A Snow from Yesteryear

Morristown Trailer Park, New Muilford, IL.

GrandDad Neece and I. At least according to Mom. I think those are my brother’s eyes and nose. I do have a memory of being on this hill on the sled with GrandDad, perhaps this day, perhaps another. The ride wasn’t particularly smooth. In memory, the day was cold, but above freezing. The snow was melty, the runners of the sled digging a bit into the gravel beneath.

 

‘Twas the Night Before…

My sister was born. It was February 1, 1964.  My brother and I stayed with Grandmother and GrandDad Neece in their mobile-home, in Morristown, a trailer park on the far south-end of Rockford, in New Muilford. They made a bed for us on the fold-down couch in the living room. Along about 9:00 that evening, my brother and I were “in bed,” Grandmother was already asleep, my brother asleep, too. GrandDad was still sitting up, watching The Outer Limits. I was listening, hearing a story of a bee-queen in human form. I was nine. I’d had “unpleasant” experiences after “scary” shows. Bad dreams and what-not. I lay awake listening. At the end, I raised my head in the blue light to see a woman with her nose in a flower. The image morphed into a bee’s face drinking nectar from the flower.  You know? That show? Not so scary. My survival of the image that evening gave me strength to look at scarier things later. Some scary things that, at that time, you wouldn’t think you’d ever find yourself looking at on television, or in magazines, some years later, and think that that isn’t so scary, either.

 

First Remembery

Baby’s First Memory? Clambering into her slatted Junior Bed (a step up from the Crib in sophisticated styling) and sucking on a sugar cube (one of two), a customary treat courtesy of staff at The Torch of Acropolis, a Greek restaurant her parents frequented.

But when – and how? – did she assign the designation First Memory to a mental event, an association of sugar cube and Junior Bed? She was four years old, perhaps, or five (no more) when the scene reconstituted itself unbidden on her mental stage with such force that she said to herself, “That is My Earliest Memory,” then wondered, “Did I know how to talk then?” and asked herself, “Where has that Memory lived until now?” (She was a precocious and introspective child, inclined to converse with herself.)

Then she considered how it came to pass that she recalled the source of the sugar cube – The Torch of Acropolis, its waiters. Surely her memory of The Torch sprang from a later time – or might it have been an earlier?

And so she formed the habit of lying awake at night and contemplating the past.

 

Before Perdue

From a note from Sheila Ryan:

I’ve saved a whole series of email correspondence inspired by something-or-other I started having to do with the fact that for women only, say, two generations back, the art of converting a live fowl into Sunday dinner was a common accomplishment.

I was amazed by the fact that so many people I know (Cooper among them) recall witnessing their grandma wring a chicken’s neck!

I’ve seen my Mother do it. When I was 17 or so, we moved to Pocahontas, Arkansas in 1972, While Daddy built a house out on Hwy 115 North of Pokey, we lived in a little rent-house down a short gravel road, off one of the main roads in town. It had a wood stove for heat. I put my “hot-comb” away, opting to lean over the wood stove and shake my hair dry. It gave it a nice “lift.”

There was a small chicken house at the front of the property . There were chickens on the lot, not sure how they became “ours” to use. Mom “throttled” one one afternoon. Now, I must have seen this before. When I was a kid, when we’d visit Arkansas, on Sunday after church, I must have been around when this had happened. Somehow I missed it. Though later my cousins delighted in telling breathless tales of chicken killing techniques, nearly all involving some wild swinging or twirling of the head off the body, nearly all ending with the gory vision of the chicken, headless, running across the yard some distance before falling over. Still, freshly moved to back-roads, this city boy’s vision of the “real” thing was all new. As I recall, the fact was nothing so dramatic as the stories. Mom laid her hand on the chicken’s back and enclosed its head in her hand and with a quick snap the deed was done. I vaguely remember her plucking it, scalding it, cutting it up–not on a board, but in her hands.

Until just recent years, Mom bought whole chickens, prefering to cut them up herself. To this day, I can’t recognize any piece of chicken in a Colonel Sander’s bucket except the chickenleg.

