from the ministry happened to be there and took us back home in his car, astonished that we would go to such trouble to be there. We were learning a beautiful hymn, "I Am Satisfied with Jesus" which included the American Sign Language version. I remember most of that song in sign language today, and sometimes think on the words, " I am satisfied with Jesus. He has done so much for me. He has suffered to redeem me. He has died to set me free. I am satisfied. I am satisfied. I am satisfied with Jesus. But the question comes to me as I think of Calvary, is my Master satisfied with me?"

So you see, not all that we learned at church was full of condemnation, but raised questions of how we might improve ourselves to be fit for Divine company. There were many, many good people and good clergymen within the church. Our time there was full of memorization of key scripture passages and of stories that likened us to people in the Bible. In reading the Old Testament stories of children and young people who interacted directly with God the Father, it did not seem impossible for one in our place and time to experience similar things. Yet, obedient to scripture, we did not seek "for signs". We did, however, snuggle into the comfortable arm of the Lord, expecting each new day to bring another wonder or miracle in plain site, because, that is really how we saw it. Life was joy.

In Girl's Auxillary we memorized still more scriptures, receiving small mementos as recognition for our efforts.We continued to sing in the choir, stayed active in the youth group. It was a good life, always framed in Biblical context, with the understanding that our lives lay before us with the Lord at the helm.

We would not happily nor willingly get on the ship that took us to the deserts of New Mexico, though. We had lessons in comparison and contrast regularly in the trips we took at least twice a year there. We could endure the holiday away from home just so we got to go home, but New Mexico, did not feel like home for us.

Our older brother, Jack had scarcely beaten cancer in the previous year, our father having spent more than we had to travel in his worry over his son, and the economy failing. Our eldest brother, Son, and our father's cousin were convinced Daddy could return to farming and support us well enough. Daddy was a hard worker and a willing and experienced farmer, but the terms would be simply sharecropping. He would be bringing his wife and family of four children ranging from 4 to 17 to support, and had not a dime to invest. We had lost the house in Pueblo, and we would be starting over.

So the day came when the household was packed, the beloved piano still standing in the living room for want of space on the truck. I don't remember any of it, but I know we loaded the truck, carrying boxes we had packed with our dishes wrapped in dishtowels and other linens. Whatever furniture we had for bedrooms went, the beautiful oak dining set, our kitchen table and chairs. As we drove away I tried to look at every tree and house for the last time. Soon my gaze fell on the river and the mountain range.

In the truck ahead of us, our father was telling our brother, David about a dream he had the previous night. That day was June 7, 1965. A few drops of rain had started to fall, and he told how he had dreamed of a flood that overspilled the banks of the Arkansas river into the downtown area of Pueblo. Remarkably, when we later unloaded our truck and set up the television, the national news carried pictures of the flood in Pueblo our father had dreamed about the previous night. Perhaps his premonition of that disaster was an affirmation for us that rough times would not have been avoided had we managed to stay in Colorado. For we children were openly heartbroken.

Where we were going was not an unknown to us. We had been to the plains of New Mexico visiting our complicatedly random family for what seemed like a thousand Thanksgivings and Christmases. But then we had always had the luxury of leaving the starkness of the cactus covered sand behind.

But by the time I was 13 and able to form my own opinions about preferable vacation spots, it was not especially enchanting to visit the Land of Enchantment. The desert was the tumbleweed home to countless sulfuric oil wells that provided paying jobs for younger men than our father. Doubtless they would otherwise be tilling the soil for cotton or maize, the other cash crop. There were a few cattle, but the brittle land would not support herds in numbers to compare to those in less arid areas across the border, in Texas.

After the 12 hour drive from Denver, we found ourselves parked in front of a small two bedroom frame house in the middle of a field of maize outside Lovington, New Mexico. A windmill creaked on the tower behind the house Within a few hours we had unloaded our furniture, put away the dishes and pans, and set up beds.

Our mother, one of the most resourceful women I have ever known, declared one end of the living room a Master bedroom. By standing one dresser on top of another she created a buffer zone that separated their room from the living area. Mother used the same curtain that had partitioned my bedroom from the den area of our basement in Colorado. Strung on a clothesline across the back end of the living room it allowed a bit of privacy. The two boys were in one bedroom and we girls in the other. We were comfortable enough if our parents were consigned to the least desirable space. I was 13 that summer as we arrived and would turn 14 before the year was up. My brother, David was 11. My sister, Mary, was 17. And Rob, the youngest, was 4.

We almost immediately began the planting of a garden, from which we canned every single thing not required to feed us immediately. David went to work with Daddy every day. It was not child's play. He rode on the back of combines, dangerous work for a little boy. Anything the men did he also did to the best of his ability becoming muscled, tanned, and weary.

He later told how he witnessed the look of worried care growing on our father's face. The economics of raising a family were unknown to my brother, but he recognized the edge in our father's voice when he told his cousin that he was "sick to his stomach with worry" over how we would make it.

To buffer us from the trials around us, Mother made sure we had the chance to go to Bible School for the week when they held it. So David had a reprieve from farm work for that time. It was a relief for us to hear familiar music and have scripture read that we recognized.

"I was glad when they said unto me 'Let us go into the House of the Lord'." We memorized more verses: "The Lord is my light and my salvation: Whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life.Of whom shall I be afraid?"

"Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before His presence with singing. Know ye that the Lord He is God. It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves. We are His people and the sheep in His pasture. Enter into his courts with singing and into his gates with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name. For the Lord is good; His mercy is everlasting; and His truth endureth to all generations."

"Trust in the Lord with all thy heart, and lean not to thine own understanding."

These verses, though seemingly simple, would become the place we could go in our hearts. when things seemed hopeless and depressing.

That fall some of the winter clothes I had from the previous year still fit. Although Mother was the best with a sewing machine, she did not have many resources to provide us with anything new as the new school year began. David was on free lunches at school. I continued to ask Daddy every day for lunch money. He would dig in his pockets and come up with a little change for me and I would thank him. Unbeknown to me, my sister did not ask and was not offered money to eat on. Why David was getting free lunches and we were not I will never know. Our mother must have assumed if she had filled out some paperwork that it applied to us all. Nevertheless, Mary went to school each day with no money in her pocket. Two very nice girls befriended her and made sure she ate every day by going back for seconds at lunch time.

To say that we hated being there would be an understatement. The culture was something we could not understand. It was as different as Country music and Rock and Roll. We were thinking about the Beatles, and few of our contemporaries there knew who they were. We treasured the few friends we made who also listened to Simon & Garfunkle. We were out of place. We wrote letters to our old pen pals in France and England and added our old friends from Colorado. Anxious for word from "home", the reports of life in a place that was becoming increasingly irrelevant were meaningless and empty for both my sister and I.

Gradually the connections to Colorado were being shorn away. A youth hayride at church turned out to be in the back of a cotton wagon. There were bales of hay, all right, but the cage around us was covered with cotton burrs and lint. Because it was fall I had worn my black and white hounds tooth pleated skirt and a black cable knit sweater. Although they fit comfortably I could not wear them again because I couldn't get the lint out of them.

Our Midwest accents and mannerisms were more foreign to them than their Southern drawls and boisterous ways were to us. Because we had grown up with those differences within our own family, we were naturally more accepting of the local kids than they were with us. They weren't going to change and it was up to us to adapt. Friendships came slowly. My closest friend suffered from a birth defect that left her eyelids partially closed. Her father worked the fields and oilfields, and she told me, could not afford the operation needed to raise her eyelids out of the field of obstruction. Consequently she kept her head tilted slightly back to see, but self-conscious, not enough to see well. Her neck must have always been sore. She had few other friends. Another girl, there from California, was as different from the local kids as I was, and as different from me than them. Being all different, we made a society of three.

Still, every night I prayed for the Lord to package us up and send us back home. When we crossed the highway that lead north, I imagined the straight ribbon as it traveled, gradually ascending to the plateaus and foothills and went past the Sangre de Christo mountain range. I imagined going back to our home, our friends, our life now gone. I cried enough in the middle of the night that Mother had to have heard me.

To help clothe us, Mother had gone to work at an Anthony's department store on the square and she brought bargains she found on the sale rack now and then to stretch our wardrobes. Although it almost never rained, she brought me a matching lined raincoat and umbrella that must have been marked far below value. The raincoat served more practicably as a light jacket since all I had was a heavy winter coat, seldom needed in the fall on the plains.

One day she brought me a little gold toned necklace that had the Serenity Prayer on it. While we were completely unfamiliar with Alcoholics Anonymous, the message in the prayer was particularly applicable to me: 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.'

She offered the necklace to me without explanation. When I read the message, I felt grateful for her compassion, and for the first time stopped blaming my parents for what had seemed like a catastrophe.

That winter was the worst time I ever remember. Sometimes there were no beans to go with the cornbread our mother made. We had soup made from a combination of every vegetable we had canned that summer, and made more substantial with macaroni. The slimy canned squash was my favorite to hate. My brother says that to this day, he cannot stand potato soup and will not eat it. But I loved the potato soup in comparison to the slimy vegetable soup we had to eat. At Christmas a relative brought a ham.

I don't remember much else about Christmas there, but I know that we we were packing for a move by February. Working as a sharecropper was not going to feed us. My prayers had been answered differently than I expected. We were moving to Lubbock, where Daddy hoped to find work once again selling insurance, something he was always to find success with.

I was glad to be going, but it seemed as though our family was always morphing and changing, and someone was always being left behind. My sister had attended two years of high school in Colorado and a half year in New Mexico. Mother had asked one of the aunts in Lubbock to see whether Mary could transfer her credits and graduate that year, but it seemed that there would be some problem with not having taken Texas History or something like that.

In any case, Mary stayed behind, living with our brother, Jack, and his wife, Mary Ann. Her friends continued to insure that she ate at school. I remember being there when we said goodbye to her at our brother's house. She was silent. My stomach hurt. I asked her if she was going to be OK there and she nodded her head. I never considered switching places with her because there wasn't a reason for it. I felt guilty running out on her, but she stood there, her face a studied mask of self-control, and we left her there. There were no tears, just an impossibly large lump in my throat.

I was now the oldest of the three of us that remained at home. I didn't see Mary again until she came through Lubbock in the summer on her way to live with our oldest sister, Nina, while she attended TCU in Ft. Worth. She stoically moved forward, and it would be years before we began to talk about the hardship of that time. But between us it was understood that God was ever there, and would help us navigate through the waters ahead.

Explaining the Big Family that was Rather Small, and the Economics of it All. (c) Nita Walker Boles

2011-08-07T00:20:00.000-07:00

When I explain that I came from a family of 10 children, my listeners usually do some kind of gasp or at least register some astonishment. Even for mid-20th Century, 10 was a large number of children. But we did not come all at once. We seemed, as I grew up, to have a lot of aunts and uncles that fit neither directly into the batch of 9 children my mother came from, nor the 5 that my father came from.

In time we became aware that there were all kinds of layers of family around. We called my father's uncles and aunts, "Uncle" and "Aunt". We called his brother and sister-in-laws "Uncle" and "Aunt" as well, and his father-in-law. "Papaw Kidd". even though he was technically not our own grandfather. We were as apt to see them as to see our mother's or father's family.

Our father's first wife, Modena, had died in her 30's from colon cancer. She left behind their two sons, Son (James Frank) and Jack. Our mother was, as I observed earlier, possibly the first Southern Baptist woman to ever get a divorce, and had two children Nina, and Doyle, to support. It was war time, and she and Daddy met while they both worked at Walker Air Force Base. They married in Roswell, and built a little house, bringing their four children together. As they married, Son was 14, Jack 9, Nina, 6. and Doyle, 2.

Their first baby, Alma Jean, was born in 1945 with insufficient lung surfactant. She did not live to come home from the hospital. The war ended, and so did their civilian jobs. For some reason unknown to anyone in the family, they moved to the Ozarks of Missouri.

Following close behind them were our paternal grandparents, and one of Daddy's sisters and brother-in-law. They spent several years in the Ozarks at Exeter, a bucolic piece of Eden where the very fence posts would sprout leaves if not painted to prevent it. I think the kids were all rather happy there. Nina and Doyle were enrolled in school with Walker for their last names, although their birth father would not give them up for adoption.

Mother had another baby in 1947, Betty Ann, who was born with a serious heart defect. Although it was possible to surgically correct the problem it was necessary for her to be bigger and healthier than she was to have survived an attempt at surgery. She died at 8 months. As an adult, Doyle would be reduced to tears as he remembered that tragedy. He was 6 years older than Betty Ann.

Son was home on leave when she died. That had to have been another shock for him. As we grew up he remained rather distant from us, never really engaging. It was not until I was grown that I understood how tentative relationships must have seemed for him.

Mary Beth was born in the first month of 1949, only 4 months after Betty Ann's death. She failed to thrive, not being able to tolerate any milk or formula until they tried goat's milk. She was so fragile that one of Mother's sisters made and sent a dress to have her buried in. She was healthy and beautiful in a short time.

I was born about 3 years later. We were still on the farm when I came, and a drought had plagued the area for a few years. To tie the farm over, our father bought a number of piglets from an individual who may have known they all had Hog Cholera. They were all dead within a short while, and Daddy lost the farm. At the same time his sister and her family sold out, moving back to Texas.

Mother's ex-spouse proposed she allow him to take the two children to live with him in Ft. Worth, where he had a " good job with General Dynamics. " . Through mother's family he reported that they would have a "better life" than they could hope for under the dire circumstances they now faced. Unknown to her, that life reportedly would include caring for an invalid grandmother and some rough treatment from an unkind father. Mother must have felt defeated. Certainly when she and I had the conversation that gave me this information she expressed that she had no other choice at the time. She allowed them to go, only to have to face a judge later in a failed attempt to regain custody.

Jack was with us for a few months when we first moved to Denver from Missouri, but not long. He went on to New Mexico to finish school, living with his mother's sister and her husband, who was my father's cousin.
He was happy to be there, and once done with school, joined the Army. He was stationed at Ft. Carson, in Colorado Springs when he began to experience medical problems that foreshadowed the ultimate battle that lay ahead for him. Despite the medical history of his mother, the Army did not focus on the possibility he could have cancer.

So, although by way of explanation I have digressed, we left the farm about 1953, before I was old enough to have more than one or two impressions of ever living there, with just we two girls and Jack, who soon was in New Mexico. Son was in the Military, Nina and Doyle in Ft. Worth.

