Category: Memories

I found a box…well, I must admit, it wasn’t lost…it had been sitting on my desk for a very long time. I knew it was a box of “things” rescued from my mom’s desk when we cleaned out the old homeplace. I don’t know why I had been avoiding it, but there it was and this week I decided to deal with it.

I think I avoided it because I knew what would happen…and I was right…I got lost. Lost in a time long gone, lost in trying to identify people I had never known, places that lived in only the briefest of my  memories of Mom’s stories.

My grandfather was an amateur photographer. In a time when a camera was a wondrous bit of magic he owned a twin lens reflex camera. He wasn’t making art or trying to capture history, he was just trying to preserve a bit of his life.

That’s what I found in the box, snapshots of life. There were studio portraits of people I did not know, and clippings a couple of postcards, but the treasure trove proved to be three crumbling brown envelopes full of negatives.

Smith & Smith Photographers of Mitchell, Indiana, in their Kodak Finishing Department (our motto: “Speed and Quality”) had developed my grandfather’s films for him at a cost of 10 cents a roll and 5 cents per print. I don’t know what happened to the prints, but here were the negatives and I wondered what they would show.

I have some experience with computers, scanners and photo software, so I stumbled around and discovered a way to use my scanner to “develop” the negatives into images on the computer screen.

That’s when I got lost in the past.

There was my mother and her sisters, in the front yard of the house I only knew from stories. There were babies playing on blankets in the grass. There was my Aunt Lena, very young and standing beside a young man who may have been a beau, but certainly wasn’t my Uncle Clarence.

There was my young grandfather, strong and muscular and very much in command of a motorized grader that featured three steering wheels and gears and levers. My mom worshipped her “daddy” and I got the impression she believed he could do anything…maybe she was right. I knew he made or worked on shoes and harness, built furniture, operated a camera somewhat competently, was a traveling preacher, a writer and musician. Apparently, he also operated heavy equipment.

The vast majority of the photos were of young people in groups of two or three or four, smiling at the camera or trying on serious grown up looks. Young ladies stood with hands on hips, a man’s hat cocked comically on their heads. Two youths dressed in overalls stood in front of some sort of out of focus plant life that might have been berry bushes or maybe fruit trees.

By the time I finished scanning these negatives, studying them for the clothing of the time, the surrounding countryside, searching the faces for some feature I could recognize to identify people I had only known as adults…by that time, I felt almost a part of their world. It was a little unsettling when I finished with the negatives and felt myself tumbling back into my own world of pandemics and civil unrest.

I believe the majority of these photos, especially the ones of the young men and women, were taken in the mid-1930’s. Were the times better back then? Were these people happier then? I couldn’t fail to see how thin they all were. They stood for the camera in clothes that were their everyday uniforms with worn or torn knees or slightly ragged cuffs. When they were dressed in their best it was clear they were ready for some event, but I liked seeing the more casual clothing, the young men with rolled up sleeves and the girls with their stockings and worn, flat shoes.

In just a few years, all these young men went off to wars. They may or may not have come home. If they didn’t grow old, they certainly grew up. The young ladies had careers or they didn’t, they married happily or unhappily and had children who turned out okay or didn’t.

They all lived lives they could not fathom as they stood for my grandfather’s camera and smiled and became part of my story.

Papaw with his dog Yogi.

The past couple of years have been a difficult time with the loss of too many relatives and friends, losses that seem almost too much to bear. As we start a new year, I find myself dwelling on memories of people I have known.

What we remember of a person isn’t the person. Our memories are 2D, but a person is 3D. It takes all the memories of all the people who knew this person and still that’s not the person. The person, the actual 3D person, is what dies. That whole person. That’s what we lose and that’s what we miss, that 3D person that we only knew in 2D. Everyone who knew that person in life misses a different person than we miss…but that’s what’s gone…that multi-dimensional person.

That’s why we tell stories. We try to round out the person that has gone, but all we ever do is make an imperfect copy to remember.

In this blog I’ve been telling stories of people I’ve never known. Still, I feel some connection because they are my people, the people who have become me, the people who have given me depth, make me 3D. I try to imagine how it must have been for them, how they felt as they tried to make it through their world.

