Remembering people from another time

Today is the 132nd anniversary of my grandfather's birth. My father's father, Joseph Thomas Hail, was one of 14 children in his family. His father, Robert Thomas Hale, had come to Texas by way of Arkansas with his extended family shortly before the Civil War. They first settled in the Leander community north of Austin. Gradually, the parts of the family split up and looked for other homes. One went to the Brady area as a miner, and another group moved north to the Texas Panhandle to Hale Center, then crossed into Oklahoma and settled in the central part of the state. My great-grandfather and great-grandfather were living in Mason when my grandfather was born, but they eventually moved to Lampasas County and settled down in the Kempner area.

By 1900, Joseph was 18 and on his own. As there were a total of 14 children and Joe was one of the oldest, his father sent him off into the world early to take care of himself as there were still younger children to care for at home. Despite being a slender man of short stature, he worked as a blacksmith, moving to Fort Worth for a while to practice his trade in the Stockyards area. Eventually he moved back to the Kempner area, where he met and married Beulah Moore, whose family had moved from East Texas to the farmland outside the nearby town of Copperas Cove. Joe and Beulah had three children, a daughter, Saba Irene, the oldest, a son, Vernon Ray, and the baby, my father, Truman Preston. Two other children died at birth. By this time, the family was spelling their surname as Hail, in spite of the fact that Joe's parents had used the Hale spelling. However, sometime before the birth of Saba, Ray, and Truman, a clerical error changed the spelling to Hail. Another clerical error when my father enlisted in the Army in 1942 changed my father's name back to Hale.

Joe continued to do some blacksmith work, but the family also farmed a little and picked cotton. They also moved around a lot, to Quitman in East Texas where my dad was born, down to the Gulf Coast to the area around Beaumont, where other family members lived, back to Lampasas and Kempner, and even to San Saba for a time when the children were young. None of the children finished school because all of them were put to work to contribute to the well-being of the family. My father only went through the second grade.

When my father was very young, the family decided to go out to Scurry County to visit some relatives. They packed their clothes, food, and other supplies in a covered wagon and set out, pausing each night to make camp. One night there was a terrible thunderstorm, but a church building was nearby and not locked, so they slept on the floor in that church that night.

The Depression was a hard time for everyone, but Joe took a job with a farmer whose farm was about ten miles away from where the family was living at that time. Joe would leave home before sunrise, walk the ten miles to the farm, work all day, and then walk home after dark. Later he was able to get an old car, and he drove it when necessary.

Truman found a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and was able to send money home to Joe and Beulah. Saba and Ray were already married at this time. When the country declared war on Germany, Italy, and Japan, both Ray and Truman enlisted, Ray first and Truman shortly thereafter.  By then Joe and Beulah were living in a little rock house on a hill along the road that ran from Lampasas to Austin. Truman sent money home and Beulah sent him cookies and candy she had made and packed carefully for shipment to him in England, North Africa, Italy, or France, wherever he was at the time.

When the war ended, Truman came home and found a job working with the Lampasas street department with Saba's husband George Hughes. They patched potholes in the heat of summer. When that job became too much, they found a job working on the railroad. In the late 1940s, Truman began driving a bus. In the meantime, my mother, Dorothy Lancaster, had finished college and returned to Lampasas to teach. One of the students in her class was Ray's son, Ray Jr. At one point that year, Junior, as he was called, told her that he wanted to introduce his favorite teacher to his favorite uncle. They were married Nov. 22, 1949. Truman continued to drive a bus for the school district, and Dorothy taught through the end of the 1949-50 school year. They had bought a tiny one-bedroom house on Howe Street in the western part of the city where they lived when I was born in October, 1950.

My earliest memory is of the entire family near the Lampasas River at Kempner, at night with a fire sending sparks into the night sky. My grandmother Beulah was there and walking around. And I could remember being passed from one person to another. That was late spring or early summer of 1952. I carried the memory for years as a sequence of images, until when I was in my twenties and described what I remembered to my parents. After some consideration, they realized I was describing a family fish fry, and I was passed from one person to another because they were afraid if I walked around on my own I might fall in the river. I remembered only images because I was still not talking much.