There was not a job waiting in Denver. Daddy had an aunt and uncle there who must have helped him get on his feet. The job as an airplane mechanic he had hoped for at Stapleton Airport went to an ex-GI, of course. Mother and Daddy both became door-to-door salesmen, selling Filter Queen vacuum cleaners, and Tupperware. David was born in early 1954, and now our family looked like 3 small children. After a while, I could not remember I had an older sister until I saw her at a family gathering when I was 4.

Doyle could not bear his father's house, and left, hitch-hiking to Denver. At 13 he looked quite a bit older than he was, already nearly 6 feet tall. He had mailed a letter to Mother telling her he was coming, and she was truly happy to have him home. He played and "roughhoused' with us, but we seldom saw him because within a very short time he was working as a bell hop at a nearby hotel. We lived just blocks from the Capital. So Doyle went to school during the day, came home for a meal and then on to the hotel til late at night.

He later told us that Mother and Daddy scarcely could make a living when we first moved to Denver. It is true that they did not prosper until the few years we lived in Pueblo, and that did not last long because of the closing of the steel mill. Their plight might have been much like that of others of their generation. The war had brought a number of people off the farm and out to work as civilians on the bases. The majority of them had only a high school education, and were not prepared to do any certain thing in the cities. But with the advent of the G I bill and FHA for housing, vets everywhere were climbing the economic ladder to a growing middle class, and it is true that encyclopedias, vacuums, spices, and any number of other household goods would be sold door to door. But Daddy's salvation was selling life insurance.

Mother and Daddy took in a boarder, our beloved Azhar, to help us make ends meet. Doyle stayed with us until he married, rather young, about 1959. He was the last of the "big kids" to live at home.

My first memory is of the green bead board shelf or cabinet top by the back porch water pump in Missouri. The next is of living briefly in a basement apartment before my parents found the house on Cherokee, in Denver. I remember Jack, a tall older brother just briefly living with us on Cherokee, and then he is gone. From that time I have a steady trickle of memories, Mother coming home from the hospital with David, (I am then 25 months old then), watching David's face as he plays, his brow furrowed with deep concentration on his objective. Mary is always beautiful, her dark chestnut hair shining and curly, her beautiful smile dimpled. I think she is prettier than Shirley Temple. Then Doyle comes to live with us sometime following our move to East 12th Avenue. Finally, a young, beautifully dressed woman comes and speaks with my mother, calling her mother. I am astonished. After she leaves, I ask, "Mother, why did she call you Mother?"

Although I had been standing right there when Mary Beth had that conversation with Mother about being a flower girl at Nina's wedding, I could not summon who she was from my short memory. I loved to look at the faces of my siblings. What I had processed on Mary's face as she was trying to understand that Nina had already married, and that she could not be her flower girl was something I can now recognize as resigned disappointment.

I knew about Son and Jack, because we had seen them at our grandparents in Missouri at Christmas. But Nina was now married and living with her husband, Donald in Ft. Worth and we saw her less often because it was another 12 hour drive from New Mexico on to Ft. Worth. In years to come, if we were home at Christmas, it would be a difficult time for our mother if Nina was not able to come. The only time I ever saw her cry was when Nina could not be home for Christmas.

So, as you see, we were from a family of 10. There were not any half brothers or sisters in that family. We all belonged to each other, even the ones we couldn't see often. Neither of my parents ever referred to the children brought to the marriage by the other spouse as "step-children" . Not ever. Nina said that after they left the farm in Missouri, they were heartbroken to have the last name they were born with once again. In Missouri it had worked, but when they moved in with their natural father it was not the same.

Both Nina and Doyle called our father "Daddy". Doyle did see his natural father occasionally in years to come. Nina did not. But Son and Jack called our mother, "Ann". Of course that would have been natural as well.

For both sets of kids, there were periods of happiness and delight, followed by sometimes shattering disappointment. In the end, we collected one another up and made sure each other were OK and forged on.

Having God on my Shoulder (c) Nita Walker Boles

2011-06-27T23:27:00.000-07:00

That I had a personality, a thought-producing id that accounted for who I was from the earliest time I have memory is a truth. The question of where I came from seemed obvious, since my mother took us to church where we were instructed about all things to do with God. However, the fact of His existence seemed independent of any teaching and evident in everything in the world surrounding me.

Every Sunday we were dressed in lovely clothing made by our mother and our hair curled neatly and bangs cut in a crisp little line well above the eyebrows. We were ushered into the big sanctuary of the church we attended in Denver, where singing an preaching filled an hour or so, and then we retired to our classes for Sunday School.

Mr. and Mrs Sommers were the first Sunday School teachers I ever had, and the only ones whose names I specifically remember. The rest were a blur of nice, smiling faces, eager to tell us a Bible story and sometimes give us a little booklet to take home with illustrations and the story of our character from the Bible in it..

From Mr. & Mrs Sommers I learned to sing "Yes, Jesus Loves Me" and "Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam". We were little Sunbeams, no one older than 3 in that class. I don't remember the specific stories they told, but I remember knowing because of what they had told me, and what I felt in my heart as I heard it, that Jesus really did love me, and God loved me as well. God seemed far above Jesus, who was far above us, and the Son of God. He died, they said, for us, but was raised from the dead to save us. One Sunday as we lined up to follow our teachers back to the classroom I stood in the light from a golden stained-glass window and felt as though Heaven was smiling down on me. I knew that Heavenly Father and Jesus loved me.

If it hadn't been true, I would have known it. I always knew what was true. When I didn't know whether or not something was true, I just let it percolate and studied it a while before coming to a conclusion. That we studied stories of children, like us, helped us understand that you didn't have to wait until you were a grown up to be important to God and Jesus. When my Sunday School teacher told us the story of Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors, I then went home to read the real story from the Bible. Then I had to find out who Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were and why their stories were important to us. To me it was obvious. We were the same as them to God. We could walk and talk with Him and were instructed to do so.

I learned to read as early as I could so I could read the Bible and learn from it. Although I never knew my great grandmother, a Quaker, I suspect she is the reason my father seldom missed a day without studying from the Bible. Since it was important to him, I knew it must be to me, so I too read nearly every day. For that reason, my language has nearly always been on the upper end of above average. I don't remember any other Bible available to us than the one my brother now has, the Family Bible, bought from the Door to Door Salesman. I vaguely remember our father anxious to get it quickly, and once it was in his hands his smile of satisfaction was a sermon delivered. There was certainly another Bible in the house, because the older children remember him as we, the younger half of the family do, looking up at them over the Bible as they came home from school every day. He did not attend church unless company came (his father-in-law, the preacher).

Our Mother took us to church but her quiet dignity was her sermon to us. It was understood you knew and kept the commandments, and that you followed Jesus. Her father, our grandfather, delivered sermons straight from the Bible. He did not vary from its' message. On his wall was a little plaque that read, "Lord fill my mouth with worthwhile stuff and nudge me when I've said enough." He seemed willing to abide by that admonition. I never remember a hell-fire and damnation sermon during the summers I spent at Grandma and Grandaddy's when in my early teens. However, I don't specifically remember any of his sermons, although I can tell you I was listening intently.They were generally instructions on how we ought to live our lives to be like the Savior.

Back at home, by the time I was five I was plenty scared of Hell, that is h-e-double toothpick HELL. We were reminded of the devil and hell on a regular basis, and the fear of going there was more of a concern than it should have been. When the invitation to come forward for profession of faith, at 5 I was determined never to go to hell. The assistant pastor was quite rattled when I told him I was ready to be baptized. He knelt down and said, kindly, "Do you know the 23d Psalm?" I answered no. He told me that when I could repeat it to him I could be baptized. He didn't know me well at all. I could read, and I could memorize, and about 6 weeks later he had to baptize me. They should have been ashamed of themselves! I hope they had a meeting about baptizing little children who are far too young to even understand sin, and especially about topics for sermons other than scaring the be-Jesus out of everyone there. I refer you to the sidebar for a taste of preaching from "Cold Comfort Farm". I am not sure my father knew anything about my being baptized. He would have put a stop to it if he had known. Now, my sister, at 8 was probably old enough, and may have been baptized around the same time, I just don't remember.

In any case, my father's no-nonsense teaching in our everyday lives was more influential in my understanding of God than any preacher. When I was appalled at about age 6 at the teaching that those who died without Christ, never having heard the gospel would be damned, I asked my father whether God was really that mean. He tenderly denounced the idea. He quoted the Savior saying, "Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free." He said God was blamed for a lot of things He never did. I can remember the light of day coming through our living room windows, and the sound of his words, and the certainty that he was right. From that moment forward I knew I was free to know for myself what was true.

So with all the riches of life around me I set out in life with the certainty that God was right over my shoulder, ready and willing to give me direction as needed. With beautiful mountains surrounding us, where rocks and streams testified of His goodness, with museums and zoos cataloging all His creations, and with books from the library spilling over with knowledge we could apply, what was there not to love about life? Our half of the family was together, for a time, in a Land of Milk and Honey.

I Wash Dishes the Way I Do Because I Was A Girl Scout (c) Nita Walker Boles

2011-06-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

Starting with the trip to Supreme Bakers in Denver, Colorado, I knew my life was going to be more enchanted because of the Girl Scouts of America. Remember that special moment when the tube that dispensed the creme filling for wafer bars was plugged, and the operator who was trying to get it going again got a face full? That was when I knew that fun and serendipity would always grace my path if I stuck close to the Girl Scouts of America.

As a Brownie, nothing could compare with dressing in the uniform that made all small girls look like, well, Brownies. The cap that topped our heads made us look like little acorns. We were irresistible sellers of Girl Scout Cookies, and we had been to the bakery where they were made, so could testify that they were the best of the best. Living on Capital Hill made selling the delicious treats both daunting and successful. The blocks surrounding our home were made up of a variety of cottages and bungalows.

But at least one of my class mates arranged for us to visit his grandparent's nearby home, the Hull Mansion to see their private collection of American Indian artifacts. In that area lived people whose mansions took up whole city blocks. Passing the classic Victorian iron fencing and approaching the open gates where hitching posts still stood, a very small Brownie would have to work up the courage to walk the pathway toward the gigantic home, climb the large steps, and use the door knocker that sometimes looked like a gargoyle, or, if lucky, push the doorbell to hear a sort of song rung out in chimes.

Invariably a butler or maid would come to the door, and occasionally they would usher a stooped, smiling grandmotherly lady to the door upon our asking, "Would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?" The answer was always yes. And the quantity was nearly always just one. Now, ponder the number of Brownies and Girl Scouts that attended at the elementary school just 3 blocks away, and imagine how many either worked up courage, or were cleaver enough to realize that gated homes housed wealthy people. Further, imagine all the hired help going home with boxes of Girl Scout cookies once they were delivered, and the cups of coffee and tea served with Sugar Cookies and Thin Mints from polished silver platters.

From courage to enter uncharted territory to salesmanship and dressing for the occasion, the lessons taught while earning Brownie Stars and Merit Badges were so very valuable. So waiting to get bigger and older was exciting as we contemplated the day we would be true Girl Scouts. Then we would wear the green uniforms our big sisters wore to their meetings and would be able to attend Girl Scout Camp.

Soon after moving to Pueblo I was a Girl Scout. The first thing I leaned was how to tie a square knot, necessary to properly apply the neckerchief we all wore. Left over right and right over left. The Beanie was traded for a Barret, and we were smartly uniformed young ladies. Girls whose fathers worked in the steel mills were dressed just the same as girls whose fathers worked in the bank. The leaders who ensured we were all welcome tapped the resources found in the careers and experiences of Post-War working mothers. In the tight economy of the early 1960's nearly everyone's mother did some part time work.

My mother sold china and silver from an off-shoot of Sara Coventry Jewelry, The Nobility Club. Under her tutelage we learned to set a perfect table, naming each piece of silver service and its use. Maria Cosar's mother was a nurse, and from her we learned to make a perfect bed, using squared corners and properly placing pillows within their cases, the ends folded in. The merit badges increased in numbers on our sashes as our self-confidence grew. We sold our lots of Girl Scout Cookies, experienced in our trade, and with all of respected society standing behind us. So we were ready and able to go to Girl Scout Camp, our cookies having paved the way so that no girl was left behind.

As close as we lived to the Sangre de Christo Mountain Range, our various families had all made the rivers and streams a part of life. But many of us had not camped in the mountains. The Girl Scout Camp was several days, if not a full week long. We slept either in cabins or in the tents built over wooden floors and frames, depending on the years of experience we had. Every day a new skill was demonstrated so we could practice and learn ourselves how to do such things as starting a fire or properly using a pocket knife.

During one such exercise one of my favorite friends, Sally, was standing beside me with a stick she had carefully whittled to a sharp point. We were at the railing outside the lodge overlooking the sweeping mountain view and she leaned over, the stick in her mouth, point end in. To my horror, she slipped forward and the stick became lodged in her palate. She had to be transported to the hospital an hour or more away. Girl Scout Camp was a nice place to be that year, but our hearts were heavy as we thought of Sally, who couldn't share our experiences. We asked about her often. Late in the week we were grateful to have the official word she would be just fine.

When we weren't learning new skills, we were taking turns with kitchen duty. It was there that I leaned the proper way to wash dishes. Dishes were gathered, organized, and scraped clean of garbage. Before they could be washed they were first rinsed free of debris, and then glasses, plates, and silverware were washed in that order. If the dishwater became cold or murky looking it was drained and changed for fresh soapy water. The dishes were rinsed in clear hot water with a certain measurement of bleach, and allowed to drain before putting away after a light wipe with a clean towel to ensure they were dry.

At home we followed the same procedure, and thought everyone else did as well. As my circles of friendship widened it became apparent that not everyone used the same method, and what seemed very dirty to me was quite acceptable to others. The great work of comparing what is "done" and deciding what you would keep as a good habit began with those days. Friendships were formed that are still fondly remembered.

Eventually Junior High School overtook us and after the first year most of us were so busy with school activities that we left our uniforms and sashes behind for other uniforms like Pep Club and Band. We were prepared in so many ways for a happy, can-do attitude in life, thanks to Girl Scouts. For me, I kept those ways, those experiences, and used them all m life.

Being 13, Part II

2011-05-22T18:25:00.000-07:00

The walk to school each morning began with a stop at the corner to greet my newer friend whose father was a professor at the college. She and her dad lived around the corner and her mother, who was from England, lived a neighborhood away, but close enough for walking, about a mile. Kathy and I would sometimes stay the night with her mom, drinking cranberry juice and ginger ale, while listening to our Beatles records.

During the week, though, Kathy and I were walking pals. Kathy was adept at making new friends, and older friends. So often we left early to stop by the home of her 9th grade friend, Christine, who was dating an even older boy in the 10th grade, at Centennial. The art of becoming a teenager is largely observant. By understanding how one does one's hair, applies makeup, puts together an outfit, one assimilates into the culture. So we both sat on either side of her in reverence as she coated her lashes with several layers of mascara (to which neither of us had regular access at home) and ratted her hair into what became a perfectly shaped football accented by completely straight bangs cut just above her penciled eyebrows.