This year I will continue to tell these stories, but I want to also share the people I have known. I’m aware that “young” people become frustrated with “old” people who are always telling stories of the past, but I’d like to remind those “young” people that we have more past than we have future. As their future is important to them, our past is important to us. No, strike that…our past IS us. It is what makes us who we are…it is our third dimension.

So today, instead of telling you more about my pioneer ancestors (don’t worry, they’ll be back), I want to tell you about my paternal grandfather. I called him Papaw.

These are my memories of him. There are others who can add to this picture, give depth to the man he was, but there can never get a true three-dimensional image of him because that would take the man himself standing in front of me.

I was little, he was big, well over 6’6”, he was thin and sinewy, and as I knew him, always old. I see him wearing overalls and a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Always the sleeves rolled up. Never down and buttoned. I know he dressed up. I have pictures of him in a suit, but that’s not how I remember him. Always in overalls and a work shirt.

This is the way Papaw always sat in a lawn chair.

He had a machine shop a few hundred yards from his house and I remember him there. When I remember him there are two images…on summer nights, after supper, he and my grandmother (Mamaw), sat in their metal lawn chairs on the back porch looking out over their property. The chairs were rocking chairs and while Mamaw rocked, Papaw sat leaning way back on the rockers of his chair, fly swatter in hand. With his long arms hanging down he could almost touch the porch floor. They sat from supper through twilight to darkness, and the murmur of their voices, the certainty that they were there, was the music of my childhood.

The other picture of him I have from my childhood is in their old house before they remodeled it, in a room that was all things. It contained the old iron, coal-burning stove, chairs pulled up in a circle around that stove, a table where we ate, a “daybed,” and a “sideboard.” Those are the names of the furniture I remember. This was the room where we spent our time, the living room.

On that sideboard, the top of which I was too short to see, were many wondrous things, tobacco pouches, small coins, safety pins, any small thing a person might need…and cough drops. My grandfather favored the Luden brand black lozenges. When he took one from the box, I wanted one too. I would call forth what I believed was a very convincing cough. Papaw always seriously offered me one from his box, but I learned early on that those black ones were horrible tasting. I pouted, shook my head, coughed again for good measure as he put the black box back and started to walk away. But then he would pick up another box, one that held red lozenges. I couldn’t read but I could recognize the box. He would ask me to be sure that was the one I wanted…not this one, holding up the black box? I pointed to the red and he shook one out in my little hand.

His profession was machinist and his shop was a wondrous place with tools that whirled and turned and drilled. I loved it. The shop smelled of oil and hot metal and work. Papaw would put on a big, black mask with a little window and make sparks fly like Fourth of July sparklers and when he took off the mask, two pieces of metal had become one forever.

There were bins of ball bearings and stacks of sheets of metal. He had one machine that cut screw threads into rods, shedding razor thin coils of metal shavings onto the floor.

The shop was a dangerous place for a child who walked barefoot through her young world. I knew the dangers from a very young age. I knew that by simply appearing in the doorway to his shop I could make him stop what he was doing and rush to pick me up and deposit me on the tall stool by his desk. The scolding I got for coming into the shop with no shoes was painless…the candy he handed me to make up for his scolds was priceless.

Other people knew other sides to the man who was my papaw. He was a son, husband, father, uncle, grandfather to more than just me. Some of you reading this knew many different dimensions of the man called Papaw, Shorty, Nick, Mr. Nicholas.

I really know very little of the man, but I never doubt he is in me.

I was once a witch. Never again.

I was probably around 8 or 9 when my mom and her best friend decided to “help” me win the prize for best costume at the neighborhood Halloween party. They worked for days on my disguise, a witches outfit. I remember fittings for the black dress and one night of hat construction. It developed that it is difficult to roll construction paper to the correct point on top and still have the exact fit for my head. Like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, my witch hat was difficult to control once it was on my head.

As the big night got closer, the perfect mask was discovered. Like the hat, it also fit somewhat haphazardly on my kid face, often obstructing my vision. This made me walk with my head slightly tilted back which put the witch hat in a precarious position and also made it difficult to see where my feet were going.