 

Reincarnation II

We were tooling along at about 72.5 miles per hour somewhere between Minneapolis and Des Moines. We were on our way to Dan’s folks for one of the winter holidays, Christmas, I believe, but it may have been Thanksgiving. Late afternoon, the almost dark side of dusk. A few flakes appeared in the periphery of the headlights, then thin, dusty wind-swept snakes of white slithered across the road in front of us. Danny tapped the brakes to take off the cruise control. We did an immediate 180 degree spin and found ourselves sliding backwards on I-35, speed undiminished.

Thankfully, there were no cars immediately behind us, or now in front of us. Headlights seemed to be at least a mile away. As we drifted toward the shoulder at high speed, we found ourselves with time to talk. “What should I do?” Danny asked. “Don’t touch the brake.” I said. We were dead calm. There was a quiet shooshing. I think we said a couple more things, but I don’t remember. I vaguely remember thinking, “Is this how it happens?”

 A speed limit sign slid past us within a couple of feet of the driver’s side as we started to tilt our way into the ditch, then we started to slide down. The road suddenly turned rumbley and thundery, but the car still maintained a relatively straight backward path as we slowed and finally came to rest at the bottom.

The car had died, the headlights and dash lights were still on. We were still facing the way we’d come. After a few seconds, Danny said, “What do we do now?” I said, “See if it will start.” It did. “Now what?”

“Let’s see if we can turn it around and get out.”

I can’t remember if our Taurus was an ’86? ’87? It was the first of three we owned. Loved the front wheel drive. Danny managed a three or four point turn to point the car in the right direction. Then taking a kind of long parallely angle to the road, he started up. There were 3 or 4 inches of snow on the ground from a snowfall earlier in the week that had been plowed off the road into a two-foot-high ridge at the shoulder’s edge. Danny managed to get up a little speed in the ditch bottom before trying to come up the side, as we did the car slowly lost traction and speed until it couldn’t get over the plow-ridge at the top. We started to slip sideways and down. “What now?” he said.

“Let’s try it again.”

Danny backed the car back down the tracks we made on the first attempt. He was able to get a fraction more speed up this time and just when I thought the car wouldn’t pop over the ridge, it did. and we were back up on the highway. Within a couple of minutes we were back up to speed.

Honestly, I think the whole thing took place in the space of five minutes. It was almost like it never happened, except the next morning we found a big wad of grass stuck in some small crevice of the front wheelwell.

We didn’t tell the family about it until years later.

 

Remembery, remembered

May 6th, 1984

Standing at the glass, my mother-in-law standing beside me. Me wondering how it might be years from now, when I’ve failed to live up to her expectations. Or your mother’s. Or yours.

I knew then, didn’t I? Or was it just a sensation? Was it a conscious thought as I stood and looked at you through the window. Me with my whole hands, my nose, my face pressed into the glass? That’s what I remember. That’s how the memory feels in my mind. I know I wanted to be close to you as possible. The glass was in the way. But the other? Did I know? I don’t remember. It’s possible, there was a sensation.

Me standing there, nearly overwhelmed. Overwhelmed. Eyes welling. Maybe I had my hands in my pockets? It is a way I stand when I stand.

Me looking at you. You were such a tiny thing. Well, maybe not so tiny. You in your state, as opposed to others in that state. You know, some come early and are very tiny, others come on time and aren’t so big. I think you got it from me perhaps. I was 9 pound 14 ounces, you were 9 pounds plus if memory serves. Maybe your mom was big, too, but I don’t remember. There was a story like that I think. Memory, here, isn’t serving. She certainly was not a big woman. I suspect it is still so.

Me looking at you through the growing blur, Dana beside. Me saying, or was it she? Was it she who said it? Who said, “What will it be like for him in the future? Will it be happy or sad?” Happy I hoped. In memory, in retrospect, me thinking, “I may never know.”