Christine's toilette was fascinating, but not inspiring. Neither of us wanted to have hair that looked like a football once lacquered with hairspray. But her teen angst was worthy of note, and when she met us at the door, eyes swollen with tears to tell us of her breakup with the boyfriend it was clear that the songs about losing the one you love were all true. How perilous love must be, we thought. Unfortunately Christine felt a little older after the breakup and didn't see much of us since she needed to confide in others more experienced in such matters.

Different routes would mean different company as we walked. Sometimes we didn't join company but just observed from a distance. One popular redhead could be observed with her circular skirt swinging from side to side, her sweater draped over her shoulders with the arms tied around the Peter-Pan collar of her blouse.I had been too puzzled by how she happened to attain that sense of motion to think why she would want to until my friend cracked, "I wish I had a swing like that in my back yard!"

Some mornings Kathy had to be earlier or later than me and I walked alone. I preferred Elizabeth Street for the beautiful yards and homes along the walk. I had grown out of an old set of clothes between spring and fall, and my mother had rewarded me with the very latest in Mod fashion. It was nice to look so well dressed without having to worry someone else was going to walk in wearing an identical outfit.

My hair always bleached blonder in the summer sun, which seemed to draw the attention of both friend and foe. And on one particular day, a convertible Mustang belonging to my neighbor pulled up full of Red and white letter-jacketed boys. "Hi, Sherry!" one of them shouted.

I glanced nervously around the street. There were no other people walking within 2 blocks on Elizabeth Street that day.I pulled my hair down over one eye and ducked my head. Surely my neighbor, Sam Ratcliff, knew who I was. He had to see me nearly every day. Sometimes he came over with his friend on a Vespa to play basketball in our front yard. I would climb up in the tree from which the net hung to visit with them as they played. That is how I got asked to Prom in the 8th grade when one of his cute friends was taken with me. (My sister was not amused, my mother was adamant that I was entirely too young, and I was disappointed because the asker was pretty cute. My father promptly took down the basketball net and remarked that the boys were killing the grass.)

If Sam knew who I was he was playing along with his buddies that day, and the teasing went on for nearly a block. Still calling me Sherry the boys asked whether I thought someone named Robbie was home. I was mortified. They thought I was walking by some boy's house. Obviously one of those houses was some boy named Robbie's house and they thought I was Sherry-who-liked-Robbie!

Still no one on the street. Two blocks up to the turn where they had to go one way and me the other. I walked faster, not responding, both flattered to think I looked old enough to be one of their class mates and embarrassed because I didn't know how to gracefully get out of their line of attention.

Then to make matters worse, they started singing "442 Glenwood Avenue" a song about a party at that address. Rats. All this great attention, no girlfriends to share the glory with, and no possibility of it becoming an episode on Father Knows Best or Donna Reed.

Finally I reached the turnoff. What a crummy situation, I thought as I pivoted on one heal and headed up to Freed Jr. High. I hoped when I got to High School someday that High School Boys still wanted to take me to the Prom and had something to say to me when I knew who they were and could have an intelligent conversation with them. Their mouths fell open as they realized the case of mistaken identify. I snickered to myself.

Not a story I could share, I had learned. It was becoming clear that being liked by boys made one a target of hatred by girls less able to easily develop friendships with them.The girls in your own crowd could and would share the names of their secret crushes. They always had a first and last name, like Rusty Samford, or Jimmy Bascom. If the crush was shared your, it could net a letter jacket for a few weeks with the understanding it had to be returned for certain occasions. But only the High School kids had cars to take you to the Tastee Freeze or the roller rink, and precious few of them were allowed to drive on weekends.

Besides, our parents were never going to let us date before we turned 16. So we all had a lot of time to observe, practice, and dream about being date-able girls. On Saturday mornings we cleaned and did our chores fervently so we would be done in time to watch American Bandstand.There we were schooled in the current dance favorites: The Hand Jive, The Twist, The Stroll. Overnight stays were for sharing records and looking through Beatle cards, and dream about Prom.

My tall, chestnut-haired sister with the perfect dimple and the demeanor of a gracious Princess was going to the Prom with the best looking older boy at church. He was really nice, from a really nice family. He went to a different high school so it made for great gossip for my sister and her friends. Mother was making her a tailored Prom dress that could have come from the pages of Seventeen Magazine. Mary was beautiful as always, but more so.

How could I compete with that? I thought. It would be a few more years before I could go to Prom, I supposed. It was hard being just 13.

Barbara* , the Bain of all New Girls, or How I Was Responsible for a Marriage

2011-05-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

The names of everyone mentioned from school in this piece are fictitious, including the teachers, but the deeds are all too familiar.

I was still seven when my mother gave me what was to be the last permanent she would ever give me. Mother meticulously sewed, dressed, and groomed us, with whatever means she had, and that included well-set hair. My hair was so white when I was about 3 that a lady waiting with us for a traffic light to change could not resist reaching down to finger it, remarking to my mother's horror, "My, her hair bleaches nicely."

But by the time I was seven, although still a blonde, just one area of my head was white and the rest ash colored. Thick and unruly, it never behaved well, so mother bought a Tonette and set to work with the rollers. The problem was, although the baby color was gone, the texture was and always would be the same: fine. It was fine as a delicate spider's web and the effect of the chemicals on those almost microscopic strands of hair was quite stunning.

As mother combed through it after the last rinse, tears welled up in my eyes. "I look like a French Poodle!" I choked.

Mother looked like she might cry, too.."It will wash out in a while," she offered, but her face betrayed her own doubt. I can only imagine how badly she wished she could have known to use bigger rollers. But it had been some time since my last perm and her expertise dated back as far as the first commercial perms went. I was her third girl, not to mention at least 3 of her sisters, and her own hair that she had seen after since she was old enough. My hair wasn't burnt, just tightly curled.

To make matters worse, on a trip to the mountains I had hit my front tooth when releasing a well pump handle. The tooth was broken off a quarter of the way up, and I avoided smiling and guarded how I held my upper lip to keep the snaggle-tooth from showing. I hoped to avoid calling attention to myself so much that people probably couldn't keep their eyes off me for trying to understand why I was so odd.

So on my very first day in the 4th at grade at Thatcher Elementary, I presented with insanely curly hair. The teacher, sweet little Mrs. Andrews, announced my addition to the class with my exotic first name, Juanita. It was the only first name I had, and I never considered using the middle name, Ruth, because I just didn't know any Ruths to judge whether it would work as well as Tammy or Linda might have for a better first name. The large freckles strewn across my nose must have made the mop on my head even more bizarre as my face turned crimson.

As we exited for the playground at recess I walked past a girl with shiny, smooth brown hair who was surrounded by a group of well-dressed friends. "She doesn't look Mexican," she said as though I was invisible while clearly, since all eyes were on me, they could at least see through me. I was later to learn from one of the other, less popular girls, that this was Barbara. She and her personality-free Secret Service agents were known widely as The Clique.

Within a week it was clear that I would have precious few friends among my classmates if she had anything to say about it. What I could not understand was why, if she didn't want to be friends, was it necessary so far as she was concerned, to be enemies. What I did that made her so determined to ruin my life would always escape me. But for 4 long school years, Barbara made it her objective every single day to have something unkind to say within my earshot. She seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time on me for someone who so disliked me so much. In doing so, she acquired free rent in my head, where for years after we left Pueblo, into my life as a young adult if I felt socially inept or like I didn't belong she would visit my dreams with her hangers-on.

In spite of her constant interference, I gradually got to know the other less socially important girls, and joined Girl Scouts where The Clique was subordinate to a lot of recited mottoes and stated purposes. The leaders were some of the few adults apparently not charmed by Barbara's social connections and talents in crowd control. They quickly snuffed any takeover attempts in that venue and redirected the group toward more purposeful and fulfilling activities. Girl Scouts became the great equalizer and testing ground for trying out new things and showing accomplishment without feeling somehow inferior. Anyone could get a badge, anyone could advance rank, and no one was better than the other.

Still the daily grind at school was a tough one. It irritated Barbara that I could finish my work before her and make better grades than her. Since our family moved in just before Christmas and Mrs. Lacy discovered quickly that I was a talented artist she had me use the extra time, sometimes half the day, to paint the faces and costumes on a new set of Santa's Helpers that would adorn the staircase at Thatcher that year. Using a blowup projector she enlarged a paper Santa's Workshop I had brought as an example when she asked for ideas from the class. Strangely no one else was privileged to work on this project, which lasted several days, and took me out of class as soon as my work was done. I could feel Barbara's eyes on my back as I left the classroom with the Art Teacher.

On one of the few occasions in which Barbara spoke directly to me she stopped me while we happened to be alone in the hall. "Hey," she said authoritatively with one hand on her hip, "What kind of health insurance does your family have?"

Wide eyed and afraid not to answer, I swallowed and said, "Blue Cross".

"Good!" she said, busily straightening her cashmere sweater. She needed to be certain my family was contributing to her well-being, I suppose. "My father sells Blue Cross."

As she walked away with her perfect hair bouncing over her shoulders I said to the back of her head, "Well my father sells life insurance." Could she possibly respect that our fathers had a shared dependance on the purchase of insurance, I wondered.I had never thought of discussing what my father did with my classmates, and I wondered what conversation in her (much-bigger-than-mine) house had pushed her to recruit from her school mates. If I could get in the Way-Back machine I would probably find out that the date was the one following the announcement of Colorado Fuel and Iron's Steel Mill closing. The ripple effect would take about 3 years to seriously compromise hundreds of families that were dependent either directly or indirectly on CF&I's success.

I crept back to anonymity since our common thread was unknown by anyone else, and I really didn't want to be a part of The Clique anyway. I wasn't shy but most of my friends were, so I was the one who sought them out, and we were mostly members of the Girl Scout Troop.. I visited one friends' fishing cabin high in the Rockies and attended birthday parties at the homes of others. And one popular and talented girl with blonde hair like mine was just as friendly to me as she was to everyone else. It wasn't so bad being Barbara's most hated classmate.

A couple of months after I arrived, a new girl, Esther, was introduced to the class. I watched in amazement as Barbara repeated the same sizing-up she had done with me, evaluating the usefulness of Esther to her group of well-dressed followers and dismissing her initially as unimportant. Esther was the only Jewish girl in our class. She had strongly ethnic features, and gazed straight at you when she spoke with you. I sensed her loneliness very quickly and reached out to her to be sure she had a friend. For a couple of weeks, Esther was my friend alone, but when Barbara learned that Esther's father was a banker I walked into class to find Esther standing right next to Barbara. Both of them looked straight at me, and I took my seat.

She had joined The Clique immediately when invited, but it wasn't long before we were playing together again after school. Saturdays she had Sabbath School and could not play, and Sundays I went to church. I was pained that Esther had been so quick to abandon me but glad when she returned. Still Esther had a quality that allowed her to maintain friendships with anyone she chose and the amazing ability to move within several circles. She and I were friends, but not best friends, and she joined Girl Scouts as well.

After forth grade came fifth, and Mrs Steadmond. Mrs Steadmond had hair that was plastered fast against her head in a severe bun. Her mouth was permanently fixed in a thin, grim line beneath a short, snooty nose and two eyes knit together in the middle by the frown of disapproval she wore solely for me. She would never call on me in class and kept her attention fixed on the shining social stars. She couldn't find fault with my test scores but she would dismiss writing that I knew was above my own grade level as superfluous. After reading an especially deep book I thought I would ask if she had read it. She listened, a look of annoyance on her face as I attempted to explain the story line of The Ghetto, a recount of the Warsaw Jewish experience. World War II had ended less than 20 years before, and I had seen the numbers printed on Esther's mother's hand. When she did not respond, I offered, "I write poetry, Mrs. Steadmond." She looked at me evenly and said "Oh, a Jack of All Trades and a Master of None." It was a long year. She really preferred to chat during playground time with Barbara and the Barbettes. I began writing more.

In the sixth grade, my mother had long since stopped trying to perm my hair to control it, so it was wavy and unruly. Mr. Melton was a big, jovial man with a good sense of humor. He did give me credit for a brain, but I cannot remember a single thing he ever said other than to ask me in front of the class if I had combed my hair with an egg-beater. Whatever I was doing, it wasn't working for me in the hair department. Barbara's favorite hairdo was a little flip with a bouffant pouf pinned in the back. I described it to my mother and she helped me pin the bouffant under. As I approached the classroom, Barbara's sycophants had already reported my change of hairstyle to her. She leaned against the door frame watching me through half-shaded eyes and said dryly as I entered, "Nice try, Kiddo."

For the first time I looked right back at her and said,"You know, they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." She left me alone the rest of that year. Mr. Melton seemed contrite after witnessing our conversation but my mother also had taken special interest in his egg beater remark. It is possible she delivered him an ultimatum he couldn't refuse, because he began to ask me questions directly when he could see I knew the answers rather than wait for my hand to come up. He seemed to make a special effort to treat me just as he would the rest of the class.

When we started Junior High School, the addition of new friends from a broader cross-section of our part of town diluted some of the effects of Barbara's efforts. There were several equally popular crowds, and of course all of them, including Barbara's had a Cheerleader for its' showpiece. That cheerleaders and football players went hand in hand had never occurred to me. But across from me in my eighth grade math class sat a tall, friendly football and basketball player, Jeff, who first introduced himself to me, and then for the majority of the year continuously talked and joked with me.

Completely across the room from us sat Barbara, shooting withering glances my way as I tried to keep the banter quiet to avoid getting in trouble with the teacher. I thought it was just Barbara's way of being superior, not causing a ruckus by not sitting somewhere next to somebody who wanted to talk and joke. But we were assigned seats by the teacher so I was there through no choice of my own. Jeff took every opportunity to crack jokes, sometimes at my expense, just audible to everyone around us. There was a lot going on in that corner of the room, but we were just friends having a good time, I thought. It never occurred to me that Jeff might have Boyfriend potential. He was fun like my big brother was fun, and I was going to marry Paul McCartney.

Over the year as Jeff's attention persisted, Barbara became more and more frustrated. She spent her one of her CIA agents to determine whether or not I had romantic inclinations toward Jeff. I told her she was ridiculous, and that we were just friends. But after class one day the teacher asked whether Jeff and I were a "pair". When I insisted we were only friends he raised an eyebrow in disbelief and nodded his head.

