Aunts and Uncles and cousins, OH MY!

 My Aunt Peggy Bartly Arnett

    For this entry I am going to lump together several questions asked about my extended family and family vacations because they all go hand in hand.  As I mentioned in the previous entry my grandparents did not live in the towns in which I lived, nor did any of my aunts, uncles or cousins.  Military life has a habit of making close extended families a very real impossibility.   On my Dad's side of the family were his two brothers and I do not recall spending much time with them as a child.  I do remember meeting my Uncle Dale's two boys  Mike and Doug on our trip to Oklahoma, and liked them well enough but have never spent time with them since then because our only links, my dad and our grandfather, both died shortly after meeting them.  I have since spent time with both of my dad's brothers after a 30 year gap, and am still grateful for the  opportunity to meet both of them.  I have also spent time with Bob's son John.  I remember him from the early days, he was stationed near us when I was little and so I remember him.  I had the good fortune to reconnect with him on our return from Hawaii and had dinner with him and his wife in Las Vegas.  It has been a real blessing to find my dad's family again after so many years.   I still keep in touch over the phone with Bob and exchange the rare e-mail with Dale and I think it does us all good.
     Just like my grandparents I know my Mothers brothers and sister better and consequently I know those cousins better.  As children we did spend a lot of time with my Mom's sister Aunt Peggy.  Several summer vacations were spent in Dallas hanging out at her house in Oak Cliff.  Who knew that as I was sitting in the Texas Theater a few blocks from her house  watching Bruce Lee movies one summer, my husband- to- be was in New Jersey reading about Lee Harvey Oswald and his attempted getaway that resulted in a murder in that very theater.  (Weird how our lives overlap even when we don't know it, yea?) So time spent in Dallas meant time spent with our cousins Marladean, John, Terry Keith and Terrilynn.  We liked all of our cousins and enjoyed time with them.  They were all older than us, but each in their own way built memories with us.  Marla by mothering us right along with her own two children Tommy and Monica, Terrilynn by taking us along on the wild ride that was her young adult life, John by spending happy hours around a dinner table playing Spades and telling funny stories and Terry Keith by zipping us all around Dallas in a silver corvette and then treating us to dinner at the Spaghetti Warehouse in the West End back when it was cool.  Of course there is also Uncle Clarence and Aunt Jean and their kids, the twins Russ and Rene, and Myra Lynne.  They lived in Oregon, so we did not spend much time with them, though they did come several times, and I do feel as if I know them.  I am facebook Friends with Myra, and its nice knowing I can contact her whenever I like.   Mom also has another brother, Uncle Ken.  I guess of all her siblings he is the one I know best because he has lived in Clovis since the early 1990's and in Mom's house for a large part of that time.  He is what could be kindly described as an odd duck, not because of his "alternative" lifestyle, but for numerous other things, each when taken individually is only mildly quirky but the cumulative effect of them all over a span of time gets down right annoying.  This is why he and Mom finally had to part ways.  He is still in Clovis, at an old age facility sporting an ankle bracelet to help ward off his unsafe wanderlust.
      I have not really addressed the question of family vacations.  I can only remember two official family vacations.  Both were trips to Dallas, where we all piled into the car and made the 8 -10 hour drive from Clovis.  The last one was during Thanksgiving and I remember it well.  Granny lived two doors down from Aunt Peggy on Brooklyn.  The Oregon contingent came down in an RV and we were all together for that one glorious extended family Thanksgiving.  Uncle Ken was still living on the edge in California, but everyone else was there.  Those were not the only times we went to Dallas, but they were the only times Mom was with us.  We went several times on our own.  We flew once, but more often we rode the Greyhound bus.  Try putting two kids on a bus alone now and see where it gets you!  But we did it more than once back in the day. One time in particular I remember staying at Granny's house over the 4th of July.  We wanted to see fire works but there was no one to take us so we were out of luck.  Granny tried to console us with the offer of watching them on her TV that was in her bedroom.  No, we opted not to watch at all rather than on a 12 inch black and white TV.  That was the summer of the doodle bugs and the flu.  I came down with the flu and spent the bulk of my Dallas visit laid out alone on the living room sofa with no TV and no one to talk to.  Jamie, who was well went with Marladean, Granny stayed in her room watching soap operas and I laid on the sofa with tears in my ears suffering from not only the flu, but an epic case of homesickness.  When I felt well enough I would sit in the sandy patch in the front yard and torment doodlebugs by digging up their little sand funnels just so I could watch them spin around and make a new ones.  Its amazing how little it takes to entertain the truly bored...  

