Welcome

I was a journalism and English teacher in high school and college for a total of 36 years. I retired at the end of May 2013. Since then, I have become an adjunct professor in Tarrant County College's dual credit program. Prior to teaching, I was a small town newspaper reporter and editor. I come from a family of journalists and story tellers and learned early to love a good story. I hope you will enjoy the ones I include here.

Total Pageviews

Friday, August 30, 2013

Happy birthday, Mom!


Today, Aug. 30, 2013, would have been my mother’s 91st birthday. She spent the entire summer that last year in a series of hospitals, and she was sick for much of her last year, although she took great pains to keep us from knowing how sick she was.

My father had died in July of the previous year, and she had been driving back and forth to the hospital to see him since he became ill in December of 2001. He spent several months in the Veterans Administration Hospital in Temple, and she made that 120-mile round trip almost every single day that he was there, although on occasion, one of her church friends drove her. A couple of times my sister and I met her in Temple, and the three of us spent the weekend in a motel so that we could visit with Daddy and spare her that long drive. When he was released to go back to Lampasas to a nursing home there, she didn’t have to drive as far, but she would try to spend a big portion of the day with him, which was still tiring.

By September of that year, only two months after Daddy’s death, she was hospitalized in Killeen. She always had tended toward anemia, and she was very weak. But my sister had planned a trip to Alaska in connection with her job in the next month, and Mom was supposed to go with her. That gave her an incentive to take care of herself and get better.
They did make the trip to Alaska, and they had a great time, even though the night skies were cloudy the entire time they were there, so they did not get to see the aurora borealis, which had been something both of them wanted to see. Mom remembered a time from her childhood in Central Texas when, for some reason—solar flares, maybe—the aurora borealis had extended as far south as the little Central Texas farm she grew up on. But the closest they came to seeing the Northern Lights in Alaska was in the post cards and books they brought home.

My sister and I fell into a routine of going to Lampasas most weekends that fall, and we would take her out to eat or to the store. She had a lady who helped her around her apartment several days a week, and one of our cousins made a trip to Lampasas to visit with Mom in the middle of most weeks. Her friends from church also stopped by to keep her company.

When we went to Arkansas for Thanksgiving that year, Mom seemed to tire easily, but she tried to do everything we wanted to do. On the way to Arkansas, we stopped at a McDonald’s in Hope to get something to drink. My sister parked the car near the door and went inside. Both Mom and I were slower. I had to get out of the backseat, which meant moving around some of the items packed alongside me. Mom got out and started toward the door just as I finally got out of the car. As she turned around the front of the car, I saw her fall over backwards onto the concrete. I ran to her where she lay, fearing that she might have broken something. She wanted me to help her up, but I wasn’t sure how to do that without hurting her more.  She was sitting up but still on the concrete when a man came out of McDonald’s. He lifted her up and set her on her feet again. She was sore from that fall the entire weekend.

When we prepared to go to Arkansas again for Christmas, my sister and I decided that she should fly. The trip would be shorter and much easier on her, and our brother would meet her at the Little Rock airport and take her home. That also gave her a little more time with our brother and his family. She had a great time, even though there were a lot of emotional moments that holiday since it was the first Christmas without Daddy. When the holiday was over, she rode back to Arlington with us, and we took her back to Lampasas a few days later.

One Sunday morning a couple of months after Christmas as she was getting ready for church, she told us that she was not feeling well. Her heart was racing, and fearing that she was having a heart attack, my sister and I called the emergency medical technicians. She kept insisting that she would be fine, but we said we wanted to be sure. When the paramedics arrived, they cut her dress right up the middle to place the sensors on her. She was so upset because the dress was her favorite. They took her to the hospital where she was kept in the emergency room for a while, and then released to go home. Because of that experience, we learned that she had a recurring problem with atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat, probably going back to a bout with scarlet fever she had as a child. Although I remembered that she never had much energy in hot weather and occasionally felt dizzy and had to sit down, if we had not been there when it happened, we might not have known about the irregular heartbeat.