We made frequent trips in those years to the little rock house to see Joe and Beulah. At some point between my memory of the fish fry and the birth of my brother, Truman Wayne, in 1953, Beulah had a stroke that left her paralyzed. The little two-room house had a kitchen and a combination living room-bedroom. The bathroom was an outhouse behind the little house. Water came from a well. An electric light bulb dangled from the ceiling in each room. They also had a primitive electric refrigerator that replaced the old ice box that kept food cool thanks to a block of ice purchased from the ice house in Lampasas.

I remember some family gatherings in that little house. On one occasion, my aunt decided to make fried chicken, so she caught a chicken from the yard, wrung its neck, and chopped its head off. I know the rest of the transition from live bird to crunchy fried lunch involved putting the carcass in boiling water and then plucking the feathers out. I remember this because they decided I should have the experience of plucking a chicken. I remember taking only one handful of those wet, soggy feathers and deciding that I didn't like that at all. Another time we were there, and for some reason, probably because of the colors, I got into a bunch of hot peppers growing just outside the kitchen door. The juice from the peppers burned my hands and face, and my mother and aunt had to washed me off and smeared butter on my face and hands.

Truman and Ray decided to enlarge the little house in the mid-1950s, to add two bedrooms, some closet space, and a bathroom, but before they were very far along, Beulah had another stroke and had to be moved to a nursing home. She was put in the nursing home in Gatesville, about forty miles from Lampasas, because Lampasas didn't have a nursing home at that time. She was there until she died when I was in the second grade.

After that, Joe lived on his own for a while or stayed with Ray and his wife Pauline. It was about then that Joe took his only trip out of Texas. He went to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.

After we moved to a large old house in 1960, he lived with us for a while. He also lived in the little one bedroom house on Howe Street for a while and in an apartment by the public library. Truman Wayne spent the n the next morning, but after they put the cereal in their bowls, they discovered that the only milk in the refrigerator was buttermilk, so they ate cornflakes with buttermilk.

Joe's health diminished while I was in college, and he moved in again with Ray and Pauline for a time before going to a nursing home. By then Lampasas had two, and he wound up living for a time in both.  I was working at the newspaper in Copperas Cove in early 1975 when my mother came into the office. Joe had been sitting in a chair in the nursing home, when he suddenly straightened and leaned forward as if to stand, then toppled over. By the time the staff reached him, he was gone. He was 92.

Joe was a soft-spoken man who enjoyed playing a fiddle and reading his Bible. He spent hours playing checkers with me and my brother. By 1960 when I was 10, he was approaching 78, but he still was able to walk around the town even though his years of hard work had left him a little stooped over. On hot summer days he could often be found sitting under a shade tree. He was never convinced that the Apollo 11 moon landing happened, even though he watched Neil Armstrong take that "giant leap for mankind" along with the rest of us in July 1969. He was known around the community as a nice old man, a man of his word, who had lived in the county most of his life. His three children had a total of nine children of their own, as well 16 great-grandchildren and one great-grandchild by the time of his death.

When I think of Joe, I remember him as an old man, a pioneer of sorts, who had farmed and chopped cotton and shoed horses, pounding out the red-hot iron on an anvil. He's my connection to the past, to relatives I never met, to a simpler time. His values made my father the man he was, just as my mother's parents' values formed her character. And those same values are being taught today to my three great-nieces, an enduring legacy.

Happy birthday, Mom!

Today, Aug. 30, 2013, would have been my mother’s 91^st 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 81^st 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 12^th 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!  

Celebrating America's Birthday

Memories of July 4^th Past

Today is my 63^rd 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.

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.

Hydro-Phobia

This summer, in an attempt to get some exercise while still not having to deal with the Texas heat, I’ve been going to water aerobics at the YMCA. It’s a good way to work on strength and flexibility without putting undue stress on my weak knees and ankles.   

