Month: August 2012

Beginning of the End

Today is the first day of school. Even though I don’t have kids at home, the school year dictates my calendar. Until next June, I will allow extra time to drive through school zones or, better yet, avoid them if possible. I will stay away from the grocery store after 3:00 in the afternoon, too many moms with tired students in tow grabbing just one more ingredient for dinner. And the lack of traffic on the road at odd hours will remind me of holidays of which I was not aware.

Nevertheless, the first day of school is a nostalgic day for me. Because I was fortunate enough to have been a stay-at-home mom, my whole life revolved around the school calendar. Let’s see, 3 boys times 12 years of school, that’s 36 individual first days of school! However, one year stands out in my memory, because, for that son, it set the tone for all the days to follow.

A  week or so before the start of our oldest son’s freshman year at Churchill High School, we attended orientation night. At the end of the program a slide show took parents and students on a virtual tour of the next four years by showing all the activities that go on at Churchill ending with pictures of graduation. That’s when it hit me. This was it. Trey would be home for four more years. Then he would go off to college and there would be no more first days of school for him.

As we walked to the car, I put my arm around his shoulder and, with tears in my eyes, said, “Well, Trey, this is it, the beginning of the end.”

He looked at me with his biggest smile and earnestly responded, “Isn’t it great!”

Our viewpoints could not have been more different. I was looking down the mountain toward the end of the trek. He was looking up the mountain at the beginning of the trek. Little did I know that he would be gone much sooner than I expected.

It happened in his junior year. For one semester he was an exchange student to Germany and lived in West Berlin at the time the wall was still standing. The sadness and uncertainty of allowing him to go into the unknown was overwhelming. This was in the old-timey days when anyone could go to the gate at the airport; Butch and I, his brothers, Andy and Joe, stayed glued to the window until we saw his plane soar into the air. Six months later I felt like I was flying I was so happy and relieved when we met him at the airport to welcome him home. But this was his beginning. Years later when the wall fell, he called his German host parents from Chile where he was doing a college semester abroad.

He’s an adult now and we are still experiencing beginnings. This Sunday he arrives from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he now lives, for a thirty-day visit to the states. We will experience another ending when he leaves to go back home.

Yes, for he and I both that night was the beginning of the end. And today for the students in my city it is a beginning of the end with all the anticipation and trepidation that goes with beginnings and endings.  Parents and students, my advice: whether your view is up or down the mountain take it one beginning at a time. The ending will be here before you know it. Relish the beginning and the ending will be that much sweeter.

A Couple of Street Corners and Imagination

A few weeks ago Butch and I took a road trip to Colorado. We’ve spent a lot of time in the southwest so when we go we try to take a route that will take us to a new place. The challenge is that, from where we live, it takes a full day to get out of Texas, unless we head for Mexico. Going west there is not much to choose from; towns are few and far between. As my husband likes to say about west Texas, “It’s not the end of the world, but you can see if from there”. For this journey we decided to take a detour through Midland and Odessa; then shoot across to Roswell and up through Santa Fe to Colorado.

As the trip time neared, we narrowed it down to just Odessa for two reasons. One, Butch has never been to Odessa, not that it’s a garden spot, but it’s something new. I’ve been there once, in high school. My dad took us there when another high school in my district went to the state football championship and played Odessa Permian. In the spirit of the event, we even decorated the windows of the car with shoe polish. At the time I wondered why my dad wanted to go to that particular game. Odessa is a long way from where we lived. I didn’t say anything about it because asking him why he did anything usually didn’t turn out well.

The second reason is that my dad grew up in Odessa. When he retired, Daddy did some genealogy work and had written a short biography of himself which included the location of his boyhood homes. When they first moved to Odessa they lived outside of town; he didn’t give any landmarks or road names. When he was six, they moved to town and lived at S. 6th and Lincoln. His dad’s plumbing and sheet metal shop was at S. 1st across from the T&P railroad depot. He also wrote a paragraph about himself for a book when Odessa High School was having a milestone reunion. In that piece he gave a different cross street (7th Street) for his boyhood home. I anticipated that it wouldn’t be difficult to find the places with these directions. The buildings might not be standing after all this time, but surely the streets will still be there.