In the spring of 2003, she was excited about going to her grandson Graham’s wedding. We had taken her shopping, and she had a new dress for the occasion. I went down to pick her up when I got out of school that day. The plan was that we would drive back to Arlington, pick up my sister, and go part way toward Arkansas that night, then drive on in the next morning. But when I got to Lampasas, Mom was moving very slowly. She didn’t seem to have much energy, but I had no idea how sick she was. As usual, she never complained. When we approached Glen Rose on the trip back to Arlington, Mom finally admitted that she was not feeling well.  She had thrown up several times by the time we got to Cleburne, so she asked me to stop at the Dairy Queen so she could use the restroom and change her clothes. We made it back to Arlington, but my sister took one look at her and decided it would be better if we let her rest that night and leave in the morning.
Mom handled the trip to Magnolia, Arkansas, the site of the wedding, without much trouble, but not long after we arrived, she was sick again. She made it to the rehearsal dinner that night and to the wedding the next night, but in between she stayed close to her bed in the motel. On Sunday morning, June 1, when it was time for us to leave she couldn’t get out of bed. Not only was she still having what appeared to be a major stomach virus, but the racing heart problem hit her again. We called for an ambulance to take her to the Magnolia Hospital and arranged to keep our motel room for a few more nights.

She was released from the hospital in Magnolia on Tuesday, and we took her back to Arlington. The next day we took her to Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas to get checked out. They admitted her, and she was seen by a cardiologist the next day. He talked to her about the atrial fibrillation that was obviously getting worse and recommended surgery to correct the problem. The surgery was scheduled in the next week. The plan was, once the heart problem was fixed, we would move on to the abdominal problems she was having. She made it through the surgery just fine, and we took her back home to Arlington with us. The hospital had also arranged a visit with a specialist for the next week, and I took her to it. I had to push her from the hospital into the medical building in a wheelchair. He wanted to schedule a colonoscopy for her, but before the time of that appointment, she went in to take a nap one afternoon with us, and when she woke up, she could not get up.

We called the ambulance again, and this time she was taken to the Medical Center of Arlington. After we stayed there all night with her, they finally found a room for her around 6 the next morning. Looking back, I think she probably had a mild stroke that afternoon that affected her ability to walk. The hospital began doing more testing. They did the colonoscopy there since she really wasn’t well enough to take back to Dallas. And when she was finally released, it was to go to a rehab hospital in Mansfield. She was there for the remainder of her life. We celebrated her 81st birthday there, just a week before she died. 
  
In the 10 years since her death, she remains an important part of family celebrations. At family gatherings we still frequently remark on what Mom would enjoy if she were still with us, just as we still talk about Daddy. The family has changed some in the ten years she’s been gone. I retired from teaching this year, after 36 years in the classroom. I don’t get around as well now as a result of a car accident in 2010 and a fall in my classroom last August, both of which resulted in broken bones. My brother’s oldest son, Corey, who came to lived with my sister and me the summer Mom spent in the hospital, has just started his 12th year of teaching. My brother’s other son, Graham, completed college and went to seminary. After serving as an associate pastor in Fort Smith, he moved the family to Jacksonville, Texas, a few years ago where he is pastor of Fellowship Bible Church. He and his wife Leslie have three little girls, Ava Grace, 6, Edy Rose, 3 1/2, and the baby, Joy Tatum, almost 4 months, that their Mamaw and Papaw Hale would have doted on, just as the little girls’ grandparents do now.  My brother’s daughter Casey graduated from both high school and college in the past ten years, and she’s now working on a master’s degree in counseling. 
My parents never had very much, but they left a great legacy for their children and grandchildren, not in material goods but in the values they held and the example they set for us. They would both be so proud of their family today.

Happy birthday, Mom!  

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Celebrating America's Birthday