Those who know me will tell you that I am not now, nor have I ever been, an athlete, despite my brief involvement in jogging for a few years back when I was in my late 20s and early 30s. I didn’t have any speed then, but I had a lot of endurance, so I ran in several 10K races, all with the specific goal of finishing without getting hurt. And I accomplished that at the blazing speed of 12 to 13 minutes per mile. In other words, only just slightly faster than a walking pace.

I also might mention here that I am not a swimmer, unless you count a weak dog paddle (that looks more like a drowning dog—lots of splashing around and very little forward movement). As a small child on a trip to a local creek to “swim” with my parents, I managed to step into a hole where the water went over my head until Daddy pulled me out. That experience made me fearful of water. Around the time I started first grade, my parents signed me up for swimming lessons, and I did learn to float on my back, as well as face down for as long as I could hold my breath. But when it actually came to swimming, I could never overcome my fear of the water for more than a few strokes. That doesn’t mean that I stayed in the shallow end of the pool during my adolescent years. No, I went all around the pool, everywhere I could go and still be within an arms length of the side of the pool.

As an adult, I had two scary experiences on water, each involving a canoe. I took a relaxing trip down a river with another teacher and some of our students that ended with one short section of rapids. The canoe I was in flipping over, trapping me underneath in water that was over my head until I managed to kick and push upward with my hands to get out from under the canoe and be pulled to safety. Not long after that, I was on a church retreat on Lake Travis. One of the guys from my Sunday School class asked me if I wanted to go for a ride in a canoe, and I foolishly said O.K. I thought we would be just paddling around the little inlet where I had seen canoers earlier. Uh-uh. That would have been too easy. As soon as we got in the canoe, he began rowing toward the middle of the lake.  Ski boats and skiers were passing us on both sides—simultaneously. We were bobbing up and down more than a fishing buoy in a hurricane.

Even with my history, I didn’t anticipate any problems with water aerobics because the part of the pool we use isn’t very deep, certainly not over my head. Also, the water aerobics sessions, at least in the mornings, tends to be geared toward the “Silver Sneakers” group (retirees), some of them recovering from or dealing with limitations associated with strokes and arthritis. I knew I was fairly strong and had only a couple of knee and ankle problems to deal with—and the water should help with those. I surely should be able to do what people 10 to 20 years older could do.

How difficult could water aerobics be? Famous last words.

I’ve been going two days a week, Mondays and Wednesdays. Each day has a different instructor, so the routines vary. To warm up, both instructors use techniques like jogging in place or doing jumping jacks in the water, simple enough for me. To build strength, they asked us to use Styrofoam barbells and foam “noodles” under the water—also simple.

Then they embellished the routines, linking several moves together to music. Sounds a lot like dancing, doesn’t it, and I have almost no sense of rhythm. (One of them incorporates the moves of the “Macarena,” popular a decade or so ago, and I couldn't do it then either.) Even the relatively simple rocking horse move (lunging forward on the right foot while the left foot comes off the bottom of the pool, simultaneously pushing water away from your body with both arms, then rocking back on the left foot as the right foot comes off the bottom of the pool and pulling both arms back toward your body) takes some getting used to. Just look at how many words it takes to describe the action. And then the instructor starts counting—up to 8, then backwards again to 1. We’re supposed to change position every time she calls a new number. I finally decided, if I can start with the class at 1 and end up with the class back at 1, the middle part isn’t all that important. I just keep moving, and sometimes I’m with the class (rarely) and sometimes I’m not (usually).

Another drill one of the instructors loves is when we hold our hands clasped above our heads and run across the pool in chest-deep water as fast as we can, until she stops us and tells us to run backwards. (Did I mention that she’s retired military?) Running in water is less dangerous for me than trying to run on land or even in a gym because I’m not as likely to trip myself and fall by dragging my right foot, the one with the nerve that doesn’t work right. The water offers resistance, which is good exercise, but stopping is more difficult. My momentum always takes me forward another two or three steps when she says to stop before I can initiate the reverse movement. That would be O.K. if I were in the pool by myself, but this is a class, remember? I do not want to be known as the one who ran over some senior citizen in the pool. And I’ve come close to doing just that.