Me, Granny and Barnaby Jones

My Granny
Martha Bridget Rhody Bartley

"Did your Grandparents live nearby?" No, yes  and YES.  I find myself getting a little annoyed at these questions because the answers are not ever as simple as the question appears to be.  I then get annoyed at myself for being annoyed at the book for doing it's job which is to provoke thought.  If the answers are all simple yes or no answers then the result might possibly be the most boring memoir ever written.  So I set aside my annoyance to answer the question.
    Lets start with Sol and Gertrude.  No they did not live near me.  In fact Gertrude did not live at all in my lifetime.  She died when Daddy was a boy and I never met her, though in a weird way I feel very connected to her through her quilt which I have inherited. I did get to visit her grave in West Plains a few years ago when Daddy's brother Dale joined me there for a family reunion.  He drove us all over the countryside showing us places and telling us stories.  Gertrude is buried in a beautiful little cemetery in the woods, and I wonder if I could have ever found it on my own.
       I did meet Grandpa Sol though and remember being given a ride on his tractor.  He lived in Oklahoma and we lived in New Mexico.  I only remember making the trip to see him one time, but I do remember that trip, we saw a longhorn steer in a pasture and Daddy stopped to pick cotton bolls out of a field for Jamie and me to play with.  We could see them whizzing by as we drove down the highway and we desperately wanted to have one to look at.  I remember being astonished at his daring, picking cotton bolls right out of a field that was not his own!   That is about all I can recall about my encounter with my grandpa Sol.  I am left with the vague impression that I liked him.  I was a highly sensitive child and if he did something to upset me, or that I didn't like I would have remembered it.
     My memories of PaPa and Granny are far more elaborate since I spent much more time with them.  They lived in Amarillo, only two hours from our home in Clovis, so we went to Amarillo frequently, and they came to see us too, though not as often.  There was a convenience store across the street from Granny and Papa's house on Taylor Street and PaPa would give us each a quarter to spend on candy whenever we came for a visit.  They took us to Thompson park  Zoo and Wonderland Amusement park...trips to Granny and PaPas were almost always fun.  Granny's back yard was a little paradise that we loved to play in, and her front porch had a swing to loll on when it was too hot to do anything else but wait for a breeze.  Whenever we were leaving to go out we always had to wait for Granny to catch the weather report on TV.  This was before the days of 24/7 news and weather coverage.  You had to catch the News at noon, the evening news or the late night news or not at all.   As a child  I never understood what the big deal was  but later learned she was making sure we were not headed straight into a tornadic thunderstorm.  Growing up in the Texas plains I guess she had her share of tornado scares.
    We actually spent the most time with Granny not just because she lived the longest, but because she actually moved in with us for a while.  I don't remember how long she stayed, maybe a year or so?  I do remember that she was in our house when I was in the third grade because that is when I came down with the chicken pox and was sent home from school.  I got to go home because Granny was there, otherwise I would have had to languish in the nurses office until Mom could come get me.
     It did not last long, Granny's time living with us.  We did not know it then, but she and Mom were not able to live together, Granny unwilling to see Mom as an adult, and Mom, then in her thirties, not willing to explain her every move to her mother.  Jamie and I were blissfully unaware of the discord, they did a good job of keeping it out of our world.  All we knew was that Granny made the best pickles ever from the cucumbers she grew in the yard and that every Thursday night we could pile into Granny's room and watch Barnaby Jones with her, and I am glad to have a happy memory of that  time.   She moved from our house to live near her other daughter, my Aunt Peggy in what was soon to become our vacation Hot spot, Dallas Texas.  I have it on good authority that there will be more on that subject soon.

Having a Tiger by the tail

Jamie Lee Furney and Zachary James Wachter
 On the Day Jamie graduated from ENMU with her Masters Degree in Education

Do I have any brothers and sisters?  That is the question asked by the book today.  I'll say!  And she is the walking talking personification of all things a big sister is imagined to be.  She can and has beat the crap out of me on more than one occasion and then turned around and beat the crap out of others who attempted to do the same.  If that is not the whole sibling dynamic tied into a neat little bundle, then I do not know what is.  She has come to my rescue many times in the past and still does even to this day.  She has driven me to distraction many times in the past  and she still does to this day.  I can say this last part  knowing that she can and would say the same about me.  Our relationship has been tumultuous over the years.  Partly because of the whole sister connection and partly because we are like chalk and cheese.  Jamie loves a crowd, I love solitude, Jamie loves  spontaneity, I love ruts, Jamie loves sports and cars, I love arts and crafts...as children she had the Bat Man birthday cakes and I went for the Ballerinas. Even our nick names tell the tale, She is Tiger and I am Kee Bird- names given to us when we were still in diapers and they could not have been more appropriate, Jamie ready to maul the world and me ready to fly from it.   If we were not sisters our paths would probably rarely cross if at all.   But we are sisters and  our shared past has entwined us permanently to each other, Her with my feathers in her teeth and me holding tight to her tiger tail because everyone knows that once you have a tiger  by the tail you cannot not let go.

