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"Chasing the Elusive Dream"


Chapter 1
The Adventure Begins

By BethShelby


When my daughter and her boy friend made up their minds to get married, they started immediately looking for a place to live. No such forethought went into the planning of our future for Evan and me. After a short honeymoon, we hit the streets of Jackson, Mississippi on the hottest day of the year, armed with the daily paper, a city map, and a bag of ice to help us survive it.

All of our possessions  were stacked in the trunk and back seat of our`55 Buick Special. It was so special it had no heater, no air-conditioner, no radio and no clock. What it did have was room. They made them big in those days. Our possessions consisted of our clothes, sheets, towels, dishes, and kitchenware, which we got for wedding gifts. In addition, we did have food.

My mother saw to it that we had enough food with us to keep us alive for several weeks. Unfortunately, we had no means of keeping the food fit for human consumption that long. I was Mama's only offspring, and I was leaving the nest for the first time. This might have accounted for the large "care package", or possibly, she suspected we might be running low on cash before my new husband drew his next paycheck. Still, I doubt if she could have guessed how low.

Two major factors limited our options in our search for our dream apartment. The first requirement was it had to be furnished, because the largest item either of us owned was a radio.  The second was it had to be cheap. We had no idea what apartments rented for, but we'd hoped to find something for around $50.00 per month. These days that sounds like the price of a meal for two at a decent restaurant, but this was 1956, and in our section of the world low rent was still possible, or almost.

We hit the streets early, because we wanted to be settled before nightfall. We couldn't afford for more of our rapidly depleting funds to go toward renting a motel room. As it turned out, there weren’t many furnished places to choose from within our price range. In fact, most of the ones we found were either in unsuitable areas, or had already been rented. The heat was oppressive, and our nerves were frayed. The bag of ice, which we'd bought to cool us down, had almost melted, and we were starting to wonder if being married was worth the trouble.

We were about to give up for the day, when we noticed a lady out in the front yard of a nice older home tacking up a sign which read "Furnished Apartment For Rent."  We inquired, and she said we were in luck. Just that morning, her boarders, a couple of single girls, had moved out. The apartment was a little three-room cottage behind the big house. She hadn't had a chance to clean it yet, but if we'd give her a couple of hours, we could have it for $50 per month. It was exactly what we had in mind, and we could be in it by sundown. Things were definitely looking up.

That evening, we moved in. We spread a cloth on the table and pulled out the care package from home, packed with soggy, day-old sandwiches, stale crumbling chips, and tepid punch. For dessert, there was wedding cake. The heat had melted the icing, and the cake itself was starting to have a funky taste, but it was our first meal in our new apartment, and we were happy.

As we ate, it grew darker. From the woodwork, came roaches to share our evening spread. They came by the hundreds. Having never lived in the city before, this was my first experience with the loathsome creatures. I was horrified. This was totally unacceptable, but still I wasn't willing to give up on our little cottage just yet. Surely, there was something we could do.

What we did was proceed to the nearest supermarket and buy everything in the pest-control section with the picture of a roach on it. When we returned to the apartment, we wound towels around our faces and proceeded to fumigate. By the time we had emptied our cans, there wasn't a roach to be seen anywhere. Neither was there any air to be breathed. We exited sputtering, coughing and gasping for oxygen. We figured the air should be safe for breathing within four hours, so we got into our car and went to a double-feature, drive-in theater.

It was well after midnight when we returned. Other than a few dead ones on the floor, the roaches appeared to be gone. The apartment was still polluted, but we opened the windows and fanned in fresh air.  Eventually we decided that survival was possible. It had been a long day, and we figured we'd have no problem sleeping. We made the bed with fresh sheets, turned off the lights and fell into bed, exhausted.

Earlier, we had only partially unpacked, and newspapers were scattered about the room.  We planned to take care of those in the morning. Now, the papers started to rattle. There was a sound of movement everywhere. Suddenly something fell from the ceiling onto my face. I screamed and bolted out of bed. Evan bounced up beside me and hit the light switch. The ceiling was covered with dying roaches, hanging by two legs and falling to the floor, the bed, and everywhere. It was a nightmare. We grabbed our clothes and fled.

At two in the morning, we found a hotel with vacancies and checked in. I had a good cry, and then we both cracked up laughing. The next morning we went back to the apartment and moved out. The lady apologized and gave our deposit back. She was probably grateful to us, because I have a feeling, we took care of her roach problem.

What a way to begin our life together; broke, homeless, and not knowing what our next move would be. Yet we were young, and it was an adventure. We knew as long as we could still laugh, we would probably be able to handle whatever circumstances came our way.  Why take the fun out of it by planning ahead?

Author Notes This one was originally posted in 2009 while my husband was still alive.
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Chapter 2
The Saga Continues

By BethShelby

By the fourth day after the wedding, my groom and I were starting to realize being married wasn't "a piece of cake." After the horrors of moving into a roach resort and fleeing the scene for more suitable quarters, we were soon confronted with a new challenge.

Embarrassed, my new husband confessed he was having a substantial cash flow problem. Luckily, I had a little money stashed away from having finally broken my piggy bank just days before embarking upon my life as a married woman. My plan was to save it for a rainy day, but the storm clouds were gathering.

The morning paper carried a few new listings for apartments, so we found a pay phone and started calling. The last one we called was in our price range but wouldn't be available until July. This was only the 27th of June. There was no way we could spend three more nights in a motel and still have enough to pay for the apartment. The lady on the phone seemed nice. She said her daughter was a newlywed also. "I know how hard it is just getting started," she told us. "I'd love to help you out. Why don't I meet you at the house, and we'll see what we can work out."

Actually, when we got there, we only got to see the outside of the house. The style indicated it was probably built a half-century earlier, but it was in a neighborhood of fairly well kept houses. Mrs. Burnette said she and her husband lived in the larger part of the lower half. The house had two upstairs apartments and an attached side apartment, which were rented.
 
The tenants in the upstairs apartments, which she intended for us to lease, were in the process of moving out, so she couldn't show it yet, but she described it in glowing terms. She said it consisted of a large furnished bedroom/living room combination with a fireplace and hardwood floors. It also had two walk-in closets and a door from the bedroom opening onto a large deck. The deck was the flat roof of the lower side apartment.

She told us if we decided to take it, she would allow us to spend a couple of days in another house she owned across town, free of charge, until the apartment was ready. In spite of the fact we hadn't actually seen the apartment, we didn't hesitate. We were a bit uneasy, considering what we had gone through the day before, but it wasn't as though we had an alternate solution. We needed a place to live fast.

She gave us the directions to her house and the key. "Make yourselves at home," she told us. "We'll get your apartment ready as quickly as we can."

Wow! This lady was surely an angel sent to our rescue. She must really trust us since she's willing to give us the keys to her house. Excited to see where we would be spending the next few days, we hurried across town. As small houses go, it wasn't bad. It was much newer than the house we'd just seen. We would later learn this house was really her residence. Her husband traveled and lived at the older house when he was in town. The truth was she and her philandering husband were separated the majority of the time. But that is another story.

The first thing we did when we got to the house was to try to make coffee. Unskilled as I was in domestic arts, I almost destroyed her electric coffeepot trying to boil water in it on top of the stove. The cord wasn't attached, and I didn't see a kettle. I realize that sounds unbelievably dumb, but it was my first attempt ever at making coffee, and I wasn't familiar with electric percolators. Anyway, I wised up in time to save it from complete destruction. The tip-off was the smell of the plastic base melting.

The next thing we did was undress with the intention of trying out the bed. This was when we discovered our landlady didn't totally trust us after all. We freaked out when we heard someone walking through the house. We knew we had locked the doors. Then a voice called out "Is something burning in here?" (It takes a while to get rid of the smell of burned plastic.) It turned out to be her son-in-law who lived next door and had a key to the place. He and his wife had come over to use the laundry room and probably to check us out. We dressed quickly and decided to go out to eat. This place didn't exactly feel like home.

Two days later, the landlady called and said we could move in. As it turned out, the apartment wasn't quite the way we had visualized it. The furniture was old and shabby. A sagging sofa and stuffed chair had slipcovers featuring huge ugly red flowers. The fireplace was closed off and a big rusty metal heater sat in front of it. Both of our walk-in closets were down the hall from our apartment. But our new apartment did boast of one truly unique feature. That was the bathroom.

It was scarcely large enough to hold the old-fashioned rust stained tub, commode and lavatory, but it was the only split-level walk through bathroom we had ever seen. The floor was built up about six inches to make room for plumbing pipes. In order to go from the bedroom to the kitchen, the only route led through the bathroom. It was necessary to step up into the bathroom and then back down into the kitchen, which held a tiny stove and apartment-sized refrigerator. There was also a small table and two chairs. Luckily, we were both thin in those days, so both of us could get into the kitchen at the same time if we held our breath.

Between our bedroom and the apartment next to ours, was a locked door. It was pretty obvious a skeleton key from any hardware would easily unlock it, but the couch sat in front of it to discourage unwanted neighborly visits. The trumpet player and his psycho girl friend didn't move into that apartment until a week later. But that is also another story.

Our landlady now informed us that the deck, which we had looked forward to using, was off limits. We were told to not set foot out there unless there was an emergency, and we needed a fire escape, because we might fall through the roof into the apartment below. In case of a fire, we had permission to climb over the railing and jump, but only if the indoor stairway was blocked.

The old house wasn't insulated, and there was no air conditioning unit. "You may need to get yourselves a little fan," our landlady informed us. The temperature was closing in on one hundred degrees, so this was timely advice.

Still, we didn't complain. It was the only thing available, and we felt lucky to get it. Anyway, we soon discovered a bright side. The roaches in this place were small, brown, and shy, unlike the big black ugly creatures, fearsome enough to have starring roles in a horror film, from which we had so recently fled.

Author Notes This is a continuation of "The Adventure Begins" which was posted earlier.


Chapter 3
Developing Domestically

By BethShelby


At the beginning of my marriage, I had my hands full learning the artistry of being a wife. At that stage, I assumed it was something every new bride should, at least, attempt to learn. My life, up to the age of eighteen, had been about as sheltered as was possible outside of being locked in a room and chained to a bedpost. It is a gross understatement to say I was naive. In addition to my lack of sophistication, I was totally unskilled in homemaking arts.

During high school years, most of my female classmates seemed to be hoping for a M.R.S. degree as soon as possible, so they took classes in Home Economics. I chose to take Science and Speech classes instead. You would think I would have absorbed some of the skills at home, which might have prepared me for marriage, but I was simply not domestically inclined. My mother made a valiant effort to teach me, but I wasn't interested in following in her footsteps. She finally gave up; probably thinking I would never marry and would become a doctor or some other highly paid professional. With a healthy income, I would be able to afford to hire domestic help. It was not to be.

I had completed one year in the local college, when out of the blue, I decided to get married. Not only was I ill-equipped to cook or do housework, I had never held a job and had no idea how to go about getting one. What I could do was burn a kettle up while trying to boil water. I didn't even know how to hold a broom correctly. I was terrified of telephones because my family never had one until after I left home. I didn't know how to drive, and I had never ridden in a city bus. I hadn't even gone shopping alone except to buy pencils or paper. My poor husband didn't get a bargain when he got me. Luckily, he thought I was pretty and intelligent, and that was all that mattered at that stage of the game.

During the first month and a half, I made amazing progress. I mastered the art of using a can opener, and even learned how to heat the contents of a can without smoking up the kitchen over three or four times a week. After the first few times of getting lost, I learned how to catch the correct bus from downtown to our apartment. I even learned how to plan a couple of simple meals.

One of my gourmet menus consisted of heating the contents of a can of spaghetti and meatballs and also a can of green peas. This I served with white bread, coke, and Oreo cookies for desert. My alternate meal was the contents of a can of lima beans and a can of cream corn, served with white bread, root beer, and ice cream for desert. Breakfast was easy. We ate cold cereal.

One other skill I mastered was the art of keeping a chair, or some other piece of furniture, between the lecherous landlord and me. He liked to surprise me by using his master key to pop into the apartment without warning. He usually used the excuse of having to inspect something. I was thankful he was a salesman and was on the road most of the time.
 
I learned from the other tenants, as well as from him, and finally even from his wife, that she hadn't allowed him into her bedroom in years. He found anything that looked even remotely female, irresistible. Each week, this pervert deliberately stole one of each of my husband's socks from the apartment's basement laundry. This way, he could show up with a handful of his own 'one of a kind' socks, to see if we had "accidentally" gotten them mixed.

I also learned it wasn't smart to report these encounters to my mate if I didn't wish to become a young widow. In spite of the fact, the landlord was large enough to make three of him and had informed me he kept a loaded gun in case of intruders, my husband was ready to do battle to defend my honor. Still, my husband was strong for his size and might have triumphed, but I couldn't face the embarrassment of seeing him involved in a brawl as long as I felt I could handle things.

Even his wife was given to using her master key to check up on her boarders. However, she usually scheduled her visits for times when she knew we weren't in. We felt our privacy had been violated when we learned of these visits. However, we were too young and inexperienced to know our rights and were willing to let it pass. I must admit one of her visits was justified. Nevertheless, it caused my spouse and me considerable humiliation.

It happened in the early fall. At the end of the summer, I decided to go back to college. Since I had all afternoon classes, I didn't leave home until a half-hour before Evan got his lunch break. Because money was so short, he came home for lunch. Dutiful wife that I was, I opened the cans and heated his meal before leaving for school.
 
I discovered the food stayed warm if I heated the oven and then turned it off leaving the serving dishes inside. That way he could have a warm meal. I also left mushy love notes propped on the table for him to read while he dined. One day, I decided to try out the Tupperware I got for my wedding. Even I should have known better than to put hot food into plastic containers and place them in a warm oven, but I went a step further than that. I forgot to turn the oven off.

That day when my husband arrived home, his dinner of creamed corn and lima beans was in the middle of the front lawn melded into the blackened Tupperware containers. The door and windows to our little apartment were wide open, and a fan was sitting on our table blowing out the smoke and scattering the pages of my love notes. The fumes in the apartment were unbearable, both from the melted plastic and from our outraged landlady. She insisted she'd saved her house from burning to the ground by entering, at great peril, and removing the offending plastic with tongs.

After that day the oven was used for storage only. I gave up writing love notes, and my husband began taking a brown-bag lunch with him to work each morning. The honeymoon was over. We had reached a new level in our relationship.


Chapter 4
Learning Curves

By BethShelby

For those of you who have read my biography from the beginning, you may recognize some of this story which was written when Evan was still alive. For the later readers, you will learn a bit about how my story begins, told in a more humorous way.

By the second month into my marriage, I realized how ill equipped I was to deal with the chores expected of a wife. Luckily, my husband wasn't demanding and went peacefully along with the flow. I'd warned him beforehand I wasn't a homemaker, so he wasn't totally blindsided.

After the fiasco with Tupperware in a hot oven, I decided baking needed to be left to more skilled cooks. My stove took over for storage, which was in short supply. Trips to my parents' home netted us enough care packages to keep us in food for a while. One item from the latest visit was a freshly baked apple pie. I stuck it into the oven and promptly forgot about it.

My most embarrassing moment occurred two weeks later, when my in-laws came to visit. I assume they realized if they wanted to eat, they needed to bring the meal. Some of it required re-heating. This meant my oven had to revert to its original purpose. I opened the oven door and exclaimed, "Oh wow! You brought a pie. What kind is it?"
 
Evan's mom gave me a blank look and said, "We didn't bring a pie." Then she proceeded to pull from my oven the two-week-old pie, which was now topped with an inch-high growth of hairy gray mold. They were gracious, but I'm glad I never knew what their conversation was like on the way home.

I was thrilled that my husband had suggested I should finish college, but I knew he really couldn't afford the expense. It was important I finish as soon as possible, so I took all the hours allowed. My advisor thought 22 college hours was excessive, but he allowed me to give it a try. This way, it would only take two and a half more years. The cost was taking a toll on an already over-extended budget. My husband's job, as an architectural draftsman, paid double the minimum wage. Unfortunately in those days, minimum wage was only $1.00 an hour.

When he got out of service the year before, Evan put money down on a place his folks hoped to buy when they sold their other house. Since they hadn't made the sale, we were stuck making payments on a house and acreage in the country occupied by his parents. We still owed on my wedding ring, our car, and the silverware I'd purchased just before the wedding. Along with the expense of the apartment, gasoline, groceries, books and college, it was a gross understatement to say money was tight.

Summer was unbearable in an upstairs apartment in the Deep South. Our only purchase so far had been a small fan, but that offered little relief from the sweltering heat. After getting paid on Friday and making token payments on past due bills, Mondays usually found us broke again. Having established no credit, our resources were the pawnshops and loan companies. Many times, we pawned our watches in order to spend a couple of hours in an air-conditioned theater in order to escape the heat and drudgery of work and study. Not a wisest or moves, but for us, it seemed a lifesaver.

The GI bill offered a small supplement for continuing education. Evan had completed one year of college before service. He signed up for night school to add a bit to our income. Night school had a limited amount of class choices available. One semester, lack of choices led him to sign up for a Spanish class. He soon realized he had neither the time nor desire to learn a foreign language. I'd taken Latin but never Spanish. By doing his homework, I learned a bit of Spanish, and he earned a passing grade. Earned is probably not the correct word. He only mastered one Spanish phrase, "Habla usted espanol?"

About this time, my husband's company decided to relocate to a small town. He had the option of moving or going job hunting. Since I was in college, we perferred being in a place that offered a college degree. Evan put out some resumes for a job but with no results. He had a sister in New Orleans, so we thought that city might offer more job opportunities plus colleges. We drove the two hundred miles for a visit. It was the first real trip since our two-day honeymoon in Pensacola, Florida. While there, I checked out schools, while he combed the streets job hunting.

Our one bit of recreation while there was a visit to a large amusement park. A roller-coaster ride was a new experience for both of us. As the ride started, my spouse put a protective arm around my shoulder. The cars slowly escalated the to top of the steep incline. As it gathered speed going down, the locked bar holding us in moved a couple of inches and made a clanking noise. Apparently it was designed to do this, but Evan thought the bar had broken. His arm left my shoulder, and he grabbed the sides and yelled, "Hold on! This thing is coming apart." The rest of the ride was a wild nightmare. I stumbled off with weak knees, wet pants, and the conviction that when things go south, it's every man for himself. He's proven over the years that this isn't the case, but I never let him live that episode down.

On our trip home, we had two dimes left between us. We were both coffee addicts, and it was just enough, in those days, for a cup each. A Shell credit card paid for gasoline, but when we spotted a Super Market Grand Opening sign offering free food, we couldn't resist stopping. I hoped no one noticed us leaving with each of us munching a hot-dog and sipping a coke, but no groceries. At least, we didn't have to join a line at a food kitchen. 

Luckily, the trip did produce two job offers, both paying considerably more than his present job. One company had a branch in our city, so we didn't have to move after all. Now instead of an architectural draftsman, my husband became a draftsman for an oil company. Things were starting to look up. At least, we could pay off the loan companies and redeem our watches.

Author Notes Picture compliments of Google Image.
Please note: This isn't a story with a central theme, but more of a rambling essay of several events taking place during those early years of marriage.

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Chapter 5
Movin' On Up

By BethShelby

In the first apartment where my new husband and I lived, there was a thin wall with a locked door between the neighboring apartment and ours. A trumpet player and his girlfriend occupied that apartment. We'd never actually met the pair, since their hours didn't correspond with ours. The club where he played must have closed around two in the morning, because shortly after that, the two of them would come in drunk and start their nightly ritual of arguing.

On one occasion, I was sleeping soundly when the girl started screaming, "Help me! Please, HELP ME!" Her cries awakened Evan, but they only became a part of whatever I was dreaming. Still asleep, I yelled back, "Hold on a minute! I'm coming!"

My shocked husband shook me awake and whispered, "Shhh!..Be quiet! We don't need to get involved with those people. They may come over here and do something to us. If she yells again, we'll call the police." 

We both sat up in bed, fearful of what might take place next. There was dead silence on the other side of the wall. They must have overestimated my ability to be of any help. That was the end of the nightly fights, and thankfully, they moved out a few days later.

At the end of one year of marriage and my sophomore year in college, our lease was up on our weird apartment with its split-level bathroom and pint-sized kitchen. Renewing it was not an option. We decided to go looking for something a little less unique. The furnished apartment we found was in a lovely, older home in a better part of the city. It had two large furnished rooms instead of one, plus a huge kitchen, a decent-sized bath and two walk-in closets. The furniture was from an earlier time, but was more tasteful than what we'd had in the other house. As with the first apartment, it was on the second floor. The owners were a retired minister and his wife, who lived downstairs, and promised we wouldn't be seeing them as long as the rent was paid.

By the time my husband and I moved into the second apartment, my cooking skills had improved to some extent. Instead of just opening a can and heating the contents, I had learned how to brown ground beef and cook pasta without having it totally clumped together. By dumping in some ketchup and chili powder, I could concoct a dish which vaguely resembled spaghetti.

My husband was so proud of my cooking skills that he invited his boss and his wife over to enjoy my culinary delights. I was a nervous wreck, and in a state of total panic. I called his office and begged him to call off the dinner, as I believed I was having a heart-attack, and wouldn't be able to be a proper hostess. He couldn't bring himself to do it, so I had to breathe into a paper bag to try to calm my panic attack and pull myself together.

Our guests were gracious enough not to cause me undue embarrassment, other than mentioning it took hours of simmering in order to produce decent spaghetti sauce.  I'm sure they must have left shaking their heads in disbelief over my 15-minute version, while rushing home to swig down sodium bicarbonate.

It wasn't long after, the transmission went out on our Buick Special. Evan took it in to the shop where he learned the repair bill would be several hundred dollars, which we did not have.

"Don't worry about it." Bill, one of his coworkers, told him. "I've been working on cars since I was ten. I'm sure we can figure it out. I'll be over tonight, and we'll rip that sucker out and have her going again, before you know it."

I got to practice my cooking skills on Bill, for three weeks, while the greasy transmission was disassembled into a zillion pieces on the kitchen floor of our little apartment. The whole place reeked of motor oil and kerosene. At the end of the three weeks, Evan got a huge plastic garbage can and loaded it with all the many screws, bolts and other paraphernalia and hauled it in to the auto repair center. We had to pawn some watches and various other items, but we came up with enough to finally have our car back in running order. I can imagine the mechanic's amusement over that incident.

The one thing lacking in this apartment was a place to do laundry. The weekly trips to the laundromat got old quickly. Eventually, we saved enough money to acquire a used washing machine, and a television. Of course, there was no water connection to the washing machine, so every time I washed, I had to drag the thing over to the kitchen sink and connect the hoses to the faucet and place the drain hose into the sink.

