Something New in the House

I clearly remember the day we got our first microwave, at least I clearly remember parts of it.  I have a vague notion of waiting in somebody else's car parked on main street probably in front of the old Woolworth's Department store while Mom and her friend went inside to pick something up.  I think that something was the microwave oven.  I tried mightily to find a picture of the model we owned on  line, but there was nothing that came close to that pale yellow dinosaur.  I liked it because it was so user friendly.  You only had to decide how long you wanted it to run, turn the knob  to indicate the number of seconds/minutes required and then hit the start button. 
 ( note the conspicuous absence of a key pad here) No fussing with power settings, or defrost settings, it was either on or off and that was it.  And it was built like a tank too!  I think we used it at home for a solid 15 years before it went on to Mom's shop to work for at least another 10 without ever needing to go to the repair shop.   I say I remember the day clearly because I will never forget how Mom Jamie and I gathered around our new space age wonder and watched as it cooked bacon on a paper plate right before our eyes.  We were shocked and amazed, and hooked!  From then on why turn on the stove if what Jamie later dubbed the "Micro-slave" could do it quicker and on a paper plate that did not have to be washed.  That I guess was the beginning of our paper plate streak too.  It was before the whole recycle thing had caught on, we were not asked to reduce our garbage when I was a kid, but  just to please keep it in its proper place, what with the Indian crying over the trash strewn highway and the little white on green stick figure throwing garbage in a can with the catch phrase "Pitch In"  Or Woodsy the Owl "Give  Hoot!  Don't Pollute!  But back in the early seventies recycling was on the hippie fringe and not mainstream at all.  So we had our stack of paper plates and a stack of plastic paper plate holders that would keep the paper plate from catastrophic failure long enough to eat whatever was on it -piping hot and fresh from the microwave.  I did not realize how enmeshed in my life the microwave had become until I moved from home for the first time when I was 17.  I had graduated high school and moved to Amarillo with the girl across the street, Cathy Clancy.  I was standing in the kitchen of our apartment with a saucepan of cold Kraft macaroni and cheese and not the faintest idea of how to re-heat it for my lunch.  I went to throw it in the microwave when I realized I did not have one anymore and I could not  imagine how I could heat it on the stove without cooking it to death.   I called  Mom long distance ( also a big deal back then)to find out how to reheat food without a microwave.    Fortunately my life without a microwave did not last long.  The staff at Cannon Chapel all chipped in and gave us a nice new ammana model for a wedding present.  I will never forget one of the chaplains saying " A Microwave oven?  Dang!  All I got when I got married was a picture of Jesus at the rock!"

Just 30 more minutes...PULEEEEZE!

Medical Center

Of course my bedtime  changed over The years but there are benchmarks that stand out in my memory for different reasons.   I remember being sent to bed at a very young age and hating that we had pillows so flat they hardly mattered.  Mom and Daddy had big feather pillows, but Jamie and I had  pillows that were made from a coral colored floral print fabric that when folded in half, and let me say here for the record that not only did they fold in half they folded easily in half,  still had barely enough loft to lift our heads up off the mattress.  When we whined about them and asked why we could not have "real" pillows like theirs we were told that big pillows where not healthy or safe for little children...I am not sure exactly where the danger was, possible suffocation?  Chronic neck pain?  Who knows, but what I was sure of a few years later was that no matter what harm could befall me from an overly lofty pillow there was nothing that the handsome Dr. Gannon of "Medical Center" could not cure.  At this stage in my upbringing I had moved past the 7:30 bedtime of my early youth and had gained a whole hour!  At first flush this seems like a real victory but not on Medical Center nights.  You see, It came on at 8 o'clock  and it was an hour long show.  I always got hooked into the story during those last 30 minutes of my day and invariably I would be sent to bed promptly at 8:30.  I would ask to stay up for the last 30 minutes of the show, but I don't think Mom ever relented.  Her stock reply was that I knew I would not be able to see the whole show, so why did I start watching it in the first place?  This was before the days of a TV in every room, so it was watch what she was watching or go do something else.  It was not lost on me even at that young age what a looker Chad Everett was and I always held out hope that this would be the week she would fail to notice the time.  So I gambled and lost over and over again.  It would seem a sorry and pitiful thing except it lead to one of my all time favorite things...going to sleep with the flickering blue light of a TV on in another room casting shadows under the door. It may be why I still fall asleep to a TV show flickering in the dark every night.