My Grand and Great Grand parent's Names

James Baldwin Rhody, my Great Grandfather

This is a a subject I have visited before in my blog, and little wonder, its been a fascination or should that read "fixation" of mine all my life.  I have always wanted to know more about who my people were.   I get a deep feeling of satisfaction in knowing my history, knowing and I mean Knowing, not guessing, not suspecting, but knowing that I am German, Dutch, English Irish and French, and whats even better is knowing who by name contributed each nationality.  James Baldwin Rhody pictured above is responsible for at the very least some French and some Irish.  There is more I am sure, but he has been a tough nut to crack.  The question I am answering today was a simple one "Name your grandparents.  I decided to go one better and name my great grandparents too.  Years go my friend Kit told me a statistic that most people cannot name all eight great grandparents.  At the time I was among the many and could only name one or two.  I took it as a challenge to discover the names of all eight greats and I checked that line item off my bucket list years ago.  So here for the record, I want to name them once more.  My grandmother on Mom's side, Granny is Martha Bridget Rhody Bartley and her mother and father were Minnie Cummins Rhody and James Baldwin Rhody.  My grandfather on Mom's side, PaPa is Clarence Russell Bartley and his mother and Father were Susan Clementine  Lane, and Joseph Pinkney Bartley.  On my Dad's side his mother is Mary Gertrude Riley Furney  and her parents were Nell Banta Riley and Ezra Riley.  Daddy's Dad, Grandpa Sol Furney's parents were Rosa Lee Hook Furney and James William Furney.  So there it is entered into the record one more time.  If any of my descendants decide to trace their roots, I hope they raise a glass to good ol Kellie Ann who took the time to make their job easier.

A Kee Bird in Key West

Kee Bird in Key West

 My nick name is Kee/ Kee Bird, Mom is the only one who really uses it, though once in a while Steve will call me by it.  I don't know when she began calling me Kee Bird, except that the bird part came via her English friend Sylvia who was our neighbor at Indian Springs where I was born, so I suspect it came along pretty early in the game.    When I was young I began to realize that she called me Kee Bird when she wanted me to do a small favor for her, and how could I say no after being so lovingly summoned.   Of course she and I both knew the truth, if she told me to do it I would have to do it or face the consequences, but if sweetly asked to do it I was far more willing to comply and we could both avoid the upset and drama of a domestic mutiny.
    I was stumped for a minute over what picture to use for this question.    How do you capture a nick name in a picture? I thought I should look for a picture that captures the "essence" of me, but that is a pretty subjective question when you think about it.  What I like to think of as "me" probably bears little resemblance to the me that other people know, and because I am the worlds leading expert on "Me" I decided that no one picture sums me up sufficiently.  I finally settled on the picture above even though I have used it in the blog before because it captures a part of me that I like, but think sees daylight too infrequently.  I like to think I am a fun loving, free wheeling, uninhibited life of the party, and once in a  while I can be, but usually I am a little too clenched for that. This picture captures one of those rare moments so I decided to go with it.  Plus  I could not pass up the pun...you see, it was taken in KEY West!   We drove down with our friends Jeff and Cathy Dull who always manage to coax out the better me, I think that is why I like being with them so much.  We had a great time and on the drive home as we were hopscotching up the keys I saw a fleeting glimpse of a Key Deer.  Cathy told me that they are very rare and that I was lucky to have seen one, and then she wondered allowed if it might be my totem animal.  It only just dawned on me today how appropriate a Key Deer would be as a totem animal for a Kee Bird...Maybe I should read up on totem animals and see if she is right.