This worked well as long as I watched carefully to make sure everything stayed in place. Since I'd never had television before, I could scarcely tear myself away from it long enough to complete a wash. One day, I was so engrossed in an episode of "I Love Lucy," I was totally unaware the hose had vibrated out of the sink, emptying the contents of the water from my washer on to the kitchen floor. The water drained through the floor to the apartment below, and when plaster started falling out of their ceiling, the startled residents called the fire department. My television show was interrupted when the firemen knocked on my door.

It's a good thing we had gotten our valuables back from the pawnshop, because they were about to be called into service again. Replacing a ceiling wasn't cheap, even in those days.

Author Notes For those of you who have read my biography from the beginning, you may recognize some of this story which was written when Evan was still alive. For the later readers, you will learn a bit about how my story begins, told in a more humorous way.


Chapter 6
A Cast of Characters

By BethShelby

Awakening at two a.m. to the smell of smoke and wisps of gray seeping from beneath our door leading into our hallway exit, was one of the most heart-pounding moments of our early years of marriage. I'll get into that episode shortly, but first, a bit about our new residence and the people who surrounded us.

After our first year together, Evan and I said a cheerful farewell to the apartment with the split-level bathroom and lecherous landlord. Our new apartment, on the second floor, was in a lovely old Victorian style home. Now, we had a much larger and more private place to live. I had completed two years of college, Evan had a better-paying job, and we hadn't pawned our watches in months. Things were definitely looking up.

Our new living quarters on the second floor were accessed by way of a lovely spiral staircase. Our apartment comprised one side of the second floor. On the other side of a wide hallway was another apartment very much like ours. All of this luxury was ours for only $55 per month. Our rent had gone up only $5 per-month for a much nicer place to live. 

Unlike our first apartment, during the two-plus years we spent here, we got acquainted with all the other tenants. Some of them fit into a category, which I billed as "characters" vs. "ordinary people". The retired minister, who owned the house, died shortly after we moved in. His disabled wife went to live with one of her children, and the house was turned over to a rental agency to manage.

Soon after the agency took over, the main downstairs living quarters were rented by a family with three unruly children, dressed like street unchins. The man was bipolar and suffered from other mental and emotional problems. He was unable to hold down a regular job. His wife worked in a clothing store, and he kept the children and made jewelry from rocks, which he polished in a tumbler. He came up to our apartment often, to display his latest creation, in hopes I would buy something. Dealing with his mood swings was a bit challenging. His mood swung in a rather unpleasant direction, after I let the washing machine hose escape from the kitchen sink. The water pouring though the ceiling of his dining room and collapsing the wet plaster onto his family, while they were having dinner, wasn't a pretty scene.

The couple across the hall from us fit into my "character" classification. Audrey was a young woman who appeared to be a flirt, with her mini-skirts and roving eyes. Her husband, Ned, was a large awkward man with a red face and bulging eyes. He had to be, at least, thirty years her senior. He had sustained a brain injury in service, leaving him unable to work. He came from a wealthy family, willing to support him, as long as he didn't live with them. Audrey had married him to escape her boring life in the boonies and move to the city. A few months after we moved in, Ned suffered a stroke and became a resident of the VA hospital, until his death several weeks later.

Once she became a widow, Audrey had a steady stream of male visitors coming and going at all hours. She explained the traffic by telling us they were from the Jehovah Witness Kingdom Hall, where she was a member, and they were coming over to have Bible studies and offer condolences for her loss. Often, they didn't leave till morning. I'm sure she found them to be very consoling.

Two men, both with serious alcohol problems, rented rooms with baths downstairs. The older of the two was a retired gentleman, who merely grunted when we passed. The younger guy, Phillip, who definitely fit into the "character" classification, appeared to be in his late twenties. He had a job with his uncle's company, but he seldom worked because he was always nursing a hangover. He knew my schedule, and he would be banging on my door before I left for class almost daily. When I answered the knock, I'd find him clutching his head and asking if he could borrow an aspirin or anything I might have for pain. The request also included a glass of water to wash it down. Then, he would proceed to tell me of his many maladies, including how many times he'd tried to commit suicide and had failed. Borrowing pain medicine was probably an excuse to find a sympathetic ear.

My final "character" was a 93-year old lady named Miss Jack, who lived in the garage apartment out back. The week we moved in, we were getting into our car, when we heard a high-pitched screeching noise. It sounded like some kind of bird. Evan was sure it had to be a peacock, since his family had once owned one. A disheveled white-haired lady emerged from her apartment with her robe flapping in the breeze. She waved frantically to get our attention. When we stopped, she proceeded to hand us a bowl filled with tuna salad, as a way of getting acquainted and welcoming us to the neighborhood. It was a surprise since cupcakes might have been a safer choice.

To our delight, the salad was delicious. It contained pecans and other ingredients, which gave it a unique flavor. Upon learning how much we liked it, she made it for us regularly. Each time I went over to return her dish, I'd find her sitting cross-legged in the middle of the unmade bed playing solitaire. She'd never married but had lived an interesting and colorful life. At one time, she'd traveled with a circus, walking the high wire and performing on the trapeze. She never tired of telling hair-raising stories which held me captive as long as I could afford to stay.

After we'd lived in the apartment a couple years, one night around two a.m. we were awakened by the smell of smoke. Nothing terrified either of us more than the idea of a fiery death. Evan rushed to the door, leading into a shared hallway. Thick smoke filled the lower portion of the house and was drifting up the stairs. The light in the hall gave off an eerie, reddish glare. Close to terror, I grabbed my clothes and yanked them on, not realizing the pants pulled off before going to bed were wrong side out. We were convinced the floor below was ablaze and we would have to climb out on the roof and jump.

Evan snatched a wet towel to put over his face and rushed to the phone in the hall alcove and dialed the emergency number. Just after the phone call, we heard footsteps pounding up the stairs. It was our young alcoholic friend, Philip, coughing and gasping for breath.

"OH NO! No!, No!. Don't call the fire department. I've got it under control. The fire is out. We don't need to wake up the whole neighborhood."

It was too late. The fire station was just down the street, and sirens announced they were already en route.

They discovered his mattress and covers still smoldering in his bathtub. He'd gone to bed smoking and had fallen asleep. At least, this time he hadn't been too inebriated to wake up. I assume death by burning wasn't one of his choices for a suicide attempt.

Before going to bed that night, we had planned an out-of-town trip for later in the morning. It was pointless to try to go back to sleep. We opened the windows to rid the apartment of the smell of smoke, grabbed our bags, and headed out into the darkness. It was time to start thinking about moving once again.



 

Author Notes For those of you who have read my biography from the beginning, you may recognize some of this story which was written when Evan was still alive. For the later readers, you will learn a bit about how my story begins, told in a more humorous way.


Chapter 7
A Race to the Finish

By BethShelby

Chasing a speeding car in pouring rain wasn't one of my most graceful moments in those early married years. At the time, I didn't particularly care how it looked. I just wanted a ride home. After rethinking it, I did have enough pride to be embarrassed for myself as well as for my husband, Evan.

The college I attended was in a nearby town. In those days, we only had one car, so I took a bus for the ten miles to the college. Most days after I arrived at the bus station, I took a local city bus home. One day when I arrived back in the city later than usual, I realized it was almost time for Evan to get off work. I decided to wait and ride home with him.

It was raining, and I had no umbrella. I stood under an awning on the far side of the parking lot and waited. Normally when I saw him, there would be plenty of time to make it to the locked car before he did. However because of the downpour, he came across the parking lot sprinting like he was competing in the Olympics. He jumped into the car and backed out quickly, before I was half away across the parking lot. I made a mad dash, hair streaming, and gesturing wildly; but he didn't see me. Frustrated and soaked to the bone, I slunk back to the awning and waited for a city bus.

Unfortunately, some of his co-workers did see me making a spectacle of myself. The polite thing would have been to offer me a ride and a bit of sympathy, but it didn't happen. I think they were laughing too hard to approach me. Instead, they chose to embarrass my husband the next day.
 
"How long has your wife been chasing cars?" one joker asked. After that day, it wasn't unusual to have one of them ask, "Were you ever able to break your wife from chasing cars?"

His co-workers loved to tease. One day, I called his office and asked to speak to him. Assuming I was his wife, one of the office clowns told me, "He's not here. He just left to go to lunch with his wife."

For a second, I did a double take, and my heart flip-flopped. Then I realized I was being had. My retort was, "Really! The jerk told me he wasn't married." I was learning to give as good as I got, even if it was at my husband's expense. I could imagine them giving him strange looks and wondering if they'd misjudged his quiet demeanor.

The Christmas season of my last year in college found me in panic mode. I was still carrying far more college hours than I should have been. I had two Education courses and a Psychology course, all of which required research papers. I was struggling with a Zoology course, and I still had four paintings to do for an Art courses I was taking. Final exams were approaching. The semester would end on December 18. There was no time for Christmas shopping and not a lot of money for buying presents anyway. I'd never learned to prepare ahead. The last few weeks saw me turn into a zombie from lack of sleep, and an irritable one at that.

Evan did all he could to help, but I was still prone to snap at him for no real reason. At one point, I flung a big teddy bear at him. The teddy bear always rested between the pillows on our bed. Evan must have assumed we had a game going, because he hurled it back at me with strength only a man could possess. I dodged, and the teddy crashed against a window behind me, shattering the glass. Since it was winter, frigid air soon filled the room. We taped a big piece of cardboard over the broken glass for a temporary fix. Temporary with us could last for months.

Somehow I made it until the Christmas break. With my work turned in and the exams behind me, I took a deep breath and tried to regroup for the holidays, but I was exhausted and depressed. The grades wouldn't be posted until January.

We did the necessary Christmas shopping, but our apartment was bare of decorations. I'd always had a real Christmas tree, but this year, there was neither time nor money for one. Two days before Christmas, the tree vendors were closing shop for another year and going home for the holidays. On the way home from work, Evan noticed that someone had tossed out the few unsold trees on a vacant lot. He stopped and picked up the nicest one and brought it home to surprise me.

I was thrilled. We strung popcorn, cut strips of construction paper, and made red and green chains to decorate it. There would be a Christmas after all. On Christmas day, we drove the sixty miles to our parents' homes to celebrate with them. It was a wonderful holiday.

Our tree stayed up until February, and by that time, most of the needles were on the floor beneath it. Classes were in full swing for the spring semester, and I had no time to deal with shedding trees. When it became a source of embarrassment, I shoved it into one of the large walk-in closets, where its few remaining limbs continued to deteriorate until June. As I said before, temporary solutions with us could last for months.

The tree was finally discarded, and we replaced the broken window, when our corporate landlords insisted, just before we moved out the following fall. Since they planned to tear the house down and construct condos, It made no sense to pay for a broken window, but when has there ever been a time whe corporate businesses bothered to make sense?
 

Author Notes For those of you who have read my biography from the start, you may recognize some of this story I wrote after Evan passed away. This earlier version written was with more humor while he was still alive.


Chapter 8
A Rude Awakening

By BethShelby

"Okay, what now?," I asked myself. "Am I ready for the next chapter of this thing called marriage?"

I'd been the newlywed, the college student, the apartment dweller and the somewhat reluctant cook and homemaker. I'd made some dumb mistakes, and I learned a lot in two years. Now, I needed to become a wage earner. Surely I owed it to my long-suffering mate to try to help with expenses.

I had my BA degree with an Art major and Education minor. I had obtained a teaching license with an Art certification. I put out some resumes, but my timing was off. Schools were in the process of phasing out their art and music departments due to budget cuts. To be honest, I was a bit relieved because after practice teaching unruly classes of teenagers, I'd already decided teaching wasn't my calling. Still, I was determined to do something to help bring home the proverbial bacon.

Perhaps I should have chosen more carefully when selecting my major. My next choices might have been to become a doctor or an architect. But that would have meant even more schooling. I'd already stretched our money supply to the limits. I was lucky I'd gotten this far, but I was starting to wonder if having a college degree was any big deal.

At twenty-two, working outside the home would be a new experience for me. I didn't know where to begin. Despite the degree, I was going to have to start at the bottom. Businesses didn't want to hire someone whose employment record was blank. My neighbor across the hall told me about a loan company in need of a clerk typist. I'd not typed since high school, but luckily their hiring standards were lax. I got the job. It meant forty hours a week at minimum wage, plus five hours of time and a half for overtime. It didn't call for a degree, and it was certainly better than nothing.

I soon learned I was in for a rude awakening. For a married lady, I was still pretty naive. Up until this point, I had led a sheltered life. The Christian college which I attended had many students who were preparing for the ministry. My new boss was a sharply dressed businessman who paid little attention to me. His wife, the office manager, had a speech impediment, but her language was filthy and she loved lewd jokes. She would turn any innocent remark into something sexually suggestive. She enjoyed making me uncomfortable with her stories. She cultivated friends who came in to swap dirty jokes.

Dorothy, the other female loan officer, was the abused wife of an alcoholic husband. Her makeup was usually a failed attempt to cover a black eye and numerous bruises which she tried explaining away by saying she'd walked into a door. Grady, the other male employee, did appraisals and repossessions of the furniture, cars or whatever the customer put up for collateral on their loans.

Since we had started our lives together with no credit history, Evan and I were no strangers to loan companies. We had always managed to pay our loans off, despite high interest rates. Now, I realized most of the loan customers were very poor. It wasn't unusual for a man to make a loan for gambling money with no way to pay it off. Often his wife would have her furniture, which she'd worked hard to buy on her meager maid's salary, repossessed. In those days, it was rare for women to own anything in their own name. It was a sad business. I saw many people crying and begging for more time. The warehouse behind our office was filled with household goods and broken dreams. The repossessions were sold off to whoever might be looking for a bargain.

To make matters worse, Grady assumed having a young woman around was fair game and started making passes at me. He was a heavy driinker, and when he became completely inebriated, he'd call me up at home. My rebuffs did nothing to discourage his flirting. How was I supposed to explain that to my husband without him doing something embarrassing which might only make matters worse? I could handle the work but not the people, so when I was offered another job with a small art agency, I handed in my notice. I'd been with the loan company three months.

It turned out, my second job was a bigger mistake than the first. The owner wasn't looking for an artist, as he'd led me to believe. He wanted a bookkeeper and office manager. It didn't take long to realize I was in over my head. I could sit at the front desk, talk to customers, and answer the phone, but I had no idea how to do billing. No one offered to train me. An agency this small, with only two employees plus the owner, couldn't run without a cash flow.

The girl who had worked there before me, had been fired for distracting the owner's cameraman with her flirting. It turned out the cameraman was even more distracted by missing the apple of his eye. He couldn't seem to do anything right with her gone. When the owner realized he'd been a bit hasty about letting her go, he gave in to her pleading and took her back. Once again I had a rude awakening. It was deflating to my fragile ego to be let go after only working a week. As humilating as it was, I was relieved of the enormous pressure of being expected to do something which I wasn't qualified to do.

"Don't worry about it," Evan said. "You don't have to work. I make enough to support us. Stay home for a while and enjoy it. You deserve a rest."

I appreciated the thought, but I wasn't ready to give up so easily. My ego was bruised, but I couldn't allow my self-esteem to suffer permanent damage.

As it turned out, something else was in the works for us. I just wasn't aware of it at the time.

 

Author Notes wd Ct 900


Chapter 9
A Slice of American Pie

By BethShelby

From the start of our marriage when visiting Evan's parents, his mother always asked the same question. "When are you all planning to start your family?" The question was never "Are you" but "When are you..." His sister and sister-in-law must have been getting the same message, because both complied and produced babies born only one day apart the year after I graduated from college. 
 
For us, the question hung loosely in the air. We talked about it, and neither of us could decide if we even wanted children. As an only child, I had never been around babies. As long as I was in college, we had an excuse, but college was behind me, and the job field didn't look too promising.

We never made the decision. We had just became increasingly less cautious, and nature decided for us. Within the week after my second job ended, I suspected I might be pregnant. A visit to the doctor confirmed my suspicions. We didn't really want to bring a new life into an apartment with characters living below who might possibly start another fire. It was time to start looking for a house.

One thing turned out to be a blessing. As soon as my in-laws learned I was pregnant, they moved back into their original house. This released the property which Evan had purchased for them, ihoping they could eventually buy it. We went over and repainted and did a bit of modernizing. We were able to sell it and earn a small profit. At last, those yearly mortgage payments were behind us.

Houses were cheap in those days. We were able to find, an almost new, three bedroom, one bath home in a nice neighborhood for $12,500. The lot was nearly an acre. No down payment was required and all we had to pay were the closing costs.

The money we got from the sale of the home his parents had lived in went toward furniture. So far, the only appliance we owned was the washing machine which had overflowed causing the plaster to fall from the ceiling in the downstairs apartment. We also had the small television which had distracted me to the point I didn't realize the washing machine was overflowing.

We combed the want ads looking for nice used furniture. We soon owned a 3-piece mahogany bedroom set, a gold colored chaise lounge, and walnut dining-room furniture. Style and color didn't matter so long as we filled the empty rooms. From a bargain furniture store, we purchased an inexpensive sofa, chair, coffee table and a yellow Formica dinette set. The new house came with a gas stove and our brother-in-law got us a deal on a small refrigerator from the B.F.Goodrich store he managed. For the time being, a bedroom and den remained bare.

The following week after giving notice we be moving from the apartment, we learned all the tenants would be leaving because the house had been sold. It would be torn down in order to build high rise apartments. I couldn't help being sad to see the lovely old Victorian which held special memories for us destroyed in the name of progress.

We moved in October of 1959. Our baby wasn't due until February so we decided to wait until nearer the date to buy baby furniture.

It was exciting to be in a new house. It had a large partially-fenced backyard filled with trees. The front was landscaped with Crepe Myrtle, roses, and gardenias.It also had a carport and detatched workshop and laundry area.
 
During the following months, I got to experience staying while pregnant. My maternal instincts kicked in. Mom loaned me a sewing machine, and I taught myself how to sew. I made baby clothes, maternity dresses and curtains for the windows. I became acquainted with the nextdoor neighbors and made monthly visits to my obstetrician.

One of my favorite pastimes was studying a prenatal care book and trying to visualize the various stages of fetal development. I was thrilled when I was far enough long to realize our baby had passed the tadpole stage and was starting to look human. Another pastime was trying to think of a name for the baby which Evan and I could agree on. He didn't want a junior if it was a boy. He couldn't come up with any names he liked, but he kept his rights of veto power.

"How about Kenneth, if it's a boy,?" I asked. 

"No way, I've got a cousin named Kenneth."

"Well, so what's wrong with that? Do you like John or William?"

"No way, I've got cousins with those names too."

"What about Patricia or Jenifer if it's a girl? "

"No, there's got to be better names than those."

"Well, forget about the names. Can we get a puppy?. Your mom said we could have one of Sandy's puppies." Surely, Evan couldn't be quite so picky about naming a dog.

The following weekend, we became dog owners. I knew about as much about housebreaking a dog as I did about babies. When dark water-stains began to appear on the hardwood floors, Evan decided to finish fencing the yard. With a Cocker Spaniel mother and Heinz 57 father, Dusty looked nothing like his parents. When we took him to the park, people would say "Oh, what a beautiful Weimaraner." We just smiled and looked proud. We'd never even heard of a Weimaraner, but we fingured it must be something special.

It didn't take much to make us happy. Ours wasn't a life of luxury, by any means, but with a new house and a baby on the way, it seemed we were living the American Dream. Fate had some hard lessons in store for us, but for the moment, we were content.


Chapter 10
Into Every Life Some Rain Must Fall

By BethShelby

Death was no stranger to us by our third year into marriage. Since Evan and I had been married, I'd lost both of my paternal grandparents. 

When Grandma died, she was the first person I'd lost who was really close. She was seventy-three and had suffered a stroke two years earlier. Grandpa, who was ten years older, lived to be eighty-five and succumbed to pneumonia after breaking a hip. I grieved for them, because as a child I practically lived at their house. Still, I was somewhat prepared, because they were older and not in good health. Evan never knew any of his grandparents, but several aunts and uncles died during those first years.

Shortly after we moved into our new house, a salesman came by and talked us into buying cemetery lots in a beautifully landscaped garden setting. The bronze markers all lay flat against the ground and flowers bloom year round. It sounded idyllic compared to some of the country graveyards we'd visited recently, and we'd not yet learned to say "no" to high-pressure sales tactics. After he left, we had byer's remorse. We were young, and with a baby on the way, the $40 extra per month could be put to better use. We begged to be released from the sale, but the contract seemed ironclad.

My pregnancy went smoothly. I only had one episode of morning sickness, which I think was really stomach flu. My doctor told me he didn't want me gaining over twenty pounds, so I stayed on a low-calorie diet the whole nine months. My body didn't understand such restrictions, and neither did I.

"Darn it. I thought I was going to be allowed to eat for two," I complained. "Being pregnant isn't fun. I don't even get to indulge in any weird cravings."

When the baby was a little over a week late, the nesting instinct I'd heard women get, happened. I had a sudden burst of energy, and I went on a housecleaning binge. At three a.m. the next morning, I lost the mucus plug and started having contractions. Not knowing any better, we thought we might not make it to the hospital on time. Boy, were we wrong. Many hours of pain lay ahead.

I'd never been around anyone in labor, but I was determined not to scream like women did on the TV shows. The nurse gave me a hand-held contraption to breathe into when the pains got hard. I used it constantly until my head felt like a tilt-a-whirl, and I vomited green gall into a bedpan. Still I didn't scream, but I did groan a lot. Evan stood by me holding my hand and looking worried. You'd have thought every contraction was grinding his gut instead of mine. About five that evening, our little girl was born. She weighed 8'2" and seemed perfect in every way. We named her Susan Renee, since Evan couldn't remember a single cousin with those names. Two days later, we took her home.

We were like kids with a new toy. Life was good in spite of the cloth diapers and lack of a clothes dryer. We had a floor furnace, and it was February, so drying diapers was no big problem. She developed normally and seldom cried. When we brought her in for her checkup, our pediatrician declared her to be a healthy baby.

At her two-month checkup, Dr. Miller said she was in perfect health and told me it was time to start her DPT vaccinations. "Sometimes this shot makes them a little irritable, or sleepy," he warned. "She may even run a low grade temperature. If she does, give her a little infant Tylenol. The directions are on the bottle. We'll see you again in a month. Stop by the front desk and get an appointment."

On the way home, Susan managed to smile and even laugh out loud a few times. I had hoped there would be no symptoms, but two hours after the injection, she started to fret. She ran a fever during the night, but slept most of the day. When she awoke, she screamed and refused to take any nourishment. I called the doctor several times, and he assured me it was normal. That night she began screaming and bending her body backwards. We insisted the doctor see her, so he met us at the clinic.

After checking her, Dr. Miller said, "This seems more serious than I thought. We need to admit her to the hospital." I stayed by her side all night, as she alternated between long naps and screaming fits. The next day, the doctor told me they needed to do a spinal tap. When they took her away, I could still hear her screams. When they brought her back to the room, she was sleeping. She had a tube running from her nose and a drip was attached to her tiny arm. The doctor told me he had sedated her.