From RICK ruminating, May 2006

 

Stitches

I was playing with a group of friends, the last day of summer. I ran to hide in a garage where a flat-bed trailer was parked. There was dusty dirt on the concrete. I slipped and fell forward, cracking my eyebrow on the fender.  I felt nothing, but wet drops splattered the dust at my feet as I stood. I put my hand to my head, pulled it down to see my palm drenched in blood. I ran two doors down to my house, to Mom, who took a cloth, cleaned the spot and shrieked, “Oh my goodness, Ricky Cameron! You have a hole in your head! We’re gonna have to get that sewed up!” That’s when I started to cry. She rushed me to the ER where I wound up getting a couple of stitches, without anesthetic, the Doctor saying, “It’s too close to his eye.” The Doctor saying, “You might feel a little stick.”

I started sixth grade the next day with the bandage across half my forehead. As kids asked me about it, the story grew in the telling: How I could take it–getting stitches. Pain.

It was sixth grade, it was just a little stick. What did I know? It was among the first thin layers of callous I’d build upon for years, until I could really take it. 

 

 

Mustard Seed

Just a quick one. I’ve been turning over in my head the differences between planning, setting intention and having faith. Mainly because tomorrow, I’m going to be our business book club’s representative for a podcast of the book we chose to read last month. Wayne Dyer’s The Power of Intention. In my mullings-over, I remembered a charm that my Mom had on her watch when I was a little boy. It was a mustard seed incased in a bubble of glass not more than a quarter of an inch across. I vaguely remember asking about it and not understanding her answer. “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move mountains.” I’m not sure how close to a quote of her answer my quote actually is. It’s what I remember. It pleases me to remember that somehow.

If you care to join in, the pod cast is at 3:00 central, http://67.19.90.10/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rse8f70a93db39

You will have to download the plugin, then put in your name, don’t enter anything for a password, you’ll be good to go.

 

Branches

Here’s a little bit of fame in the family tree. My maternal Grandfather’s name was Harry Branch Rickey. He was a cousin of Branch Rickey,the innovative baseball manager who broke the color barrier by hiring Jackie Robinson.

GrandDad Rickey was a man of few words. He loved baseball. He loved the Cardinals. One vivid memory: He, sitting on the end of the couch watching a black & white screen under rabbit-ears flagged with foil. The Cardinals were on. Now and then, he’d lean over the arm of the couch and spit a stream of tobacco juice into a gallon-size milk carton sitting on the floor at his side. He loved Red Man, too. Once in a while, he’d look in the general direction of the kitchen and holler, “Coffee!” GrandMother Rickey would bring him a cup of instant.

I remember Sunday afternoons, when I was little, a group of us would go to the nearby schoolyard of North Park Elementary in Rockford to field the fly balls GrandDad Rickey would knock, batting left-handed, to the far-reaches of the field. From out in the field, he seemed acres away. I watched him, tiny, toss the ball up and swing, the crack of the bat on the ball coming to my ears time-delayed, a fraction of a second later.

He worked second shift at Greenlee’s in Rockford, Illinois. I don’t know the circumstances of the move, but he’d brought his family to Rockford in the early Sixties. He owned forty acres someone else farmed on the outskirts of O’Kean, Arkansas. There, there was a four-room house with no indoor plumbing. Years earlier, when visiting, I remember holding my poops until I could finally hold them no more before making the trek to the outhouse, risking snakes, risking spiders, risking every fearful thing I feared. Once inside, it wasn’t so frightening. I found a certain comfort in the enclosure of weathered wood. Perhaps in my relief, I was nearly delirious.

The last car he owned, a black 1965 Buick Wildcat, had an enormous engine. On a four-lane, when GrandDad was driving, if anyone tried to pass him, he would say, “Cain’t nobody pass this Wildcat.” He’d floor it and off we’d go, leaving the trespasser bouncing around in the jet-fueled backwash of the V-8. (Later, when we got our driver’s licenses, my Uncle Clifton (five months my senior) and my brother and I would take the Wildcat and “run the wheels off it” or “burn up gas,” as GrandMother called it, on the country roads around O’Kean.)