The instructor of the Monday class likes to have us use one of the “noodles,” the ends held securely in each hand, for support in the water as we do some sideways underwater kicks. I don’t fully trust the “noodles” so I keep one foot on the bottom of the pool as I lean forward with the “noodle” and kick with the other foot.  About two weeks ago, as I kicked out with my right leg, the calf muscle cramped. All I had to do was put the right foot down and stand up. Sure, I know that now, but at that moment my instinct was to grab the cramping leg, which meant turning loose of the “noodle” with my right hand, causing me to toppled over backwards and splash everyone within a five-foot radius while I tried to regain my footing. The only thing that could have been more embarrassing would have been if the lifeguard had jumped in to help me, and he was leaning forward with his buoy when I finally managed to get both feet on the bottom of the pool again.

Both instructors like to have us do a cross-country skiing move in the pool, alternating between right leg and left arm forward, left leg and right arm back and left leg and right arm forward, right leg and left arm back. This one has great potential for disaster. First, I have to keep my arm and leg movements coordinated, an almost impossible task for somewhat who can lose her balance and fall while standing still. To complicate the exercise, one of the instructors likes to insert a “tuck” (pulling the knees up toward the body) while changing the foot and arm positions. Second, this is a move based on skiing, and I may be the world’s worst skier. No kidding. No title has been conferred--yet, but I think it probably is well deserved. I flunked ski school years ago in Breckinridge, Colo., on my one and only attempt at the sport after I took the ski instructor down in the snow several times (unintentionally, of course) and then knocked down my whole ski school class just like dominoes as we lined up to climb the bunny slope sideways. (I was at the bottom of the hill when the instructor told us to lean on the side of our skis to hold our position on the incline. I leaned a little too far, fell on the person next to me, who fell on the next person, and so on all the way to the top of the hill.) For my own safety, and that of everyone skiing on the mountain that day, the instructor advised me to go have some hot chocolate and watch the ice skaters on Maggie Pond.

I’ve wondered if I need to put a disclaimer somewhere on my swimsuit, especially on those days when the pool is really crowded: “Warning—Totally out of control waterphobe with bad balance, prone to sudden, unpredictable movements, frantic splashing, and sheer panic. Approach at your own risk.”

Despite the (unplanned) thrills I’ve experienced in water aerobics, I have enjoyed the classes, and I think they’ve been successful in some respects. My upper arms and shoulders seem more muscular, and I do have a greater range of motion in my legs. I’ve also gotten used to the smell of chlorine which seems to cling to me, no matter how much I shower, wash my hair, and launder my swimsuit and towels. It’s not an unpleasant smell, really—mixed with my pineapple-coconut bath gel and body lotion, it smells like summer. 

An Anniversary of Sorts

This past Sunday, July 15, was an anniversary for me. Not the kind that you receive gifts for, like a birthday or wedding anniversary, but an anniversary all the same, one that I expect I will continue to observe for the rest of my life. And like a lot of holidays on the calendar, it is closely paired with another date: Memorial Day/Veteran’s Day, Flag Day/the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving/Christmas, Christmas Eve/Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day, Christmas/Easter, Mardi Gras/Easter, Hanukkah/Passover, etc.   

For me, the paired dates are April 8 and July 15, both in 2012. April 8 was the date I was in a major car accident that could have taken my life. July 15 was the date I was finally released from my tour of North Texas hospitals, nursing homes, and rehabilitation centers. I guess I could add a third date to that list, October 29, 2012, the date I was released from outpatient rehabilitation, but that date didn’t have the impact (no pun intended) of the other two.

At the time of the accident I had very little experience with doctors and hospitals other than routine treatment for an occasional bout with allergies or a sinus infection. I had pneumonia several years earlier and had to miss work for seven days, but even that was really not a big deal. I just stayed home, took my medicine, and slept a lot. I had previously had three broken bones, a toe, and both pinkie fingers, and those were three separate injuries. Other than that, good health.