I was not pleased with this outfit, but the obvious delight Mom and Alice were taking in its creation was hard to fight, so on the night of the party, I just meekly stood for my transformation.

You have to understand this was a small neighborhood party. Simply by process of elimination, it should have been easy for the adult sponsors to figure out what kid was dressed in what outfit. At least, you would have thought so.

Because they wanted no hints as to my identity, Mom and Alice drove me to the party, but let me out about a block away so no one would see the car that brought me. My last instruction as I carefully exited the car: “Don’t talk. They won’t be able to guess who you are if you don’t say anything.”

It was dark. My mask kept slipping down on my face and covering my eyes, but every move I made to correct it put my hat in grave danger of falling off. Somehow I made it to the door only to discover the party was in the basement…down steep steps. Somehow, with great care and very slowly I negotiated the stairs and entered the party.

That party was…well, I did not have fun. Turns out not being able to speak a word is very limiting. Did I want to sit down? Nodding was dangerous, so I didn’t say a thing.

Did I want red KoolAid or purple? Not a word.

Do you want to take your mask off and bob for apples? I just stared straight ahead.

I couldn’t join in any games that involved physical movement…or talking, so I sat to the side and watched (as well as I could through tiny mask eye-holes that kept slipping down my face.

At the end of the party, prizes were awarded for scariest costume, funniest costume, and the big one, the costumed person who could not be guessed. I won that one big time. Everyone was amazed when I finally agreed to remove the pesky, ugly mask.

When Mom and Alice picked me up after the party they were excited to find out how it went. Did I win anything? Yes, no one could guess who I was, so yes, I won that.

If there had been such a thing as High Fives back then, Mom and Alice would have done the whole bit with the explosion at the end. As it was, they were extremely proud of their accomplishment and only barely noticed my lack of enthusiasm when asked if I had fun.

“Yes, yes I did.” I answered.

And that’s why I don’t dress up for Halloween.

The Black Tulip – You know who you are Tom C.!

 Mother’s Day is coming up so I thought I would tell you a story that includes my mom.

Mom loved flowers. With five kids and a husband who insisted on driving his mower fast and straight, never around anything, flowers were something she always fought to save. She didn’t have a lot of time to spend in the yard, so she planted flowers that could fend for themselves; lilies of the valley, crocus, daffodils, tulips, all plants that could bloom, die down and come back the next year.

For a couple of years she favored tulips. Somehow she acquired a bulb for a black tulip, and she babied that plant like a sixth child. It took a couple of years for it to really kick in, but finally one spring day, a bloom bud appeared.

She walked out every day to check the progress, pulled the weeds around it and probably even talked to it. She was so filled with anticipation of the opening of the black tulip. Her red tulips and her yellow tulips were lovely. She had some frilly tulips and some she called parrot tulips, but the black tulip…that was going to be a wonder.

I happened to be in the kitchen with Mom the day Tommy our next door neighbor kid, came to the back door. Mom welcomed him casually as she did all the neighborhood kids and then, a half second later she realized that in his grubby little hands, he was holding up to her the entire plant that was her precious black tulip.

“I brought you a flower,” he said proudly.

The bloom had opened overnight, and young Tommy had picked it just for her, along with leaves, roots and, for good measure, some surrounding soil.

He looked a little like a TV commercial for laundry detergent as he presented his gift. My mother took a brief moment, finally smiled, reached to receive her prize and said, “Why, thank you, Tommy, what a very special tulip this is.”

That doomed black tulip had pride of place in a vase on our dining table for the couple of days that cut flowers can survive, then it was no more.

Mom appeared to be unflappable through five kids and all their neighborhood cohorts, but we couldn’t have been easy. In spite of worn bare base paths in the front yard, jars of tadpoles on the back porch, broken windows, and the sometimes frightening screams of children playing kick the can in the dark, she always liked and welcomed the neighborhood kids and was especially proud of the adults our neighborhood produced.

Eventually she became an excellent gardener with a yard that looked like a city park, but as far as I know, she never again had a black tulip.