I believe he had been devastated by the loss of one of his sons, Leon–third youngest–when Leon’s car, at high-speed, wrapped itself around a telephone pole, in the early Sixties, killing Leon and his wife in the wee-hours of the morning. They left two small children, Cindy who was later adopted by her maternal grandparents, and my cousin Terry, two-years-old or so at the time, later adopted by GrandMother and GrandDad. It was about this time GranDad took to weeping at odd moments. One particular time, he looked me full in the face. He smiled and started laughing silently, then he gasped as his head dropped, his shoulders bobbed up and down as quiet sobs took him over. Shortly after, they moved back to O’Kean.  Built a small two-bedroom ranch with plumbing. Tore down the old house.

He was diagnosed with–memory fails me here–Hodgkins disease? Lou Gehrig’s disease? The irony of his love of baseball, and this near statement, now, not lost on me.  He began a relatively long period of failing. Near the end, Mom and my brother and sister and I drove to Arkansas over Christmas school break, so Mom could help Grandmother care for him for a little while. I had my learner’s permit, so I could help drive the ten-hour trip. Dad had to stay home and work. By that time, GrandDad had to be fed through a tube the doctors installed through his side to his stomach. GrandMother and Mom would fix supper, then whirl it up in a blender to put in a large syringe and pump into his stomach through the tube.

 We were there about two weeks. If memory serves, Christmas day that year, temperature-wise, was something in the mid-seventies. I remember kicking a can that day, across some dry, scrubby ground. I was wearing shorts (For someone who’d lived his life in Rockford, Illinois, such warm weather that time of year was unheard of.) I remember thinking how unreal all of it was.

I’m a little ashamed I don’t remember the exact date of GrandDad’s death. Or the year for that matter. It was sometime early in the following Spring. It had to be about 1971 or 1972. Nor do I remember his age. It had to be around about the age I am now.

Harry Branch Rickey, preceded in death by one son, Leon. Followed in death by another son, Lowery, drowned, just a few years later, in flood-swollen waters, fetching a boat that got away from its mooring on a fishing trip in the bottoms of a nearby river. Followed, some many years later, by my GrandMother, Hazel Martin-Rickey, from the failure of her heart.

 

Umbrellas

I just wrote some rules for myself to use in my writing here. (See Why, above) I’m going to immediately break Rule #1 and share a memory that was triggered a while back. First the trigger:

I’ve always loved the look of umbrellas. Why is that? I’d love a colorful collection someday.

–Brandon Hobson

And Brandon, yes, it would be lovely to have a collection of umbrellas in many colors, but you must bear in mind never to grow too fond of an umbrella. Umbrellas never really belong to us. We merely have them on loan.

–Sheila Ryan

And the memory:

Umbrellas remind me of my GrandDad Neece’s funeral in Arkansas. We grandsons were asked to be pall-bearers. From the funeral home, the procession took off from Hoxie across the bottoms, then across the hills to the outer reaches of Powhatten, AR. On the way, rain came, a toad strangler, along about the time we passed Lake Charles.

When we reached the cemetery, we carried GrandDad’s casket to the bier under the tent. I went back to the limo with three other grandsons to carry GrandMother, in her wheelchair, across the soggy ground to sit near his coffin. On my third trip back to the car, to retrieve my black umbrella, I stepped in a hole and filled one of my Baker-Benjes with mud.

During the service, as the minister said sweet, honest, Free-Will-Baptisty things about GrandDad and GrandMother, I looked across the crowd of us. Umbrellas of many colors. Gifts-with-Purchase. Armani, Drakkar Noir, Happy. I remember one vividly, Nascar. Yellow and black. We were bobbers in a sea of rain.

My first thought, as I stood there: “Where are the beautiful funerals they have in movies like Being There. where everyone is dressed in black and all the umbrellas are black, where the rain falls not in a deluge, but gently and quietly?”

My second thought. GrandDad. A few weeks before, when Danny and I had been visiting them, their pastor stopped by for a few minutes. Near the end of the minister’s visit, we stood in their living room in a circle holding hands while the preacher said a prayer for GrandDad’s health. When Danny and I were saying goodbye that day, GrandDad took my hand and one of Danny’s in his and said, “You boys go to church?”

I said, “No GrandDad, we don’t.”

He gave our hands a gentle squeeze. “You ought to,” he said.