I left wondering whether it was possible people really thought I liked Jeff and that he liked me when we never saw each other nor really spoke outside of class. I thought about sock hops and whether I could ever remember dancing with Jeff, and I really couldn't. Barbara had admitted to her friends that I was a "good dancer" once at a sock hop where I never lacked for a partner. They were probably trying to figure out why no one asked them to dance when they were so important and popular. Since I loved to dance it also never occurred to me that in the social scheme of things, any one of my dance partners was a Potential Boyfriend. Maybe I had danced with Jeff. It was a big school. Sock Hops lasted a couple of hours. You could dance with a lot of people in that amount of time if each record was 3 minutes long.

The next day as I walked toward Math class, I could see a sort of parade of populars trailing behind the tall head of Jeff, but couldn't see who was next to him until the bottleneck formed at the door. Barbara turned with a little smile and stepped into the classroom with a glance back at me. Jeff sat down silently across from me, never to tell another joke again. For the rest of the year, Jeff walked Barbara everywhere to class. I would miss the fun a little, but I had other things to worry about.

We were moving after school was out to be near my older brother, who had cancer. I had told my close friends, and was trying to wrap my head around the concept of leaving Colorado for the Desert Southwest of New Mexico. The Steel Mill had been closed for a year or more and Daddy's business had virtually stopped as the economy of 1962-1963 plummeted. He was going to farm in New Mexico again after some 15 years of making a living in the city.

Our family moved on to Lubbock, Texas after less than a year, and I met and married my husband after high school there. Like my mother, I loved to sew, so I got a little job in the fabric department of one of the more elegant department stores, Hemphill Wells. When they opened a new store at the mall, they hired a new girl, Jan, to work in the fabric department with me. We warmed up right away, but she sometimes stood staring at me. "I just know we've met before," she said.

We went through church, college, sororities, social clubs, and finally high schools. I went to Lubbock High School, but she went to Centennial, in Pueblo. My mouth fell open. What year? What Junior High? It was staggering to think she could remember me from so many years before. I hadn't changed, apparently, although my hair was now honey brown and well-behaved. Who did you know, we asked each other. I ran through the list of Choir friends and Girl Scout Friends. She knew most of them, and I wondered how we had failed to connect at Freed Jr. High with so much in common.

Then she asked if I knew Barbara. I said, yes, we had gone to grade school together and were in the same Girl Scout Troop. She said Barbara was her best friend. I couldn't suppress the gasp, but I walked back through the past several months of working with Jan to examine any evidence of unkindness. She was always, always nice, I concluded. "Well, are you still in touch?" I asked. When she affirmed that they still wrote I wondered how long our friendship was going to last now.She ran through who had dated who in those years after we left Pueblo, and who was married to who now. Barbara had married Jeff.

I could hardly believe my ears. We were in the eighth grade. Had she held onto him all four years of high school or did they ever see anyone else? Had I haunted Barbara as some kind of force to be reckoned with when I managed to thrive despite her seeming desire to crush me like a bug? Was marrying Jeff, who came from a poor family like mine, a decision that began with taking away something she thought I had? I was never going to ask Jan.

Jan was getting married. She and her fiance had finished college, and would be moving to a farm homesteaded by his grandparents. It sounded like a wonderful life, and she held my admiration as future wife of the American Farmer gone Agribusiness. We stayed in touch and wrote for several years we added to our little families and worked out the American Dream. Barbara never came up in conversation again. Jan never cooled in her friendship with me, and I quit having dreams about Barbara on a bad day not long afterwards. So far as I know, she and Jeff, my never-even-considered-it boyfriend, are still married.

Being Thirteen: Part One

2011-05-09T01:33:00.000-07:00

"And now," said The Great Stoneface, "for a really, really big sheewww..." It was quite possible that everyone knew Ed Sullivan as the Great Stoneface, but tonight it didn't matter what other people's fathers called him, because the Beatles were on and it was clearly an event for all time. My father eyed me and my sister watching enthusiastically as screaming adolescent girls drowned out the cute mop-headed band members. We had heard them on KDZA just a few times, but we liked them because they were different. And they were from England, we explained to Daddy, who looked at us from under a now-raised eyebrow. He politely waited for a commercial before he explained that he could walk out on the street and find four young men and himself produce a band equal to the Beatles.

"No, Daddy," we shook our heads, which were covered in metal spiked brush rollers for the next day's smooth flips that would bob up and down as we discussed the night's events with our girlfriends. "They are REALLY neat!"

He nodded, his look a little jaded. We knew he didn't understand but he was not a girl, was he?

Over the next months we acquired overseas pen pals, because you really needed a girlfriend in England if you loved the Beatles. You and she could share details about what was exciting in your two respected and admired countries that could then knowingly be told to your un-penpalled friends. And while my sister went on to High School and acted normal, I went to Jr High School and along with all my equally Brit-enchanted friends acquired an English accent to be used while out riding the bus or shopping, or in any other public occasion. Six or more of us on a single bus could command the attention of every wary adult who could neither understand a single thing we said, nor why we would wear the leather caps or knee length boots that had become a sort of uniform.

My mother was so impressed when my friends and I all chattered in our Brit Brogue that she had to tell one of her friends about our call to the radio station asking a record be played that we knew had been released in England but not yet in the US. She was certain we had convinced the station we were VIPs from across the water. She sewed mod outfits enthusiastically for me and my sister. Since she was able to literally reproduce an outfit from a magazine photo we were on the cutting edge at all times.

My friends and I collected Beatle Cards in huge stacks. Mine were taken away by a teacher who found them a distraction and at the end of the year my mother, though still impressed with my linguistic skills did not go sign them back to me, so they were forfeited. Since I couldn't have chewed the gum that they came with at school, it must have landed in the trash can just outside the gymnasium where the sock hops were held every other Friday.

A local DJ would spin our requests and we could wear off calories and boundless energy and enthusiasm for the bands we stayed up late at night to hear. All of us without visible means of support-very few of us got such thing as an allowance-resorted to a 10 cent ice cream sandwich for lunch and saved the rest to buy 45 rpm records at Globe Discount City, the precursor of KMart and WalMart.

On Saturday mornings we would start our trek south toward the bridge on West 4th street and meet each other along the way. Dressed in our Pep Club uniforms with maroon corduroy skirts and matching sweaters declaring our membership in gold letters around a golden mascot Ram we were unavoidably American. The walk gave us ample time to discuss boys, boy friends and boyfriends, and to sing "My Boyfriend's Back" along with The Angels via Linda's transistor radio. At the game, we worked in concert with the cheerleaders. We were a chorus to be reckoned with, and surely insured the success of our outstanding football team whose members all were, of course, cute boys.

The walk home took us past Globe and we could there acquire the prize 45 rpm of the week for less than a dollar. It only required a few days of ice cream bars to provide a library of fab records. And a month of restraint could lead one to own the latest album. Later, in one or the other of our homes we would gather around the stereo and no one really minded at all that 5 or 6 of us were actually singing over the voices of our idols, because that was, after all, what we did-in a kind of trance. We had the words memorized and the tones and inflections duplicated perfectly. We were choir geeks of the first kind, having been chosen for our superior talents to sing in the Performance Choir.

Later that night after KDZA signed off we would tune into KOMA and Wolfman Jack to stay in touch with the broader USA, who were also enchanted with everything British. So the announcer in the echo chamber that chanted off the names of raceways having big road blasters also listed the bands most of us would never see: Herman's Hermets, The Searchers, Manfred Mann, The Moody Blues, and of course a mix of American bands all going to cities no where near Pueblo.

We would write a note about the game and our record purchases to our pen pals, and whisper a little longer on the phone trying not to be caught up late. Finally we would go to sleep with the radio still running under our pillows.

There were only a few of us who really did see the Beatles at Red Rocks. I won't forget their names, Mary Jane who loved Ringo, and Linda, who loved Paul and was the first of my friends to have 3 inch long white shag carpet in her living room. Those lucky girls. Most of my friends saw A Hard Day's Night first run. I could not come up with the money in time even if I skipped the ice cream bar, so I ruefully stared at the marquee from across the street at the park as I waited to meet up with them.

When the movie was out we all got on the bus and put on our British accents before getting off at a little shop downtown to order some hot tea with cream and sugar. My fortunate friends didn't let me sulk at all, but gave me a moment-by-moment detail of the entire movie. Behind the counter the waitresses whispered back and forth to each other something that must have been like,"Well, there's some more of those kids acting like they're from England again. They must have just come out of that ridiculous movie with those long-haired singers. Yep, and since all they can afford is a cup of tea, there's not going to be a tip, either."

Pueblo, a beautiful place in time.....

2011-02-24T17:28:00.000-08:00

We arrived on my birthday, November 25, 1959, the year I turned eight. Although there were no presents because of the haste of our move I could not know the gift we all were receiving in our father's transfer to Pueblo. Appropriately, the next day was Thanksgiving.

Although we had loved the mountains and life in Denver, and had forayed into several wonderful adventures during our brief stay in Colorado Springs, we were about to live through the most enchanted time of our lives.

Assembly-line style, we carried boxes from the truck our father had rented to move our belongings into the white stuccoed house with green trim, taking in details about our new home. It had a modest Tudor look to it, was framed by elms in front and back, and a rather unruly shrub between the windows. The front door was thick wood, appropriate for a medieval fortress, with a little door to peak out of that latched from the inside. The inside was a modern aqua blue--a designer, we were told, had owned the house before us. Draperies framing the living and dining room windows made of quirky abstract prints in light colors. A built in display and book shelf was on the wall opposite the fireplace in the roomy living room.

The kitchen was a calm creamy yellow but the ante room between the kitchen and stairs leading to the basement was a brilliant, not quite mustard yellow. Our mother announced that painting the ante room would be a top priority, but it was still the same color when we moved out several years later. In the kitchen were a staggering number of shelves, all of which needed cleaning before we could put away the dishes, and one small appliance garage just right for a toaster.

The bathroom had a soft blue terry shower curtain that contrasted with the pink and black metal tiles that lined the wall. Like the curtains in the front of the house, a little quirky.

There were two upstairs bedrooms, both ample.There were two parents,two daughters, and a son when we moved in.In Colorado it was almost unheard of that you didn't have a basement. We did, with a beautifully paneled light knotty pine bar at one end of a long black and white tiled floor game room.

In the corner behind the game room was a little coal room, long out of use, with a single small window that had been the coal chute. Behind the remaining width of the game room was the laundry and storage room, where all the Christmas decorations were kept.

Mother was quick to turn the coal room into David's abode. Mary got the nice front bedroom, and I was consigned to the 8 X 10 room, with what was probably the wine closet for my clothes closet, just behind the bar. Mother curtained off the open room with a feminine floral print for privacy and I was good to go.

The truck unloaded, our things arranged, we spent our first night in what was to be the home of our hearts. The morning was cold when we awakened the following day. We were grateful to have a fireplace, and a nice furnace, which was allowed to heat the 3 core rooms upstairs. (All the bedrooms had their furnace grates shut and we slept beneath quilts piled so thick we could hardly turn over, but kept a window cracked in almost any weather because we craved the fresh, clean air.)

After whatever morning chores we had were done, my brother, David, and I coated up and ventured out into the neighborhood to see who we might meet. It was the Thanksgiving holiday and the sounds of other children nearby piqued our curiosity. We made our way across the front yard when two boys appeared from behind the fence across the street and began to throw rocks at David. He seemed non-pulsed and just picked them up to throw 'em right back. Pretty soon they were best friends, my brother, David, and David Norton.

The Nortons lived in a big white farmhouse that was probably there before the rest of the neighborhood encroached from the south where the downtown area was.
We lived on 22d Street between Court and Grand streets, and to our south on Grand were an array of tall turn-of-the-Century row houses. They were punctuated with filigree and gingerbread, every one having a porch. To our north on Grand after the first lovely Victorian style home came a series of Bungalow and Mission style homes on both sides of the street. In general the surrounding neighborhood dated to the turn of the century every block or so but was filled in mainly with homes dating to the 20's and 30's.

As we explored the neighborhood, my brother and sister and I found the park just five blocks south, it's name dreamy: Mineral Palace Park. Specimens of different trees still had labels declaring their origins. Waterlilies lay dormant beneath ice in a small pond that became a skating rink when it was cold enough. A community hall flanked one side of a beautiful lake that was accented by two beautiful arched bridges. Behind a shrub-covered chain link fence was the right of way and the noise of the highway. Across the lake from the community hall, a band shell with an Art Deco rainbow frame presided over the stage from which we would later hear the city orchestra play in the summers. A swimming pool and a playground in the park seemed mere fringe benefits. A bench to dream upon was all we needed aside from the carefully staged beauty around us.

Winter came quickly with an abundance of snow, and the walk to Thatcher Elementary School was pure joy. Although everyone shoveled their sidewalks, we loved to walk in the drifts to each side, making deep prints in the snow. An easy snowball fight could last for blocks as friends joined the parade along the way.
Grand street was the usual path we took toward Thatcher, but it was my preference to take Court because the trees from both sides of the street formed an ice Cathedral overhead for most of the walk. Ice cicles draped every tree and house, snow frosted and softened the landscape and silenced the scene to allow the gentle packing of footprints left behind to assure a record of your travel to a warm destination. Coats and hats and boots left on hooks and wooden floors were reclaimed at the end of the day.

I remember seasons before Pueblo only in flashes of time, but the walk to school gave a little girl a lot of time to notice everything. Winter slowly gave way to violets blooming through melting patches of snow. Daffodils and tulips came next, then Lilacs, heavenly Lilacs.

Mrs. Arthur, our next door neighbor had 3 different Lilacs: a light purple, a dark purple, and a white. We had two light purple not quite as tall as hers had grown to be, but we could sit under them to read Under the Lilacs by Louisa May Alcott. How romantic!

The elms in the front and the back had crotches just at the right height to be able to climb. Across the street, the Nortons had a tall pine with sturdy spiral stair branches to climb. A wooden swing suspended from a thick rope hung beneath the branches of their cottonwood tree.

When the school year wrapped up, we were scattered among relatives so Mother could work without worrying about what kind of trouble we were getting into, and as summer wound down, we would return home for the preparation for school. Mother sewed nearly everything we wore, and there was shopping to do for material and shoes. Her machine hummed out a complete wardrobe within days.

With sweaters and coats bought we were glad to start the annual migration back to school. Doors along the way opened as friends joined us for the walk through crunchy leaves. The sweaters of the morning were too hot for the afternoon sun on our shoulders as we returned home.

The familiarity of the routine was right out of Leave it to Beaver or My Three Sons. Something fragrant was cooking for dinner when we came in from school. Daddy would up from his big Family Bible, marking his place with one finger, and say,
"You need to get a Nanner (banana) and eat it right now!"