Tom grew to be a talented musician and actor and a devoted family man, and he brought his wife and kids to visit her a couple of years before she died. She was thrilled by that visit…to think that when he came such a distance to see his family, he thought to drop in on her.

That was the kind of person she was to her kids and the neighborhood kids and to everyone who knew her…a person to be remembered.

I just miss her.

Happy Mother’s Day to you all…the moms who have been and who will be, and to the daughters and sons and friends who love you.

Tools of a carpenter

I was about eight years old when Dad started building The House. Mom was expecting their third child and she was tired of moving. In their married life of 9+ years, she’d moved almost that many times, for whatever reason. We’d lived in trailers, tiny houses, rentals. I can remember some of the places.

There was the tiny trailer where I encountered The Big Puddle.

There was the four room concrete block house where I know for a fact there is a suitcase key in the crawl space, because I’m the one who wanted to see if it would fit through the crack in the floor.

There was the larger house with a long lane and a creek down at the bottom of a steep hill. One summer a group of us decided we would “sled” down the hill on an old piece of tin roofing. I went down the hill, but the tin did not. I still have the scar. I had chicken pox in that house and started school from there.

But when Mom got pregnant with our third child, she wanted a real home so Dad, an accomplished carpenter, bought an acre from his Dad’s farm and determined to build a house for us.

First, he built a concrete block, flat roof, one car garage, and we moved into that until he could finish the house. There was barely room to walk around what furniture we had, but I spent most of my time outside, so I didn’t really mind. My brother was two, he didn’t know any better.

The house took shape in an orderly manner, and I took great interest in all the details of the construction. The first walls were just wooden stakes with string stretched between, then there were trenches dug along the strings. The trenches were filled with concrete and Dad told me those were footers. On the footers, he started laying the block foundation.

Under construction

I loved every moment of watching that house grow. I thought I helped. We hammered nails into scraps of lumber, stacked broken concrete blocks and pieces of brick. Balancing on the floor joists, Dad showed me which room would be mine, and I thought it was huge. I loved the metal boxes in the walls that would become the electrical outlets because the round punchouts where the wire ran through became a fortune in play money.

Dad had always worked in construction, so building a house was second nature to him. As a carpenter, he could lay a couple of courses of concrete blocks for a foundation but he was not a bricklayer. When it came time to lay the outside brick walls of our house, he hired a professional for one day to come show him how. He and the bricklayer worked side by side all that day, spending considerable time on the corners which were a little tricky. After that, Dad did the rest.

I’ve always loved that about that house…that I watched it come to life in his hands.

The house was not quite completed when I came home one rainy day from my grandparents’ house to find all our furniture out in the yard between the garage and the house. Mom was on the warpath. You see, the flat tin roof of the garage was an engineering disaster. It leaked like a sieve and some days there weren’t enough pans to catch the water and have supper, too.

My sister was only a couple of weeks old and on this particular rainy day, her basket happened to be directly under one of the leaks. That was it. Mom declared we were moving into the house, finished or not. On that day, the house became home and a constant “work in progress.”

The House – the early years

Two more sisters were born over the next few years and I guess you could say we lived happily ever after in that house…at least, we were as happy as any normal family I’ve ever known. My brother and I saw the house built from the ground up and my sisters never lived anywhere else until they left for their own grownup homes. We grew up in that house, we went out into the world from there.

We called it The House as in: “I’ll meet you at The House…I’ll leave the book for you at The House…I’m here, I’m at The House.”

We sold the house this year. We’ve all been away from it for longer than we lived there, but Mom and Dad lived in it for the rest of their lives. Dad died in 1998 and Mom lived there until she passed in 2016, always insisting she would “never move again.” She never did.

The House – Our Home

There are a lot of memories around that house. I hope the new owner appreciates that a family lived there, grew up there, that the house was built with loving hands. There are places the builder’s hammer may have slipped, where a door might sag or stick and Mom swore it never got finished once we moved into it, but if it wasn’t a perfect house, it was a perfect home.

I hope the new owner appreciates that and I hope that new family makes a happy home and many memories there.