Mom and Dad drove the sixty miles to be with us that night. Evan and Dad stayed at the hospital so I could go home and rest. Susan slept through the night. The next morning, I went back to the hospital early, after having spent a restless night. She lay still and unmoving. I assumed she was still sedated. Evan was by her side when suddenly she stopped breathing. He raced down the hall and grabbed a nurse. The monitor had already alerted the staff that she was in trouble. Almost immediately a code was called, and the room filled with nurses and aides. They wheeled in a crash cart and started working on her.

I stood watching in muted disbelief as the paddles were put on her chest and over and over again as they tried to resuscitate her. Finally, they gave up and called the time of death. Evan put his arms around me and sobbed. We held each other, but I couldn't cry. It was like I was transported to another dimension where everything moved in slow-motion. I knew I just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other and do what had to be done. The doctor came in and told us he'd never expected this to happen, and he was sorry he hadn't been there.

In a trance-like state, I went through the motions of making the necessary phone calls. Then, Evan and I went to the funeral home to make arrangements. People came to comfort us, and I acknowledged them in a daze. For me, it was surreal. I never once was able to cry in public. I'm sure people thought me unfeeling. I realized I don't deal with grief in a normal way. When Evan and I were alone, I could let my guard down and express my grief. In public, I turned to stone. I realized then, I'd reacted the same when my grandparents died.

We had the funeral two days later. We used one of the four cemetery lots, for which we'd tried to cancel the contract. After the autopsy, Susan's final diagnosis was encephalitis, which we would later learn, is present in children who die or suffer brain damage from the whooping cough portion of the vaccine. Even with that dignosis, the doctor refused to admit the vaccine caused her death.

With the funeral over, we decided to go out of town for a few days to grieve in private. In the meantime, friends came to our home and dismantled the nursery. They felt having her bed there would be to painful for us.

On the Dolphin Island, Alabama beach, we walked on the sand dunes, talked and cried in each other's arms. We knew then we wanted more children. We were young. We had to get past this and move on. This open wound would heal, and in time, only a scar would remain. When we left to go back home, I was pregnant again. It would be a while before I realized it.

Sometimes, such an experience can destroy a marriage. In our case, I believe it drew us closer. Another pregnancy would give us new reason to hope for a better tomorrow. We would never forget Susan, but our season of grief wouldn't last forever.
 

Author Notes Sorry, I wasn't able to get this story upbeat. Sometimes life deals hard blows.


Chapter 11
An Awkward Situation

By BethShelby

The week after Susan's funeral, Evan and I spent some time on a practically deserted Island in the Gulf. We walked the sand dunes and grieved our loss, comforting each other and vowing to have another child as soon as possible. Possible would be sooner than either of us expected.

Returning to Jackson, I found an ad in our local paper for a commercial artist. I arranged an interview and got the job. It was with a large glass company located a few miles out from the city.

The art department was in a small building away from the executive offices. It was composed of an office, an art room, a darkroom, and a restroom. The office walls were lined with shelves containing printed soda bottles, jelly glasses, and many other types of printed glass. The art room was equipped with two large drawing tables, file cabinets, and art supply cabinets. Another small building near the art department housed a silk screen department, and still another larger building had an engineering and die-making department.

The head of the art department was the only other artist. Floyd had worked there for around twenty years. He was in his late fifties, about 6' 2" with graying hair, glasses, and an engaging smile. He was kind and sympathetic upon learning I'd just lost my first child. I'd never done darkroom work before, so the mixing of chemicals and use of enlargers and cameras required some hands on training. Floyd had always had a male artist working with him before, so working with a girl was a new experience for him. I guess the head of the personal department failed to considered the fact that putting a female in such a private situation with only one man wasn't a smart idea.

Floyd was older than my father, and it never occured to me that he might want to be more than a mentor and friend. He loved to talk and was a good listener, when I had things to share. One thing he revealed was that he'd had problems with alcohol, but he indicated he'd gotten it under control. He didn't drink at work, so I didn't give it much thought. Twice a day, he'd go into the break room, make coffee, and call me over to join him. An engineer, named Brad, usually joined us as well. To me, Floyd seemed like an understanding uncle or surrogate father figure.

After a month on the job, I realized the desire Evan and I had for another baby was coming true. I was pregnant again. We were thrilled, but we decided to let it be our secret until it started to become obvious. I was nearly six months along, when I let the company know I would be leaving to have a baby. Management said they had gotten good reports on my work and wanted me to return to my job as soon as possible after the baby came. Although I bearly knew them, the girls in the main office surprised me with a baby shower.

A few days before Christmas, Floyd brought a bottle of vodka to work. Brad, who blushed easily, was over sharing a drink with Floyd. I didn't drink, but I did have a tiny bit of vodka in my coke. Suddenly Floyd got up and walked around the desk to me and said, "Holidays are a time of friendship and goodwill. I need a Christmas kiss." He bent down and proceeded to plant a lingering kiss on my lips. At first, I thought he was clowning around just to embarrass Brad.

"Whoa! Where did that come from?" I gasped. "That's not a friendly Christmas kiss. That was way too intimate." I pulled away in surprise.

Brad's face was crimson. He said, "On that note, I think it's time for me to go. That was more than I needed to see." My own face was burning as well. It was then that I realized this was not Floyd's first drink of the morning. Later, that day, he said, "I know I'm too old for this, but I've fallen in love with you. I can't help myself."

"That's just crazy," I told him. "I think of you as a friend, but that's all. We're both married, and I love my husband. If it's going to be like that, you know I won't be able to come back to work here after the baby comes."

From that day on, I was uncomfortable around Floyd. I was twenty-two at the time and was starting to look as if I'd swallowed a pumpkin. Surely a pregnant lady couldn't be attractive to an old man. Old is relative. Now the late fifties seems like the perfect age. Floyd wasn't old, but to someone not long out of high school, he was nursing home material. In a month, I would be going on maternity leave. This man was married, with grandchildren. It was more than just an awkward situation.

In my sheltered younger days, I'd grown up in a dry county and practically a dry state. Those who had a taste for strong drink had to make an effort to get it. I had some uncles who knew where to find it, but I seldom saw them. I wasn't aware of how an alcholic's common sense and inhibitions could go out the window. I should have gotten a clue from some of the experiences I'd had at our first apartments, but apparently, I was a slow learner.

Floyd continued to distress me with his declarations of love. It was easy to tell that he'd been drinking most mornings, before arriving at work. Not sure of his reaction, I hesitated about telling Evan. What if he thought I'd led this man on? He had enough problems at his work, I needed to handle my own problems like a big girl.

For the time being, I decided it was wise not to mention Floyd's actions to my husbend. Truthfully, I didn't have a clue how to handle the situalion without making a fool of myself. I didn't want to hurt Floyd's feelings, since he'd been so kind and understanding about my loss. I assumed it had to be the liquor talking. Who, in their right mind, would fall for someone about to give birth?

The baby wasn't due until February, but I found an excuse to take my maternity leave earlier than I'd originally planned. Things became worse because Floyd was drinking constantly. He'd even told his wife that he'd fallen in love with me. Almost every day, he would call me at home, and with slurred speech, tell me how much I meant to him.

At first, I tried reasoning with him, but when that didn't work, I would hang up as soon as I realized who was calling. When the telephone rang, my heart would go into panic mode. Eventually I started keeping the phone off the hook. He even called on weekends and at night when Evan was home.

In the end, I had no choice but to tell Evan what was going on. It felt like I was confessing a sin I hadn't committed. Evan wasn't happy, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt as to what contribution I might have made to cause this man to become obsessed with me. Since Floyd was the second coworker who had called me at home when he was intoxicated, I wondered if all working women had to deal with this kind of problem. Maybe I didn't belong in the city.

Was I too naive to know how to deal with men? Was it even possible for a young married woman to have male friends without them getting wrong ideas? I told the company that I wouldn't be returning after the baby came. Hanging up as soon as I heard Floyd's voice on the phone helped. Maybe he got help with his drinking problem.The phone calls gradually tapered off and eventually stopped. I have a feeling, Floyd's next assistant wasn't female.

Carol was born on the 27th of February. Having lost Susan, I was reluctant to leave my baby with anyone. Evan and I were overly cautious about everything and were always subconsciously preparing for the worst. We told the doctor she would not be getting the DPT injections, and he agreed. When she was two months old, I found another job and a sweet older lady to take care of our daughter while I worked. She wanted to be called "Big Mamma,"and she treated my baby like she was her own grandchild.

I vowed to be more cautious about making friends when it came to male coworkers. It was a time when women had little recourse other than being vigilant and trying to stop things before they started. I was slowly learning a few facts about the working world. Young women were vulnerable. It was like a jungle where a woman could easily become the prey.

Time would tell. I'm glad I didn't realize, at that point, how much more I would still have to learn.

Author Notes This is an ongoing story of my early marriage years and will become part of the book, Chasing the Elusive Dream, which is in my portfolio.


Chapter 12
Back to the Drawing Board

By BethShelby

There seemed to be no end to my frustrating experiences in the world of the wage earner. I enjoyed the work I did as an artist for the glass company, and it was disappointing to have to give it up after only eight months, due to the unwanted advances by my coworker.

One of the local TV stations had placed an ad for an artist, without actually having an opening available. When the personnel director interviewed me, he was impressed that I had a degree in art, but he told me the position was still in the planning stage. He asked if I'd be willing to work evenings as a switchboard operator, until he could make room for me in the art department. In the meantime, he could give me artwork, which I could do at home during the day.

I thought that might work for a while because it meant I'd be with my baby during the day and would work from six to eleven in the evenings. Evan could be with Carol in the evenings, and we wouldn't need to find a sitter. I could get acquainted with the type of art a television station required and would be paid for it on a free lance basis.

The switchboard, in 1961, was something you only see in museums these days. Once I got accustomed to plugging the cords into the various holes, the job was easy. Not many calls came into the station at night, but those, which did, were often strange and annoying. They went something like this:

"Ma'am, I got the TV Guide in the newspaper here, and it says "Barney Miller" is supposed to be playing. It ain't on. There's that idiot governor talking, and he ain't saying a thing that makes a lick o' sense. I want to know why "Barney Miller's not on."

"I'm sorry. I don't have anything to do with the scheduling. The program was probably preempted for the governor."

"Well, it ain't right. Ya'll shouldn't print stuff in the paper if ya'll are gonna' change it. I work hard all week, and I need be able to relax and watch what I wan'ta watch. Ya'll need to let somebody there know that people ain't gonna to stand for ya'll changing stuff. I'll start watching Channel 9 if this keeps up."

"Well, we appreciate your call. I'll leave a message for the scheduling department."
___

"Hello Operator, Put me on with the line with Governor Barnett."

"I'm sorry. The governor has already left the station."

"I know damn well he hasn't left the station. I'm listening to him talk on TV right now. "

"Well sir, that was pre-recorded earlier in the day."

"I don't believe you. If you lie to me, I'll report you. You connect me right now or I'm coming down to the station and talk to him personally. He needs to hear what I got to say."

Some evenings, I went home very frustrated from having to deal with nut cases like these. Evan was becoming dissatisfied with me not being home when he was there. After a few months without hearing anything further about the upcoming job in the art department, I began checking want ads again. There was an ad for a layout artist with State Times, a newspaper, which, for the last seven years, had competed for readership with the more established paper.

I applied and was offered the job. When I let the station know I'd be leaving, I was told I could start in the art department right away, if I agreed to stay. Since it appeared I would be able to do what I'd originally hoped to do, I agreed. I called the State Times to tell them I wouldn't be able to take the layout job after all.
 
The following day, the personnel director took me to an art store downtown and we purchased the supplies I would need. Afterward he took me back to the station and introduced me to the artist with whom I would be working. It was then I realized I hadn't been given all the facts.

The lady artist had a severely mentally handicapped five-year-old son that she brought to work with her each day. He had no use of his body and could only slobber and make high-pitched screeming sounds. I couldn't help but admire her courage for being able to deal with a child in this condition. Still, the situation wasn't one which I was convinced I could handle.

The mother, apprently starved for an adult audience, chatted non-stop without noticing she left me no openings to respond to anything she said. For someone who needed to concentrate on learning the skills required for television art, it was an almost impossible task. After an hour or so, my head was pounding, and I felt as though I was losing my mind. I left for lunch and sat in my car and cried. The situation was more than I could handle. I hated myself for giving up withour giving it more time, but I simply couldn't force myself to return to work.

I called the newspaper back and learned the job was still open. It was embarrassing to have to make the calls, both to the station and to the paper. I felt like a immature child who didn't know what she wanted. My career as a television artist ended almost before it began.

The next job would have its own set of challenges of an entirely different kind.

 

Author Notes This is a personal essay rather than creative fiction.


Chapter 13
Surprise! Surprise!

By BethShelby

"She is precious. I love babies. Oh, I do hope you'll let me keep her. She would be just like my own grandchild."

Those were welcome words from the kind-looking gray-haired lady who I was interviewing as a potential baby-sitter for my eight-month old daughter. Mrs. Burns' brick home was comfortably furnished and orderly. Her neighborhood was in a neatly kept older section of the city. She was already keeping her grandson, who was about Carol's age. When she held out her arms, Carol went to her willingly. It seemed like the perfect solution. My instincts were right, and she turned out to be a great choice during the time I worked for the newspaper.

My first day on the job, I was surprised to find so many young people working there. Many of the men were ad salesmen. There must have been twenty or thirty girls my age or younger, doing various jobs.

One girl, named Frances, whispered, "Watch out for Mr. Scott. He loves to sneak up behind us and pinch our bottoms."

Okay, at least this time, I'd been forewarned about the proverbial 'wolf in sheep's clothing'. I'd make sure to look over my shoulder. Mr. Scott was the owner. He had a huge plush office and a secretary who looked as though butt pinching wasn't something she really minded. She had a nicely rounded bottom and wore short, tight skirts to show it off.

My art table was in a large room with six other girls, who were also part of the layout staff. Most of the work involved cutting line art from clip books and deciding the best placement on the page for the art, the type, and other elements. Sometimes original art was used, depending on what the customer was willing to pay. We were required to make proofs and get customer approval before the ads ran. The work wasn't hard, but it was stressful, because everything had to be completed in time to meet the press deadlines.

In school, my major had been fine art rather than commercial, so each job I'd had, no matter how short lived, was a new learning experience. This one went along great for several months, until, to everyone's surprise, we were all called up front for a meeting.

"I know this will shock most of you," Mr. Scott told us. "Since we've been on the scene, we've operated in the red. For seven years, we could write off our losses on income taxes. Uncle Sam won't let us continue to do that. We've had a good run, but today The State Times will issue its final edition. All of you will be given two weeks severance pay and any vacation time you may have coming. It's been fun, and I'm sorry it has to end. If anyone needs references, or if I can help you in any way, let me know."

Most of the faces around me held expressions of shocked disbelief. I thought briefly about the television job I'd given up. In the back of my mind, I remembered the station manager warning me when I gave notice that the newspaper was on its last leg. I'd taken a chance and made another bad decision, or maybe not. I might have gone insane by now, if I'd stayed in that madhouse. I wondered where I go from here.

Where I went was back home. Mrs. Burns seemed heartbroken to lose Carol. During the next few months, I picked up some freelance artwork to do at home, and for a six-week stretch, I took a temporary job putting a phone directory together. Then suddenly, Carol became fretful and started running a temperature.

Overly alarmed since we'd lost our first child, we rushed her in to the clinic, and she was diagnosed with red measles. The vaccine against this dreaded childhood disease was at least a year away from development. Carol was miserable. Evan and I took turns walking the floor with her at night, as she fretted and cried. Thankfully, she recovered with no lasting side effects. 

We had not talked about having another child, but somewhere along the way, Evan and I became careless. My obstetrician confirmed I was pregnant once again. "Sounds like the perfect excuse to stay home, and let me be the sole breadwinner," my husband told me. "I think we can afford it for a while."

After giving it some thought, I was happy to stay home with Carol. I wasn't upset about the pregnancy either. I'd been an only child, and I had hated not having a sibling. Carol would have a brother or sister near her age, so this was a good thing. I enjoyed the next few months at home. Carol was at a cute age. She was toddling and starting to talk. The baby would be due around Christmas. There would be time to think about whether or not I wanted to go back to work again in the spring.

I tried to prepare Carol for the new family addition. She was talking pretty well by this time, and she seemed to understand.

"What would you like us to have, Carol? A baby brother, or a baby sister?"

"Bro 'n sisser."

"No, which one? A boy or a girl?

"Gull 'n boy." I want gull 'n boy."

In the middle of November when I went in for my checkup, and my regular doctor was out. I was disappointed by having to be examined by a doctor I didn't know. When he listened to my stomach, he said. "Hmm..., there is something going on here. I think we need to do an X-ray to see if we can confirm, what I suspect."

"What's wrong? Is something wrong with my baby?"

"Well, it's possible, we may be talking babies. Let's look at an x-ray and see."

This was years before ultrasound, and often low-exposure x-rays were used in the last months before delivery.

When the x-ray confirmed his suspicion, I spaced out. It's a wonder, I survived to get back home. I couldn't believe I was having twins. Carol would only be twenty-two months old when they were due. I went through three red lights and swerved all over the road. I could hardly wait to get home and call Evan.

"Guess what?" I shouted into the phone. "We're having twins!"

"Are you serious? You're joking, aren't you? How are we going to handle three babies?"

"Very carefully."

Earlier in the year, Evan's sister had given birth to twin preemies. Born at seven months, they weighed only two pounds. Only one of them survived. Because of her experience, we were concerned, but my babies went full term. I was having trouble getting out of a chair, and was waddling like a duck.

The doctor put the delivery date at December 26, but he said twins usually come a little early. My greatest desire was to hurry and deliver these babies and be back home before Christmas. I was convinced if I gained another pound I might spontaneously combust. On the sixteenth of December, I spent most of the day jogging circles around our living room. I figured these kids had been in the oven long enough to be well done. One side of my abdomen seemed to be in constant motion while the other side barely moved.

On December 17th, Carol got her wish for both a boy and a girl. Christi weighed 6 lbs, 9 ozs and Donald weighted 6 lbs, 12 ozs. Don won the race by six minutes. I could tell right away, he had been the active one. Christi just wanted to sleep. We were happy. Life would never be the same again. We had no clue about what interesting times we would experience while raising our growing family.

Author Notes The picture is of Carol when she first started walking.
If parts of this seems incomplete,it is because it is part of larger book and will be put in as a chapter when this is no longer active.


Chapter 14
Battling the Baby Blues

By BethShelby

When I was in my mid-twenties another lifetime ago, I found myself imprisoned in my own home by virtue of the fact that I had given birth to twins when I already had a child less than two. Suddenly, two hands were no longer enough, and trying to deal with a toddler and twin infants was overwhelming, to put it mildly.

The world has progressed a long way from the days when all mothers had to choose from were two types of cloth diapers; a gauze layered type and a waffled cotton. I owned dozens of these white flags, and believe me, many days, I felt like flying one. With three babies sporting them at one time, the washing machine ran constantly. A drier was a luxury beyond our limited budget, and the cold, rainy winter days were something I don't care to recall.

The twins learned at a tender age if one needed a quick change the best way to get it was to do it yourself. A bare bottom was preferable to a wet one. Removing a diaper from one’s own bottom was a bit tricky since there were open diaper pins to deal with. This was the pre-velcro days. Notwithstanding, in no time at all, both of my talented offspring had become adept at removing the offensive scrap of cloth. It was a trifle embarrassing to usher in guests to admire my little family only to find them sporting the bottoms to their birthday suits.

During those early months, I stayed home because I was still naive enough to believe I had some wonderful ideas on child rearing. Besides, I couldn't quite figure out what to do with them otherwise. Slowly, I adjusted to the situation in which I found myself.

I was pleased to discover, for a while at least, the babies were capable of entertaining themselves with each other as play things. Of course, it was necessary for me to disentangle their fingers from the hair of their twin when the wails became unbearable,  It was also neccessary that I empty a jar of baby food into their waiting mouths at regular intervals. Actually, it isn't much harder to feed two than one, because while one is swallowing, spitting, or doing whatever else they might elect to do, you merely spoon a mouthful into the other baby. Jars are emptied much faster this way with far less leftovers.

Bottles were a little harder, literally. Because back then, most of them were made of glass. You give two babies in the same playpen matching glass bottles, and you have the recipe for disaster. Babies are born suspicious they are somehow being cheated, and the milk in their sibling’s bottle must taste sweeter. Glass bottles can be held in such a way as to become very effective clubs, enabling the conquering twin to take by force the bottle which holds the tastier beverage.

Still, we got through that stage without anyone being permanently maimed, and I actually had a little quality time left over for the toddler who seemed pleased at being dubbed "Mom’s little helper." (Now, unfortunately, she tells me she needs therapy because of being thrust into such a demanding roll at the tender age of twenty-two months.)

There is a limit to how much time babies will allow themselves to be confined in an enclosure of any kind, and that day arrived all too soon. The boy twin was first to discover that by standing on the face of his sister, he could manage to pull up on the side of the playpen and hoist one leg over. From that day on, my life went downhill.

Free at last, they made quick work of the lovely ceramic pieces which I had so painstakingly fashioned during my months of pregnancy. I remember the day I discovered my porcelain kissing-angels clutched in the chubby fists of my son. When I yelled "No!", he clashed them together like cymbals, sending broken wings and heads in every direction. Yes, I had put them out of reach, or so I thought. This child was preparing for a career at the top and was quite capable of finding plenty of objects that would support his weight on the way up.

Next, the terrible twosome invaded my kitchen cabinets. Molasses and flour were favorites. These made an especially intriguing combination when poured generously upon the living room sofa.

Regular trips to the emergency room and frantic phone calls to the pediatrician weren't at all unusual. On one occasion, they teamed up to climb onto the aquarium stand and overbalance it They were pinned to the floor, while ten gallons of water, broken glass and many jumping fish cascaded over their trembling bodies.

Don, the more active and accident prone half of the twosome, got so many lumps on his head from falls and objects he caused to fall that these occurrences ceased to be a reason for serious concern. He seemed to thrive nicely with half-inch high lumps on some portion of his head. Force feeding him bread, which seemed to be the doctors preferred method for removing pins, buttons, tacks and other foreign objects, became a standard part of his daily cuisine. The day the two of them fed each other toadstools growing by the side of the wading pool was a bit more unnerving. That was the day I learned druggists carry a product specifically designed to bring up substances recently swallowed. Another item was added to my already overstocked medicine chest.

In the long run, daycare proved to be a viable solution. I never went back to being a stay-at-home mom. My family seemed to appreciate my attention more when I was with them less, and I certainly enjoyed my time with them better when I wasn't so frustrated I felt like stringing them up. I didn't see any harmful side effects developing at the time. Their behavior appeared to improve with exposure to different people and situations.