Filling our cheeks and bellies with the stuff of life, covering our bodies with hand-made clothes, providing our minds with beauty and joy that would last a lifetime, we were so very lucky. This time of life was the best, the very best present we could get.

A Winter Wonderland

2010-12-05T19:57:00.000-08:00

Although we lived there almost 5 years, I have never seen a single photograph from that period of Court Street in full winter regalia, so I am left with my memories of winters in Pueblo, Colorado and a need to describe the splendor of a cherished life there.

Our home, between Court and Grand street on 22nd was a white stuccoed Tudor with green trim. It fit oddly into the cross-section of building periods represented within a few square blocks. Directly across the street a large farmhouse and its' outbuildings occupied more space than the rest of the neighborhood lots, which had undoubtedly been carved from its' original acreage. Heading south around the corner on Grand were bookended Victorian era row houses, ambling and ample, some made into apartments. To the north, after a couple of lovely and graciously grounded Victorian homes, a succession of Arts and Crafts style Bungalows stretched on,and spread, seemingly in every direction for several miles. Court street had a few brick houses that seemed that seemed to have been more recently built, but by and large it was a '30's neighborhood all the way south to Mineral Palace Park. An abundance of trees of every kind and landscaping, fountains, and statuary, to complement different homes made any stroll interesting.

In the spring I preferred the walk past the Victorians toward Thatcher Elementary school. But in the winter nothing could possibly compare with the five block walk down Court Street through a tall cathedral of interlaced branches laden with icicles and an ample dusting of snow .

Leaving the warmth of our home and dressed in wool from head to toe, we would join the silent march of people, some as young as 5 and others as old as 18, headed toward our various schools. The high schoolers walked a full mile to the old Centennial High, and the Junior High, Freed, was something more than a half mile. If you were on the way to the elementary school you avoided the carefully shoveled walks and took your trek through the mounds of snow on either side of the walk in order to enjoy the muffled crunch of the snow as you packed it with your boot prints.

The few conversations were animated, but hushed in the winter, because the snow both insulated and amplified every sound. In the white silence, the occasional drip of ice melting from a roof or breathing of the earth beneath the snow pack left an anticipation of something inexpressible. Peace and quiet reigned. The work of living was shortened by the hours allowed by the sun. Crocus and violets were months away and I willed them dormant to allow plenty of time for this long respite the earth seemed to crave. Snow left a long trail toward Christmas and a school holiday. It made evenings by the fire place with popcorn or hot chocolate and Nat King Cole or Sing Along with Mitch, or, better, the piano and Christmas carols.

In the rituals of winter our mother scattered cornbread on the snow for the birds that failed to migrate, commenting on one particularly fat robin who had stayed behind. She hung our father's starched shirts on the line to freeze, their arms outstretched in a bizarre gesture satisfied only by the singed smell of the iron soothing away the wrinkles and restoring warmth. Periodically after a fresh snow a big enamel pan was filled with the white fluff, sugared, and vanilla flavored for "snow ice cream".

My brother considered it play to shovel the walk, at least at first, and the widow next door was given a free shoveling guaranteed by our parents. If the adults minded shoveling sidewalks or driveways, we were unaware. It was with a smile that our father took off his overcoat to inform us he had put chains on the tires.

The house was kept cold, except for the living areas and kitchen. Thawing was done in front of an open oven in the kitchen, the fireplace in the living room, or grate from the furnace. Drawn together by the warmth, we sang at the piano or watched television shows that presented our portion of the Camelot dream. Walter Cronkite assured us that we were all a part of a greater whole as we contemplated the changing times. The Lovely Lemon Sisters sang sweetly. Haws, Adam, and Little Joe, all failed to marry, but stayed close to Pa doing chores on the Ponderosa. And Captain Kangaroo kept the Treasure House ready for us when we awakened every morning.

Although there were furnace outlets in our bedrooms, we preferred our bedrooms cool, at least a half inch of window open to allow fresh air in the winter. Pajamas were flannel, quilts were wool and corduroy. Once in bed we could hardly turn over for the weight of quilts that took a while to warm to body temperature.

On weekends and during the holidays it was our joy to make forts for fabulous snowball fights. A good snow could provide a virtual empire of walls and fortresses, and an inexhaustible supply of snowball fights for the entire neighborhood. Some winters our growth outstripped our parents' budget, and the right size in boots or mittens was not on hand. Several layers of socks and plastic bags tied over our shoes (or hands, in the absence of mittens) enabled survival for battlefield forays.

If we were lucky, it was the year of the Wintertime Olympics. In that case, Mother celebrated with a batch of homemade yeast rolls and butter. Or Daddy popped corn in the little fireplace pan with a wooden handle. We were fortunate enough to have ice skates and after watching the graceful presentations on television, headed to the park to skate in less graceful patterns, but with no less satisfaction than the Olympiads.

Eventually the last snow melted and the violets and crocuses presented the first colors of spring as the noise of birds filled the branches on Court Street and in the expanse of the park. We peeled back some of the layers on our beds, and shed our coats for spring sweaters. As for me, I shifted my walking arrangements to gaze at the Victorians on Grand street once more, since the park offered the main visual course in the spring, and I had to get to school on time.

The Hills Were Alive

2010-09-10T20:01:00.000-07:00

If the Heavens are the Throne of God, and the Earth His Footstool, then the Rocky Mountains must be the very spot where He rests His feet. When we were children, the hues of deep forest green and dusky blue pines and spruces, and the flickering of green aspen leaves against white and black trunks provided a tapestry of smells and sounds that refreshed and nourished our spirits. Thirsty for water pumped through rock formations that bade us drink for the taste of springs secreted deep in the earth, we filled our cups. The cold streams and rivers that ran in abundance provided the cleansing noise of rushing water spending itself against stones rounded with the effort of a million years. Falls spilling over magnificent cliffs terrified with constant thundering that this was Hallowed Ground. We were ancient as the woods and waters once settled within the canyon walls. We roamed and climbed, finding secret places of moss hidden beneath the long branches of shrubs at the water's edge.

Evergreen and Estes Park were places we frequented, but our father and mother loved the road and we searched out places like Rabbit Ears Pass and Steamboat Springs. In plateaus we found mining towns such as East Cliff, Middle Cliff, and West Cliff. We wandered through museums where our father talked with locals about UFO sightings reported there. Through the languid, pleasant years that seemed as though they could not possibly end, we explored both sides of the Continental Divide, witnessing the astonishing metamorphosis from forest to arid Pleocene bluffs
eerily brooding over dried seabeds now watered by two rivers.

We were at the pinnacle of Earth's diversity and beauty, and most precious of all, a family. The songs of road trips often came from Broadway musicals, frequently The Sound of Music, as my sister and I harmonized together. At the end of the day we would make the drive, long or short, back to our home, colors, sounds, and sensations memorized and implanted, a part now of our genetic makeup.

How do you tell someone what a library is and what it is for? Reflections on the impact of words someone else bothered to write and probably did not get paid well for, and upon the gracious gifts to community by the wealth makers and creators of our system of economy.

2010-08-15T23:37:00.000-07:00

As I have revisited my childhood, a dominant theme for me has been that we were just above the poverty line-maybe just a fraction, and that we were at the same time rich. Two things contributed to that truth: 1. We lived where a great industry was on its's last leg, and 2. we enjoyed the public gifts of people made fabulously wealthy by the riches of the earth: Nearly every well-known and some lesser known Moguls of the 1800's contributed heavily to civic development, parks and schools, and to libraries. Microsoft and others who give today are doing what has been done before. Philanthropy is a blessing of American life we take so for granted.

Old postcards of the McClelland Public Library show a white stone building with what looks to be a red tile or possibly a copper roof. But then the building was built about 1902. Dale Carnegie had made good on his promise to spread his fortune about the country by creating libraries where communities raised adequate seed money, and McClelland dished out a considerable sum to make it a beautiful reality. It was 1960 when we first climbed the steps of a building made of stone hewn from the not-distant mountains and entered the repository of all good things. Polished marbled floors and columns supported the weight of knowledge contained in thousands of books. It was quite simply an architectural delight.

In the basement where the restrooms were, inaccessible doors held research and precious materials I wished to prowl. In a second floor room you could plainly see through the glass a Mummy's Sarcophagus casually propped against the fireplace tile. Our Girl Scout troop would later visit that room and the story of how the Mummy had found a home in Colorado was told only to be forgotten in my adult life. But for now, where did the wings to the right and the left go? What other museum treasures, I wondered, could this fabulous and spacious monument hold? The third story and full basement must have been full of needful knowledge, all under wraps!

On the main floor, fine woods crafted into moldings and ladders, desks and drawers, newspaper racks, and card files, all with a patina told of over 60 years of earnest use by thousands of fingers that had traced their grain. High ceilinged rooms opened upon rooms with mezzanines overlooking the activities below. Quiet and order prevailed.

We were ushered to the youth area, but at 9 years of age I had read the Funk & Wagnall's obtained by frugal parents one at a time at Safeway with qualified purchases, and the Bible had broadened my vocabulary and reading skills well beyond most of the fiction offered there. A good dictionary with the origins of words was part of our home library, as was the National Geographic and a rotating supply of Readers Digest Condensed Books--many too old and boring for my taste.

Restlessly I joined my sister with stacks of 5 or 6 books to last a week or two until I became bored with that section. Nancy Drew, the Boxcar Childeren and the Bobbsey Twins seemed trite. Louisa May Alcott and Robert Louis Stevenson seemed worthwhile and I quickly burned through them. Rusty's Spaceship is the only other book from that section having any lasting impact on my imagination. At the old age of 11 I was ready for more serious reading.

Growing up during the Civil Rights Movement with a father whose evening never started without a heavy dose of Walter Chronkite had made it impossible not to be alert to the meaning of certain words. But somehow I failed to grasp what a ghetto was. In our lives in Denver and Pueblo we were not really far from what must have been the poorest of the poor. But the prosperity of the Gold Rush Years had left rather nice housing for even them--and us, and an abundance of fresh crops from the surrounding plains made it possible to feed a family fairly inexpensively.

But one day, dressed in a red fabric hardback was a book whose name arrested me then and there;
The Ghetto. I thumbed it's pages, small print and thickness undaunting. Maybe I just needed that book this time. So I took it to the checkout desk where it was duly stamped when I showed my library card, then went to sit in the foyer to read while my siblings finished their searches.

It wasn't the Ghetto being spoken of in the nightly news, as it turned out. Instead, it was The Warsaw Ghetto. Very quickly I was being drawn into a world I had thought existed in the distant past. My friend, Helen, attended Sabbath School and spoke Yiddish at home. Her parents were nervous about Gentile visitors, and I scarcely remember her mother having spoken English. Both Helen and I were born in 1951 and that, to us, was long after the War had ended. But Helen's parents both bore the numbers scorched on their skin to identify their precarious place in Nazi concentration camps. They had managed to survive and Helen and her older sister, Frieda, were the ages of myself and my older sister, Mary.

Our father always called us to the television any time a program dealt with the atrocities of WWII. I was not born yet when our great uncle, a Colonel, brought home 18mm film of the liberation of a camp (we believe Dachau) which he was present for. The family had watched impossible wretchedness, never to forget as he projected it on the farmhouse wall. He told of gathering up the townspeople and marching them to and through the camp to impress upon them what their cooperation had wrought.

Now I was reading the stories of countless individuals, adults and children who learned to resist, who tied up German resources and time, and who gave their lives trying to preserve the lives of their families and friends. It was compelling and life changing. I felt older and more wary than my class mates who were still engaged in childhood games. Throughout our city were many Eastern Europeans who had immigrated before and after the war. We all had more to be grateful for than we could possibly imagine, I thought.

Now were books like the Diary of Anne Frank, and books like An Episode of Sparrows. But we lived in a peaceful vacuum where we could sell pop bottles for enough cash to take a stroll down a shady street with a friend and have a Coke and some peanuts, or save money from lunch for Beatle records, somehow immune to the Cuban Missile Crisis. My gratitude for this lucky life increased measurably. And I would finally learn about a different kind of ghetto not from books, but from the news as blacks demanded and obtained freedom they were already guaranteed under the Constitution. And already simmering in Southeast Asia was the next war......

History began to have weightier relevance as we watched the evening news and I wondered how the seemingly simple concepts our forefathers had fought for were so twisted and complicated when politics and media mixed. The books, the films, the stories of both happiness and imagination,
and those tragic accounts of barren, bleak worlds where someone could do something to change it all, combined to help me do the one thing my father wanted me to do.

So many times he would turn from the news report or look up from a newspaper and say, "A lot of eople are like sheep. They say, "I think..." and then repeat what they read in a paper or book or heard on the news. The fact is, " he would say, "they really don't think at all. They just read or hear something on the news and repeat what they've been told." Our parents read, and they made sure we read and watched and asked what we thought, expecting us to think.

Not every book was weighty and ponderous. There were Lewis Carrol tales and Robert Lewis Stephenson poems. The Brontes and the Brownings, all familiar friends to visit. And sifted between, other books by lesser known authors to take away the boredom of a sweltering summer evening or long winter's night and leave behind thoughts and musings over subjects we might never have approached alone.. Check out, read, gather up, check in. Up the stairs, through the doors, down the stairs, into the light of Day.

Today we blog on, still unpaid and unappreciated authors chronicling what we are witnesses to. We had moved away when the library was torn down and replaced with a new and comparatively undistinguished edifice. It was replaced with one more suited to modern needs, part of a system that included satellite buildings to serve a growing geographical area. The financial moguls who give now include Bill Gates, the Hunt Brothers, and T. Boone Pickens. They have it right: giving back is sweet. Someone after us will want to read what we did, hear what our music sounded like,and learn what a hero really is. The laptop and the computer terminal are now the McClellan Public Library. Books are sold in the stores, but long afternoons are spent honing computer game skills and evenings searching topics to understand homework assignments.

It feels strange to look back into that room with the Sarcophagus. Was the mummy still in there, or was it an empty box? I don't remember the answer--I just remember the wonder.

Movies at the Aladdin and Other Exotic Places: Check more links!

2010-06-04T20:53:00.000-07:00

By 1956 they were called “The Movies”. Sophisticates might have said, “The Cinema”, but we knew little of what they were talking about. The first one I remember going to was that year, and I was four.

We were used to the grand buildings of Denver. We lived only two blocks from the Governor's Mansion. Our sidewalks were of red sandstone. The Museum of Natural History was ours, and so was the Denver Public Library and the Aviary at the City Zoo. The hills and mountains that surrounded us were placed there specifically for our exploration. They belonged to our world just like the next door neighbor's house because they were all rightfully parts of an enchanted childhood.