Home is where the Heart is

I have lived in many houses in many places, but one house rises above all others as the place I think of as home.  None of us live there anymore.  After Mom's stroke we sold it to a friend so that Mom could move to Roswell and live with Jamie.  But I think it's safe to say that we all still think of it as home, even Zachary who found it to be the one constant in his nomadic Air Force Brat life.  All roads led back to 921 West Plaza, even after I had grown and gone, when I said I was going home I meant this house. There are so many memories of our life there I cannot begin to capture them all, but here are the ones that come immediately to mind while looking at this picture.  
   
First I remember our front yard which was made of white rocks instead of grass.  Believe it or not we learned to run across those rocks into the melting summer asphalt and across the street to Cathy Clancy's house barefooted.  The first trip of the summer was always the hardest, but by the time August rolled around we did not even give it a thought.  You might think that because the yard was not lawn that maintenance would be minimal.  You would be wrong.  Weeds would come up all over the yard and because of the rocks you could not mow them down, they had to be pulled, or so Mom said.  Have you tried pulling a weed out of the sun baked sod of the southern High Plains?  I do not recommend it.   Imagine my surprise when my soon to be husband Steve said "why don't you just spray them with round-up"   What is this "round-up" of which you speak I asked.  He turned me on to herbicide that day and it is one of the enduring reasons I love him so.  Speaking of Steve, please notice the mimosa tree growing in the front.  It is what you might call a late bloomer if you think it should be leafed out and in full flower in February.  Steve thought so, and since it wasn't he attempted to cut it down.  We put a stop to his butchery just in time.  We pointed out that dormant and dead are two different things.  We saved that tree and it still stands today, having grown big and sturdy enough to support the weight of three grand kids who climbed up into the cool shade of its canopy each in their turn.

To the left off the garage are buried three dogs,  our beloved Panchito and Conejo, who grew up in that house right beside me and Jamie and Granny's dear Little Bit .  We had thought we would put Milford's ashes there too, but now that the house is sold to another, we'll take Milford with us to our next and hopefully last house.

You can also see poking up over the roof of the house the swamp cooler.  Its a bit of a dinosaur today, but when I was growing up all the houses had them, and what little I know about mechanics I learned working on the swamp cooler.  

Now the road home leads to  Roswell, a town I never lived in.  It seems sad and strange not to take the familiar roads to my old town and my old neighborhood,, until I see all the familiar faces and things surrounded by new walls, and then I realize I am back home after all.  

The bathroom sink

The book asked today if my dad shaved with a straight  razor or an electric one.  I do not know.   I only vaguely recall ever seeing him shave.  I was generally not out of bed yet when he was getting ready for the day, so do not recall how he shaved, though I know he must have.   All men in the Air Force have to shave, and I do not recall ever seeing him with a beard, though I do remember his whiskers. What I can recall about my dad and the bathroom sink was the ever present bar of lava soap and the faint residue of motor oil and grease left behind  after he did his best to scrub clean after work.  The lava soap was not meant for us, but I used it anyway, who could resist soap with bits of rock embedded in it?  And the truth be told, it worked pretty well after a hard day of making bricks out of the ashes at the bottom of the grill, or digging a hole in the ground at school.  I liked getting my hands dirty back then and still do today.  I have tried to wear gloves but they just wind up getting in my way or getting full of holes so on the rare occasion when I do try them out, they are ditched withing the first thirty minutes or so of any given project.   As a result my hands have prematurely aged, but ainokea, it is what it is.  I have more fun using my hands than admiring them.  I suspect Daddy felt the same way about his hands, they were tools to be used and use them he did.  I remember his finger nails were mangled on one hand after an industrial accident, the details of which escape me.  Mom did tell me  though that he had to have a skin graft on his fingertips and they took the skin from his chest, so from then on he had hairs that would grow from his fingertips, but because he used his hands so much they were always worn down.   So how did he shave?  I cannot say, but I think  pumice soap and mangled fingernails is a reasonable substitute.
Update: After reading the blog to Mom she says that Daddy shaved with a saftey razor and shaving soap...