Maybe it's a cop-out and I should feel guilty for my decision to work, but I have to admit, I have no regrets. To those of my offspring who think perhaps they suffered from lack of full-time mothering, I can only say, don't judge me till you've walked a mile in my moccasins. At least, you're still around to complain.

 

Author Notes If this seems like a different tone from others in this series, it is because I wrote this story earlier than the other. I first posted it in 2009. but it seems to fit here so I'm going to use the certificate that allows it to be resurrected. The twins are about a year old in the picture.


Chapter 15
The Help

By BethShelby

Although it might appear I went back to work in 1965 for purely selfish reasons, such was not the case. I will admit escaping 24-hour-a-day toddler care was a bonus, but there were other considerations. The economy had suffered a major setback. The oil company, where my husband was employed as a draftsman, was in crisis. The drafting department employees were warned some of them would be leaving. With three children and a mortgage, we couldn't afford to lose an income.

From the beginning, Evan had a personality conflict with his immediate supervisor. My husband is a conscientious worker, but the sensitive side of his nature demands respect. His supervisor ran the department with the tact and temperament of a drill sergeant. His blunt and unrelenting criticism of the employees under him did little to make anyone feel secure. Since Evan had worked in the drafting department less time than most of the others, he was convinced the cutback would be used as an excuse let him go. I needed to find a job fast.

The employment ads offered nothing in the field of art. The only thing, which looked interesting, was an ad for a proofreader in one of the larger printing companies. I knew nothing about proofreading, but the back of the dictionary had a section on proofreading marks. I studied them and went in for an interview. I was given a galley proof to read and mark corrections. I did it with the expertise of an experienced proofreader and was hired on the spot. The next step was getting childcare for my three toddlers.

"I have the perfect solution for you," Lou Ellen, the office manager, told me. "My girls are old enough to stay by themselves. I'm going to have to let my maid go. She'll need a job. What if I send her to you?"

"A maid? I can't afford a maid. How much are you paying her?"

"Eighteen dollars a week. She is great with kids, does all my housework, and even prepares meals."

I was shocked. I'd never had household help, and I wasn't sure I wanted a stranger in my house, but it certainly sounded like an option. It would be better not having to drag the children out on frosty mornings.

"Sure, we'll give it a try and see how it works out," I told Lou Ellen.

This was Jackson, Mississippi. The time period and location was the same as the setting for the book, "The Help." One inaccuracy I've found in the book is that those maids were paid $40 per week. I find that hard to believe because the maids I came to know seemed content with half that much. Minimum wage was a dollar an hour. Maid service came under a different category, and minimum wage laws didn't apply.

Evan and I lived through the racial unrest of the sixties, and although injustices done in the name of maintaining traditional Southern values was all around us, we had our own problems and scarcely noticed what was taking place. Since our wedding, we'd not had any dealings with other races. Poverty and lack of education in most of the black community kept the races separated.

Lou Ellen's maid worked for us only a couple of weeks. She'd been offered another job paying a little more, but she had a friend who needed a job. The next week Mamie came. She was about my age and the children liked her immediately. Mamie was shy, and although I tried talking to her as I would a friend, we never seemed to get past the employer/employee stage in our relationship. She did whatever I asked, and things seemed to be working smoothly. It was great having a clean house when we came home from work.

At the printing company, when I revealed that I'd worked as an artist, I was assigned their artwork in addition to proofreading. The company was using an ad agency, but they were more than happy to turn the art and design work over to me.

I'd not been with the company but a couple of months when it was sold to another party. Changes were in the works. The new owners reorganized and over half the work force was dismissed. My fate hung in the balance. I was told to keep working, and they'd let me know when a final decision was made concerning my continued employment.

The company changed names and moved to a smaller location. I was assigned to do my work in the stripping department. There, I was trained in pre-press preparation. Now in addition to my earlier responsibilities, I worked in the darkroom stripping negatives into position on orange masking paper, and burning them onto aluminum offset plates. I learned every phase of the printing business, but was still labeled artist and proofreader. Since I was now proficient in many skills, I was able to keep my job.

In spite of his concerns, Evan kept his job as well, while many of his coworkers were left to find other employment. Just when everything seems to be going too smoothly, something is likely to change.

Mamie had continued to work for me for two years, and I had no complaints, Then one day, I came home and found Mamie in tears.

"Ms. Shelby, I can't works fo' you no mo'. Yo' son, he call me sumpin' what ain't my name."

"Mamie, what did he call you?"

"I ain't saying it. But I can't works here no more. It be sumpin' what ain't my name."

"Mamie, I'm so sorry. I'll get him to apologize, but I have to know what he called you. We don't use the "N" word around here. Surely it wasn't that. Can't you tell me?"

"No'm, I can't say it. It be sumpin' bad. You needs to get you a new maid. I ain't gonna be comin' back."

No amount of persuading would change her mind. Don was three. When I asked him, what he said to her, I got nowhere.

"What did you call her?" I pleaded. "I need to know. You've hurt her feelings."

"Nothin'" and "I don't know," was the most I could get from my son. I asked Carol who was almost five. "I didn't hear him call her anything," my daughter told me. "but I did see her shaking a sheet in his face and yelling. She said 'you thank you be white. This is white. You ain't white.'"

I never found out what was so objectionable. I could only assume he must have called her "black." That didn't seem so horrible, because it was time when the phrase, "Black is beautiful" was being used to refer the negro race. If he included the "N" word, it is possible he'd picked up from one of the kids in the neighborhood or even my dad. Dad was the Archie Bunker type who was prejudiced against all races. He was perfectly capable of using any derogatory term in his vocabulary.

I was disappointed to lose Mamie, but having a maid with the children had worked well, so I hired a new maid. Mary was a student at a nearby college. She was educated and more self-assured than Mamie had been. Mary and I did get to be friends, and we often got into interesting discussions about college courses, social issues or religion. The only problem was Mary wasn't dependable. Too many days, she called at the last minute to say something had come up, or she wasn't feeling well. I'd started using a daycare for times when Mary couldn't be there. Eventually, I ended up using them entirely. My days of dealing with 'the help' had come to an end.

As time would tell, the daycare too, had its drawbacks.
 

Author Notes This is the continuing story of my life during the sixties.
It follows "Battling the Baby Blues." The picture shows twins at ages three and Carol at five. This story starts when the were a couple of years younger.


Chapter 16
Who's the Teacher Here?

By BethShelby

To say that Evan and I were unprepared to be parents was an understatement. As an only child growing up among adults, I knew absolutely nothing about children. Evan was the oldest boy and a middle child with four siblings, but he was grown when his baby sister came along. We had never discussed having children and weren't sure parenting was for us until we were faced with the fact  one was on the way.

After losing our first baby to the DPT injection, we knew we could make babies. and having another one became a number one priority. By the time we had three, our fear of parenting had dissipated, but the learning experience was far from over.

It's too bad kids don't come into the world with individual instruction books dealing with the task of turning them into functional beings. Child rearing is a tricky undertaking, and sometimes the parents have as much to learn as their offspring. Every child is different and bent on going off in his or her own unique direction. Other than their last name, none of the four children we raised seemed to have much in common. In the sixties, there were only three of them. Ten years later, we would add the fourth.

The last child, Connie, would be the most challenging of all. This was particularly true as she approached her teen years. By the time she came along you would think we would had mastered the art of child rearing. Not so. About all we had learned was to try to take one day at a time and not be shocked by anything. Since Connie's birth was ten years in the future, I'll have more to say about her personality later.

From the beginning, we were convinced Carol was brilliant. She retained facts quickly, but she was born with a stubborn streak. If you approached her in the right way, she was cooperative, but you had to tread on thin ice in order to get the reaction you wanted. Invariably every morning, she got out of bed in a foul mood. She'd march into the room without uttering a word and plop herself down on her dad's lap. One of us would dare to say, "Good Morning, Carol."

"Whhhaa....I din't want you to say goo' mornin' to me." The lips would poke out and tears would form.

She enjoyed playing with other children, but when she was three, I gave her a birthday party with the neighborhood children in attendance. All went well until we began to sing Happy Birthday. Then came the tears. She ran from the table and locked herself into her room. There is where she remained until every child went home.

The first time she got a haircut, she looked in the mirror and hated the new look. As soon as we got home, she locked herself into her room and informed us she was never coming out again. The locked door became the norm. In order to retrieve our child, we had to keep a set of tools handy for breaking in.

Once I made the mistake of insisting she not leave the table until she finished her meal. She might have sat there for days, with big tears running from her eyes, if I had not relented. After that, I decided not to make an issue out of food.

Once at an amusement park, I asked if she'd like to ride the little kiddy boats that went round and round on a small track filled with water. She said yes, so I paid her way. Happily, she got into one of the boats. As soon as the ride started, she changed her mind. I saw the look and knew she was not happy. Realizing the ride would not stop to let her off, she faked a faint. Evan and I watched knowing she was all right and just pulling one of her stubborn acts. She didn't mind humiliating us. People began to point.

"Look at that child. She's passed out. I wonder what's wrong with her. Why don't her parents do something?"

The ride went round and round without her moving. At last, it stopped and she sat up and got off. It was a long time before I asked her if she wanted to ride anything again.

Christi was a petite and pretty child. She had a sweet and lovable disposition. Everyone wanted to hold her. Right away, she claimed the role of the baby in the family. Christi would sleep for hours seemingly needing twice as much rest as the others. She was my quietest child. We had no way of knowing this, but it was a temporary condition. In later life, she would become the most vocal, making sure that everyone was aware of anything amiss in her life.

During her first ten years, nothing made her happier than being held and cuddled. If one of us was too busy to hold her, we would often find her sitting alone playing with a doll while her siblings engaged in more active activities. Christi was in no hurry to do anything, including walking. There was no rushing her. We could count on her making sure we would be late for wherever we were planning to go. To this day, she refuses to be on time for anything. 

Don walked early and couldn't be still for a second. He had a two-minute attention span and a short fuse when it came to temper. His busy fingers were always fiddling with something. He was usually in the process of taking apart whatever he had in his hands and destroying it. Later in life, working with his hands became is best asset.

Climbing on something and falling off was another favorite activity. It wasn't unusual having to rush him to the emergency room for whatever injury his latest escapade caused. Foreign objects had to be taste-tested and often swallowed.

In spite of the fact he seemed to have no fear of physical obstacles, he had an irrational fear of change or anything he didn't understand. New situations or bad thunderstorms traumatized him. He ignored his quieter twin but loved to follow his older sister around. He called her Ca-uh rather than Carol.

"Ca-uh, Ca-uh, cum' here Ca-uh. Ca-uh cum' play wid' me." Carol didn't seem to mind the attention. They got along well, except when we traveled. Then what we heard was, "Mama, Don's bothering us. Make him stop."

You might assume these early personality traits would be an indication of the direction their lives would take. Not so. This was only the beginning. As the months passed, a few traits remained but new quirks and challenges met us at every turn.

No wonder parents get gray hair. Child rearing is definitely a learning experience. The question is are we teaching them, or are they doing their share to teach us what it means to be a parent?
 

Author Notes In the picture,Carol is five and the twins are three.


Chapter 17
Daycare Dilemmas

By BethShelby

Something was wrong. I knew it the minute I drove up and saw Don's little face screwed into that sorrowful pout. I could tell he had been crying and was trying his best to hold back the tears. My heart went out to my four-year-old son. His sisters were happily skipping along beside him carrying pictures they had made at the daycare. His picture was wadded up in a crumpled ball. Oh no! I thought. Is this another daycare that isn't going to work out? The girls seem happy enough, but my son obviously has a problem.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "Did you have a bad day?"

Don looked at me with woeful eyes and dug his toe into the ground. "I don't like that place. I don't want to go back."

"What happened? Why don't you like it?"

"I just don't. I want to go back to the other place. It was fun there."

"He wet his pants," his big sister informed me.

Oh, is that all. I thought. It's a bit unusual for him, but that's no big deal. All kids have accidents sometimes. He'll get over it. At least I hoped he would get over it. I had researched all the available daycare centers, and this one came highly recommended. There was even an article in the paper about how much this placd was on the cutting edge. I was sure this was the best place for my three pre-school offspring. The lady operating it had graduated from college with a double major; Child Psychology and Drama. She was young and full of ideas of how to keep the children busy and happy

The last nursery certainly hadn't worked. It was near my work and the children loved it, but it wasn't the cleanest place around. The play yard was a dust bed. When the children came home each day, they were caked with dirt. Even their hair had to be washed daily.

I remembered how embarrassed I had been the day the lady who was in charge of the daycare called me at work to tell me Don was running a high temperature and needed to see a doctor. He had an ear infection, so I called and made an emergency appointment. I picked him up at Playland and took him straight to the pediatrician. The doctor took one look at him and scowled at me and said in a stern voice, "This child is filthy. You need to take him home and give him a bath before you bring him here."

Still, I continued to use Playland for a while longer until Christi, Don's twin became sick. After a week of trying to find out why she couldn't keep food down, we learned another child at the same facility had been diagnosed with hepatitis. When the doctor checked her for that, the tests showed she also had hepatitis. After she spent two weeks in the hospital, we never took the children back there again. In fact, I think the Health Department may have closed them down permanently.

I had high hopes for Kiddyland, but now, my son was telling me he didn't want to go back. I assured him everyone has accidents and promised him tomorrow would be better. I could tell he didn't believe me, but he tearfully promised to try again. I had paid for a month in advance and was determined to give it that long to see if he would adjust.

It didn't happen. He started to have nightmares. Every morning, he awoke in tears and begged me not to send him there. Still, he couldn't seem to tell me what was wrong. Even the girls were starting to complain. Carol told me Miss Janice expected everyone to stand up in front of all the other children and perform each day. They could sing, dance, recite a nursery rhyme or whatever. At first, the girls had thought it was fun to sing little songs they knew.  Now, the pressure was beginning to get to them. They told me Don wouldn't do it at all. Maybe this was the answer to Don's problem. Performing in public can even scare the pants off of adults. Who does this woman think she is? These are children, not performers. 

I had a talk with Miss Janice, but she assured me the children were well cared for, and no undue pressure was being put on them. She seemed blissfully unaware of any problems my son was having. "It just takes a bit longer for some children to adjust to new situations," she told me. "Children love to perform. When they're young, they're so free and uninhibited."

Don, who had been toilet trained since he was a year old, was coming home every day with wet pants. I had to start sending a change of pants and underwear. I enlisted the aid of Carol. "Watch and see what happens to get him so upset," I told her. It seemed to happen when the children went outside to play. Carol told me Don was being kept back and usually came out later crying.

One day, Carol didn't go out with the other children. She deliberately hung back and heard one of the day care workers talking to Don. "You gonna' pee in yo' pants again if I let you go out," she said shaking him. "I'm not changing your clothes again. I'm gonna' stand in that bathroom and watch. You're not leaving till you pee." 

I had my answer. Don wasn't used to having an audience when he went to the toilet. He wasn't about to let some stranger watch, while he took care of business. Once her patience was exhausted, she would relent and allowed him to go outside. He promptly relaxed and wet his pants. I told Miss Psychology/drama major that I wouldn't be bringing them back.

It took a few days of searching, but I finally found another nursery. This was a Catholic run daycare. The atmosphere here was relaxed, and children were allowed to be children. The workers were warm and caring. The priest played games with the kids and made balloon animals for them. Don didn't have any more accidents. Each day, my children came home excited. They told me how much fun they were having with Father John. Since we weren't Catholic, it took some getting used to hearing them calling someone Father. We had to drive all the way across town to take them there, but at least, we didn't have to end up putting our poor traumatized son into therapy for the next dozen or so years.

I felt pity for those poor children who continued to get dramatized and psychoanalyzed by the young Psychology/Drama major, who thought she had all the answers. A little learning can be a dangerous thing. What works for some children can be bad news for others. 

Author Notes This is no longer a contest entry. I'm using the certificate to renew an old post because it fits into the book of memoirs I'm writing.


Chapter 18
Green Acres

By BethShelby

There is an old adage which goes something like, "You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy." That saying applied to my husband. Despite the fact his mother insisted her children not grow up to be farmers, the lure of open spaces and woodlands is so firmly a part of who they are it can't be easily eradicated. City living is too confining.

Both Evan and I had rural roots. The Shelby family had been landowners ever since they immigrated from Wales in the 1700's. Having grown up in the country, hunting, fishing and farming were ways of life for Evan until he graduated from high school and had one year of college behind him. Then due to his mother's encouragement, he began moving around the country working at various short-term jobs, such as surveying, until the army drafted him. Back from Korea after a two-year stretch, he was between jobs when we met.

Although my father worked in a small town, our home was on the outskirts. He did limited farming on the side, so I was exposed to some of the benefits of country living. I've never regretted those years of riding my bike down dusty roads, climbing embankments and chasing fireflies, but I'd firmly made up my mind farm life wasn't for me. I was convinced my future lay in a setting where life was a bit more exciting. By the time Evan and I decided to get married, he was working as a draftsman in Jackson. The thought of broadening my horizon seemed very appealing.

Evan was a good draftsman, but he had an ongoing problem with his tyrannical supervisor. He couldn't afford to quit, because we needed the income, but he made up his mind to keep his options open for something more rewarding. His country roots kicked in, and he developed an itch to become a landowner.

"You can't go wrong with land," he told me. "They're not making any more of it. Pretty soon it will be so expensive you'll have to be a millionaire to get your hands on any. Why don't we see if we can buy some while it's still affordable?"

"O.K., as long as we don't have to live on it," I said. "It would be nice to have a place in the country where we could go on weekends."

Eventually, we found a reasonably priced piece of land about a forty-minute drive from the city. It consisted of a hundred and forty-two acres, and it was owner financed at a low interest rate. There was no house, but it had open pastures, some cultivatable fields, and woodland with creek running through it.

The land turned out to be a good investment. The government allotted us cotton acreage and paid us not to grow cotton. I know it's sounds crazy. I'm still wondering about the wisdom of that, since we had no intention of growing cotton in the first place, but we weren't inclined to argue with Uncle Sam as long as there was money involved. Soon after we bought it, an oil company leased the mineral rights which brought in a nice little check. The woods were teeming with trees, which timber companies were anxious to harvest. Neighbors leased part of the land for farming and grazing. So for a while, collecting checks came in handy for paying off the remaining mortgage.

Eventually, the novelty of just owning the land wore off, and Evan decided to become a weekend cattleman. Gradually, he began accumulating a herd of beef cattle. Our most expensive addition to our little ranching enterprise was a registered Hereford bull we nicknamed 'Sam'. During the summer, grass was plentiful, but in winter, we had to buy hay and food for the cattle. The farming equipment my husband acquired included a beat up old tractor, discs and a bush hog.

Not wanting to be separated from my husband all weekend, the kids and I often came along for the ride. The children were easily bored. I invented games which we played or sang children songs while in the car, but once we arrived, there wasn't much for them to do other than watch their dad build fences and herd cattle. There is just so much blackberry picking, exploring, and wildflower gathering before kids start get antsy and become annoying. Some of the many questions my son came up with struck a raw nerve with Evan.

"Daddy, what's that long thing hanging under Sam's stomach? Daddy, why is Sam trying to climb up on that cow?"

Since neither of us was keen on starting sex education with a four-year-old, we decided there might be more suitable activities for preschoolers back home. When I started staying behind with the children, I began to wonder if my vows to never become a farmer's wife had somehow gone awry.

Carol was seven and the twins were five, when Evan decided we needed to purchase an additional vehicle for his use on the farm.

"Beth, I think I should buy a truck. I'm going to need some way to haul the cattle when it's time to take them to market."

The farm was eating into our budget, and we'd not had a decent vacation in several years. "Hmm... You need a truck and I need a vacation. Maybe we can work out a compromise here."

"Maybe," he agreed. If he didn't say 'no' right away, he was likely reasoning that it might prevent me from insisting we couldn't afford a truck.

Right away he started reading the want ads."I've  found one in the paper," he told me. "I'm going to call about it. It has a camper body. If we get it, we might want to try it out on the road. We've never been out West. What do you think about that?"

"No argument here. It sounds like a plan to me."

Sometimes, it's a good thing we can't see into the future. We might miss out on some of life's little adventures if our decisions are made knowing what pitfalls lie ahead.

The Story continues with... Nightmares Going West.


Chapter 19
Nightmares Going West

By BethShelby

With limited funds available for extras, the green used pickup my husband purchased for the ranch wasn’t anything to boast about, but the back was covered with a detachable camper hull with windows. Camping was something I’d never done. It sounded adventurous enough, I thought it might be fun. I had every intention of holding Evan to his promise of a vacation trip out West. If we camped out along the way, it should make the trip much less expensive and provide a learning experience for our three children.

Since he’d gotten his truck without me making a scene, Evan was open to the idea of trying it out on a cross-country trip. I’m not sure what I was thinking when he agreed, because I went a step further and suggested we take my mother along.

"You know how Dad is," I said. "All he wants to do is stay home. Mom loves to travel, but she never gets to go anywhere. She could sit in the back with the kids and watch them, and I could be in the cab with you, so I could help you drive."

Again he agreed, and Mom was delighted with the idea. She suggested we put a double mattress on the bed of the pickup, so it would provide a soft place to sit or lay.

Lest you get the idea that this was a fancy camper, let me assure you, it wasn’t. The double mattress took up the entire bed of the pickup so all luggage or food with be on it, as well as an adult and three children. There as no way to stand or move around. A simple white metal shell with windows fit over the bed of the truck and was the same height as the cab. In order to ride back there, one would have to sit or lie with legs spread out in front of them. Believe me, it was not the most comfortable position to be in for any length of time. These days, I doubt if it would even be a legal way to travel. Still, it was a cheap trip and something to break the monotony. My mom only thought she knew what she was getting herself into.

We lived in central Mississippi, and our destination was the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Our time frame was one week. It was early May. School was still in session, and Carol’s first-grade teacher frowned on me for taking her out of class for a week. I figured she would learn more traveling than in reading about Dick, Jane and Sally. We packed our bags, a week’s supply of groceries, a small camp stove, sleeping bag, cooking pots, and two small tents and headed out on Saturday night.

We drove all night, and just before daybreak, we arrived on the outskirts of Dallas. Mom and the children were stretched out on the mattress in the back trying to sleep. We were congratulating ourselves on making excellent time, when suddenly we heard …Blump…blump…blump. Our mode of transportation had blown a tire. It was Sunday morning, and nothing was open. We finally found a service station and got a wrecker, but they couldn’t repair the tire. We had to hang around until after lunch in order to buy a new one. About two o'clock in the afternoon, we got underway again. Everyone's mood had deteriorated. Our three children decided this wasn’t such a fun idea after all. .