That night in April, in an instant, I had a broken right femur caused by sliding sideways into the gear shift, a broken left wrist caused by the exploding airbag, and a broken left ankle, cause unknown, just the force of the impact, I guess. Emergency medical technicians worked to stabilize my injuries before getting me out of the car, then took me across the intersection to a field where a waiting CareFlite helicopter took me to Harris Methodist Hospital in downtown Fort Worth. I was there for most of the month of April, including the first three days in intensive care.

Next, I went to Heritage Oaks Nursing Home/Rehab in north central Arlington where I spent a month trying to build up my strength. Most of the residents were elderly people who had had strokes, but there were a few residents who were about my age, although they, too, were recovering from strokes. I was the only one of the residents I met there who was healing from a car accident.

In early June of 2010, I moved to the HealthSouth Rehabilation Hospital in south central Arlington. By that time I was able to move myself from the bed to a wheelchair and then back to the bed. The therapists there were real slave drivers, in a nice sort of way. They really worked us, but again, most of the residents were older than I was and many were in much more serious condition. By that time I was a lot stronger, and I got even stronger propelling myself up and down the halls in the wheelchair. I still wasn’t able to put any weight on my left ankle because some of the bones were still being held together with a screw, so I couldn’t do any standing. My physical therapist could not understand why I wasn’t able to stand up on just one leg, but I told him, “It’s called a lack of coordination. I couldn’t stand up without using both legs before the accident.” I still can’t. So since he couldn’t get me to stand, he had me left weights to strengthen my arms.

At the end of the last week of June, I returned to Heritage Oaks for another stay. I needed to have surgery to remove the screw in my ankle, and HealthSouth doctors determined they could do no more until the surgery was done. This time at Heritage Oaks I was much more independent, although I was still in a wheelchair. I could get myself into and out of bed, go get whatever I needed from the nursing staff, maneuver myself into the bathroom, and take a shower by myself. I was there a little more than a week. I had the surgery on a Thursday afternoon, and the following Monday, I moved one last time.

This time I went to Arlington Rehabilitative Hospital in northwest Arlington. The nurses, doctors, and therapists there were very nice and quite competent. They specialized in working with stroke victims, and they did get me a lot of practical instruction on how to do things around the house: load the washer or the dishwasher, maneuver through a narrow bathroom door with a walker, go up and down steps and curbs. However, a lot of the skills they would ordinarily have taught me I had already learned at Heritage Oaks and HealthSouth.

Finally, on July 15, I was released from that hospital to go home. I certainly couldn’t do much on my own at first. My principal exercise was in walking from the back of the house to the front and back to my recliner several times a day. But I started outpatient rehab and began to do things with my friends from church again. In early August, I bought a Hyundai Santa Fe to replace the Saturn totaled in the accident and went back to school when school started.

So Sunday, as I thought about the ways my life has changed in the two years since I ended my hospitalization from the accident, I noted a lot of changes. I’m not fully recovered, and it looks like I may never regain all the abilities I had before the accident. The broken femur stretched the nerve that affects the ability to raise and lower the front part of my foot by flexing the ankle. The doctor thought that would eventually come back, but so far it hasn’t. I’ve figured out a way to compensate most of the time, but I still have to be careful that I don’t drop my toes, stumble, and fall. I have fallen once that way, and I’ve tripped and caught myself many times. So I’ve had to slow down. My left ankle still swells if I stand up too long or walk too far. And my left wrist is still weak and may eventually develop carpal tunnel problems.

While I usually walk with a cane, I’m notorious for putting it down somewhere and walking off without it. Once, in the spring, I was standing by the classroom door when the fire alarm rang, and I was halfway out of the building before I realized the cane was still in the classroom. Oh, well. I made it outside and back with no mishaps. Some of my friends see that as a sign that I may one day not need the cane, but others, those with less respect for their elders, say it’s just proof that I’m absent-minded.

