Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, mixed

So, that manager that I had to side step cautiously when he made suggestions about us seeing each other outside of work, well, he’s gone and I am being promoted. I am not a particularly patient woman but I play one at work. Sometimes my ability to make things happen worries me. I’m on a roll here and I’m wondering if I should have set my sights higher. I should take a minute to apologize to anyone who is still looking at my blog for not posting more, but hell, I’ve done it so many times before and I’m not getting any more consistent. I’m not ready to give it up, but I have no idea where it’s going in the foreseeable future. The new position brings with it increased responsibility and probably more time in Denver, not a place where I spend much time writing. Of course, I have not given up my serious writing. I am entertaining you today with the first few paragraphs of the second book I’m working on, the story of my father’s life. I hope it leaves you wanting more…


My father would have told his story differently, of that I am sure, but he left without writing it down, leaving me to tell the tale in my own way. I’m not even certain I know chapter and verse, but I knew my Dad as well as any human knows another, and even though there are things he would have rather not have done and words he would wish unspoken, we are the sum of all that is inflicted upon us and all we inflict on others. I will not swear every word is true, that would be too big a blot on my already spotted soul. Even eyewitness accounts are notoriously erroneous, but I promise to tell it the way he lived it, lovingly, imperfectly, and unforgettably. In the end you can make your own judgment on what his life meant, but it will not change a thing about the almost equal parts of love and exasperation I feel when I remember him.

His mother was born on April 1, 1882 into a life I truly cannot imagine. I have a few snaps of her taken when she was young, posed almost seductively with her best friend, her soon to be husband sitting in a chair in front of them, a rawboned country boy sporting an untidy mustache and a wild look in his eye. There is a lace curtain covering the barn wall behind them, a professional touch by what must have been a traveling photographer gleaning a pittance of a living in rural America. No one in the backwater of Kentucky could have afforded such a luxury as a personal camera, certainly not my ancestors scraping out a living from the rocky soil of Grayson County. In all but one of my pictures of my grandfather appears to be wearing the same dark suit. Here he poses with his fiancé, here later with the mules he bred, here on the wedding day, all in the buttoned up wool vest, stiff white collar, and broad knotted tie. There is also one younger portrait of him in a different ill-fitting suit, with what may have been coordinating striped pants, poised with his hand on a table and an intricate hand worked crazy quilt as backdrop. He has a look of health and vigor about his face in that one, and a half smile on his lips. I realize this may be the only picture taken before he developed the TB that finally took his life in 1927, a few years before the great depression hit.

My father only dimly remembered days before the illness. The life of his Father, his Mother, his brother, and himself revolved around the disease like the lesser moons of a gas giant, vast and inescapable. They traveled first to Colorado trying to find respite from the damp humid air of the Ohio valley. My father told me nothing of the journey, but surely it would have been by train, the fare scraped from somewhere in those flush days after the First World War. My grandfather began to feel improvement in the dry mountain air, but my father tells me he and his brother did not thrive. I never questioned him about his statement that his skin “turned yellow” because of the climate. I knew my grandmother, a stern but loving woman, stubborn and opinionated. I am sure she hated the isolation from her mother and siblings, felt the pull of the eastern woodlands, despised the sandy alkaline soil in her barren yard. I can see her in her sunbonnet, hoeing the alien earth, planting the seeds she brought from home, carrying bucket after bucket of water to the beans, tomatoes, and corn. I know her reaction to the first taste of the crops she may have forced to bloom in the strange land. It was not home, could never be home. She packed the children up and headed back to Kentucky. Her husband hoped for her return, but finally decided death with her would be better than life alone and headed back to Kentucky so his body could lie on the hill overlooking the farm where he was born.

When he died they left the rock scrabble farm behind with the two boys sitting on the back of a road wagon, pulled by the mules his father cherished. They arrived in the small flourishing town of Beaver Dam after a torturous trip over dry creek beds and cow paths until reaching the then dirt path that is now Kentucky Highway 62. The seat the boys had chosen for the trip was the ill placed mirror of their mother’s chest of drawers. Lying flat on the back of the wagon and covered with a quilt, the boys had no clue of the fragile nature of their perch. My father clearly remembered the shame of his innocent act and the fear of punishment he thought would be forthcoming. He never said what his mother did when she discovered the minor tragedy, but I doubt she saw it as too significant considering what she knew she faced in the months ahead.

At 14 my father became the man in the family. He always spoke of his older brother in tones of reverence, never questioning the family dynamics that demanded he work and help his mother so the older boy could complete college. Dad dropped out of high school and spent the rest of his life admiring the educational attainments of his sibling; the one who lived in a tiny house on a schoolteacher’s pittance while my father became a millionaire by working with his hands. Perhaps the thought of his wild early years shamed him into believing his brother some kind of saint. The inconsistencies in him when he bragged to me in secret about those days still baffle me. He always followed the tales of debauchery with a moral, a benediction for some saving grace that pulled him from the very pit of hell to what he admitted was an undeserved position of prestige in the community. To say he was a humble man would be erroneous, but he always seemed to leave that impression on those who did not know him well, a group that included all but myself and my mother, and perhaps my siblings, although I’m not sure about my brother. It would be more accurate to say he was a man filled to overflowing with contradiction and dare I say it, a touch of hypocrisy.

There were few jobs available in 1929, the year my father turned 16 and left high school for good. He used what he had, his 6’3” frame and the muscles earned from hard work to land a job as a bouncer in a roadhouse. His mother prayed for him nightly but accepted the money he earned gratefully. His reputation as a tough customer came after a run in with the town bully, a man older, larger, and more accustomed to solving problems with his fists. The man called him out one night and preceded him down a dark alley with great bravado. When the man finally turned to face the frightened boy, my Dad already had his fist drawn back, laid an immediate and unexpected shot to his jaw, then watched in wonder as the man’s head hit the brick wall, knocking him unconscious. I listened to him tell another young man about the shame of those days, but in a way that sounded a lot like bragging to me. “I remember his face,” Dad said with a devilish grin. “He looked real surprised for a second then slid down the wall and crumpled to the ground at my feet. A few minutes after he fell all the other men from the roadhouse came around the corner to watch the fight. They were pretty surprised to find out it was already over.” Dad laughs along with the young man to whom he’s telling the tale, but just when he has him hooked, admiring, Dad lands his punch again. “If it had not been for,” and here he names a man know to the two of them, but not to me, “I could have ended up living like that my whole life. He took me aside, told me to stop reading trashy magazines. He gave me good and decent things to read and kept checking up on me. He got me to turn my life around.” The young man hangs his head, but Dad puts his arm around his shoulders and towering over him, tells him he has a choice to make about his future.

It would be a great story if it were accurate, but while I don’t know for sure about the details, I do know who turned my Dad’s life around. She was only woman he ever loved, my mother, Evelyn.