By five o’clock in the afternoon, we were exhausted and didn’t feel up to roughing it, so we stopped at a little town in Oklahoma and found a motel for the night. The next morning, after a good breakfast at a restaurant, we were refreshed and ready to try to get back some of our adventurous spirit. Before long, we faced the long drive across the Texas Panhandle. For a while, the children were interested in the tumbleweeds and the occasional roadrunner or jackrabbit, but Mom had her hands full keeping them occupied. They colored, fought with each other and tumbled around on the mattress, making keeping the covers straight impossible.

Our little adventure was becoming more and more like the journey taken by the Joad family in Steinbeck’s "Grapes of Wrath." Exhausted, we stopped at another restaurant for lunch.

I took a turn in the back to give Mom’s legs a rest and realized what she had been enduring. The space was so tight, even the double mattress barely fit. There was no way to contact anyone in the cab, because two layers of glass, with open air between, separated us. In order to get someone’s attention to stop the car for an emergency or a potty break, it was necessary to wave frantically and hope someone in the passenger seat would finally glance back. The side windows were small and didn’t provide much air. The children were bored and had started on the chips and cookies, scattering crumbs across the bed. Lying prone on the bed was a horrible way to travel, especially with three children fighting with each other and bouncing all over you.

This was becoming expensive. We were only one day into the trip and already we’d spent more than we planned for the whole week. It was time to get down to some serious camping. We were determined to find a campsite by evening. Still, there were miles and miles of open country with a few tiny towns and no campsite anywhere to be found. We hadn’t even passed a town big enough to have a motel.

As we crossed into the north corner of New Mexico, just before sundown, we spotted a small roadside park. There were several picnic tables and fire pits, so we pulled in. A couple of other cars were there. One group was a family of five having a picnic. At another table, there were four sleazy looking characters with stringy hair. They were loud as they argued and laughed while sharing a couple of bottles of liquor. An old beat-up looking Ford was parked near their table.

We pulled in and got out to stretch our legs. Mom and I pulled out some of the food and put together a fairly decent meal. The men, who appeared to be in their twenties, kept glancing in our direction. It was unnerving, to say the least. Mom declared, "It might be dangerous to try to stay here. You mark my word, those guys are up to no good."

The family finished their picnic, packed up and pulled away. We were considering doing the same, but then, the men got into their old car and also drove away. Their muffler was shot, and their car made a loud, unpleasant noise as it rattled out of the parking area. We felt very relieved to see them go.

This was obviously not the kind of motor park where people generally spent the night. There was a small restroom, but no bathing facilities and no staff around to monitor the place. We were all tired, and the countryside was so desolate it seemed pointless to go on. Our truck was the only vehicle remaining, and dark was upon us. Obviously, we weren’t about to pitch any tents here. We discussed it and decided, Evan and I would try sleeping in the back with the children, and we would let mother take her sleeping bag and curl up across the seat of the cab. At least, we could all be locked up for the night.

Evan looked in the glove compartment and pulled out a small pistol, which he had brought along in a brown paper bag. It was unloaded and the ammunition was in an another bag. He wanted it with him in the back in case we needed protection, but he hadn’t planned on the children seeing it. Around children, keeping things hidden is not always possible. When they realized their dad had a gun along, they freaked out. It dawned on them that maybe this trip involved some danger, and it took a while to calm them down.

In order to lock the back, it had to be done from the outside. Mother took the keys and locked us in before getting into the cab and locking herself in. We found sleep nearly impossible. Five people on a double bed doesn't make for good rest, much less sleep. In spite of the stifling heat and being jammed together, the kids did eventually drift off. Sleep was not in the picture for Evan and me. He kept turning the flashlight on to check the time. It was obviously going to be a long night. We heard a few cars passing on the highway, but traffic was light. At two a.m., things took a decidedly dark turn when we heard the unmistakable sound of the old Ford, with the busted muffler, returning to our area.

Evan and I sat up immediately, and he grabbed the pistol and loaded it. We started banging on the glass that separated our area from the cab, but it was no use because Mom couldn’t hear us. We were trapped. There was no way we could get out unless Mom unlocked the back with the key. It soon became apparent that she was awake, because she decided to start the truck.

Unfortunately, she didn’t know how. She turned the key, without using the clutch. The motor started but wouldn’t catch. The truck lurched forward and the motor died, all to be repeated over and over again. In addition to that, she repeatedly turned the lights on and off. What on earth did those men think was going on with us? Were they here to harm us? Maybe they were. We’ll never know, because after about thirty minutes, they drove away. The long night eventually ended with only the children getting any sleep.

The next morning, Mother came back and released us from our prison. She assured us that she had saved our lives, because she had frightened the men away with her futile attempts to start the truck. Evan vowed this would be his last attempt at camping. From now on, we would stay in motels, no matter what they cost. I was surprised he didn’t insist on going back home immediately.

We continued our trip and put the idea of camping behind us. We concluded that we weren’t suited for the great outdoors. Since we had never been there before, we were in awe of the Rockies. But poor Mom almost had a heart attack trying to climb the steps to the restaurant at Pike’s Peak. The thin mountain air caed her blood pressure to drop, and she came close to passing out.

Once after we’d paid for Mom’s breakfast at a restaurant, she insisted on buying everyone ice cream. Of course, no one wanted it after just having breakfast. She was stuck holding six melting ice cream cones over the already filthy sheets that covered our would-be bed. She finally crammed the whole sticky mess into a large mouthed thermos.

I would like to say the rest of the trip went smoothly, but with my mother and three children under eight, you would know I was lying. Still, nothing else that happened came close to being as hair-raising as that first Monday night.

When we got back home, we read in the paper about people being robbed and killed at rest stops along the Western highways. Mother said, "You see, I told you. I saved our lives." I wasn’t about to argue with her. Maybe she did. I figured she had suffered enough and deserve to be our hero.

Author Notes This was posted earlier. I'm using the certificate to revive it.


Chapter 20
School Daze

By BethShelby

 
 
My life at the printing company was going well considering some of my past short-lived excursions into the working world. I had mastered enough skills to have some degree of job security. The best part was I was finally able to use some of the college training I'd gotten in commercial art. 
I was busy working on the new brochure for the Maloney Appliance account, when Mary Lou buzzed me from the front office.

"Beth, pick up on line two. It's your son again."

What now? My kids are driving me crazy with the phone calls. I'd warned them not to call unless there is a serious problem. Personal phone calls were disruptive and frowned on by management. My next door neighbor, who had children of her own near their ages, was looking after my three after school for a couple of hours until Evan and I came home from work. She hadn't been able to stop their after school phone calls.

The school was around the corner from our house. Carol was eight and in second grade and the twins were six and in first grade. Because of their late December birthdays, they started to school at agev five. Since Carol had a February birthday, she had started school later and had a much easier time adjusting than the twins.

My son's voice on the phone sounded excited. "Mama, Mama guess what? They had rewards day in assembly, and I got one. I got called up on stage. They gave me a piece of paper and it's a reward."

"Really, Don't you mean an award?"

"Whatever. I got one on a piece of paper."

"What was the award for?"

"It's a reward for being retarded, or something like that."

"Retarded? What do you mean 'retarded'? You're not retarded. They don't give rewards for being retarded." By this time I was having trouble controlling my voice. It was becoming louder and starting to sound like something needs oiling. "Put Carol on the phone."

"Carol. Mama wants to talk to you. She wants to know about me getting the reward for being retarded."

"Carol, what is he talking about? What is this about him being retarded?"

"I don't know. The big kids always call the little kids 'Retardo'. I guess that's what he's taking about."

"No. He's says he got called up on the stage and given an award for being retarded. Do you know what that's all about? Am I going to have to call the school?"

"Oh, that? He got a certificate saying he hasn't been absent or tardy all year. I think it's supposed to be a good thing."

Okay, another mystery solved and crisis averted. I was thinking I should have held this kid back another year. He was too immature at five to start first grade, but at least, he's not being publicly labeled retarded. Of course, it wouldn't be totally surprising if someone thought he was. His schoolwork comes back from school wadded into a ball and crammed into his pocket. On the other hand, his twin sister brings in neat papers, proudly showing off the happy face stamps and A+ marks.

Whenever I tried to work with Don to help him learn his math and spelling, his attention was on everything except the task at hand. At this point, Attention Deficit Disorder wasn't recognized as a treatable condition. Hyperactive children were just considered a discipline problem.

"Don, I need you to pay attention and think," I would tell him. "What is two times four?"

"I don't know. Ten? Seven? Five? Nine?" While he was in the process of guessing every number he knew, he was either tossing some object into the air or mutilating it. I would become frustrated and wonder how his teacher could handle a classroom full of boys like this. Even worse, what if my son wasn't a typical boy? Maybe, he was her only problem. I was afraid to ask.

At least, Don was amusing. A couple of weeks before, he had come home with some news from school. "I think I've got me a girl friend."

"Really? What is she like?"

"Her name's Angela. She's nice, and she's pretty, too, but her roots show."

"Her roots? Don't tell me a first grader has her hair dyed."

"No. Not her hair. Her neck. You know. Those little blue roots on her neck."

It took me several minutes to realize the child had thin fair skin which showed little fine blue veins. We had a good laugh over that, but I wasn't laughting a couple of days when I got a call from the twins teacher.
 
They had mentioned causally they were going to be in a play at school, but they had managed to misplace the note the teacher sent three weeks earlier telling me their part required a costume. Their teacher called the night before the play to remind me to make sure they brought their Jack and Jill costumes to school the following day. I spend most of the night making costumes. Then I called work and make arrangements to be off a few hours. A mother needs to be there for something as important as their children's acting debut.

I was relieved there was only one more week of school. No more PTA meetings, no more parent-teacher conferences. No more art projects on the side like the two 8 ft Christmas displays I had to paint when the PTA president found out I was an artist.

I signed the kids up for a summer day camp program which I hoped would keep them occupied. Hopefully, I would only get emergency phone calls.

The phone line buzzed again. "Pick up on line three," Mary Lou told me. "I think it's your neighbor calling about one of your kids."

"Beth, Carol just ran into a tree. The kids were playing chase, and she didn't watch where she was going. I don't know if she broke her nose, but it is bleeding pretty bad, and her lip is busted. You might want to come home and see if you think she needs stitches."

Trying to work when you have children isn't easy. Asking off again fueled my boss's argument that women shouldn't get the same pay as men for the same work. His reason for this pay-gap was because it was always the women who had to leave work if there was an emergency at home. Apparently, he had a point.
 

Author Notes I've written this in present tense rather than past although this took place around 1969. The title is an attempt at a play on words rather than a misspelling. The picture is the twins in the Jack and Jill costumes I made for them. There were supposed to look like children from bygone days.


Chapter 21
You Really Do See Stars

By BethShelby

My son didn't pay a lot of attention to his school work or to warning we might give him to keep him from having an accident, but he did seemed tuned in to anything the girls might have which he felt he was lacking.
 
"Why can't I have my own bed and my own room? Carol and Christi have a room."

"I know, Don. You need one," I said. "We're working on it. Try to be patient. Hopefully, it won't be long before we can move into a bigger house."

We'd spent ten years in our first house. The girls roomed together, but ever since Don outgrew his baby bed, I'd made a bed for him every night on the couch in the room we used as a den. Since our country acreage was too far from our jobs to commute, Evan bought a three-acre tract near the new interstate highway 20. It was ten miles from Jackson, where we worked, but ten miles closer to the farm property. He'd spent most evenings lately drawing up house plans. His time as an architectural draftsman came in handy.

The idea of a new and larger house was appealing, but we'd enjoyed our years of living in the Jackson house. Our lot was nicely landscaped and had a large fenced area in the back for pets and children. Evan had built a 12 X 12 workshop at the back of the lot, where he'd produced tables, lamps, a gun cabinet, a stereo cabinet, and many smaller projects. The past summer, we'd had a a nice garden.

Our new lot had no nearby houses, but it was located in a quaint little town which seemed like a better place to raise children. Since the children were attending a church school, having a public school nearby wasn't something we felt we needed.

Evan finished the plans, made copies, and sent them for construction bids. The first one that came back was discouraging. We'd paid only $12,500 for the house we had, including the large lot. We weren't expecting the cost of building on our furnished lot in 1969 to be so far out of our price range.

"Beth, I'm sorry. There is no way we can afford to pay $40,000 to have this house built. We won't be able to afford the mortgage payments we'll have. I think we're going to have to forget it."

"Let's don't give up yet. There are two more bids that haven't come in," I reminded him. "We've got to have more space. Don can't keep sleeping in the den. Maybe we'll have to try adding on to this house."

The next bid came in at $28,000, but it was still too steep for us. When we got the final bid, it was only $18,000. This was a lot more like it even if the builder was new on the scene.

"We may be able to swing it," Evan told me. I think the bank will loan us enough if we sell this house and cash in our insurance's policies. Of course until we sell it, we're still going to be stuck with the $90 monthly mortgage on this one," 

"I've learned one thing from this. You were smart to get three bids. We should never buy anything with the first price quoted. Look how much difference there is between the prices."

"This contractor is a young guy. I think he knows the building trade, because he's worked with his contractor dad since he was a teenager, but this is his first time bidding a job on his own. He may have underestimated what he can build it for. Still, if he signs a contract with us and the bank, he'll have to build it for this price even if he loses money."

"The real estate market is down right now. Why don't we try renting this house out, so we'll have money for the mortgage and worry about selling it later?" I suggested.

"That's not a bad idea. Let's get in touch with an agent to handle renting it, while they are building our house."

It was exciting picking out tiles, carpet and appliances for our new house. Almost every evening after work, we drove to the building site to watch the progress. Sure enough, our builder had underestimated the cost of the job and was trying to compensate by cutting corners. Evan studied our contract and made sure he stuck to it, even though there were times he had to redo some things. Since he was starting to lose money, the contractor was less cordial each time we saw him.

The original closing date on our new house passed without it being completely finished. Our Realtor told us she'd found a tenant for our Jackson house, but they needed to move in right away.

"This is probably the best opportunity to rent this house you'll get," she told us. "These people would be wonderful renters. They have great references and are willing to pay top dollar, but they must find something by this weekend."

We checked and found we could go ahead and move in, if we were willing to let the carpenters come the following week to finish putting up the stair railing. We'd expected more notice before moving, and we'd not even started packing.

"Tell the people we'll be out of the house by Friday, and they can move in this weekend," Evan told the agent.

I looked at him in disbelief. "It will take us that long just to clean out the closets. I've got all those dishes to pack, and what about your shop and the storage room we can barely get into? Besides after we do all that, we've got to try to leave the place clean."

"I think we can do it," he argued. "Let's just get started."

Lacking funds to call a moving company, we rented a U-Haul and began our move. We had three days and only evenings after work to accomplish a monumental task. By evening of the third day, we'd moved the furniture except our beds, but we were not even close to finishing. We had piles of household goods, which needed to be separated from our growing junk pile. That night, we worked until three in the morning. The kids were asleep on the floor. In the end, we didn't have the strength left to do a good job of cleaning.

"We were crazy to attempt this," Evan admitted. "Never again are we going to let anyone push us out on so short a notice. If there are any more moves in our future, we'll take our time and do it right."

The next day the renters, who were in such a hurry to get in so they could be free to watch the Sunday ball game, decided they didn't want our house after all. It probably wasn't clean enough for them. The agent apologized and said she'd find someone else as soon as she could.

We were in our new house, but with no stair rails, I was worried. "Please be careful," I cautioned the children. "Walk very slowly and hug the wall on your way up. Someone could fall and get hurt bad."

The house was a split-level with four steps down to the lower level and eight leading up to the bedrooms. The foyer, living room, dining room, and kitchen were on the main level.

On Sunday afternoon, Evan went out to the farm to check on his cattle. The kids and I stayed at the house to organize things. In spite of the many warnings, Don came racing down the upstairs hallway and didn't slow down when he hit the landing. Just before he went airborne, he tripped, which sent him headfirst toward the foyer floor. I stood in the middle of the living room, rooted to the spot, as I watched in horror.

Don sat up quickly, looking dazed. A rapidly rising lump appeared on the top of his head. I was in a panic. Evan had the car. Our truck was in for repairs, and our phone hadn't been installed yet. There were no nearby neighbors to call. All I knew to do was apply ice and pray.

He could have broken his neck, but except for the large lump, he didn't appear badly hurt. Still, I was concerned there might be a concussion. If I'd had the option, I would have rushed him to the emergency room. In spite of my anxiety, his comment made me smile.

"You know what, Mom? When you hit your head just right, you really do see stars."









 

Author Notes This story is a continuation of Chasing the Elusive Dream, but until it is no longer active, it will remain a stand alone story.


Chapter 22
Visitor in the Night

By BethShelby

The incessant ringing of the doorbell at night startled all of us. We'd been in our new house a couple of weeks and were still in the process of settling in. With no close neighbors, a visitor at that late hour was unlikely.

The only contact we'd had with anyone from the little town was during the first week when the Baptist pastor came by and invited us to visit his church. We explained that our children were enrolled in a church school in Jackson, and we planned to keep attending that church. He smiled and offered his card.

"That's fine. It's all good," he said. "God has children everywhere. But if there is anything you need, or if I can help you in any way, please don't hesitate to call."

"Thank you so much, Pastor. We really appreciate the offer. It is so nice to meet you. If we need anything, it is good to know there is someone we can count on." I shook hands with him and took his card.

The kids and I were in the den watching an episode of The Brady Bunch, and Evan was in the kitchen helping himself to a dish of ice cream. Our phone was installed the week before, but no one had called to say they were coming over. Our house sat at the end of a long curved driveway away from the blacktop road. One side of the property faced the recently completed interstate highway. Since we'd had no time to put up window treatments, we could see, or at least hear, a car driving up. Tonight, we hadn't seen or heard anything, so who could be ringing our bell on a chilly October night?

Evan and I went to the door together. He turned on the overhead light and peered through a peephole in the door before opening it. A young girl stood outside shivering with cold in spite of the lined denim jacket she wore. She had on jeans and her hands were empty. Her straight brown hair was pulled back and tied with a ribbon. A baseball cap completed her outfit.

"Hello," I said. "Can we help you?"

"Hi," she answered hesitantly. "I was wondering if I could have a drink of water?"

"Of course you can. Come on in out of the cold. What are you doing out on a night like this?"

"I've been hitchhiking," she said. "My ride put me out here."

"You're kidding! You came off that highway? Where do you live?" Evan asked.

"I'm from Ohio. I was living with my aunt, but she died."The girl's eyes shifted as though she had something to hide.

"Are you hungry?" I asked. "I have some left over chili." She nodded. "Well, come in and meet our kids. You can watch TV with them while I fix you something to eat. What's your name?"

"Mindy. My name is Mindy Wilson."

"Kids, this is Mindy," I said once we'd reached the den. "She's been traveling. She is going to stay with us a little while. I'm going to go and fix her something to eat. Mindy, this is Carol, Christi, and Don." I nodded to each child. They stared at her like she was from an alien planet. Carol, my oldest child, smiled shyly and said, "Hi Mindy."

Evan followed us into the den and sat down, keeping a sharp eye on her. I could tell he didn't trust her. For that matter, neither did I. Her story was too vague. Her Southern accent was thicker than mine. She's not from Ohio, I thought. She probably didn't even tell us her real name.

"How old are you, Mindy?" I asked as I pulled out a TV tray for her food and drink."

"Eighteen," she told me in a low voice. She's lying, I thought. She doesn't look a day over thirteen.

Mindy drank the whole glass of water without stopping, and proceeded to gulp the food down like she was starved. When I offered more, she nodded. "That's so good," she said. "Thank you. I would like some more."

Mindy quickly made herself at home. She was soon chatting with my children about the television shows and was petting our cat. Shadow curled up in her lap and started purring as though she considered Mindy a member of the family.

When I returned to the kitchen for more food, Evan followed me.

"We can't let her go back out tonight. It's too cold. But I don't feel right about her staying here either," he whispered."Something isn't right about her. Why would anyone drop her off in the middle of nowhere? Surely, they would have let her out in town. I think we need to call the sheriff or someone."

"Wait. I think I know where I put that preacher's card. You go back in there and take her this plate. I'll run upstairs where she can't hear me and see if I can call him. He may have an idea about what we should do."

I located the card and made the call. Pastor Bingham picked up on the first ring. When I explained the situation, the pastor got excited.

"Stop right there. I know exactly who this girl is. She lives right on the other side of the highway from you. She's been gone all day. We've had a search party out looking for her. Her parents are here with me now. They're worried sick because she's diabetic, and she has some emotional problems. She left home without her medicine. Don't say anything to her, and don't let her leave. We'll be right over."

Fifteen minutes later the bell rang again. This time it was Pastor Bingham along with the girl's parents. The pastor performed the introductions.

"Mr. and Mrs. Shelby, this is Bert and Leona Thomas. These are Sarah's parents."

"Sarah? She said her name was Mindy."

Recognizing the voices, the girl came out with tears streaming down her face. Her mother, also in tears, ran over and embraced her. Sarah's father patted her shoulder and looked uncomfortable. He had a hard look about him that made me wonder if he might have been Sarah's reason for leaving.

I started trying to explain how this all came about, but a sharp look from the pastor warned me to be quiet. The parents thanked us for calling and left quickly. This might have been the end of the story but, it wasn't.

About three weeks later, I got a call at work at two o'clock in the afternoon. Sarah had run away again. According to the pastor, a group of our new neighbors were at our house peering into the windows trying to determine if Sarah, once again, had taken refuge there. Pastor Bingham wanted us to come home right away and unlock the door so they could search our house.

"I'm sure she isn't there," I said. "We haven't seen her. With our doors locked, how could she have gotten in?"

"We didn't see anyone when we looked in your windows. But one of the neighbors saw the curtain moving upstairs. We think she may be hiding up there. We'd appreciate it if you'd come home and look. If she's not there, we need to know, so we can go from there."

"Well, Okay. I'll have to call my husband because we rode together, and he has the car. I'll see if he can get off work."

We both made arrangements to leave early. I wasn't happy about people staring into the windows of our house. It felt like they were invading our privacy. The fact that a curtain was moving upstairs made my heart beat faster. Once we got there and opened the door, I was thankful the crowd standing around didn't insist on searching for themselves.

Evan went upstairs to check. In minutes he was down, holding the cat. "I think I see why the curtain moved. The window is Shadow's favorite place to sit. I'm sorry, but Sarah isn't here. If she shows up here later, we'll call you."

This time, Sarah had hitchhiked a ride with a truck driver. She called her parents a couple of days later from Kentucky. She'd learned the hard way that life isn't easy for a teenager on the streets with no money. I'm fairly certain she never ran away again.

Life at home may be difficult sometimes for young people, but at least, if a girl has a roof over her head and parents who care, it is much better than being on the street.

Author Notes This story takes place in Mississipp in 1969.