We drove into Odessa in the late afternoon of July 22, tired from driving, but excited about finally starting our trip. We checked into a Holiday Inn Express along with sixty or seventy Halliburton workers. The oil boom has once again come to life in west Texas and it has become a busy place.

The next morning we started out. The desk clerk at the hotel gave us a map. We had studied it and got our bearings. With the aid of our GPS, known to us as GyPSy, we drove right to Lincoln and S. 6th.

What did this corner look like in the 1930s when my dad was a boy?

The intersection is now located downtown. A Baptist church spreads across two corners with its parking lot on a third. This seemed appropriate since my dad and mom were members of a Baptist church for over 50 years when they died. An AT&T office building stands on the fourth corner.

Leaving our car in the Baptist church lot, we walked the block to the intersection of Lincoln and S. 7th. This intersection had a Disciples of Christ church and some other office buildings. After taking photos of all the corners, we went to search for Granddaddy’s shop.

S. 1st was nearby and we quickly spotted the railroad tracks. A few buildings lined the tracks, but nothing that looked like a depot and none that looked old enough to have been standing in the 1930’s. Butch went into a shop and asked about the depot. He was directed to another business that had been there much longer. The owner there knew exactly what we were looking for. In fact, the shop had stood across behind his shop. The depot was across the street by the tracks and had been torn down long ago leaving the lot vacant.

Granddaddy’s shop stood on this corner. Across the street was the T&P Depot which no longer exists.

Standing where the shop probably had been and turning towards the north and downtown, we spotted a tall building, probably the tallest one in Odessa. I had noticed it when we were at the boyhood home site. That landmark gave me a sense of the distance my dad had traveled when he went from his house to his dad’s shop, just a few blocks. In those days, without the buildings and the traffic, he could have walked or run–he was a boy after all–the distance in a few minutes.

From his dad’s shop, my dad’s boyhood home stood on the other side of this tall building.

So this is where my dad grew up from about about six or seven years old until  he was in 10th grade and his family moved to Abilene. Daddy has always been a mystery to me. I never understood what made him like he was: non-communicative, independent, emotionally cold, quick to anger. Standing there on those corners in Odessa, I imagined what it must have been like growing up in flat, dry and dusty west Texas. He told me stories about when they lived in the country, stories about climbing up the windmill in high winds and setting the brake and times when he ran away from home. But he didn’t tell any stories about living in town, at least not that I remember.

My dad is gone now. He passed away in 2004. All I have is a couple of street corners and imagination. In Odessa I learned something. All the questions I have about my dad, all the things I don’t understand about him, it’s time to let those things go. He loved me the best he could. It’s up to me to be open and vulnerable with those I love, to let them really know me and not leave them with only a couple of street corners and imagination.

Aspens

I have recently undertaken a project to make a walking stick out of the trunk of a small aspen tree. In the process I have learned that aspens grow in clonal colonies. These colonies are derived from a single seedling. Each sapling is a sucker that grows from the root system. So in a grove of aspens the tress are inexorably tied together underground. They are a family.

A grove of aspens stretches their trunks straight toward the sky, their exquisitely white bark set off with dark markings and silvery green leaves trembling and shimmering in the breeze. But all aspens do not grow straight; some are crooked. For some reason their trunks have grown twisted or bent. Nevertheless, they remain part of the family, standing firm in the circle among their aspen relatives, an eternal family reunion.

That’s how it is for aspens. What about us humans and our families? There is a connection, an underground thread, that is just as real. The underground thread connects us by blood that is passed through the act of creation. The thread connects through shared history and experiences. And love. There is love which is felt. And love which exists only as a wish, love which is longed for, and love which is the object of hope.

Blood, history, love. An invisible connection, strong and unbreakable. A grove of aspens standing tall and straight, joined by the underground thread.