I’m gearing up to start my third year of school after the accident. This may be my last year to teach in public school. I’ve been thinking I might retire and collect my teacher retirement, while teaching in one of the private schools or community colleges in the area. I might do some writing, or I could just be a substitute teacher in Arlington and Mansfield. That would save me a lot on gasoline if I could work closer to home and eliminate the daily 56-mile commute.

Looking back, I can see how far I’ve come in two years, and I’m still hoping to improve further. I’ve also become more sensitive to the needs of people with disabilities. In the fall of 2010 I went to the State Fair of Texas with the assistance of a motorized scooter I rented at the fair. And in that scooter, to most of the people at the fair I was every bit as invisible as Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility made him. I tried to buy my lunch at one of the indoor booths at the fair and was ignored until my sister DJ happened to pass by and asked, “You still don’t have your food?” She ordered for me, and I finally got my lunch. Fair-goers stepped in front of me and cut me off from the rest of my group all day, only noticing my presence if I was unable to stop in time and bumped into them. (No, I didn’t do it on purpose, but it was tempting.)

I’ve become vocal about the rights of the disabled, especially businesses that don’t have enough handicapped spaces or that pile merchandise in the aisles so that the aisles are too narrow to navigate with a walker or wheelchair. Maybe once I retire, I’ll get involved with some advocate groups.

So on this second anniversary, all in all, I think I’m doing pretty well. I’m still able to work, although really enjoying my summer vacation, and I’m starting to look ahead to life after high school—at last, 43 years after most of my classmates left their high school days behind.

A Legacy of Fathers

    Tomorrow is Father’s Day, and once again the stores are full of sport shirts, ties, cologne, and all sorts of sports equipment for the multitudes of fathers being honored on this once-a-year event.

I can recall going the ties, socks, and handkerchief route when I was a child, because those were the sort of things that were in my budget. As I got older (and had more financial resources), I moved on to fishing rods, athletic shoes, and clothes. On Daddy’s last Father’s Day, I took him several new shirts that I thought would be cool and comfortable for him for summer. Although they weren’t the kind he normally wore, he put one on and wore it that day.

Of course, none of us knew then that he was in his last month with us. We’d watched him getting weaker since his collapse before Christmas, but we’d thought originally that, once he got out of the hospital and the rehab center in Temple and back home in Lampasas, where he could have visits from friends and relatives daily, he’d improve. Early on, it seemed that might happen. We’d visit on weekends and take him out to have a Dr Pepper at Storm’s or a burger from Sonic, and he’d seem to enjoy it. Back then no matter how tired he was, he was never ready to be taken back to the nursing home.

That changed, however, later in the spring. We had driven over to San Saba where he had lived as a boy, and he enjoyed the scenery for a while, but as he got tired, he began to be restless and finally expressed a desire to be taken “home.” He’d never referred to the nursing home that way before. By Father’s Day I’d finally almost accepted that the nursing home would be his permanent residence, but that Sunday he seemed in good spirits and really enjoyed the day.

Thinking back to the gifts we gave him over the years, they weren’t much in comparison to what he’d given to us, not only his hard work to provide for the family as long as he was physically able, but his pride in each of his three kids, his excitement whenever we came for a visit, his sadness whenever it was time for us to leave. We never had to wonder if Daddy loved us. He showed his love every day when we were all at home, and by the time we were grown and ready to leave home, we didn’t question it.

That didn’t mean, however, that he wasn’t strict. He believed part of being a good father was in being a disciplinarian whenever we misbehaved. I know from family stories that I was responsible for more than my share of that misbehavior, including getting loose in church one Sunday during the invitation time at the end of the service when I wasn’t much more than a toddler. I ran down one of the aisles on the side of the church, and he stepped out in the aisle to chase me. To my 2-year-old self, that meant “play time with Daddy,” so I began to squeal as he gave chase. He finally caught me by doubling back. I kept looking behind me to see where he was and didn’t notice him coming around in front of me. He took me out and spanked me, and I never interrupted another service in that way again. 