Chapter 23
Holiday Drama

By BethShelby

The minute we walked into Evan's parents' home that Christmas Day, we realized something was very wrong. Everyone sat around wearing a strange combination of expressions which varied between shock and depression. Although we were late, the fact we'd arrived at all was barely acknowledged. What had happened? Where was the joyous high-spirited celebration we had come to expect during the holidays? Why was no one eating? Surely the meal wasn't over.

Thanksgiving and Christmas were two occasions we traditionally celebrated at the homes of our parents. My parents lived in a Mississippi town sixty miles east of Jackson. Evans' parents lived in an even smaller town nearly twenty miles further south. As an only child, the celebration with my family was limited to only my parents and us. Evan was one of five children. All of them came with along with their families for these occasions. Christmas Eve was celebrated with my family, and noon on Christmas Day was reserved for his parents.

Evan's older sister, Helen, had one son who was twelve years older than our children. Her husband, Joe, didn't attend because he never cared to be a part of the family dynamics. He owned a factory that manufactured church pews. Joe liked to play the big shot, although he often condescended to buzz the house, at some point during the day, in his private plane.

Maxine, two years older than Evan, was married to Wayne, who was very sociable and loved being part of the family. They had two sons, near my children's ages. Wayne managed a tire and auto parts store.

Rhomas, Evan's only brother, worked as a project engineer and was married to Shirley. They also had two sons near the ages of our children.

Evan's sister, Nan, was the baby of the family. She was fifteen years younger than Evan and was married to Richard. She was pregnant with her first child. Opinionated and untactful, Richard hadn't managed to fit into the family. His manner of speaking often left people hurt or angry. Evan and I learned to overlook his abrupt manner and became comfortable around him. I found him to be an interesting character because he was a writer, photographer, and a very talented craftsman.

Richard's personality had clashed with Wayne's from the first time Nan brought him for a visit. A typical Southerner, Wayne made a joke that had racial overtones. Richard took exception and challenged him, making him look foolish. Evan's older sisters found their own reasons for disliking Richard. Still. Nan loved her sisters and looked forward to spending holidays with them.

This Chirstmas we'd been delayed. While we were still in route, a drama was unfolding at the Shelby residence. Richard had been a diabetic since early childhood. It was late enough that his blood sugar was dropping, and he was anxious to eat. Wayne, also a diabetic, was having his own blood sugar problems.

"Come on ladies. Get a move on. It's late. When's the food going to be ready? I need something to eat, now," Richard said, as he got up and moved toward the table, which was being prepared buffet style. "What do we lack here? Where's the turkey?"

"Maxine, do you reckon we ought to go ahead and start? I hate to eat before Evan's family gets here," Mrs. Shelby said. "They ought to be here soon, but everything's ready, and the food is going to be getting cold if we don't go ahead and start eating."

"Yes, let's go ahead and start. The kids are getting hungry, and Wayne needs to eat on account of his blood sugar. They won't mind us starting. They can eat when they get here."

Richard had already grabbed a plate and started filling it, when Wayne picked up a plate and moved in front of him. "I'm going ahead and fix the boys' plates," Wayne said. "Shirley, you might want to fix your boys' plates too. They can take their food into the front room and watch TV while the rest of us eat."

"Hey, Man. What do you mean pushing in front of me?" Richard growled, giving Wayne a shove.

"Watch it, Bud," Wayne snarled at Richard. "What do you think you're doing? You can wait. I'm making plates for the kids. You want to fight me? I'm ready right now." He put the plate down and turned to face Richard, giving him a sharp jab to the shoulder.

Richard staggered back and hurled his plate of food against the wall. "You can go to hell, Man! I don't have to be a part of this." He turned and rushed out of the house. In seconds, he'd jumped into his car and took off.

The women had been grabbing at the pair and begging them to stop. Maxine's boys were crying, while Rhomas's two sons stood, bug-eyed with their mouths hanging open in disbelief. Wayne looked embarrassed and offered a quick apology, before grabbing his jacket and heading for his own car.

Evan's father, who was suffering from emphysema and heart problems, had turned pale and was having obvious problems breathing. Mrs. Shelby went to his aid. "Arthur, are you going to be all right? Let me get your pills. Do we need to get a doctor?" Maxine ran to get water, while Helen stood by nervously wringing her hands.

Rhomas' face was crimson. He kept clenching his hands into fists and releasing them, all the while muttering to himself. "Richard started it. I knew he was going to be trouble from the start. He doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut."

Tears streamed down Nan's face. "It was just as much Wayne's fault as Richard's," she insisted. "He shouldn't have pushed in front of him."

Shortly after this, our own branch of the family arrived on the scene. "What's wrong?" I asked. "What's happened here?"

Gradually, the story came out. No one had eaten anything. It appeared they had all lost their appetites. Eventually, we did eat, but like the rest of the family, we were shocked. Richard returned much later, but refused to get out of his car. Nan went out to meet him, and soon they departed for home.

Wayne came back after a few hours and apologized again. "I don't know what got into me," he said. "That guy gets under my skin. Something just snapped."

This episode marked the end of occasions when all of the family could be together. From that day on, Maxine's family and Nan's family worked to make sure their paths didn't cross again. One family would be there for Thanksgiving, and the other would come for Christmas.

Personalities clash in the best of families. This wasn't our fight. Evan loved all three of his of his sisters, and all of them were welcome in our home. One thing we've learned over the years is to pick our battles carefully. In this incident, there were no winners, and taking sides wouldn't have made life better for anyone. The two inlaws, were never able to be around each. We adjusted to seeing to their families on alternate occasions. 






 

Author Notes I realize there are a lot of people in this story. Let me know if all the names are too distracting. This took place about 1970.


Chapter 24
Everyone Has a Breaking Point

By BethShelby

Each time I mentioned I had an easy going nature and seldom lost my temper, my husband reminded me of the time I totaled the car in our own front yard. That incident points out a rare exception to my, otherwise placid, temperament. But then, if it hadn't been for him, the whole thing wouldn't have happened in the first place. I never understand why he insisted on presenting himself as the innocent victim of a woman who had "totally lost it".

I'm a person, who if left to her own devices, would never be a minute late for anything. I find nothing quite as annoying as having to wait on someone who is perpetually late. My husband was such a person. Evan was extremely meticulous about everything he did. Time wasn't a priority, until he realizeed he might have to endure the icy stare of his supervisor if he walked in late again.

Personally, I've never spent much time on my own appearance. Even with the responsibility of making sure our three children were ready for school and getting myself dressed, it consumed far less time than it took for my husband to be ready to leave the house.

When we moved away from the city, our economic situation made it prudent the five of us drive into Jackson together each day. We knew we'd save money by taking only one car. Since I was due at work first, the plan was for my husband to drop me at my job, take the children to school and then, drive himself to work. 
 
This worked well if everyone cooperated and got themselves ready to leave at the prescribed time. However, a smooth departure was seldom the case. It wasn't the only problem I had to deal with. I'd recently changed jobs which required me to punch in on a timeclock. There was no way to slip by the boss without leaving evidence of a tardy arrival. It didn't matter that I'd work later and make up the time. With him, getting off to an early start was everything.

Also in those days before women's lib, females were lucky to get paid even a third as much as men. This attitude, coupled with the fact that most Southern men possessed the inborn notion working women did it as a hobby rather than a serious source of income. Our husbands would swear, on a stack of Bibles, it actually cost them money to have us working. They didn't want us to quit, but they insisted, our salary put the family in a higher tax bracket. I'd not seen it proven on paper, but it was the prevailing attitude. My husband, while not the originator of this dubious notion, was, nevertheless, swayed by it.

If a child had a problem calling for the presence of a parent, the parent was always the mother. If someone had to take off from work to take care of family business, regardless of which members' business it was, the wife was the one who needed to ask off. If anyone had to go into work late and face the withering looks of the boss, let it be the one who worked for the fun of it and not the real breadwinner.

Each day, I would sit in the car with our children, fuming, and tapping the horn at periodic intervals, waiting for my husband to finish tying his tie, or whatever it was he was doing. Now understand, I would have left much earlier if we'd been driving in separate cars. Invariably, it was only after there was no chance I could get to work at a reasonable hour, when Evan would come to the realization, he would be the one late if he didn't go straight to his own work. This meant, he would need to take the other vehicle, and it would be up to me to get the kids to school before going on to my job.
 
Even on this particular ill-fated day, I think I might have held my fracturing emotions together, if it had been the first time, rather than the third time, that week such a decision was made.

That day, perhaps, he caught me in the middle of a hormone crisis. At any rate, something snapped. Our house was at the end of long curved tree-lined driveway. I was unskilled in the art of floor-boarding it, while going backwards on a curved drive. Still, I might have made it escept for that one last tree. It wasn't even one of our bigger trees, which is probably the reason I flattened it.

Our roomy luggare compartment ceased to exist. But miraculously, there were no casualties other than the car and my son Don's Evel Knievel lunch box. To this day, that lunch box has never been seen again. That was no big loss, because after that day, Don didn't seem interested in dare devils anymore.

We were down to one vehicle. It was just as well, because no one wanted to allow me behind the wheel anyway. There was one consolation, if my memory serves me correctly. After that day and for as long as we lived there, I can't remember being late for work again.

Author Notes This seems to fit at this point in my book so I'm reactivating. This was about 1971.


Chapter 25
It's All In The Cards

By BethShelby

After five years with one printing company, I took a position, at a much higher salary, with a new company just starting up. For the first time in my working career, I worked with women and was in a position to have friends my own age I could socialize with outside of the office.

Up to this point most of my co-workers had been men. I learned the hard way, a woman can’t afford to be seen with a married male coworker outside the office. Wives are naturally suspicious of women who work with their husbands. I’d even managed to get chewed out by the wife of a man, thirty years my senior, for driving him to the hospital, when he had suffered a heart attack during our lunch break.

One of my new friends was a girl named Maggie. She was a fun-loving little brunette who had appeared in some TV commercials. She was married to a traveling salesman and was the mother of a four-year-old girl. Carolyn, a tall blonde flirt who drove racecars in a Powder-puff Derby, was another coworker. She had a boyfriend for every need. There was a mechanic, a banker, a repairman, and one guy who bought her groceries and met her physical needs.

"Beth, someone told me about this black lady who lives out in the projects who is really good at reading cards," Carolyn informed me. "I’m thinking about going out to see her. You want to come?"

"What kind of cards? " I asked. "Are you talking about those funny looking fortune-telling cards?"

"No, not Tarot cards. I think she just uses plain old playing-cards, but she told this girl I know some stuff, and every bit of it came true. I want to know if there are any new men in my future."

"Well, you don’t need a fortune teller for that. With your track record, I’m sure there are a lot of new men in your future," I said. "I don’t think Evan would want me to go. Why don’t you ask Maggie? I think she’s into that stuff. She’ll probably go with you."

We lived in the heart of the Bible belt. Fortune-telling was considered the work of the devil. Gypsy palm-readers traveled with carnivals, and a lot of black ladies read cards for extra cash. A few years before, I’d encountered one at a neighbor’s Halloween party. Some of what she said was eerily accurate, but other things were open to interpretation. For instance, she told me there was something going on in my stomach area, but it would all turn out fine. I was two months pregnant at the time. Seven months later, it turned out fine in the form of twins.

Maggie came over to talk to me after Carolyn asked her to go. "It sounds like fun," she said. "I’ll go if you will. My husband knows what Carolyn is like. He’ll have a fit if I go off with just her, but if he knows you’re going, he’ll be all right with it."

"Did Carolyn say how much she charges? I don’t need to be wasting my money on that phony stuff."

"I asked her that. She said this lady works cheap. Sometimes she does it for a piece of clothing or a purse. Carolyn says she never charges over five dollars. Let’s go with her. It’ll be something different to do."

"Well, maybe I’ll go just to watch. I don’t know if I want her to tell me anything."

Sunday afternoon found us in a run-down section of the city searching for the house. It was painted a Pepto-Bismol pink and had a swing hanging from the ceiling of the tiny front porch. A large dark-skinned lady with a colorful scarf tied around her head sat shelling butterbeans, on the porch-swing. She appeared to be about fifty.

"Is this where the lady lives that tells fortunes," asked Carolyn.

"Yessum. I’s Miss Lena. Yaw’ll wants yaw'lls' fortunes read? It’ll be five dollars a piece."

We nodded, and she rose and put her pan aside. "I’s gonna takes yaw’ll one at a time. One of yaw’ll come on back wit’ me. The rest of yaw’ll, set thar on that swang and wait."

Carolyn moved forward, and they went into the house together. When she came back out, her face was wreathed in smiles. "You both have to do it," she said. "It’s worth the money."

Maggie went next. She returned wearing a frown. I could tell she was concerned about something, but both girls insisted I go and see what she would tell me.

Reluctantly, I got up and followed Miss Lena. It took several minutes for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. The only light came from a small curtained window. The room contained a soiled print sofa and a couple of stuffed chairs. She led me to a card table with two metal chairs.

As she spread the cards across the table, she started to talk. "You is married to a good man. He be a mighty fine man. You is lucky. He ain’t never gonna leave you. Yaw’ll gonna to be together fo' a lot of years. How many chillen’ yaw’ll got?"

"Three," I anwered, wondering why she needed to ask.

"Well, deese cards here say yaw’ll supposed to have five, so I reckons yaw’ll gotta have two mo'."  I started to tell her about the baby I'd lost, but she continued quickly without interruption. "Dey’s a black-headed woman what comes to yo' house some times. She thank mo' about yo' husband than she do about you."

Hmm..., That had to be my sister-in-law, Shirley. She did date Evan before I met him. She’s the only lady with black hair who’s ever been to my house. Nothing to worry about there. He thinks she’s silly.

"Dat place where you works at, dat job ain’t gonna last. You be changin’ jobs pretty soon. I thank you be movin’ to another state befo’ too long." Oh well, I wouldn't be surprised. Changing jobs seems to be the story of my working career. But moving? I can't imagine leaving Mississippi.

Her next statement shocked me. I wasn't expecting her to go into anything about death. "I sees an old man. He ain’t doing so well. He gonna be dying fo' long."

"Other than them few thangs, you got you a good life. Yaw’ll all gonna be happy and yaw’ll gonna have enough money. I don’t see no sickness comin’ on. Tha’s about all what deese cards say."

I gave her the five dollars and walked out dazed. I hope she was wrong about those two kids, I thought. Susan has to be one of them. I didn’t tell her my first child died. I’ve given birth to four children. That is enough. I sure hope we won’t be moving. We’ve only been in our new house a year. And who is this old man that’s going to die?. Evan’s Dad did have a heart attack a few months ago, but he’s doing fine now. Get a grip, Beth. You don’t really believe this crap, do you?

We compared notes on the way home. She told each of us our jobs wouldn’t last. According to her, all three of us would be moving away. Carolyn was thrilled to hear that she would soon meet a very rich man and get married. Miss Lena told Maggie that she would marry again in the future.

"What will happen to the husband I have now?" Maggie asked her.

"He may have to die, Honey," Miss Lena told her. "But you gonna be alright tho'. He gonna' leave you wid plenty money. You gonna have another baby with that new man."

Evan wasn’t happy with me when I told him about having my cards read. He grinned, however, when I told him the lady said I was married to a "really good" man and we’d have a lot of years together.

Within a couple of weeks, Evan’s father suffered another heart attack and died. After eight months, our company declared bankruptcy and began selling off their equipment. I found a job with another printing company.

Carolyn moved to Memphis. Maggie’s husband was transferred to another Mississippi town. After she moved away, I lost touch with both girls.

Rumors begin circulating that Evan’s company would be relocating to New Orleans. The company would be laying off some of their personnel and retiring others. Would we be transferred? Evan didn’t think so. Neither of us wanted to move from our new house. We liked where we lived.

The cards had been right on many counts, but the move was still to be determined, and I had no intention of getting pregnant again. Only time would reveal whether or not all of the predictions would come true.

As for me, I’d decided to opt for the surprises life has in store. The idea that a deck of cards could predict my future wasn’t a possibility I cared to explore further. Some time has past since that day, and I might as well admit those last two predictions did come true. Still, I never had the desire to learn of my future again. 

Author Notes Black dialect and bad grammer are intentional


Chapter 26
My Son, The Adventurer

By BethShelby

My son, Don, was born with a lust for adventure. No family vacation we ever took could quite satisfy his yen for excitement. During the 80's, we were living in New Orleans. Most people could have found adequate stimulation around there, but Don felt the need to seek his thrills a little further away from the watchful eyes of his parents.

During the summer months, he worked at summer camps in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, and Virginia; leading a group of innocent pre-teens into a series of capers their moms probably would have been horrified had they only known. Don tended to be reckless and accident-prone. The hair-raising tales of his close calls usually filtered back to me long after the incidents had passed.

During his first year in college, his best friend was a boy from California. Even after he changed schools, he and Rick remained close. One summer, he decided to go to California with Rick to work a construction job with the boy's father. The plan was to work a couple of months doing carpentry work and finish the summer counseling at a California teen camp. This was a bit further than he'd gone before. We weren't convinced enough to fund this venture.

"You'll have to pay your own way," we told him.

"Oh, no problem. Rick and I have enough to get us there, and then I'll be earning money. Rick's dad will pay us for the work we do."

Somewhere between New Orleans and Las Vegas, Rick's truck started giving them problems. They were able to chug their way into Las Vegas before the truck completely died. Neither of them had much cash left at that point. Not wanting to wire home for money or to beg on the street, the two of them decided to try out their salesmanship skills. Rick happened to be carrying a lot of his dad's tools in back of his truck. I don't know if it was their sales ability, or if the deals were too good to pass up, but they were able to obtain a little cash that way. At least, that is what we were told later. It occurs to me, they may have pawned them. We didn't always get a totally factual story.

At any rate, they hadn't raised enough for the needed repair work, so their next move was to use the money to hit the slots hoping to increase their cash. (It would have been interesting to hear the conversation that likely took place later between Rick and his father. I'm sure those tools weren't cheap.)

They were down to their last three quarters, when they decided to pray about the situation, thinking maybe, since all else had failed, God would bless their gambling efforts and help them produce some real cash. God had other plans. He wasn't a likely one to endorse the vice of gambling. Foreseeing what lay ahead, He must have known it wouldn't be the last time that summer His assistance would be needed. With the last of their change gone, they were forced to call Rick's dad and have him wire them enough money to get home.

It was a couple of years before we learned that Rick's father wasn't too happy with our son's carpentry skills. It seems Don broke most of the bases of the commodes he was supposed to be installing in an apartment complex by tightening the bolts too tight. This might have been why he had enough time on his hands to go sightseeing alone.

Clad in khaki shorts and a T-shirt, he borrowed Rick's mountain bike and decided to explore the countryside. After a few hours, he was hot and tired and a long way from Rick's house. He realized he needed to find a shortcut back. He wasn't deterred by the fact that the shortest distance back lay across a hill that had "Government Property-Keep Out!" signs posted. He could see a path, and there were no people around to stop him. That seemed like an open invitation, as long as he could manage to get his bike and himself on the other side of the chain-link fence.

After riding what seemed like miles across the deserted property, his legs were numbed to the point they had little feeling left in them. He thought he felt something brush against his leg. Looking around, he saw a huge coiled rattlesnake. The snake fascinated him enough that he got off the bike, pulled out his camera, and took a picture. As he got back on the bike, he glanced down at his bare leg and to his horror, he saw fang marks and two rivulets of blood streaming down into his sock.

Panic set in. "I'm gonna' die. There's no one around for miles. No one will even find me." He jumped on the bike and took off pedaling as fast as he could, determined to get somewhere close to civilization before he succumbed to the rattlesnake bite. It seemed he'd ridden forever before he saw a way to exit the government land. There was a house in the distance. When he got there, he managed to get someone's attention, but he was so out of breath. he could barely speak. He could only point to his blood-stained leg and get out the word "rattlesnake." Alarmed, the people called 911, and help was on the way.

We did get a phone call this time. He needed me to give them our credit card number so the emergency service could be paid. After taking his vitals the EMT told him, "Son, you're lucky it was such a large snake. Evidently he didn't release any venom. The younger snakes can't control it. If he'd released venom, you'd be dead by now. All that exercise would have pumped the poison straight to your heart."

That may have been the worst fiasco of his summer but certainly not the last close call. Rick's father gave him another shot at construction, and this time, a large beam fell and hit him on the head and knocked him out. While technically, this wasn't his fault, it may have been the way the universe went about paying him back for breaking all those toilets.

It was at that moment, the building inspector came to check out the work progress. I'm not sure how he reacted to having to walk around a young man still struggling to regain consciousness. At least, he wasn't the safety inspector. Luckily, this was Don's last day on the job before heading to camp. It was a good thing, or he may not have survived the summer. His guardian angel was working overtime.

The following day, still sporting a sizable knot on his head, he stopped for lunch at a greasy spoon and ordered Mexican food. Our star-crossed son was served some of the cheese that made national news when it was recalled for causing food poisoning. He arrived at camp too sick to venture far from the rest room. Aside from being the sickest he could ever remember being, he did recover. Every phone call we got from him that summer involved a new disaster that caused my hair to go a bit grayer.

At the close of the summer camp session, all of the campers and staff made a trip to Colorado. Don's funds were running low again. He and a friend from camp hiked up a mountain and found some vintage iron railroad spikes. They carted them down the mountain and spray-painted them gold and sold them to the campers for souvenirs. He netted enough cash for the plane-ticket home. He was told later that even though they were abandoned, it is illegal to take anything belonging to the railroad.

With the summer behind us, we felt we could relax a bit. Of course that was a ridiculous idea, because when you're raising a son, even if he's legally considered an adult, it is best to keep your guard up at all times. But for a day or so, we relaxed under the false assumption that maybe the summer had afforded him enough adventure to get him through another year in college. Time would prove us wrong.



Chapter 27
Help for the Brokenhearted

By BethShelby

Let me start by saying my heart has never been truly broken; bruised maybe, during my pre-adolescence early years, but nothing a good night's sleep and a pint of ice cream couldn't fix. Don't tell me there aren't some advantages to getting married young to the first guy who ever says he's in love with you. Still, I wouldn't recommend that for everyone, because I've noticed it doesn't always work. The world is full of jerks, and I guess I just got lucky. So since I've never had a broken heart, what qualified me to share my wisdom with those who have? I'm glad you asked that question. I'm the mother of four children, all of whom have had their hearts shattered so many times they look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Nevertheless, their Humpty-Dumpty hearts keep getting put back together again, and life goes on.

Nothing can be worse than a teenage boy in love for the first time, unless it is a teenage boy with his first broken heart. Everything is so magnified out of proportion you might as well forget about trying to see it from his perspective. He is viewing the world from a roller coaster while you are riding on the back of turtle, so he doesn't even expect you to understand, much less offer any helpful advice. It's enough to be there to listen in case he wants to talk and to have something he likes available to fill his empty belly. (Usually, boys' appetites aren't seriously impaired. That's the female department.) Also, you might want to keep your schedule open to run him to the hospital in case he tries to put his fist through a wall. Males tend to get a bit physical sometimes, but broken bones mend at about the same rate as broken hearts at this stage. They heal after a few months, and the second time around, it is usually less severe.