So when my father ushered us toward the large building with a fabulously decorated onion dome, lighted torch lamps, and exotic tiles suggesting what waited within, it was a certainty that this, like so many others we had during those years, would be a choice experience. He strode confidently toward the ticket booth in his Fedora hat, took out some bills, and our little family of five was admitted, a uniformed attendant opening the door as though we were royalty.

Wafting through the air was the enticing aroma of freshly popped corn. Treats were a carefully measured part of our lives, but that day required the purchase of a small paper bag for us to share. Mother quickly took control of it to assure it would last through the cartoon to at least the beginning of the movie. Something like Koolaid was produced in a Tupperware cup, also to be sipped and shared.

Within the walls of the Theater, the décor was plush as a Sheik's tent. Heavy crimson drapes hung over the screen. Ornate balconies hovered to the right and left, and behind, where gum-chewing, sometimes popcorn-throwing teenagers staked out their territory. But this was mainly a family place, and dozens of other families filled in around us as we took our places center front, my big sister and I well coiffed and dressed by our tall, slender, and fashionable mother. She murmured soothingly to our brother, just two. He happily took a seat next to her and the theater darkened.

A cartoon ran, I'm very sure, from all subsequent experiences, but it was this movie I would always remember. Beautiful orchestral music lilted as images of a pastoral Indiana farm unfolded. A male voice sang a hymn to everything beautiful in nature and wedded love. “Thee I love, more than the meadows so green and still, more than the mulberries on the hill, more than the buds on the May apple tree...” The pleasing farm before me now was a familiar reference to our grandparent's farm. The hay in the fields, the barns and the streams, the leaves on the trees, the same, the same, but on a scope permitting you to linger over every detail longingly and evoking the sounds and smells so basic to peace and order.

Then the parade of characters set in another time—a man, very much resembling my father in both looks and character, and a woman who was not unlike my mother spoke to one another in language that resembled prayer. Their handsome eldest son, clearly a hero in conflict, their daughter, though considered “grown”, a romanticist I could already relate to at my tender age, and a freckled boy, the youngest, harassed by Samantha, the pet goose. Too young to understand the story fully, I remember quickly loving Anthony Perkins, body and soul in his portrayal of Joshua. When the war overtook him, his tearful and dogged loading and shooting, loading and shooting set him apart as an actor for me, and I breathlessly waited for moments to see his lanky frame again on the screen.

In a while it was all over. There was clapping and cheering from a well-satisfied audience. The lights came on and we filed out past the crimson velvet, golden trim, and sconces resembling lighted torches. Murmuring voices spoke of praise and admiration, laughter tittered over the pants-nipping goose. My own mind ranged over the landscape, the fields, and rested on the people I had come to know in some way. In a different context than the line in the movie, I wanted to say, “Let's go back there soon.”

We emerged different, albeit still very little people. Through Aladdin's magic lamp we had found a new, profound world, not just a fabulous building. We had stepped across time, and had become sincere Quakers. We had seen both Edenic beauty and Hellish war. We had seen both innocence and brutality. And yet we sighed with satisfaction as though we had eaten a meal to satiate desperate hunger and quench dire thirst while we pledged in our hearts to the belief that man was basically good.

“Now, that was a good movie,” our father said. We nodded in agreement, and felt his equals in judgment. He and Mother glanced in the rear view mirror at us, smiling little smiles of approval. It was a short ride home.

We were lucky to have parents who pinched enough pennies to take us to the Aladdin several times over the years in Denver. When later we had moved to Pueblo, the drive-in became a staple for family fun when Ma and Pa Kettle or Tugboat Annie movies came into town.

Mother would make enough popcorn to fill a paper grocery bag, fill the gallon Thermos jug with Kool-Aid and make her version of Rice Krispie snacks with cheaper (and tastier) puffed wheat.

Once she had made a bed in the ample back seat of our red and white finned DeSoto, we piled in with pillows and blankets before sunset to head for the movie.

The drive to the edge of town seemed endless, but the sun was still up as we arrived, and Daddy paid the $2 to get his carload of kids in. We flung the doors open and poured out to get to the swings before there was a line, but usually we had to take turns anyway. As the sun sank behind the mountains and images began to appear on the screen, we hurried back to the car to bunch our pillows up for our perfectly comfortable seating. And even though we had eaten the customary hearty farm-hand style meal, we liberally ate from the sack of popcorn poured into Tupperware bowls that matched our Tupperware cups with lids to prevent spillage.

Two cartoons, usually Porky Pig and Popeye or Buggs Bunny and Tom and Jerry, played followed by the backward, clueless family we loved to not be--Ma & Pa Kettle. Their eldest son seemed to be normal, but the other kids were mainly a little off. They were named Clem and Slim or something along that line. Ma couldn't remember who she was addressing half the time, so after she had run through two or three names, the addressee would protest "But I'm not Clem!"

She would then shout back, "Which ever one you are!"--which also became a regular line our mother used when she started the litany of names at home and couldn't get it right because she, like every mother, was doing three things at once. Maybe we saw a little of the Kettle family in ourselves. I am not sure they had a daughter named Juanita, but it must have been only because the writers didn't think of it. I never understood with sisters with average mid-century names like Nina Bell, Betty Ann, Alma Jean, and Mary Beth, I got the Juanita Ruth one. Maybe those names were just a little before mid-century, but I digress...

The Kettles were good-hearted and good-natured,, prolific, and entertaining. They kept an Indian around (Native Amerian-not to be confused with our family's on Real Indian, Azar,) who had a lot more going for him than Pa Kettle. Pa didn't seem to have any visible means of support although Ma may have washed and ironed for their living. The eldest spoke normally and went to college. We were rooting for him all the way.

Our exposure to the cinema was not limited in Pueblo to the drive in. We also had the good fortune of having a mother who seemed in constant search of Something For Us To Do. For 10 cents, I kid you not, in the early 1960's you could go to a Saturday Movie at the Uptown Theater, across the Union Street Bridge and in front of the McClellan Public Library and next door to the Skating Rink.

Sponsored by KDZA radio, the movie was mobbed once or twice a month by children of countless grateful mothers who went off to shopping at Globe Discount City or J C Penny's, unfettered for at least 2 hours. The attendant in the booth who took our dimes did not ask what was in the large paper bag we carried in. We hurried to get seats toward the front, and after the theater filled, balcony included, we were often delighted to see a DJ in a Gorilla Suit do a short warm-up before the movie began.

We all clapped and cheered his antics, and then the lights dimmed, the heavy velvet curtains parting, and the cartoons signaled the beginning of the show. The movie itself was normally Tarzan, and there must have been ten or more different ones, a Swashbuckler with Errol Flynn, or less often a Western with Roy Rogers or Zorro. Hopeless romantic, I went for Errol Flynn over Johnny Weishammer any day. How I longed to be a pirate's wench! But we were landlocked, and the lights too soon came on and we were turned out to the bright sunlight and reality.

Across the street awaited reality and a fountain of knowledge: The McLellan Public Library.

Music as the Spice of Life * Check Links for some Sample Music

2010-05-31T06:34:00.000-07:00

Like a pantry full of exotic seasonings our lives were laced with orchestras and bands, Mariachi's and musicals. The Philco floor model radio brought us background music for the day's work and the hymns at church music for worship. In Sunday School came the songs about Jesus and little children, building our faith. There was singing in school, Brownies, and Girl Scouts. Happy songs, and sad songs, and songs of romance and far-away places. When was it, I have to wonder, that people first began to sing?

The first orchestrated singing I remember came the day that Daddy appeared in our living room on Josephine Street with a guitar. We gathered around him when we started hearing him tune it. Then he began to first strum through several chords before picking out a tune. The day before, we had no knowledge of our father's musical capabilities, and now we were hearing and seeing someone with a fair mastery of at least basic principles of music.

The next thing we knew, he was first singing and then having us sing back the words to a cowboy song, The Maple on the Hill. He taught us the beautiful, reassuring hymn, "Whispering Hope", which we loved to sing and later learned to play ourselves. We already knew Down in the Valley, and we expanded our repertoire from there. The songs were portable, and went on to fill hours on long road trips to New Mexico and Texas.

Daddy's new boss moved us from Denver to Colorado Springs, and finally to Pueblo. One day in Colorado Springs Daddy announced one Saturday that we were going to hear a Mariachi band. We had no idea what that meant, but by the look on his face, it was going to be better than Disney Land. He drove us to the Antlers Hotel where some kind of festival--probably Cinco de Mayo--was going on, and we were thrilled to be able to feel the polka rhythms reverberate through the ground and into our bones. The impressive Mariachis wore white rhinestone and sequined suits with gold braid accents and large matching sombreros. It was an unforgettable introduction to Mexican music, and curiously about the same time, Daddy began to listen to Mexican radio while in the car. Or while outside working on the car, turned up a little too loud while confused school acquaintances said within my earshot, "Well, Juanita doesn't look like a Mexican."

Although he always had his fiddle I first heard Daddy play Ragged Bill after we moved to Pueblo, in 1960. He said he used to play in a band when he was younger. We drew the mental picture of him fiddling at a string of barn dances, his laughing eyes and grin in place. But the instrument that most changed our lives was the player piano that appeared one day in our Pueblo living room soon after we moved in. Mary, it turns out, had been given lessons through the public schools in Denver and was already "fluent" in piano. One of her best friends was the daughter of a piano teacher so I was set up for lessons immediately.

Meanwhile, Daddy brought out the paper rolls and hooked the beautiful mahogany monster up to the vacuum in blow instead of suck, bypassing the pedals to make it electric. And he added tacks to the hammers to give it the tinny sound of a honky-tonk while Mother rolled her eyes. Not a lot of time went by before the tacks were gone and Mary Beth and I were vying for time to practice our scales.

Naturally, Mary Beth was a much more disciplined pianist than I was, and in a short while she was accompanying the girl's glee club at school. I continued to practice but deferred to her. Fortunately for us, she had access to some great Broadway music, and we always had the old blue Baptist Hymn Book that included great key-pounders like Flee as a Bird to Your Mountain, and Master the Tempest is Raging. I could play these as well as my sister if I worked long and hard, but my fingers could not really span an octave at 10 years of age. So while she played, I belted out Climb Every Mountain, Flee as a Bird, and On the Street where you live. Daddy and Mother must have been Very Satisfied with their investment.

Daddy, restless soul that he was, had to have something new now and then, so while the grand piano sat upright against the east wall of the Living Room, leaned against the south wall was a banjo. Daddy prowled the hock-shops and junk stores for treasures like this, and he was soon picking at the round and tinny-sounding oddity with some success. Next came the Mandolin, from which Daddy could immediately coax the sweetest sounds ever. The banjo went but the mandolin stayed. Finally, he brought home a blue box with a handle and latch that slightly resembled an over-sized suitcase. When unlatched and opened fully it was a field organ, complete with foot pumps. It was there a little while but didn't hold a candle to the player piano where we worshiped the keys and tenderly polished the finish.

In the summers we would often lay quilts on the grass and lay looking up at the stars while we listened to the Symphony Orchestra concerts amplified from the Art Deco rainbow shell in the park just a few blocks away. The elementary schools still taught classic Christmas Carols in the 1950's and 1960's, so we sang, sometimes in harmony, as snow fell to make our long walk home from school shorter. Even the junior high schools put on a completely costumed and staged musical each year so we participated eagerly, and sang in the church choirs regularly. It was reassuring to have our parents in their Sunday best attending a performance, whether we were performing or watching seated beside them.

The seasonings of beautiful and enjoyable music still permeate our lives. Although the piano didn't make the move to New Mexico, the fiddle and mandolin did and and both now belong to one of my brothers. Mary Beth and I still play the piano a little, and the boys play the guitar. I have a similar piano in less than beautiful condition that my children learned to play "a little". One chose choir, two of went on to study violin, and all enjoy a variety of music. When they were little, like my dad, I made them sing. Everyone sings.

Quiet Endurance: The Story of a Very Determined Woman named Anna

2010-05-26T16:12:00.000-07:00

I cannot tell you about our mother without saying that if Daddy was fun, she was mainly all business. If he was sometimes a little rough around the edges, she was grace and dignity. Both of them were unafraid of work, and I was an adult before I knew what unrelenting challenges they faced. They were typical of that Greatest Generation who survived the Great Depression and then threw themselves into a national machine that helped win WWII.

Both sets of our grandparents were born in the last two decades of the 1800's and witnessed the advent of electricity, the telephone, radio, and automobile. Our maternal grandmother nearly blew off the head of her future husband when he chose the wrong direction to approach the house as she took a shot at a fox that had invaded the chicken yard. Children growing up on the Texas prairie were likely to encounter rattle snakes and carried pistols as a matter or course when crossing the ranches. Yet our Great Grandfather and his boys ranched and farmed in suits, his a 3-piece, and they had fine furniture and china until unfortunate times overtook them--but that's another story. The perspective of these hard-working, church-going people was rather fixed, but they were far from being isolated or bogged in the 19th Century.

Even on the farm, our mother was a Fashionista, and a talented seamstress. Somehow in her youth, the railroads had brought enough catalogs and magazines for her to get a taste for great clothing and coiffures. She was 13 when she got her first flapper dress, while living in Spur, Texas. (Her mother's youngest sister, who bought the dress for Mother was, during the same time period, writing notes to her girlfriends about certain young men who were "Some Sheiks!" and asking who had a car at his disposal so they could go Kodaking.) The movies brought far-away places close, and you could take a snapshot and have it developed into a post card to circulate to friends and family.

Our Mother, Anna, was a modern woman, the first Southern Baptist woman on record, as far as her new mother-in-law was concerned, to get a divorce. Mother's divorce was coincidental with the tragic death of Daddy's first wife, Modena. Each of them was alone with two children and working at Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, New Mexico when they met during WWII. They were married within two years of becoming single.

They bought land where the Holiday Inn was later built, and built a little house of mainly salvaged materials. And they brought all four of their children together: Son, whose first name was really James, and Jack, from Daddy's first marriage, Nina and Doyle from mother's.

Jack once told me that when he first met our Mother that he thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. A more quiet version of Doris Day, she was tall and Teutonic, with blond hair that carried a slight hint of strawberry, a shade some people referred to as "Champagne Blond" I have seen only on one other person. Our father, who worked with Boeing before coming to Roswell, was a handsome man who would remind you of Humphrey Bogart both in mannerism and looks.