All The Dogs I've Loved Before

Milford

Winslow

I am an animal Person.  I cannot think of a time when I was not.  I can remember as a child thinking that when I was grown up and could do what ever I wanted I would have any kind of pet that I liked.  And through the years I have had quite a variety of animal companions.  Dogs and cats naturally, but I have also kept tortoises, ferrets, a bird, hamsters, fish, a rabbit, a snake and even a crawdad, he was not a pet so much as a prisoner, but I was only 7 what did I know about crawdad husbandry?  If I had to choose one from the list though it would be a no brainer, Its dogs all the way for me baby, and Rat Terriers to be specific.  We got our first rat in Lubbock.  Milford was his name, and what a dog he was!  We had him for almost 14 years.  His life as a military dependant was not easy.  Though a house dog, he did enjoy the outdoors and for 6 years of his 14 he really did not have the opportunity except in a 6x4 kennel or at the end of a leash.  So when we moved to Alabama we gave him the yard to do with as he pleased.  He lived up to his breeding and actively hunted the small game on our property coming happily through the doggy door with his muzzle caked in dirt from hunting his prey.  I am glad we did that and let him pursue his bliss as they say.  When we got to Hawaii, the yard was a paved lanai.  By then he was was losing his sight, hearing and mobility so a warm slab of concrete was a fair trade for the wilderness of a yard he had just left, but he did have two good years doing as he pleased in Alabama.  When the time came that  we had to let him go we swore off dogs for a while but in a few years we were ready and we went straight for another Rat Terrier.  This time we found Winslow.  Milford and Winslow share the same breed, but that is where the similarities end.  Milford was an overweight chow hound, Winslow is  finicky and only a few skipped meals away from anorexia.  Milford was stubborn and intransigent, Winslow is compliant and easily over corrected. Milford would bolt every chance he got, Winslow stays in his yard and comes right back in the house when called.  Milford was a true feist, bold and fearless.  Winslow is far more skittish.  They could not possibly be any more different than they are, and I am glad.  I want Milford to always be Milford and Winslow to be Winslow.  Its easy to love Winslow knowing that he cannot possibly ever be thought of as a Milford substitute.   And one day I know we will bring home another rat terrier puppy and think how happy we are that he is nothing like our dear Winslow.

"I had cast my lot with an Airman and where he was, was home to me."

Our current house in Columbia, SC

The tile of this post is a variation of a quote by Martha Summerhayes.  She had cast her lot with a soldier, but my life has been spent with Airmen.  First Daddy who brought me from Nevada to New Mexico and then Steve who took me everywhere else.  The question is "Do I live in the city or the suburbs?"   The answer to that depends on when you are asking!  My first home was in Indian Springs, NV and that does not even qualify for much of anything let alone a suburb or a city.  Clovis was most definitely a town boasting a population of around 35,000 people when I lived there.  I spent most of my life in Clovis at 921 W plaza, but also spent some time in Base housing on Market loop, short stints on Cameo, Ross, 10th street and Wright Street.  The first two when I was very little and the last two when I had grown.  Wright Street was where Steve and I had our first apartment and became friends with Lona and Dwight Waldo.  Lona interestingly enough had also been my first grade teacher way back in the day at Ranchvale Elementary.  I spent roughly a year in Amarillo living in the Nantucket Apartments with Cathy Clancy until a fist fight over a beer can pyramid brought the whole unhappy period to a close.  For the record I was the one who was anti-beer can.  Even back then I was a nester who wanted nothing more than a nice well appointed home.  Beer cans did not then and do not now feature in my idea of a well appointed home...let me amend that statement...EMPTY beer cans do not feature.
     Since then my homes have always been pleasant, and while I have lived technically in cities proper, it has never had that urban loft apartment lifestyle I think of when I think of urban dwellers.  I have usually lived in a detached or semi detached house with a lawn, though there were exceptions.  We lived in a  three story Dutch duplex  in Terschuur;  a small village in the middle of the farmland of Gelderland.  Then we moved into base housing in Soesterberg, The NL where we were stacked up like cord wood.  From there we went to a ranch house in Lubbock Texas, the first house we owned. Another military duplex at Offut AFB near Omaha Nebraska was our next stop.  Something we called stairwell housing in Kaiserlsautern Germany came after that.  That was as close to urban living as I have gotten.   Vogelweh Military housing are apartment buildings that have three stairwells each.  In each stairwell there are four floors and two apartments per floor so a total of 24 families lived in each building.  We lived on the the third floor on the outside edge of the building.  We had no yard, so taking Milford out for his potty brakes several times a day got to be a real pain in the butt, but we got fit doing it.  We even got in the habit of racing each other up the stairs...couldn't pay me to run up three flights of stairs now!  From Germany we went to our house in Alabama.  We bought it sight unseen off the Internet.  A risky move we knew, but the gamble paid off and we sold it at a small profit after only two years because we were off to Hawaii!  The house we rented there  was nothing to write home about, a standard dated 60's ranch house badly in need of updating, but it was in an exclusive neighborhood called Maunawili and our back yard looked straight up the Ko'olau mountains.  On rainy days silvery thin water falls would come down the green fluted cliffs.  I counted 20 one day.  It was a view we never tired of.  After a while you generally stop noticing your surroundings.  That never happened in Hawaii.  We treasured each day there.  Finally, the second to last house I will live in, or so I hope, is this house,  also secured sight unseen over the Internet.  We are only renting this time so it was not the okole clencher that the first one was.  We gambled and won again.   Its a perfectly adequate house that has served its purpose well.  Of all the houses though it has seemed the least like home and I know it is because Zach has never lived here. In about a year from now we will pack up the boxes one more time and move home for good, back to NM where I can finally spend all I want on flower bulbs knowing that I will get to stick around and watch them bloom.