Girls are another story. I had three of these, and while they tend to become less physically violent, they are a lot more verbal. Get used to seeing puffy eyes and tear-stained pillows. Their story is the great tragedy of the ages. During this time, they may lose weight and start to take on the appearance of someone from a famine-ravished third world country, but with any luck, they'll survive to love again. There is only one way for the grief to work its way out of their system. They must relive the whole affair six million times, dissecting it in a different light each time. Finally after all their friends have gone into hiding, and you are about to check into a rehabilitation center, one day they wake up and look at their emaciated body and decide they like themselves that way, and they need a whole new wardrobe.

There are worst case scenarios. Most tragic of all is the one who somehow escapes heartbreak until they are well into their ninth year of marriage, and to complicate matters, don't even see it coming. Such was the case with my firstborn. Heartbreak is like chicken pox. It's a lot easier on you if you get it while you're young. Still, the process is the same. It just may last a lot longer. You might as well forget offering advice. They are in no frame of mind to even hear you. "Get a lawyer and take the bum for all he's got" isn't even going to compute, if they've already made up their mind they are somehow to blame and therefore deserve what is happening to them.

Sometimes, they feel they need more than Mom's shoulder to cry on. This is where counselors and support groups come in. Of course if it comes to that, you might as well know in advance that the problem always stems from their childhood, and somehow you're always going to get the lion's share of the blame instead of the jerk who really deserves it. Still, don't feel too bad because it's all part of the process, and so what if they beat you up in effigy. After all, isn't that what moms are for? Eventually the day will come when they decide to reinvent themselves and get on with life. It may involve a new look, a new job, or sometimes, a whole new personality. The point is, that heartbreak doesn't last forever, and there is life, even after divorce.

How can you help a person get over a broken heart? Don't flatter yourself into believing you have that kind of power. It's their heart, and there is very little you can say or do that is going to make much of a difference. Healing comes from within themselves. Like the childhood disease, it's just got to run its course, and all you can really do is stand by with a pot of chicken soup. If there is any message you can convey to them at this time of personal tragedy, none is any better than the little four-word cliche that my grandma used to utter, "This too shall pass."

Author Notes I haven't written anything lately, and those of you who have been reading my story, will find this goes along with it, but offers a more humorous take on the heartbreak that my children seem to experience.


Chapter 28
My Husband the Organizer

By BethShelby

You are taking a big leap of faith when you leave a recently retired husband home alone on a rainy day. If there is nothing interesting on TV to entertain him, he might find a way to make himself useful, which could cause you untold complications. 

To begin with, I was alarmed when my husband informed me at age fifty-six, he was retiring. Visions of homelessness and soup-kitchens surged through my mind. No one retires that early. He’s too young to draw Social Security or retirement benefits. How are we going to survive? We’ve still got children to educate. He must be having a mid-life crisis.

Luckily, he’d thought of all of that. He’d been dreaming of retiring since his first job. He wasn’t lazy; far from it. He just didn’t like working for someone else, and he wanted to be free to pursue his own thing. Since I wasn’t inclined to live in the sticks while he raised cattle, he made sure he’d invested enough over the years that we’d survive. Although I’d protested, I knew when to shut up. All my dire predictions of being on the street didn’t occur and life went on. I chose to keep working, just in case. Unlike him, I actually enjoyed my job.

Most days, my husband was happily involved in something out in the yard, making a garden or building something. He kept busy and never regretted a day of retiring early. But then one rainy day, he decided he would do something to make my life easier, or so he thought. 

To say I’m not the most organized person around is a gross understatement. My husband, on the other hand was meticulous and organized to the hilt. One rainy day, he took a look at my closet and my library and decided it was time to organize me. 

The problem was his idea of organizing was all about the aesthetic looks of things. He was a neat-freak. I had a huge walk-in closet in which I stored things of all sizes depending on whether my body was holding water or had been on a 20-day fast. I also had clothes for all seasons and all occasions. They ranged from brand-new to twenty-five years out of date. To him, it looked like the chaos of a mad woman. The things I grabbed to wear each morning were the things I liked best. They were in season and they fit, both my body and my needs for the day.

When I came home on that ill-fated day, he took my hand and proudly led me upstairs to see his handiwork. To my shock and horror, my clothes were all color coordinated. My closet was lined up like a rainbow. Everything I’d ever owned was with its matching color. My new blue winter suit, my blue robe and my blue spring dress from ten year ago all hung neatly side by side.

Next, he led me to my library. It had been a long day, and he’d worked fast. I had hundreds of books on every imaginable subject like self-help, inspiration, medical, classics, mysteries and encyclopedias. He had them neatly rearranged by size. Apparently, he’d found it offensive to see a 10-inch-high book with brown jacket standing next to a 6-inch x 12-inch book in a blue jacket, even when it was written by the same author. Apparently the tops of all books needed to even and the colors consistant in order to look neat on the shelf.

He looked so pleased with himself, I found it hard to burst his bubble. I did most of my crying in private. 

I discovered there was one area in which his organizational ability did come in handy. Every time I loaded the dishwasher. He would go behind me and remove everything I’d put in and rearrange it. He was genius when it came to loading a dishwasher. He could get three times as many dishes in as I could, and they all came out sparkling. I assigned him that task permanently and asked politely that he steer clear of my closet.

He agreed to allow me to be a slob, and he would look the other way. It worked well, until he became bored again and drew up plans for a third story sunroom with views of Lookout Mountain. When the time came to build it, he informed me half of my closet had to go so he would have an area in which to build the stairs. The room turned out beautifully, but sacrificing my closet broke my heart. All of those clothes I didn’t wear had to be packed away.

I had to admit his talents as designer and carpenter were much more desirable than his organizational skills. This time he actually did accumulate some brownie points. That room became a family favorite.

 


Chapter 31
Self Help to a Nervous Breakdown

By BethShelby


Life was so much simpler before the invasion of self-help books.  Before everyone who believed they had experienced a unique revelation concerning their own maladjusted psyche, decided they could write a formula that would cure the most deranged member of society and earn themselves a generous profit as well, we somehow managed to cope.  And we did it with a lot less stress, I might add.

We didn't have to deal with the possibility that somehow we might be suppressing our inner child, or heaven forbid, even more sinister, perhaps multiple personalities might lurk in our tortured brains.  We didn't spend our precious leisure moments contemplating ways of becoming the "total woman" or fretting that we might be suffering from the "Cinderella complex".  It didn't occur to us that self-hypnosis or yoga might correct our bulging waist lines or that chanting "Ummmm" sounds could release the power within us.

There is a plus side, of course.  At last, we can excuse the temper tantrum by mentioning PMS or referring to our hormone imbalance.  If we totally lose it and hurl a plate of food at the wall on Christmas Day, you can't hold us accountable because dinner is late and our blood sugar level is low.  If our children tie the teacher up and threaten to burn the school, they are likely either hyperactive or suffering from attention deficient disorder.

In those good old days of "Take two aspirins and call me in the morning," most of the ills that beset us fell under the mysterious heading of "Virus". The family practitioner could usually set our minds at rest by nodding knowingly and assuring us that it would probably pass in 24 hours.  Alas, those days ended when the Disease of the Month books hit the shelves.  Now, we have to deal with hypoglycemia, chronic fatigue syndrome, toxic shock syndrome, and an endless parade of possibilities that might account for the fact that we aren't feeling quite up to par.

Perhaps not everyone haunts the libraries and book stores in search of answers, but I'm blessed (or cursed) with two daughters who do. Both have assured me that they have discovered that I am the root cause of all their problems.

One daughter attributes her low self esteem to the fact she lost her identity as the baby in the birth order, when I schemed to replace her by giving birth to another child when she was ten.  She refuses to believe me when I tell her it was more a leaky diaphragm than a deliberate plot.  She's an active member of the Disease of the Month club and calls regularly to inform me that she has finally isolated her problem and will be totally healthy soon. I can't wait.

The other daughter's accusations I take more seriously. She was once confident, well adjusted, and a delight to be around.  After her obsessive compulsive husband of eight years decided he was suffering from marriage burnout and bailed, she began to suffer serious self doubts. Her friends rushed to comfort her with arm loads of literary insight to help her deal with grief and determine what went wrong. After discovering that "Men are from Mars" and we would all have been better off if they had stayed there, she was hooked.

Her latest passion is the Codependency craze. Codependency, as nearly as I can determine, has to do with needing another person to meet a need that you may have, or allowing yourself to meet the needs of a person who needs you. It's like "needing a hug" is a bad thing. "People who need people," according to the authors of these books, "are not the luckiest people in the world." In fact, they are downright sick. It seems to me, that automatically puts all parents and most married couples in jeopardy. If you've ever read their list, you probably know that almost everything that involves interaction with another human being qualifies you as a certified card carrying member of the Society of Codependents. In order not to make the dread list you would have to be a hermit,  preferably on an isolated island near Atlantis or some other lost civilization.

My once helpful, caring daughter has become so afraid of needing or being needed by someone that she can no longer talk on the telephone without analyzing her motives to determine if she really wants to have this conversation or if there is another motivation. Naturally, the problem stems back to her early childhood when I was, more or less, still in charge.

If I give financial help or other aid to any of her siblings, I'm an "enabler". If I offer a suggestion, I'm a "controller". It's depressing, but then that's not allowed either. There are numerous "how to" books to help me cope with that.

As far my daughters are concerned, perhaps there is hope for them yet. To paraphrase the wisdom of Erma Bombeck's mother, maybe when they hit menopause, it will take their mind off their problems.

As for me, things are definitely looking up. My son, the chiropractor, who is into astrology, numerology, biorhythm, and other pseudo-sciences, assures me that my problem lies in the fact that the stars aren't lined up just right for me. I should be coming into a new cycle soon that will assure me of health, happiness and material prosperity.  As long as I keep my vertebra aligned, massage my pressure points, and look into the joys of jogging, life will be sweet.

Author Notes I wrote this piece several years ago in response to a frustration over the advice I was receiving from my children who were very much a part of the culture of their day.


Chapter 32
Selective Amnesia

By BethShelby

I think my husband suffers from selective amnesia. If it weren't for a handful of isolated incidents forever etched into grooves of his brain, one might conclude from his recollections, he was probably zapped into existence as a full grown adult.

I don't have an exceptional memory, but I have retained bits and pieces of almost everything of any significance that happened to me from age three on, and some things earlier than that. It seems to me, short of being dropped on his head and thereby erasing whatever happened up to that point, there should be something more in his memory bank other than the pain of being teased about the hole in the seat of his pants at the tender age of five.

Truthfully, there are a few other things. He remembers being reprimanded by a teacher, for standing up and yelling at someone outside the window while class was going on. He remembers being scolded by his father for scooting across the floor on his behind. attempting to impress his uncle's new bride. (That may be how he got the hole in the seat of his pants.) He hasn't forgotten the time he was late for class and nearly decapitated himself by running into a clothes line. He also remembers the time he ran half a mile home, fleeing the  slingshot hanging out of his back pocket, while thinking he was being pursued by a deadly rattler. Then, there is the memory of "Katsy" or rather, he remembers begging to go to "Katsy's" house. Nobody in his family ever figured out who Katsy was, much less where she lived, but those meager anecdotes about sum up all that's survived of his childhood.

The next time his train of recall starts up, he was a full grown soldier boy, heading for war. He remembers the war years well, mainly because he had knots in his stomach for two years from fear of flying shrapnel or the possibility of stepping on a land mine.

As nearly as I can determine, in order for him to consider an event memorable, it must involve pain, embarrassment, fear, or something totally non-existent. Given that, I have to consider it a positive thing that he remembers so little of our courtship and our numerous years of marriage. All the adorable things the children did or said are part of my memory, not his. He remembers their accidents, the skeletons they dragged  from our proverbial closet and displayed for the amusement of our friends, and the fights in the back seat when "I'm going to count to ten" stopped working, and he occasionally managed to subdue them by threatening to stop the car.

However, what stands out more vividly than any other tidbits of family history, in his cache of recollections are our vacations, or more accurately, selective parts of them. He can conjure these jewels from the depths of his grey matter with total recall, causing all the emotions he felt at the time to come flooding to the surface. Those are times we tiptoe and try to stay out of his way.

I guess the reason these memories are so much clearer than the others are because they involve a combination of stimuli. Pain, from the inescapable headache that follows a day of driving and listening to me yell at four hyper children, who were attempting to destroy each other, in the back seat. Fear, that maybe he might totally lose control and actually do bodily harm to one of them (or me). Embarrassment, caused by the likelihood  we might be evicted from a restaurant, because one of them had initiated a food fight. But central to all, is his creative, but paranoid, imagination, which convinces him that I once deliberately set out to cause his demise, by nearly running out of gas in the middle of the scenic route, and then, choosing not to find a motel room instantly, when he informed me that his head was bursting, and he didn't think he was long for this world. Even Alfred Hitchcock couldn't have devised such an ingenious murder plot.

Since that time, every year when vacation rolls around, we've had to deal with the resurrection of this cerebral demon of his, which threatens to call a halt to any plans I might have to get away a few day. Personally, my own demon sleeps. I remember peaceful mountains and carefree days. Reality sets in some time later, usually when we've traveled too far to turn back. 

So be it. Perhaps I have my own brand of selective amnesia. 

Author Notes This was written years ago when my husband was living.


Chapter 33
How to Make a Holiday Memorable

By BethShelby

Holidays have never gone smoothly for my family. It is a time when Murphy's Law always decides to kick into gear. As if the stress of preparation isn't enough, something bad is sure to happen, and the Christmas of ninety-five was no exception. I'm a last minute person, but you'd think with our track record, I would have learned to schedule in those emergencies that go with my family's special days. Maybe in spite of everything, I'm an optimist and I want to believe things will fall neatly in place. I guess I will never learn.

I awoke from a sound sleep at four a.m. to the piercing wail of one of our fire detector alarms. The sound appeared to be coming from an unused bedroom. My husband's feet hit the floor at the same time as mine.

"Run downstairs," he ordered, "and see if anything's on fire, while I check up here."

Alarmed but still groggy from sleep, I hit the stairs running. Four steps from the bottom, I tripped and tumbled the rest of the way to the floor. My leg twisted, and a shocking pain shot through my ankle. I knew instantly it was broken. I lay in a whimpering heap on the floor, shaking from the chill of the room. Meanwhile, my husband had determined that the fire alarm had malfunctioned, and there was no real cause for alarm. He had managed to open it and extract the battery to stop the deafening noise, but by then, it was me that was making the noise.

It was Christmas Eve, and as usual, I was not even close to being ready for the holiday. Since I had worked on the previous day, I hadn't started to prepare food for the big meal I was planning. There would be ten family members plus several friends, whom I had invited to join us. My daughter and her husband were due to arrive that night from Florida to spend a few days. I still had cleaning to do, plus a last minute trip to the grocery store. I had counted on having all day to get everything together.

After crawling back up the stairs on my knees, with one leg suspended at a forty-five degree angle, and tears streaming down my cheeks, I managed to get dressed. Evan did his best to help, and eventually, he got me back down the stairs and to the car.

The temperature was in the process of hitting a new record that day. It was five degrees below zero. Maybe that doesn't seem cold to those who live in the northern states, but for the sunny south, it was rare indeed. It took a good thirty minutes for Evan to scrape the ice off the windshield while I shivered inside the car.

Since time was in short supply, we decided to go to the nearest hospital. It was one of the smallest hospitals, and I assumed the least busy. Surely, they would be able to handle a broken ankle. Boy, was I ever wrong. Unfortunately, there was only one doctor on duty in the emergency room. We arrived at the same time as a heart attack victim. Naturally, he was in more distress than I, and the doctor's attention was called for there. My insurance was processed, and I was given a wheelchair and told to wait.

Two hours later, they took me to X-ray. That's when things got a bit interesting. The X-ray personnel became very excited over the fact that X-rays of my heel seemed to show a large piece of metal embedded in it. I think they assumed it was either an alien transplant or a railroad stake. The fact that the ankle was indeed broken was only of minor consequence as far as they were concerned. We never figured that one out, but two years later, when I broke the same ankle again, this time on Christmas Day, the x-ray didn't show this unusual phenomena. I guess the Mother Ship must have zoomed down and had its big-eyed henchmen extract the object while I was sleeping.

But back to the story at hand, I sat for another three hours until the doctor was finally free to look at my ankle. It was noon by that time. The poor guy with the heart attack had passed on. The doctor spent about five minutes telling me that he wasn't qualified to set my ankle, but he would have someone get on the phone and contact an orthopedic surgeon. The only one available happened to be in surgery, but he would be free around two o'clock. So, I was left to sit another two hours.

They put me in a little curtained off section. I was starving because I had not eaten since the night before, and I was getting very impatient. Barely out of my range of vision, the patient charts were placed on a shelf in the hallway. I knew mine had to be one of them. Each time a nurse walked by to pick up a chart, I prayed it would be mine. By stretching really hard, I could almost see how many charts were left. Finally, curiosity got the better of me, and I stretched a tad too far. The wheelchair scooted backwards and I slid forward and crashed to the floor. If you aren't getting enough attention in a hospital emergency room, this is an excellent way to get it. The chair banged into to a table upsetting a metal pan and suddenly, I had five nurses and the doctor at my service.

After finding out I was no worse off for the spill, and probably wasn't planning to sue, they assigned someone on the staff to keep an eye on me. I was, at least, a bit less bored. Finally the doctor arrived. He was rude, ill mannered and not at all pleased to be working on Christmas Eve. He cracked a few tasteless jokes in which he mentioned "the stiff" in the next room. Then, to cap it off, he had the nerve to insinuate that if I had not been overweight, I would have been less clumsy, and probably wouldn't have fallen in the first place.

He constructed a plaster cast that I had to wear for the next six weeks. It was four o'clock that afternoon before we got home. Many things were left undone that Christmas, but with the help of a crutch, I managed to cook a decent meal. Everyone pitched in with the cleanup and sympathized with me over my misfortune.

The day after Christmas, my four children and their spouses and friends all decided to go skiing. When they returned home that evening, my son-in-law from Florida came limping in on a crutch. He had managed to break his own ankle in the same spot as mine. You would have thought after all I went through, I would have been able to play the sympathy card a little longer without having to share, but it was not to be.

During the next six weeks, I stumbled around wearing what felt like a tree attached to my leg. I wasn't allowed to shower and my leg itched and developed a foul odor. At the end of the six weeks when I returned to the doctor, he informed me if I hadn't made such a big deal out of the whole thing, he could have put a removable boot on my ankle that would have worked just as well. It was all I could do to keep from crowning him with my crutch.

I shouldn't have been surprised at the turn of events. It is only par for the course in this family. I guess we just don't feel those days will be memorable enough on their own. There is nothing like a little trauma to make sure the day will never be forgotten.


Chapter 34
Wedding Thrills and Spills

By BethShelby

It was the day before my son's wedding, and I was posting red alerts and pushing panic buttons. Disorganized to begin with, I had fallen into my habitual pattern of procrastination. My soon-to-be daughter-in-law wanted the rehearsal supper in our home rather than a restaurant or church recreation room. I figured I could handle it, and there was no point in catering a small supper.
 
My soon-to-be daughter-in-law mailed out the invitations, but failed to mention, until the last minute, she had invited between sixty and seventy-five people. Her invitations were open-ended with things like "Bring your family if you like. I'm sure it will be fine with my mother-in-law." There was no RSVP, so how many would actually come was anyone's guess. My house is fairly large, but I had never had over twelve people in it before. I imagined people in every room and hanging off the rooftops.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon with the supper scheduled for six. I was in the midst of inflating balloons and hanging streamers when I got a phone call from my son saying he had invited everyone over early to go on a hike. And no, he couldn't call and rescind the invitation because they were already on their way.

My husband can take just so much of my "freaking out" before developing a splitting headache. This gives him permission, or so he thinks, to go into hiding. He grabbed an old beat-up coffee pot and a hot plate, and headed for our upstairs bedroom. Figuring no room would be off-limits once the mob arrived, I grabbed the offensive pot and attempted to shove inside the vanity cabinet. In the process, I spilled coffee all over my white carpet. Snatching a bar of soap and a towel, I tried to wipe up the spill, but in my haste, I left the carpet slippery from wet soap.

At this point, Hubby tried to retreat to the master bath. Unfortunately, his unshod feet found the soapy spot just before stepping onto the ceramic tile. In an instant, both feet went airborne and his bony hip came crashing down with a sickening thud on the hard floor. My worst nightmare had come true. In the process of falling, he had fractured a hip, and the arriving guests were already ringing my doorbell. 

I am the kind of person who sputters and pops like a case of firecrackers during minor crisis, but when something major happens, I suddenly become a rock. Nothing can shake me. Of course, I was probably in shock because I don't remember most of it. But with the help of 911, (called because we couldn't move him down the sharp angled staircase) and one daughter, who was happy to get out of serving, we managed to get him to the hospital.
 
Incidentally, 911, in spite of being informed we needed only one ambulance, sent two police cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck, all with sirens blazing. This brought all the neighbors from several blocks out on the street to see what was happening. He was transported down three-landing stairway politely greeting the arriving guests on the way down.

The rehearsal dinner went on as scheduled, and despite our earlier sideshow, the supper was a great success with all sixty-five guests getting their fill, and marveling at my calm demeanor. I was able to postpone my traumatic reaction until later when I was trying to get to sleep that night.
 
Poor hubby missed the wedding and had to wait an extra day, in traction, before he could have the hip set and pinned. He insisted that I be there when he went into surgery. He was convinced he'd never walk again, and apparently he needed me there to feel the guilt of having caused his accident and of not having accompanied him to the hospital that night.

My son and his bride-to-be weren't about to call off the wedding or their honeymoon to Aruba because of the accident. So the wedding went on as planned without the father of the groom in attendance. My husband still hasn't gotten over that. But prior experience has taught us that all the major occasions in this family's household have chaotic scenarios, so why postpone the inevitable?

Author Notes A few of you have read this oldie already. I am promoting it again because it is one of the few stories in my book "Chasing the Elusive Dream" that hasn't yet reached the magic 26 reviews that gives it a higher rating.


Chapter 35
Trouble Times Two

By BethShelby

 As far as I know, no one who matters ever said raising twins is easy. Sometimes, it's even harder when they're away at boarding academy with someone else theoretically raising them for you.  Donald Ray and Christi Faye were the two of my four who gave me the most headaches.

I had my reservations about sending them away to another state to go to school. They could manage to get into enough trouble at home with me there to keep an eye on them. Let them get that far out of reach, and the potential for problems was immense. Nevertheless, it was their senior year in high school, and this boarding school was about as strict as they get.