Their first baby was born with Hyaline Membrane Disease. The baby, whose name was Alma Jean, never came home from the hospital. I was a young mother with children of my own when I asked Mother about this time. She said she was inconsolable, unable to stop crying for days at a time. Finally, she dreamed of her own grandmother, who said, "Why are you crying? She is here, with me!" Mother said her grandmother was holding the small baby, but beside her was another baby, just a little older. She was comforted, but she also knew that she would have this experience again.

There was no time to even ponder that, because The War was winding down, and no job awaited. Since they were both civilians, they would have to wait to be hired behind a veteran for any job. Perhaps it was one of the other mechanics who told Daddy about the farm in the Ozarks of Missouri, but somehow life began again not only for the older children, but for Daddy's parents and his sister and her family, who followed us to their own farms, our grandparents just across the pasture from us. As though they had always belonged there, a clan of Walkers now lived near Exeter, Missouri.

As the second born and first daughter in a family of nine children, Mother would not have considered four children a handful at all. But Son, as James Frank, the eldest was still troubled after his mother's long illness and death. There were several years between him and Jack, and now he had two additional siblings with Mother expecting another baby.

And our eldest sister hotly reported that our grandmother took pot-shots about divorced women repeatedly within our mother's hearing. I would not have known though, because Mother had long since won her over by the time I was old enough to remember. There was peace and mutual respect between them as I grew up, but I was separated in years, nearly a decade, from these situations.

Betty Ann was born in 1947, a blue baby. Her struggle to survive of course took in the whole family. Mother told me that Papaw, our grandfather, often drove her with Betty Ann to see the doctor. They hoped that someday, when she was strong enough, he could do surgery to correct the hole in her heart. But after eight months Betty Ann was in heart failure and had to be held on a pillow. Mother said she could not stand to see her suffer any longer. She said that every breath seemed to hurt,so she silently prayed that the Lord would take her, and He did. She said that Daddy came and sat beside her while they held her, surrendering her at last to God. It was Son who ran across the pasture to tell our grandparents. No wonder it was hard for him to get close to us!

The day following Betty Ann's funeral, the older children were sent back to school. Clouds were gathering, rain forecast, and hay was in the field. Daddy had to help his father bring in the hay. Mother was alone.

For some reason, Joyce Lacy, who taught at the one-room school house, asked one of the older kids if anyone was with their mother. When Mrs. Lacy learned that Mother was by herself, she left the class, drove to the farm, and took Mother the short distance to our grandparents home. Our grandmother had gone into town (Cassville) with one of the family who had come for the funeral for something she needed. When I asked what she did, since she was still very much alone, Mother simply said, "I just sat in the kitchen and waited until the men came in from haying."

When Mary Beth was born a few months later she lived, but did not tolerate milk of any kind. So desperate was her condition that our aunt sent a dress for Mother to bury her in. Thankfully, someone thought to try goat milk, and it saved her life. When I was born about 2 years later, and didn't give anyone reason to dread and fear for my life, they must have joyfully fed me and fed me. I look quite plump at about a year and a half.

Once I was an adult, I looked with a heavy heart at the fracture that had taken place between the older and younger offspring of our parents. Tentatively I would ask when the moments seemed right, and gradually the story came from mother, one of our brothers, and from our sister. Daddy was unable to speak at all about it.

Around the time of my birth, the drought in Missouri had taken a serious economic toll. Daddy was selling Watkins products in addition to farming. It was inevitable that the farm would fail when a herd of pigs that was sold to Daddy all died of hog cholera. He and his brother-in-law decided they would try to sell televisions in Kansas City.

About the same time, Mother's family came to take Doyle and Nina to "visit" with their father in Ft. Worth, whom they had neither seen nor spoken with during the 6 year interval in Missouri. It seemed as though he had a good job with General Dynamics, and could provide comfortably for them. Mother told me she had felt defeated and as though there was no other choice. Son completed high school and joined the military. We lived briefly in Kansas City--maybe 5 or 6 months, before going on to Denver to pursue the hope of better work as an airplane mechanic at Stapleton Airport. Jack went with us to Denver for a brief time, and then on to New Mexico to join some of the extended family there, where he finished school.

After 6 years together, this big Missouri farm family had in a matter of months shrunken to a family of four with two small children and a baby on the way, who lived in Denver. I was so small the memory of the older kids faded right away, and I was only conscious of the here and now. Both of our parents were undoubtedly filled with worry about the unseen future and anxious about the separation from their children, but we did not know it for many years.

The Airport job didn't work out since so many veterans were well-qualified, but, undaunted, Daddy began his life as a salesman of Filter Queen vacuum cleaners and ultimately, life insurance. Mother was used to working, so she balanced work and three young children somehow without me ever remembering day care of any kind.

Mother seemed ever looking for an opportunity to make life better. Denver was so rich in culture it really did not matter what you didn't have. All around were museums and the library, zoo, and parks to take us to. The Little Mermaid and Wynken, Blinken, & Nodd were our playmates at Washington Park's fountains, bringing our adventures in books to life.

She became involved with "The Opportunity Club" which provided entrepreneurs with support for their own micro business. Of course sewing was Mother's forte. Mother worked at May D & F demonstrating sewing machines and producing glorious dresses for us that began as model garments for the store. For herself, some spider-web silk was the expression of loveliness in two different dresses--one of wine and the other royal blue.

During the Depression, mother had learned to shop ready made clothes stores to see what she liked, buy different material, and cut a similar pattern from newspaper. She sniffed, "Who would want to wear a dress just like everyone else had on?" Mother's hands were never still, constantly crocheting borders around towels or washcloths. She kept a light bulb to darn my father's socks, and a basket of mending for the evening hours when we gathered either around the radio or, later, the television.

Our hair was carefully curled around soft plastic spools that inverted to become what looked like little turtle shells. The end result was a head full of tamed curls to top the beautiful garments she produced for us. We made our television debut representing her sewing club with bright lights blinding us as she hissed from the curtain on the side, "Turn around! Turn around!" We turned around.

Mother was the stalwart who made sure we went to church and to Sunday School each week, and to Bible School each summer. She usually always went with us, but Daddy held out for the rare Easter or Christmas service, protesting, "But I haven't been bad enough!" She took it in good humor and plodded on. In the pew beside us we could hear her clear soprano voice singing not too loud.

Around the house Mother hummed to the music on our radio. She taught us to enjoy keeping a home, standing in a chair at the sink to do the dishes, scrubbing the woodwork clean from our own little hand prints, feeding the starched white shirts as she cranked them through the roller atop the old Maytag washer out in the yard.

Whenever we moved Mother found a church home for us to belong to and insured we learned our Bible verses. We attended Brownies and Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts for our brothers. As we got older she made sure we went to youth activities at church. She was not a cuddly Mother--and neither she nor Daddy learned to express their love for us until we taught them to from our own adulthood. But Mother spent her whole life making do, going forward, and anticipating and providing for most of our needs and many of our wants, usually under less-than-ideal circumstances.

What were her gifts to us? To seize the opportunity to find something good. To get all you can from your education, whether it be spiritual or secular. To get over it, whatever it is, and move forward optimistically. To bite your tongue and bide your time while you wait for your adversaries to become allies. To have good manners, and grace in the face of crudity. To trust in the Lord, and expect His plan for you to work out well. In so many ways she was the quietly working heart of our home. I would like to think I could manage that well, but it would be hard follow an act like that. Instead, for me, it is something to strive for.

Why life was beautiful, or the Wit and Wisdom of a Man Named Clifford (c) Nita Walker Boles

2010-05-18T17:45:00.000-07:00

Laughter was a staple at our house. Our father enjoyed coming home to his children and apeing around. He would swing one arm , his knuckles grazing the floor, assume a hunch back, drop his jaw and become a wild-eyed and pursuing gorilla from whom we would flee, shrieking. Mother would chuckle and sputter as he chased us around but continue with her crocheting, cooking, or sewing, a reserved smile escaping now and then from the corners of her mouth.

That he delighted in us was self-evident, but we were as exasperating and annoying at times as any other kids. Still, he had a wry way of handling us that delivered the message without diminishing our worth. When I was found with scissors, cutting out paper dolls, he would shake his head as if amazed and describe me as "always cutting up little giblets of paper," meaning I'd better clean it up when I was done.

From our earliest memories, any car trip of consequence also included a narrative of our father's experiences in a parallel world where he once roamed with tribes of Indians (that was before we knew about political correctness) and Jim Bridger or Paul Bunyan. He was there personally to assist as Babe, the Blue Ox dug the Grand Canyon alongside Paul Bunyan. He and Jim Bridger once got caught in a Blue Norther and had to shoot a Buffalo, crawling inside the hide to keep warm. They later took the meat home to the Tribe. When banter erupted between him and our mother, she often got the best of him. Not to be outdone, he would remind us that "We used to drown squaws for less than that!"

Of course we knew Indians never drowned their wives, and that Daddy was only kidding, and that nothing he said when spinning these elaborate tales was entirely true, but his lore sent us to the library for books to read. Mark Twain and Tennyson were regular sources for quotes. And Daddy was seriously fascinated by Native Americans.

The National Geographic was well cared for in our home, and read by all. Books that included all the Indian Tribes and their locations were standard. Speculation on the origins of the cultures of the Incas and the Mayas, along with the Cliff Dwellers was regular conversation in the evenings and at supper. It was our father who first told us about the reception Cortez received as the Native Peoples assumed to their doom that he was their Bearded White God, returning as he had said he would. History was not boring for us in school with Daddy to put it into context for us.

His adherence to both Alley Oop and L'il Abner provided fodder for the unique vocabulary of our lives. A visitor in our home could easily be confused by asides and references in conversation. You sort of needed to be in the loop to get it all. We were entertained and educated by his close personal friendships with Pappy Yokum and Foozy. (For the last 20 years of his life, he was known affectionately as "Foozy" by certain family members.) For breakfast we often had Pterodactyl eggs with a rehearsal of the story of how Daddy and Alley Oop witnessed one drop an egg on a volcano. (This story was actually combined at times with a similar Popeye cartoon in which Popeye takes out a vulture who keeps company with Sinbad the Sailor.)

Even with all this media to stimulate political (both comic strips were highly political) and social commentary, and to provide euphemisms galore, Daddy had his own vernacular that we all still faithfully employ. If he thought what we were doing was funny or peculiar to the extreme, or that a demand was particularly challenging, he often exclaimed, "Oh, my right eyeball!"

Daddy would also invoke assistance from Deity in coping with the travails of a parent: "Lord, help the sick and the afflicted and them whose got kids." (Mother adopted it but shortened the plea to "Lord Help!")

He calmly deflected our attempts to involve him in our frequent searches for lost items by looking over his newspaper and directing us to "Look for it until you find it and when you find it, say, 'Whoopee, I found it!'"

When we came home with an astonishing account of some encounter or event in our day he would remark, "Well, I've been to two goat ropin's and a county fair and I ain't ever seen anything like it."

Fun and good humor permeated nearly every communication with our father, and when he was serious we hung on every word. Although he seldom darkened the doors of a church, Daddy was deeply religious. The big family Bible is so worn from his use that I have had to put a temporary binding tape on until I can get it repaired. Any of us in recalling what we would see when we entered our home after school would reply, "Daddy bent over the Bible, marking his place with a finger to greet you."

Although he was never preachy, when we had questions about doctrine being bandied about at church, he consistently had the reference close at hand and could quote what the Savior or Isaiah said about it. The most profound experience I had relative to this was when I was about 6 and a "Revival" was taking place at the church we attended.

Already so shaken by the threat of hell and damnation dished out from the pulpit I had asked to be baptized at the ripe old age of 5. Believing me to be too young the preacher had asked me if I knew the 23rd Psalm. Of course I didn't, and he didn't think I could read. So he hedged and postponed my baptism until I could recite the 23rd Psalm. Several weeks later I was baptized.

Now the guest preacher was asserting that if we didn't give more to the mission fund that thousands of individuals in the jungles of Africa would perish and go straight to hell because of their ignorance of Jesus Christ. I was stunned. I hardly had any money at the age of 6 and didn't believe my parents were especially wealthy, much less my friends and neighbors. How could God be so mean when those poor people in Africa could not help what they didn't know?

I went home to Daddy and explained the situation. I knew he had the answer, and in my heart I knew what it was, but I needed to hear the confirmation from Daddy. He looked steadily and tenderly at me over his open Bible and said, "Nonnie, God got blamed for a lot of things He never said." Then he looked down at his Bible and back up at me and said, "You know, Jesus said,'Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.'"

The time of day, the look of the room, the sound of his voice, the redemption of the moment are all so familiar still to me. I had just been given permission to think and believe for myself by the person I most respected in this life. In fact I had just been given the keys to personal revelation. In the Scriptures I would always find the truth and in my heart I could trust the Holy Spirit to verify it.

Life was beautiful.

(c) Nita Walker Boles

Two Ladies: A memory in collaboration with my brother, David Walker (c) Nita Walker Boles

2010-05-10T06:57:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it was at the Capitol Building in Denver that I first learned there were differences between the races. Our Brownie troop was there in 1957 to climb the stairs to the dome, some three-hundred if I remember correctly. We came in on the basement level and my eyes saw the label above a pristine white ceramic drinking fountain: Negro.*

Before I could ask the question forming in my mind, we were ushered toward the monumental task ahead. The climb did not obscure the thought, though, and I went home to ask what it meant. There, I received a simple answer. Negro people had to drink from that fountain because some white people didn’t want to drink from the same fountain.

Oh.

In those days we often took the bus that ran in front of our house at 311 Josephine. My older sister, Mary Beth, took it to tap-dancing lessons because she was big enough to ride alone. My younger brother, David and I rode it to the library with our tall, beautiful Mother for “Story Time”. And in the summers, we all boarded it for the swimming pool at Congress Park.

Whenever we got on the bus we were seldom lucky enough to make it to the back bench before the Negro people beat us to it. They were usually older people, gardeners and maids who worked in the lovely mansions around Capitol Hill. Their quiet laughter belied some private joke having to do with our attempts to run from the front door to the bench before the best seats were taken. We would snap our fingers and sink down into a side seat, about two-thirds of the way back when we saw our efforts were hopeless.

It was a cold autumn day when the dark lady came to our front door. She had well-coiffed hair and her sturdy brown working shoes were neatly polished beneath the thin herring-bone coat she wore. Mother answered the door, and in rich, southern tones, the lady explained that she had stood waiting for some time for the bus to come.

The cadences of her voice were familiar. Our family often visited friends and relatives in Texas, where our parents had been reared. It was always interesting to hear how different the same words could sound from one person to another.

The lady said she could hardly wait any longer. The cold wind had made it necessary for her to ask, “Could I please use your bathroom?” Mother said, “Well, of course!” and ushered her toward the back of the house. We sort of paraded behind and in front of Mother and the lady, David leading the way. Mother shooed us away, saying, "Go mind your own business!" and trying to allow the lady some privacy.

