Best Parts of Me

 

Not long ago my 93-year-old parents came to visit me at the lake.    My 93-year-old parents got into their car in Mansfield and drove themselves the hour and a half to my home at the lake. 

Personally, I think that’s kind of amazing. 

We ate lunch, talked, and looked at really old pictures for about three hours.  It was the best, watching and listening to my folks remember and try to remember the who, what, when and where of their young lives.

It was a great day.

My father is an engineer and worked for a large utility company making all that wonderful electricity we use.  I grew up in company homes adjacent to power plants in what we called the village.  Those homes are my memory of….home.  Those homes are all gone now.

They were removed a long time ago and I wanted to see pictures to see if my memory came even close to aligning with reality. I had asked my dad if he had any pictures of any of our old houses and he presented me with two boxes of photos in chronological order for the years 1950 to 1980. 

We looked at a lot of those pictures, mostly from the early 50’s, as in 1950’s, as in a long time ago.

I loved watching them remember, debate, and argue about who that was and where that happened only to finally agree it might not have been either of the people they thought.  It’s a gift to see them talk about who they were before they were my mother and father.  It’s a gift to see them as more than parents but real actual people with real actual histories.

My mother for instance, apparently had other boyfriends and went to dances and parties and all kinds of stuff.

Mom has fought macular degeneration for the last 20 years and is to the point she can’t see much anymore, even with a magnifying glass.  What’s bad is she was and is very visually oriented, she has curiosity and wants to see what that thing is in the back.  Her persistence in living and playing through all of that is just one of the amazing things about Bettye Lou.

BL was born a Yankee in Illinois but made it to Texas and she is now will always be a Texas girl. 

She (a BL quote, she has always been very quotable and I have a lot of my mother said stories, any way Mom would say, “My name is not she, use my real name.”) Mom, Bettye not she is, in the highly competitive world of Texas mothers, a top tier Mom. 

Never, not one time, have I ever felt not loved and valued.  Never, not one time, have I ever worried about my mother not accepting me.  And as hard as it is to believe when you see me today a calm cool dude there have been times in my life I have been decidedly unlovable and not very likeable.  I had sullen teenager down to an art.  But I knew my mother would never stop loving me.  That’s a remarkable thing to have in your corner when you are being unlovable.

This good woman used to go with her family of five in a small blue Mobil Scout travel trailer all over the Rockies.  Five of us, in a trailer or a car for two weeks.  Can you imagine the smells, the complaining, the arguing?  And that was just me.

Yet, somehow I remember those trips as fun and because I had the narrow vision of a child I don’t remember all of the work getting those trips together.  I just remember seeing every Indian dwelling in New Mexico and Colorado and seeing The Sound of Music somewhere in Colorado.

This is the woman who typed all my high school papers on her old manual typewriter.  She was my spell check and grammar check.  Imagine typing a research paper with footnotes on a manual typewriter in the middle of the night because the author procrastinated until the last minute. 

IBID baby.

Mom could and did get mad about this kind of stuff.  But I never, not once, worried about being loved.  In fact, that occasional anger, the irregular eruptions of emotions, taught me how to curse eloquently and gave me tools for my own marriage.  It’s okay to get mad and stomp and yell because love, a mother’s love, this mother’s love never, not once waned. 

My senior year in high school my father was transferred to Fort Worth.  My parents let me stay home In Colorado City to graduate.  It was a sacrifice for both.  My dad was awarded the most loyal fan for driving from Fort Worth to all the football games of a pretty bad football team.  My mother was at all those games, and all the baseball games and PTA meetings and plays and concerts and on and on and on. 

My mother was there.

She, Bettye Lou my mother, was there when I cried, when I had a post puberty case of the mumps, when I fell in love, when I got my heart broken, when I needed to suck it up, when I needed to learn to cook, when I learned how to iron, how to do laundry, how to live, how to understand others views, how to accept differences and most importantly how to love. 

I took that one to heart, my ironing pretty much sucks.

Mom is the one who says, from time to time, “We really need Marty here”, when something happens where Marty’s expertise or her brazenness or her intelligence would have been helpful.  It happens a lot.  My mother remembers my wife. It’s a small thing but those thoughts, her remembering Marty with love and admiration makes me happy and reminds me her love extends beyond the here and now.

Every now and then when I say something odd or a tad bit controversial (translate I talk like a democrat) Bettye will look at me and say, “Where did you come from?”.  She just can’t see how I got where I am.

That one  is easy.  I came from her.  I am my mother’s son. 

She taught me all the good stuff.  The stuff you need to know to love and be loved, she taught me to care and be concerned for others and most importantly she taught me that all of us, all of us are the same, we are just regular people.  She taught me the importance and value of basic fairness, she taught me not to be afraid of life, she taught me to love God, to never fear God. 

Truth is my mother taught me the best parts of who I am today.  And I kind of like who I am today.

Thanks Mom……and you know what, I will always love you, that’s what you taught me.

 

Gone Fishing

 

Dear Mr. and Mrs.

I’m not sure we will meet at the closing or not….you know the whole COVID thing.  Just in case I
wanted you to know you bought a good house filled with amazing memories.

Thirty years ago, when we moved to Waco from little Hillsboro, we were a little overwhelmed by all the options for housing, but we kept coming back to that house on Sandalwood.  It was all blue at the time, blue carpet, blue walls, and blue curtains.  We ended up buying the blue house because it just felt right.

This house has sheltered me and mine for three decades.  When we bought this house in 1990 it was a real financial reach for us, but we did it, at my wife’s insistence.  Like so many things, she was right to insist.  She was always smarter than me.