Family Reunions

Me with my Uncle Dale Furney and my coousin Rosanne Brueggman in Golden CIty, MO
August 2009

Banta family Renunion

Me posing near the Banta Road sign near Steve's childhood home in NJ,
It was named after my ancestor

         

When  I hear the phrase "Family Reunion" it conjures up all kinds of images.  I think of large extended families where everybody is familiar, kind of like I feel when I visit with all of Steve's brothers and sisters and their kids.  We all know each other and have a shared history even if its an aggregate cobbled together from random scraps accumulating here and there over the years.   I also get a mental picture of an over-sized picnic filled with laughing people  in old fashioned clothes.  I know it comes  from the black and white photos I have of an old Bartley family reunion that took place in Thompson park in Amarillo when my mother was a girl.  By the time I came along we had fallen out of the loop and were no longer attending the reunions assuming they were even still happening.    I had never been to a family reunion until the summer of 2009.  I had just rediscovered my Furney family roots and by extension my Banta family roots.   The Banta's were and still are as far as I know having their annual family reunion in Golden City Missouri.  The year I went I met with my Dad's brother Dale who took me all around West Plains and told me about his life there with my Dad.  The next morning we headed for Golden City to be the first people at a Banta reunion to represent the offspring of Nell Banta Riley, the one child of James Henry Banta who had never had representation at the reunion.  She and hers it seems had also fallen out of the loop.  Her daughter, my Grandmother died young so the connection had been lost for a while.   I was glad to go to the reunion and get Nell's family back into the loop, and I hope  I can  again one day.  I did not know a soul in the building, but still felt oddly at home.  Maybe it was in seeing all the double chins; I guess that must be a  Banta trait;  now I know who to blame...Maybe the ease I felt there was the product of genetic memory, being among people who shared so much of my lineage.  Whatever it was, it was powerful and I liked it.  It was not unlike walking through the old church yard in Hackensack and seeing the headstones of all the people I knew  who were my kin, not creepy in the least despite the tilting headstones and heaving graves.  I felt quite at ease in that ancient burial place.  I guess it comes down to a feeling of belonging. A belonging that is a birthright and  not a privilege, somthing to be either  bestowed or withdrawn, but something that is.  Like Descartes said "I think therefore I am."   I say "I am, therefore I belong."

Memiors of a West Texas Pioneer

                                                                  Pauline and Martha Rhody

 This entry is all about the stories that Granny told me over the years.  The first I will remember is about the picture above. Granny said that it was taken just before she and her sister Pauline rode the train from east Texas out west.  She said her stepmother had the picture made just before they left.  It was a big deal back then not just because of the rarity of having a photograph taken but because they were wearing the first "No Iron" cotton dresses that were available in the region.  Sure enough, I don't see any wrinkles, do you?  Granny is the one without the hair bow, I guess she was a bit of a tomboy back then.  The other stories she told me about her childhood have to do with her time on a ranch outside of Floydada, TX.  Her mother died when she was little and a good part of her upbringing was left to her older brothers, I guess that might explain the disdain for hair bows.  She told me once that whenever she had had enough and needed to escape she would climb on the back of a horse and ride off.  If the Granny I knew was anything like young Martha, she probably spent a lot of time on the back of a horse.    She and her brothers and sisters also spent time on the back of a mule.   She told me that she and several others would all climb on the mule and ride around bareback  until the mule had enough and then he would head for the nearest prickly pear or thistle and  sit down just in front of it causing whoever was nearest the tail to slide off right into the spines.  When I first heard the story I thought that must have been one smart mule, later I began to speculate on the brightness of the children who would return again and again for the torture of being closest to the tail.  I guess hope sprung eternal back then too.Granny also told me stories about the ranch hands and the ranch.  She said there was a sinkhole on the ranch and that they never could find the bottom.  She said the ranch hands screwed together 17 windmill pipes  and lowered them down the hole and never did touch the bottom.  This is very plausible, the bottomless lakes near Roswell testify to that, as does the fact that the water was too full of gypsum to be good for anything other than the stock tanks, and even then, I think it would have to be diluted with sweet water to some degree.   I swam in Lee lake once at the bottomless lakes park and the water was very full of gypsum, so much so that as the water droplets dried on my skin they left little white patches.  Granny also told a funny story about the ranch hands trying to pull a fast one and sneaking what they thought was a watermelon from the garden only to be sorely disappointed when they cut into it and discovered that it was a citron melon instead.  She also told me of being stranded during the dust bowl days.  She said she was in the car with Uncle Clarence, I am assuming Papa was with them, when they were overtaken by a huge dust cloud.  It was so thick it choked out the engine of the car and it stalled.  They had to hunker down and wait for it to pass and try not to breath in all the dust.  I remember Granny telling me she was very frightened for the safety of Clarence who was just a little baby at the time.

    I am glad I took the time to ask Granny to tell me about her life as a child, there are not many stories, but I treasure the ones I have and I am pleased to capture them here so that Zach will be able to share them with his children, and they with theirs.  

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...