I knew the way, still know the way, though the house was demolished years ago. You walked past wallpapered living room, through the dining room where oak woodwork arched the passage into the kitchen. Just to the right were the attic stairwell, and the door with a glass knob to the bathroom. But we had been pointed to the quiet of the living room to be out of the way.

It was unusual to have a stranger come to the door and ask to use the bathroom. That she was dark skinned was not unusual at all to us. Our parents worked with a couple who had a beautiful daughter, Cleo who was less dark than her Negro father, and a contrast to her blond, German mother. Like our parents, they had met during WWII. Negro,we had been told, was Spanish for Black.

Cleo’s father played with the Denver Symphony Orchestra, making him a more elite musician than our father, who just played the guitar and the fiddle. Cleo and her siblings were sometimes over for supper with their parents. Afterwards, the grownups usually had a hot game of forty-two while we all played together.
The visitor was darker skinned than Cleo, but lighter than Cleo’s father. But whatever her skin tones, she was clearly one of those people who always got to sit at the back of the bus and drink from a reserved water fountain.

When the lady emerged from the back of the house, we stood, seven and five years of age, our backs pressed against the green and white gardenia wallpaper. The lady thanked Mother heartily for her kindness, and Mother assured her it was no bother at all. The lady wrapped her coat tightly against the autumn wind, and Mother shut the door.

For a moment she stood looking at our blank faces. We were mute, but we sensed we had just seen something out of the ordinary. Kindness to others was one of the main lessons of our rearing, but we couldn’t have known how difficult this moment was in 1958. Although David and I assumed this was a courtesy extended to anyone, Mother was not sure how to feel about it.

“Well, I had to let her use the bathroom!” she insisted, defensively.
We walked silently away to find things to read, toys to play with. But there was no question in our minds. It was perfectly logical. The lady needed to use the bathroom. We had one. She used it.

The people on the back bench of the bus have faded into history, and we have long since figured out the joke of institutionalized bigotry. There is no longer any evidence that there were ever separate drinking fountains as far North as Denver. And the house, as I said, is gone with the era we witnessed passing.

Still, the moment remains frozen, no, concrete. It will never melt away from us, since my brother remembers it as vividly as I do. We know the weather that day, and the time of day, and the color of the wallpaper. We have visited this scene many times as a frame of reference for our own conduct.

“It seemed like a privilege to show her the way,” David told me when we discussed our perceptions of the event. David had intended to lead the way to the bathroom. But he was a little boy, and it was ultimately Mother who claimed the privilege, with a kind of discretion only women show one another in time of need.

In each of our lives there must be hallowed moments of which we are completely unaware. Although we, her children, have placed the dark lady’s visit next to such monuments to the Civil Rights movement as Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” oration, Mother remembered it not at all.

* I contacted the historian at the Capitol in Denver several years ago to verify my memory of the drinking fountain. During the civil rights movement, many pictures were shown of drinking fountains labeled "For Negroes Only" or some similar thing.
He stated there was no record of white ceramic drinking fountains, but that it was possible there was such a thing. He also could not confirm or deny there were separate drinking fountains. It is possible associations have made this particular part of this memory. One of the people who rode at the back of the bus could tell you. I did see those fountains somewhere in my childhood firsthand.

Going to the Mountains (c) Nita Walker Boles

2010-05-03T16:00:00.000-07:00

Other than an Ansel Adams, have you ever seen a black and white that really looked like the landscape enough to call it beautiful? We didn't have anything but a brownie camera anyway, when we did have one, and if the relatives took pictures of us in the mountains in the 50's and 60's we didn't get any copies. In the early 90's we went back and shot a few pictures of Evergreen. The visuals were the same but it was disturbing to hear what sounded like urban traffic bouncing off the canyon walls and see houses glistening with satellite dishes where it had been National Forest. Even more disappointing was to go to Red Rocks Amphitheater and lean over to look out on the prairie only to find you were looking into someone's back yard. Times 500. There was no prairie left-just an ocean of houses.

So you see, I have to tell you how it was in its' glory or no one will remember. Our car was cream colored in those days, a beetle sort of shape with a visor over the front windshield. The seats were horsehair and smelled heavily of my father's chain smoking. We would sometimes just find ourselves in the car before dawn headed toward the shelters at Evergreen, a few miles up in the mountains. A bed made over the picnic baskets and cooler was cushioned by quilts made of wool and corduroy. We would doze back off to sleep, still in pajamas and under heavy covers until we arrived and mother woke us to bathroom and dress in the frosty morning air as the sun lightened the sky a little.

The bathrooms were permanent structures, a slightly nicer-than-an-outhouse small log cabin with a painted concrete floor and a metal lidded toilet. I was always afraid of falling into the seemingly endless hole to stinky nowhere. We washed hands at the water pump just outside.

The shelter was a different story. Rock with heavy log frames on a slab, wooden benches built in, and a picnic table. No wonder they got us up early to ensure we got one. There was a fire pit and a grill. I never remember the grill being used but it might have been so. Building a fire was an art both parents were adept at. Within moments of our arrival they had embers flaming and a coffee pot percolating. A dutch oven held the biscuits and an iron skillet sizzled with bacon. When it was done there would be scrambled eggs followed by gravy, the drippings for the bacon having been saved in a jar or can. We had milk from the cooler to drink as the sun came up and we huddled beneath our quilts. When we could see the sun over the tops of the gentle foothills of the Rockies, we would be warm enough to run and play, but first our bellies were filled with the unequaled biscuits and gravy, bacon and eggs.

We didn't have much to do with the clean-up since we weren't allowed near the fire.
Mother had an enameled pan full of sudsy water to wash and the rinsing was done at the pump before the dishes were put aside. We would stay all day. Three square meals worth.

Along with us frequently was our teenage brother, Doyle, our Great Uncle Rufus and Aunt Esther, and sometimes Great Aunt Jessie, and while he was living, Uncle Smitty.
But often it was just our little family. The rocks just a few feet from the shelter were red, rose quartz. The eons of time had created hollows in the sandstone tops where rain had pooled, just the right size for a child to sunbake on the warmth of the rock. We ran up and down the mountain sides. We laid on quilts or the rocks and declared to one another what the cloud shapes were. The wind rustled the trees, ebbing and flowing like an ocean that would start it's stir in a distant bend and work its' way toward and through you. The soft, cleansing breeze would pull at you dreamily, making you one with the trees and the birds and other creatures of the wild. An occasional deer would come near the camp, unafraid. We would sit still and watch until he ambled away.

Daddy would sometimes bring a book or newspaper to read, but often just lay under a tree to nap in the healing surroundings. Mother was busier, usually having something she wanted to get done for the next meal and always with an eye on us. But Daddy would make sure she had a little time under the tree as well, and take over chasing and teasing us.

So familiar were our surroundings over time that we could anticipate the next turn, depending on our destination. The road toward Estes Park was a maze of pink and gray granite that climbers frequented. There were several stop-offs where we would picnic and watch the chip monks eating our bread crumbs. Daddy was ever in search of a mountain stream to camp near. It was a ceremony with him to take off his shoes and put his feet in the icy water. The sounds of water over rock were calming and soothing. Every sound and sight testified of a Divine Creator blessing His children with unspeakable beauty. This was one of His sanctuaries.

We were so lucky, so happy, so blessed. Only on this side of life can I understand that while we were the recipients of this simple happiness, this was a great time of healing for a man and woman who had both suffered great and repeated losses, and who carried burdens we would take years to fathom. Ever in their minds with our presence were the four other older children, each entering their teen years and young adulthood elsewhere, with other family members.

For each of those children a separation from their family was its' own trial, and each of them also carried the memory of two infant sisters born and gone within the first few years of the family coming together--we couldn't know. We were too young to possibly understand.

It is good to remember those days with gratitude. For our parents and for our older brother,Doyle, when he could come, the much-needed respite was found in the cleansing beauty of the Rocky Mountains. For us, still very small, they were a foundation we would need to build on in a few years when beauty and peace were harder to find.

Alice in Wonderland-Or, The World is So Full of a Number of Things, I am Sure We Should All be as Happy as Kings! (c) Nita Walker Boles

2010-04-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

The course of day to day life when I was small was usually quite pleasing. To say that the world was my oyster would be accurate. Whimsy and mimsy were to be expected. Our sidewalks, leading toward the red Governor's Mansion, were red Slate. So when my little brother rode on his bullet-shaped vacuum cleaner/train each joint in the sidewalk made the appropriate clackety-clack sound and the wheels sort of created train-on-the-track noise as he went. David was usually deeply engaged in whatever endeavor he chose, a wrinkle of concentration on his brow as he imagined his role of engineer.

Mary Beth, my beautiful big sister had curly chestnut brown hair and a matched set of beautiful dimples. She was old enough to take the bus to her tap lessons at the YMCA. As with my brother, I was fascinated and in awe of her beauty,capabilities and accomplishments. We must have walked to school together although I remember that I walked home from pre-school and kindergarten alone.

My birthday came in late November, but because at the time, Colorado allowed enrollment from Jan-Dec of the year you were born, I was allowed to start preschool at age 3 and kindergarten at age 4. To say the least, many of my classmates were nearly a year older than I. It was some 7-8 blocks but I don't remember feeling lost or afraid, because I knew the street signs and landmarks.

Our proximity to the Capitol put us in prime seats for some excellent side shows. The sounds of a marching band drew me outside one spring morning, and I ventured to the corner east of us on Washington Street to look toward Grand Street, about 5 blocks away, where the parade was taking place. The green canopy of trees momentarily blocked my view but instead of a parade toward the north, just to the south I caught the astonishing vision of an Indian--that is, a Native American--in full War Bonnet and sitting atop or a beautiful brown horse. His horse had undoubtedly become nervous with the brash sounds of the band. Several yards behind him were two more of his tribe, less regally dressed and sitting motionless on their horses waiting for this one to calm. They all looked steadily, silently at me.

Even at 4, I thought to myself, "No one is going to believe this." After a moment I turned on my heel and ran to get my brother, calling his name as I went--and alerting the horsemen that trouble was surely coming. By the time I returned with him they had vanished, and I was left with an indelible, incredible memory.

Our mother took every advantage of the resources close by. We were enrolled in Brownies and Girl Scouts as soon as eligible. School field trips included the Colorado History Museum, Molly Brown's Museum, a trip to the Denver Mint. One special class trip was to the Hull House Museum, privately owned by the grandfather of a classmate. I was impressed to see baskets woven so tightly by the Native Americans that they held water. A beautiful white doeskin dress was displayed. Sadly, at the Museum of Natural History at that time, the bodies of Cliff Dwellers were still on display,including that of a child, and I remember thinking if I were dead I would not want my body put on display.

The Girl Scouts took us to the Supreme Bakery where Girl Scout Cookies were made. We went from room to giant room where great rollers cut quilt-sized sheets of dough into shapes with delicate impressions. In one room the creme was added to sheets of crisp wafers in various colors from a plastic tube descending from the ceiling. A woman with a hairnet controlled the flow of the white goo with a foot press.

Our guide was droning on about something and the other Brownies had their heads turned and listening attentively but I was quite interested in the goo dispenser, which had, to the consternation of its operator, stopped dispensing goo. It was just at a level with her head. She stooped beneath it and attempted to dislodge a clump with a wooden tool. Still nothing came out, so she placed her face beneath it to look for the problem just as....well,I don't have to write it, do I? I elbowed the Brownie standing next to me with her head pointed toward the boring tour guide.
She hissed at me while I kept my eyes fixed on the exasperated goo operator who was mopping her face with a rag. I looked around and not one of the other girls had seen! Why was I always the only one who noticed things??!!

The Museum of Natural History was so familiar to me that I could anticipate which room was coming up next. How could our eyes see enough of beautiful amethyst and rose quartz? The 12 foot long core samples that lay in the floors showed an amazing array of geological formations. Crystals in abundance, collections of staggering proportions all lay before us to absorb.

We lived in a wonderful world where there were so many insects, particularly beetles, moths, and butterflies, that Victorian collectors had sorted and classified them by rooms full. Our parents loved to take us there, and to the Denver Zoo. On one visit I observed a polar bear walk out in the summer heat to perch on a rock, but as soon as his bottom hit the surface of the rock he sprang up and jumped into the water. No stranger to cartoons at the age of 4, I burst into laughter and explained what had happened: "The bear sat down on the rock, set his hiney on fire, and made his britches smoke!"

T-Rex was a companion who followed me to the mountains. When we went to Evergreen for breakfasts with our extended family, my siblings and I climbed on and around him, his flesh frozen in rock formations, his bones displayed at the museum below on the prairie. During those years the sounds of the mountains were that of wind through a thousand trees, and water rushing over rock. From Red Rocks you could see a grassy expanse that led to a distant city. But we were within the walls of the mountain fortress, where granite and quartz made climbers of otherwise sane men, and where roads wound in predictable, tight turns, taking you higher and higher, past buffalo that spoke of days not long ago and streams that turned into rushing rivers below.

We ate and drank of the feast before us. Anything was possible.

So I admit it: not only am I an anachronism, I'm a writer and a poet. (c) Nita Walker Boles

2010-04-27T15:48:00.000-07:00

My life began on a little farm in the Ozarks of Missouri. I was the third child born on that farm in Exeter, the second to live, and the first to thrive from the beginning. My oldest siblings could still cry at the thought of Betty Ann's death forty years later. My mother would later tell me of the near death of my sister, Mary Beth, who was not able to tolerate any form of cow's milk or formula. So dire was the situation, she said, that her sister sent a dress to bury her in. But she lived, and thrived when someone thought to try goat's milk. The pictures of me show a very plump baby...Mother must have been giddy to have a baby do so well.

The baby before Betty Ann was named Alma Jean, and she never came home from the hospital in Roswell, New Mexico. That is where my parents met, both single, each with two children of their own, and both working at the Air Force Base as civilians during WWII. After the war they bought a beautiful little farm near Exeter, Missouri. They had several years there to meld their families together, and to farm the beautiful land where my eldest sister says our father had to paint the fence posts to keep them from sprouting. But a drought set in and ravaged the area so long that we could not secure a living.

In a twist of hard fate, the drought drove us from the Edenic pastures of Missouri to Colorado. The older children scattered and the family was reborn in Denver with three young children. One older brother came home to finish high school but the rest progressed to adulthood living with relatives in Texas and New Mexico. In Colorado most of my memory of life as a thinking person begins. We did not know how poor we were, because life was too rich to imagine otherwise.