The male half of the pair had already ventured into the world the year before. Even though the school he attended was the one assigned for students in our church district, it was over 10 hours away by car. I had barely driven away from the campus, when my son discarded the class schedule I had so carefully worked out with courses he needed, to at least, give him a fighting chance of getting into college. The classes he substituted were an assortment of non-academic fun classes that would qualify him for nothing in particular. It was obvious he wasn't there to study, and I was furious with his advisors for allowing him to get away with it.

After two months away from home for the first time in his life, he was anxious to touch home base. During fall break, busses were provided to transport the students to their respective districts. As anxious as he was to get home, you'd think he would be there when the bus was ready to roll out. Not! My husband and I had figured he was about an hour into the ten-hour trip home when the phone rang. The shaken voice of our male heir came on the line to inform us he had overslept and missed the bus. As usual with most of the phone calls I got that year, it was a crisis situation, and he expected us to come up with an instant solution from our corner of the world. This time, luck was with him. The school policy was to call roll before heading out. Since someone had neglected their duty, the school was forced to fly him home at their expense. He arrived home several hours before the busload of exhausted students and was rather proud of himself for being so clever. It takes real talent to miss a bus.

Every time I heard from him after that, either he needed money, was in trouble or was about to embark on some caving or mountain climbing adventure. The school seemed to encourage the students to live dangerously. Somehow, he made it through the year without any lasting ill effects other than low grades, in spite of his chosen fun classes. Even so, my nerves were frayed, and I vowed to have him closer to home the following year. His twin sister, who didn't feel ready to go away at fifteen, decided he wasn't leaving again without her.

This time, we chose a closer school which wasn't a part of our district. Still, a hundred miles is out of reach of the apron strings, a lot of things can happen. In spite of the fact Don was the veteran, he was the one that the things generally happened to. He was a gymnastic star that year, and it wasn't unusual to see some part of his anatomy sporting a cast. Regardless of what was broken, he'd leave a cast intact just so long. By the time it has gotten wet a few times and started to itch and smell, he'd head for the woodworking shop to rid himself of the offensive bit of plaster, despite doctor's orders.

He was in "luv" that year. I can think of nothing that is more nauseating than the first time a guy falls hard for a girl. Rational behavior isn't even in the picture. One of his most bizarre accidents involved several crushed hand bones, the result of trying to run his fist through a metal door. The cause being that the dean had forbidden him to see his fair lady for a week as punishment for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The dean, realizing that blow was directed, at least symbolically, at him, considered sending him home for good.

His twin sister, comparatively, was having a relatively good year. Aside from the usual money and boy friend problems and the weird hyena shriek she had developed at the first hint of something amusing, all was going well. Graduation was only a week away, and we almost had it made. Then came another call from the school.

My daughter had stayed out of trouble just about as long as she could tolerate. No offense carried a stricter penalty at this school than that of a student daring to invade the sleeping quarters of one of the opposite sex. This was the rule she chose to violate. She and another friend decided, it would be a great sport to sneak into the room of a sleeping male student, seize his covers, yank them off, and yell "Trucking" and bolt from the room without being caught. The trick went off as planned, but word got out and someone squealed. Now, I was being informed I should come immediately to get my wayward daughter and take her home.

A hasty meeting of the staff convened. They decided perhaps expulsion might be too stiff a punishment since this was the first offense. Besides, you never know how a parent might react at seeing so much hard earned money escaping down the drain. Therefore, although she wouldn't be allowed to participate in any of the graduation parties and activities or be on campus, she could return for the actual graduation ceremony to receive her diploma. Under no circumstances would she be allowed to attend any of the other functions.

I was making arrangements to leave my job to go after my mischievous juvenile offender, when I got a call from the father of an off campus friend. "There's no point in you having to make that long trip," he said. "We'd be delighted to have her stay with us a few days." I considered his proposal and agreed, luckily for her, because I wasn't taking any of this too lightly.

Saturday night was class night, and at least one of our children was participating. Don had parts in several skits and an Elvis impersonation for the talent portion. Since Christi was banned from the campus, we went straight to the auditorium. The program was starting when we noticed a strange looking little old lady, wearing a long dress and pull down hat, enter leaning on her cane. She kept her head down to avoid eye contact with anyone and sat down quickly. It wasn't long before whispered messages were being passed from one student to the next. Heads turned and giggles erupted. Finally, I got wind of what was going on. My daughter, this time with the blessing and aid of her friend's delinquent father, was once again defying the school by masquerading as an old lady. I was horrified. I'm sure someone in authority must have learned of my daughter's latest escapade. Too many students were willing and anxious to tattle. I fully expected the diploma to be snatched from her grasp at the last minute. For the fact it didn't happen, I am truly grateful.

The following year, they went on to college and no, it didn't get that much easier, but gradually I got more seasoned. They're a long way from seventeen now, but they're still capable of providing me with amusing anecdotes to tell my grandchildren. If there's any justice out there, maybe somewhere in the future there will be twin grandchildren to whom I can tell those stories

Author Notes This is a really old one. There is a somewhat similar story in my later book, but I told this with a bit more humor.


Chapter 36
When It Rains, It Pours

By BethShelby

Backstory:
It has been a while since I added to my book. For those of you who are new to my book, Grasping the Elusive Dream, it a true story of my family living in New Orleans in the eighties. My husband, Evan and I have three children living at home. The twins, Don and Christi, haven't finished college, but they are taking a break and planning to return. Connie is 11. Evan has decided to retire as a drafting supervisor from Chevron at 56. I am 47 and have been working for a printing company. We have an older daughter, Carol. She is a nurse, and she was married a few months ago to Glen. They live in Valdosta, Georgia. Some of you will remember this story, but you might want to look over it since I plan to write the next chapter shortly.
 
 
Some memories are almost too painful to relive. Still, they are also extremely hard to forget. The year my youngest daughter was eleven not so good in many ways. I was physically at my worst. I hated my job, but that was a minor irritation compared to the problems I was experiencing heatlh-wise. I had what once was referred to in whispered tones as female problems. To put it bluntly, I was bleeding to death. My doctor was doing everything he could to frighten me into having a hysterectomy, but I've never been one to listen to a doctor, particularly when it comes to doing things to my body which involves the use of a knife.

Christmas is always stressful, but somehow, I managed to do all the shopping, gift wrapping, and the food preparation necessary without completely passing out. We even made a six-hour trip out of town to be with family for the holidays. That wasn't so pleasant either, especially since a nephew set off one of those chaser type firecrackers that had my name on it. All twenty of us were lined up for a family photo when the little imp lit the thing. After scurrying about like a crazed mouse with its tail ablaze, it singled me out and made a beeline for my leg where it sputtered itself out, burning a hole in my pantyhose and leaving a small scar, which I have to this day. This was only a precursor of things to come.

We made it back to our home in New Orleans late on Christmas Day. Carol, my married daughter, and her husband had spent Christmas with his parents, but they were planning to spend a few days with us before returning to Florida. They would be arriving the night of the 26th so I needed to get ready for their visit. Relieved with this much of the holiday behind me, I knew there was still much to do before I'd have to return to work on the twenty-seventh.
 
The day after Christmas started out with me attempting to do a load of wash in the laundry room, which was off the den. That is when the pipes burst, flooding the laundry room and den's carpet with six inches of water and making it necessary to pull it all up. By the time the carpet was spread out to dry in the backyard, it was apparent I had to do something about my continuing loss of blood. I was so weak I could barely stand, so my husband, Evan, got my doctor on the phone and informed him that he that he would be taking me to the emergency room.

Once I got there, the doctor decided he needed to perform a D & C. However, because my blood count was so low, he insisted I be given five pints of blood first. They checked me into a room, found a vein and started me on the first pint.

Evan went out for lunch, promising to be back soon to spend time with me. The twins, Don and Christi, were home from college on Christmas break, so we'd left them to supervise the activities of my eight-year old daughter, Connie. The truth is the twins could have probably used some supervision themselves.

A neighbor friend Connie's age came over to play with her. The girls decided to construct a tent in Connie's room by draping overlapping bath-towels across dining-room chairs. They found a solution to the darkness in the tent by taking the shade off a lamp and positioning it inside their tent. The problem was that the bare bulb lay against one of the towels. When the towel started to smolder, Connie promptly wadded all of the towels up and tossed them into her closet.

Big brother smelled the odor from the smoking towels and stepped in to perform his duties as man of the house while Dad was away. "What are you two up to?" he demanded.

"None of your beeswax!" Connie retorted. "Just girl stuff."

"Well, go outside and do your girl stuff!" Don snatched the lamp cord from the wall socket and set the lamp aside. "You've made a mess, and you've got this place smelling like smoke. Go on out, before I call Daddy."

"We're going to Lesley's then. You're not our boss," Connie fumed on her way out.

New Orleans was having an unseasonly warm December day, so Don opened the windows to let the room air out. He turned on the ceiling fan and closed the door. Soon, he was once again engrossed in the book he had been reading.

A half an hour later, Christi noted that the house was getting hot. "Is the thermostat on heat? I'm burning up. I'm going to take a bath and cool off," she told Don.

"You don't have to tell me. Do what you want to. I don't care," he said.

Finding all the towels missing from the linen closet, Christi decided to check Connie's room. When she opened the door, tongues of fire leaped out at her. She screamed and slammed the door. Don came running to see what was happening.

"The house is on fire! The house is on fire! Do something quick!" she yelled.

Don snatched the spread from his bed and opened the door. He started slapping at the flames, but it quickly became apparent, this was not working. By that time, smoke had filled the entire house.

"What's the number to 911? Quick, tell me the number to 911!" yelled my brilliant daughter.

"Just get out of the house! I'll call them!" Don ordered, trying hard to keep his cool.
 
Luckily, firetrucks were already on their way. An alert neighbor had seen the smoke and made the call. By this time, Don and Christi were choking and gagging from the clouds of black smoke. They had to stoop low and crawl out to avoid the heavier smoke near the ceiling. Once outside, Don called the hospital. Evan had just arrived, expecting to remain with me for several hours. When I answered the bedside phone, he said, "Let me talk to Daddy, now!" I handed the phone over, knowing by his tone there had to be trouble.

"Dad", he said. "Please, don't say anything to Mama, but the house is on fire and the fire truck just got here. All the neighbors are standing in the street watching it with us. We don't even have our shoes on!"

My husband gulped and paled but tried to keep calm. "Okay., I'm coming. I'll be there in a few minutes."

"What's wrong?" I demanded. "You were going to stay with me. Why do you have to go? What have they done?" He was in a hurry and didn't want to tell me, but I was determined he wasn't going to leave until I knew the worst of it.

"Okay, if you must know. They had a little fire over there. It didn't amount to much. I think it's probably out by now," he lied.

Needless to say, my blood-pressure shot so high they almost had to postpone the surgery which was scheduled for the following morning. The house didn't burn to the ground, but one room and most of the attic were completely destroyed. The rest of the house and all of our belongings were blackened and ruined.
 
A friend down the street, gave the four of them a place to stay for the night. Evan left a note on the blackened door for Carol and Glen when they arrived around midnight. Seeing the dark house, Carol was shocked. When they reached the soot-covered front door, they failed to see the note right away, but the odor of smoke was still in the air. 

The following morning the minor surgery went well, and the five pints of blood made me feel like a new person. I needed the extra energy to cope with the next two weeks. Our insurance company managed to find one motel room for the five of us, and one freaked-out cat, which the firemen had managed to rescue. We tried in vain to get another room for our daughter and her husband, but we were told we were lucky to get even one room, because everything available was booked for the Superbowl. Carol and Glen had to cut their trip short because seven people in a small room was too much. They spent two days taking loads of clothes to the laundrymat to see what might be salvagable. Since Connie's entire room was a total loss she had nothing to wear. 
 
Since New Orleans was about to host the Superbowl, no hotels or motels were available. The best they were able to do was find one room with two queen beds in a Day's Inn. This would be our home for five of us for the next two weeks, and for two nights, until my married daughter and her husband could make their excape back to south Georgia, there were seven of us in it. It reminded me of Judd family in Grapes of Wrath. 
 
I'd love to say we'd seen the worst and everything was lovely from that point on, but you wouldn't want me to lie, would you?
 
 
 

Author Notes I'm reposting this older one because I think it belongs in the book "Chasing the Elusive Dream" and I hope to get a few more reviews on it.


Chapter 37
Lucky

By BethShelby

 
 
I'm not sure luck was with us the day my husband, Evan and I decided to buy the colt. We named him Lucky anyway, although at the moment, I can't remember why. He was a sorrel chestnut colored quarter horse with a star-shaped splash of white in his face, and there was fire in his eyes.

I was excited because, at one time like most teenage girls who read the classic horse books, I wanted a horse of my very own. In truth, the only time I'd ever been on the back of an animal was when my grandpa let me sit bareback on his old plow mule as he led her back to the stable.

Evan had owned a horse when he was a child, but the horse had managed to throw him and dislocate his shoulder. The point is that neither of us had any business owning a horse. We knew nothing of breaking or training one, and besides that, we lived in the city and had no place to keep a horse. 
 
There is the saying, "You can take a boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy." For Evan, his dream of having a ranch someday was his motivating factor. Although being a rancher's wife wasn't high on my priority list, we did have a daughter who was starting to dream of horses. In the end, I wasn't hard to persuade, especially after I saw him. He was beautiful. The colt belonged to one of Evan's co-workers, and the price was right. 

Unwilling to pay to board him, we carted him off to my in-laws' farm several counties away to grow up with their cattle. Since Evan's parents were getting on in years and had no use for a horse, Lucky was left undisciplined and on his own. We saw him occasionally and dreamed of when we'd buy a piece of land and bring him home to live with us.

By the time he was two, we realized our own country place was not going to materialize in the near future. We needed a trainer if we were ever to be able to ride our horse. We found a man who kept a few horses and worked with them in the evenings and on weekends. Unfortunately, his job in the city left him little time for training horses. After a couple of months, he gave us a call and said he'd managed to saddle the horse and ride him. He said our horse was very unpredictable, and he would like us to move him as he wasn't getting along with his horses.

I don't think the word 'unpredictable' registered with us at all. What we heard was the horse could now be ridden. We went over immediately to have our turn in the saddle. To Evan's credit, he was able to ride around the pasture without any major mishaps, and then it was my time.

It should have been a tip-off to the part-time cowboy and my loving mate that I was a greenhorn, when I attempted to mount from the wrong side of the horse. Then, I almost ended up facing his rear when I put the wrong foot in the stirrup. But they patiently helped boost me into the correct sitting position and handed me the reins. If they didn't notice my ignorance, Lucky did. He read me like a flashing neon billboard.

I bravely dug my toe into the horse's side, slapped the reins, and shouted, "Get up!" Well, he got up all right. He took off like someone had lit a match to his tail. I dropped the reins and grabbed the saddle horn and his mane and held on like an embedded tick. This horse knew every low hanging branch on all of the many trees scattered throughout the pasture, and he didn't miss a single one that appeared capable of decapitating a rider. I flattened myself out along his back and prayed. All the time, we were being pursued by my husband, my three kids, and the week-end cowboy all shouting, "Pull up on the reins!" The problem was that they were too far back in our dust, and I was too preoccupied to hear anything.

Eventually, after he had been unsuccessful at scraping me off, he headed toward a high barbed wire fence. I had visions of him going air-borne or else crashing through. Instead he came to an abrupt halt, no doubt expecting me to go flying over his shoulders into the next field. At that point, I managed to regain control of the reins and get out a belated and shaky, "Whoa, boy!" He probably had himself a horse laugh over that. I could almost hear him saying "Yeah, like she had anything to do with me stopping."

My family caught up and helped me to the ground. My legs were almost incapable of holding me, and I was forever cured of visions of galloping across golden fields on my own stallion.

As for luck, I felt very lucky to be alive. We were also lucky he was a beautiful horse and there was another would-be-cowboy willing to take him off our hands for a decent price. Hopefully, Lucky turned out to be lucky as well and got a trainer with the patience of Job. I hope for his sake, his story ended well. 

Author Notes This is a true story written for a writing prompt for a club of which I'm a member The prompt subject was "Luck".


Chapter 38
The Sea and Me

By BethShelby

Growing up in Mississippi, which has towns bordering the Gulf of Mexico, you would think my parents might find a reason to drive the three hours down state, so their daughter could dip her feet into the waves occasionally. Unfortunately, they weren’t inclined to leave home just for pleasure. I could only dream of seeing the sea.

When I got married at eighteen, I’d only seen the Mississippi Gulf Coast twice, and on neither occasion did I have a chance to exit the car. I had swum in a few lakes, rivers and ponds, but those can’t compete with water reaching as far as you can see. My husband and I did take a short wedding trip to the Gulf in Pensacola, Florida. I loved it, but two hours was just enough time to realize my new husband wasn’t really a beach person.

It was years later, when we moved to New Orleans, I was thrilled to learn the seashore was nearer than it had ever been before. Living a block off of Lake Pontchartrain, I did get the pleasure of viewing water as far as I could see. I enjoyed hiking the trails along the lake, but it wasn’t for swimming or digging your toes into the sand. The water was dirty, and often, dead fish were washed up on the rocks lining the shore.  

By then we had three children, and soon after moving there, a fourth child was added. We often drove over to Gulfport or Biloxi on the weekends. The children loved the gulf waters as much as I did. The drive took only a little more than an hour.

After a few unfortunate faux pas, my loving brood decided their mom was an accident waiting to happen, and they surmised, it was likely to be a weird one at that.

They never stopped teasing me about the time my husband and I changed drivers on a road trip. It wasn’t my fault, but I was the one left standing barefooted on the side of an interstate highway. I’d gotten out of the driver seat to walk around the car and get back in on the other side, when my husband, who had simply moved over, drove away before I had a chance to get back in. The kids thought it was so funny they couldn’t stop laughing long enough to tell him what happened. He had to drive 20 miles to turn around.

There was the time my shoes went down the Ocoee River, when a friend talked me into getting into the water with her to cool off. How was I supposed to know at certain times the upstream dam was opened to create more water pressure for the white-water rafters? The water increased in depth and swiftness so suddenly there was no time to rescue my shoes, camera or reading material. Fortunately, I stopped chasing my shoes down the river in time to save myself.

I could go on, but let’s just say I’d had enough embarrassing moments to have earned myself a reputation for getting into trouble. The seashore should have been a place where I would be safe. I wasn’t a risk taker. I hadn’t even waded out past my shoulders in the water. My feet were firmly planted on the solid seabed.

I was peacefully enjoying the lap of waves, the gulls overhead and the feel of the sea breeze caressing my face, when I thought I heard shouts from my children who were playing in the shallow water on the shore. I turned just in time to see an out-of-control sailing dinghy heading straight toward me. The guy and girl in the boat were trying their best to turn the sail.

Moving through the waves quickly enough to avoid a collision was impossible. The pain of the impact was an unpleasant jolt, which came close to knocking the wind out of me, but it wasn’t life threatening. The couple, seeing I was still upright, yelled apologies as they continued on their way, trying desperately to keep the sail from dumping them into the brine. I limped out of the water with a rapidly forming bruise on my side.

After seeing there was very little blood, my loving kids started to laugh. My youngest was the one to proclaim “No one but Mom could possibly get run over by a boat.”


Chapter 39
Safe Keeping

By BethShelby

Things happen from time to time which defy all rules of logic and leave you mystified and wondering if twilight zones may actually exist. One such incident I experienced involved a safe in the office of the printing company where I worked. Not only did the hint of the supernatural involving the safe cause me to question things I thought I understood, but the material locked in the safe led to an interesting encounter which impacted my life in a positive way.

Let me give you a little background. Doris, the company receptionist and office manager, had previously demonstrated her ability to sense things before they happened. She claimed to have walked and talked for years with her mother, who died when she was four. She always sensed when her sister or other family members were in pain or trouble. Although at first, I resisted becoming her friend, it didn't take me long to realize there was some kind of psychic bond existing between the two of us.

I'd barely started with the company when I had a vivid dream which involved seeing her in a meeting. The company owners were present and she and other company employees were distressed and crying. Since I was a new employee, I was unaware such a meeting had actually taken place the night in which I had the dream. When I related the dream to her the following day, she accused me of having prior knowledge of the meeting. Apparently, it had happened exactly as I saw it. The company was undergoing reorganization, and most of the employees would be losing their jobs. Her own future, as well as mine, was uncertain. Thankfully, both of us were among those chosen to stay.

Two men owned the company. Ralph was the serious intellectual type, who did most of the sales work. Billy, who provided the bulk of the cash, was addicted to gambling and usually kept a bottle of liquor at work to help him get through the day. Billy owned the safe in question, and he was the only person who had ever been able to open it.

A professor from a primarily black college in another county came to our printing company wanting a large book produced, which involved hundreds of photographs and artwork. Since I was the company artist, the job of doing the layout and artwork would fall to me. I had other jobs to be completed first, so Billy decided to store all of her photographs in the safe until I could clear time to work on her job.

None of us realized how deeply Billy was in trouble with gambling debts, One morning, we were all stunned to learn he had committed suicide. When our grief at having lost one of the owners of our company had lessened to the point of getting back to business, the question of how to open the safe was on everyone's mind. Ralph had the combination, but it didn't work for any of us. We spent hours and days trying to open it, but it stubbornly refused to open. The deadline of printing the book was running out, and it appeared the lock would have to be blown off.

"I had a dream about you last night," Doris informed me one morning. "I dreamed I'd gone to the break room to get coffee, and when I walked back through this door, you had opened the safe."

I shrugged and said, "You wish. That's not likely, as many times as I've tried the combination." Later when I saw her go for her morning coffee, I thought 'What the heck. Why not try it one more time.' To my complete amazement the safe opened smoothly just as Doris walked back through the door. I used the same combination, but this time something jelled.

Doris didn't seem surprised. After all, things like that happened for her all the time. For me, not so much. We didn't dare lock it again. It probably couldn't have been repeated.

Did it change my life? Indirectly, I'd say it did. Professor Michaels, the lady who had left the photographs, came back a few days later. Ralph gave me permission to devote full time to her project. This involved going to the hotel where she was staying, and working with her in her hotel room. Did I mention this was the Deep South in the early sixties? Did I mention that Professor Michaels was black at a time when only Caucasians were allowed in "white only" restaurants?

Miss Michaels had grown up in New York, where she was a member of an elite black family. Black was the more polite term people used to refer to her race at that time. Her bearing and confidence amazed me. I was surprised when she invited me to have lunch with her in one of Mississippi's nicer restaurants. I went along, proud to be considered her equal, but wondering if we would be escorted out. Whether it was due to her light skin tone, her confident attitude, or the fact she was accompanied by an obviously white lady, we were served and treated with the utmost respect.

She was pleased with my work and her praise managed to secure me a nice raise, but the bigger change was my attitude toward members of other races. Any inbred prejudice I might have had melted away when I got to be friends with a really classy lady.
 

Author Notes WC 863

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