In this house we have loved, laughed, cried happy tears, and cried sad tears.  Our children both graduated from high school, and college while Marty and I lived in this house.  We saw them both married and start their own amazing families all while the “blue house” was our home.

In this house we celebrated and loved our kids and their friends.  We had more than one big kid’s party or gathering in this house.  We loved having them over to our place, it felt safe for them and it felt safe for us.  Young people spent many nights smiling here.  There were tears and teen age loves and break ups and Halloween parties and church Xmas white elephant gift exchanges and birthdays and communions and just family.  This house sheltered all.

My wife finished her doctorate sitting in the dining room working on her dissertation all night and all day.  She sat and played the piano in our living room for hours at a time.  It was her refuge and my opportunity to sing off key and loud. 

Eventually she had both of her strokes in that same living room.

The “blue house” has long since transitioned to different colors with different carpet and different floors.  Our children left and moved on and we added a continuous flow of caregivers, nurses, and therapists to the list of house guests.  Some of those guests became so familiar to us they became family and this house sheltered and cared for them too.

Luckily, the house on Sandalwood evolved very nicely and provided a perfect place for Marty, my wife, to live.  She was in a wheelchair for 14 years and the house worked perfectly.  Little did we know when we originally bought that blue house it would become our refuge from the intensity of chronic care.

This is where we did that, this is where we lived through the midnight ambulance rides, the evening rushes to the hospital and the natural fears of a stroke patient.  Despite the strokes, we eventually began to find ways to laugh and smile and cry and live a full life.  Marty even started playing that little piano again. 

This house, made of brick, wood, metal and wire, was our shelter against all the storms raging around us.

John Denver wrote and sang a song, “This Old Guitar”.  He sings, “It opened up the space for us to be
What a lovely place and a lovely space to be.”  He wasn’t singing about our home, but it fits perfectly for how I feel about this house.  It was the perfect place for us to be for the last years of Marty’s life.  Being in this familiar space gave comfort to me and my family as Marty found another way of being on May 7, 2019.

It feels like it’s the right time for me to walk a new trail.  I’m happy we lived here; it was simply the right house at the right time in our lives.  I hope you have the same feeling for years to come as you fill it with new memories, with new laughter, new smiles, new tears, new life. 

And yes, you will learn how to 3 point turn out of the garage, or you will knock down the fence.  It’s been done before.

A Summary -- Where I Reveal What I Found

It’s a long way home, if you are coming from Dalhart USA, especially when you must stop and pick up a Sharon, and you have to listen to the Dallas Cowboys lay a stinker of a game in New York.  Come on guys.

I dealt with it by letting Skip drive.  I dealt with my anxious riding while Skip drove too fast and tail-gated too many cars by burying my head and brain in my computer documenting this trip. 

This one I’m doing from home.

We drove right at 3,000 miles on our epic quest.  If you look at it on a map we sort of made a loop from Waco/Austin up to Paris, across to Lubbock and up through New Mexico and Colorado and into Utah and back to Colorado and eventually back to Waco/Austin.  Okay, it’s not really a loop, I just don’t have another word for it….so loop it is.

We witnessed the topographical changes from central Texas to east Texas pine and cedar trees and cotton in dark soil to Lubbock’s scrub oak and cotton in red soil to the pines and colorful aspens in the mountains.  The cotton in east Texas is ahead of the cotton in west Texas and west Texas, Lubbock, was greener and had standing water in the fields.  We saw snow in Colorado (sounds like a song title --- use it if you want).

We saw deer and elk and antelope and lizards and chipmunks.  We saw and heard people from all over the world.  We saw amazing natural, God given beauty, not just in parks but in small north Texas towns and fields and in the faces of the servers and clerks and fellow travelers in Texas, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.  

People are fascinating.  I love people.

We hiked and played golf and wondered and wandered and talked and listened to music that described what we were doing and how it felt.  

We saw where Marty was born.  We saw where she was formed, we saw where Marty and I met and where our babies were born and where we found peace and where we had fun and ultimately where Marty died.  We made the circle and in a particularly fitting way we closed that circle with as much grace as we could muster. 

I started this quest looking for closure.  That’s not what I found.  Hell, closure is just a word that I’m not sure exists in real life, with real things in that real life.  I don’t know.  I found enjoyment in simple things, I found some new friends, talked with old friends and I found good, hard, belly aching, coughing laughter.  Ultimately I rediscovered some marvelous memories and some of what Marty and I were before she got sick.

I sat on a rock in Utah and looked out over this enormous expanse, this marvelous creation that had taken millions of years for real nature to form.  I sat on that rock and somehow found a sense of peace I haven’t felt it a long time.  I walked away from that rock feeling lighter, feeling less burdened, feeling less sad.  It was a healing.

I can’t recommend the experience enough.  If you do it, you have to find a good friend, a friend who will laugh with you and laugh at you, a friend who will cry with you and sing badly with you, a friend who generally smells okay and doesn’t snore.  Mostly you need a friend, someone you love, someone you know loved your wife and someone she loved who was willing and able to go on a quest. 

Then you must make a plan, a flexible plan and just go.  You go to find yourself; you go to remind yourself of who you are and what you have done, you go to honor all that was and all that will be.  Just go.

Taking care of Marty was the most decent thing I’ve ever done.  Taking her around the state was one of the best things I’ve ever done.  Somehow, somewhere, Marty watched, laughed, gave directions and advice, cussed and cried.  It was just right.