Memories of July 4th Past
Today is my 63rd Fourth of July, which means I’ve been around more than one-fourth of the 237 years this country has been in existence. Of course, I don’t remember much about the first few celebrations. But somewhere in my earlier childhood I became aware that there were two times a year, once in the summer and again just after Christmas, when there were fireworks. (Several years later I would learn that the two occasions were the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve.)
Back in the 1950s when I was a child, there were fewer city-wide fireworks shows and more of the small scale, do-it-yourself fireworks displays. My dad’s fireworks of choice were sparklers, firecrackers, bottle rockets, and Roman candles. He always got sparklers for my brother and me, but he handled the others himself to keep us safe. I didn’t even really like the sparklers because the sparks burned my hands. The bottle rockets and Roman candles produced bright, pretty lights in the night sky so we enjoyed seeing them. I also wasn’t too fond of the firecrackers because they were so loud, louder even than my brother’s cap pistols, and those were loud enough.  Sometimes Daddy put away some of the firecrackers for a more opportune time which he wanted to play a prank on one of his friends.
During the ‘50s, my home town of Lampasas learned just how dangerous fireworks could be when a large fireworks stand located inside the city limits on the main street through town blew up, killing the man who worked there. Our house was only about six blocks away, and we heard the explosion. Daddy knew the man who was killed.
The first big fireworks show I ever saw was at Fort Hood in the 1960s. We had friends from church who had access to Fort Hood, as the father of that family was stationed there. Our family went to that show as their guests, and it was impressive, both the elaborate fireworks themselves and the patriotic music played by a military band.
In the early ‘80s when I lived in Austin, I watched a massive fireworks display over Lake Austin, accompanied by patriotic music from the Austin Symphony. One summer I watched a fireworks display from my sister DJ’s apartment on North Collins when the Rangers still played in the old Arlington Stadium. And then there was the year when I was living in a second floor apartment over on Lamar in North Arlington. From my front porch I could look to the right and see the fireworks in Downtown Dallas or to the left to see the fireworks in Fort Worth.
One memorable Fourth of July was in 1988 when I was traveling with my parents through South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and on into Alberta, Canada. We were in Calgary and Banff on Canada Day (July 1), Canada’s Independence Day, then back into Idaho, Utah, and Colorado by July 4. As we drove through the mountains that night we could see periodic fireworks in the little communities we were passing.
The year DJ and I bought our house, our parents came up for the Fourth of July. It was a cool, rainy July 4 so we spent most of the day inside watching movies on TV. Another year not too long after we bought the house, we went to a Fourth of July party at the home of a friend from church. It was another cool day, and we spent a big part of the day sitting around a chiminea on the back patio enjoying the smell of the burning pinon wood.
We spent the Fourth of July in 2002 sitting in my dad’s room in his nursing home in Lampasas, watching the fireworks display in New York. My sister went to Sonic and brought daddy a strawberry sundae, and he ate every bite. That was about the last time he was alert and able to take part in any kind of family activity or conversation. He died about 10 days later, on the last day of the annual Spring Ho Festival in Lampasas.
And so what was our plan for this year’s Fourth? Nothing fancy. DJ and I went to a movie this afternoon and saw White House Down, then picked up drinks and hotdogs from Sonic on the way home. We’ll watch TV and probably do a little reading tonight. Fort Worth is supposed to have a great fireworks display, so I’ll try to catch part of that on television, too. Tomorrow we have plans to attend another movie matinee (Despicable Me 2) with friends from church, then go out to eat. Not as exciting as some previous years but still enjoyable and more fitting with my senior citizen-retiree status. Besides, my recliner is a lot more comfortable than a lot of those things I used to do. Remember, I’m more than a quarter the age of the entire country.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Top 10 List


10 Things I Have Not Missed
Since My Last Day of School

My last day of a 36-year career in education was June 1. Since then I have stayed busy with a variety of projects and the usual summer vacation activity of doing a lot of reading, as well as keeping up with old friends on Facebook and taking up some new hobbies. Following is a list of what I have not missed in the first month of my retirement.

10. Teenagers who think they know everything.
9. Monitoring students’ cell phone use and confiscating phones.
8. Two words—state testing.
7. Grading papers every weekend.
6. My alarm clock going off at 4:30 a.m. Monday through Friday.
5. Have to eat lunch in the same 30-minute period five days a week.
4. Not being able to buy a Diet Coke from a vending machine until 2 p.m. (after the end of the last lunch period).
3. Timing restroom breaks for the six-minute passing period between classes.
2. Seeing what new traffic configurations and detours are in place every morning and afternoon on almost every major highway in the Metroplex.
1. Early morning traffic on I-35W north of downtown Fort Worth where most drivers of the tractor-trailer rigs that fill the northbound lanes in rush hour apparently think 35 is the speed limit.