Daddy had learned to be a father from his own father, my grandfather whom we called “Hampa.” Apparently, I couldn’t say Grampa when I first started talking, so what came out was Hampa, and it stuck. Hampa was a quiet, gentle man when I knew him, a man who had worked hard for his family and was a person of integrity. In his earlier years, he had worked as a blacksmith, a fact that did not seem to correspond to his short stature and small, wiry build. Later, when Daddy was a boy, the youngest of three in that family, he had done some sharecropping and the whole family—children, too—picked cotton. They worked hard, and none of the three children went to school for very long, but their memories of that time were good ones: trips to West Texas by covered wagon, fish fries and campouts on the Lampasas River, visits to see relatives on the Gulf Coast.

Because of an experience he had as a young man with his own father, Hampa had resolved to be a good father to his own children, even if they did have to work picking cotton or doing other farm chores. His own father, a man who had 10 children by his first wife and four more when she died and he married her sister, was not a nurturing sort of father. In fact, he was a hard man who was known for telling his children, the boys anyway, that he was not going to support them anymore, that it was time for them to make their own way in the world. This usually happened when they were teenagers, and because Hampa was one of the oldest, this happened to him. In fact, Hampa was working on his own when he received word that his mother was dying, so he went home to visit her on her deathbed. His father met him at the door and refused to let him in to see her.

In my 35 years as a teacher, I’ve seen a lot of students come through my classes who have no real relationship with their fathers, some of them who have never even met their father, and many others who have grown up without even a father figure in their lives. The numbers have seemed to increase in recent years. Unfortunately, statistics say that, by not having personally seen and experienced a father’s love, many of them will also be absentee fathers, producing a new generation of children who grow up essentially without a father’s influence. That certainly was not the case with us.

Besides Daddy’s influence, we also had Hampa and our mother’s foster father, Grandman. Both of them spent time with us and had an influence on our lives. My brother loves to tell about one time that he spent the night with Hampa. They had planned to have cornflakes the next morning for breakfast, but when they checked the refrigerator, all he had was buttermilk, so they are their cornflakes that morning with buttermilk.

Grandman used to tell us some of the wildest tall tales imaginable, and we kids believed every word he said. Grandman was also a hunter, and he loved hunting squirrels. In his youth, squirrels had been a part of the family food supply, and he continued to enjoy eating squirrel all his life. In fact, one of the memories my sister has of visits with Granny and Grandman was looking into their freezer and seeing those little aluminum-foil-wrapped, four-legged bodies.

When my brother married and had three children of his own, I saw him become the same sort of strong, dependable father Daddy had been as Daddy adjusted to a new role as grandfather, or Papaw, as Corey, Graham, and Casey called him. By that time, Hampa and Grandman were no longer with us, but Daddy did the sort of things with his grandchildren that his father and father-in-law had done. Daddy took Corey and Graham fishing and went to watch their T-ball games when they were small, and sat on a tiny chair or on the floor drinking pretend “coffee” as Casey “cooked” in her little kitchen.

Now Corey, Graham, and Casey are grown, and Graham is married and has two little girls. Daddy would have loved spoiling those two little girls, but since he’s not here, my brother has moved into the role of grandfather, or Pops, as Ava Grace and Edy Rose call him, and he treats them like princesses. Graham, their father, having learned from the example of his father and grandfather, spends time with his girls, loving them, providing for them, training them, and disciplining them when necessary.  

We have a legacy of strong fathers in the family, but thinking about them always makes me think of something Jesus said in one of his sermons. As good as human fathers can be, they aren’t perfect, but most fathers do want what is best for their children, even though they may not know how to provide it. As Jesus said, “What kind of father, if his child asked for something to eat, would give him a rock?” (That’s the Ann Hale version, paraphrased.) “So if flawed human fathers try to take care of their children, how much more would our Heavenly Father do for his children?”

The legacy is this: the experience we have of the strong fathers mentioned above, and of other loving fathers among our uncles, cousins, and friends, shows us in a small way just how great God’s love for us is.

May you all have a happy Father’s Day, surrounded by the love and memories of strong, loving fathers among your family members and friends.