I call this blog, Memory Stew, because I am not capable of writing an autobiography, and even a memoir might be difficult. It is hard not just because writing is hard, but because my memories resemble a stew. There are parts of my past that are recognizable: this is pot roast, this is a carrot slice, that is a pea. But the integrity of much of my past has been compromised, the substance of the past has dissolved into a thick broth of deja vu. We moved so much that I was nowhere long enough for the people and places to imprint on my mind. I grew up, and in a way, I bloomed, but I was like a cut flower: I had no roots.
There are, obviously, people who have moved more often than I did. Not many, in the US, but there are many. I go to church with a woman who was born and raised in German. As an adult she lived on the communist side of the Berlin Wall. She shared with me that twice she was a refugee, walking with her siblings and mother to flee a war ravaged home.
I worked 6 years at the Abuse and Neglect Hotline for Oklahoma, and the 11 years prior to that I worked directly with children and families where abuse and neglect were issues, and I heard and witnessed stories that make it very clear to me that I did not have a horrible childhood. We moved too often, yes, but I moved, sometimes, 2 to 4 times a year. I know children that have lived in their car, under a bridge, in one bedbug infested motel room after another, moving almost daily.
The troubles in the world are so horrible, that I feel I have nothing to complain about.
On the other hand, just because others have a harder life, it does not mean my life had zero hardships, and it does not mean I have no Life Story that belongs only to me. I have 4 brothers and a sister, and while we share a history our histories are not identical. I was the oldest and I had 5 younger siblings. I am 15 years older than my youngest siblings, twin boys, Jim and Joe.
When I left home at age 19 my oldest brother Tim was 13 my twin brothers were 4.
I was a child of newlyweds, a teenage mother, who gave birth to me when she was 17 years old. My father was 20. My parents were struggling to get on their feet. My twin siblings were raised by parents who were on their feet, or at least as much on their feet compared to the way they lived when I was a very young child.
MOVE ONE
I was born in Austin. I don’t know what happened exactly, during my infancy, so I will share what I have heard.
MOVE TWO
I know that at one point in my baby years, we lived in Houston, Texas. My father was working in a Bank. He told me he came home from work and the house was a mess, I was crying and needed to be cleaned up. My father said, I thought that maybe he had just married “a lazy wife.” My mother had cooked something. He said they sat down, and as my mother was cutting her meat, the knife slipped off the meat and made a tap noise on the plate. My father said that then my mother began to tremble all over. He said he gathered me up, put my mother in the car and took her to the hospital.
My mother had spinal problems that required some of the vertebrae to be fused, using bone taken from her pelvis. My parents did not have any insurance. They borrowed money to pay for the operation and paid on that debt most of the time I was living in the home. My mother once told me they had actually paid for the total cost of that operation 9 times, because of the interest that accumulated on that loan.
Then I did not realize it, but my mother might have been given to hyperbole. My mother told me that the surgery required the doctors to cut the hip muscle to her right hip loose, and when she told me this she would pat her butt, and to cut out living bone. That hip bone was then used to fuse several vertebrae in her back.
This surgery required us to make another move. My mother’s mother, my maternal grandmother, was an LPN, Licensed Practical Nurse, and it was felt that Grandmother Crawford would be in the best position to care for my mother during her recuperation, and also to care for the infant me.
MOVE THREE
So from Houston we moved to Cameron, Texas.
My mother told me she would lay on her stomach and sometimes she would scream for a hour before it was time for her next pain injection.
My father could not stand living with his in-laws, and he could not stand living in a small town.
To earn money, my father told me he would do the books for a Cameron Drug store. He would go to the store after it closed and do the books for that day’s sales. I have no idea how he got such a job, because he appeared to have no ability to keep track of his own income and outflow.
My father told me that one night, he was working in the quiet of an empty store, and he was so miserable he could not stand it. He picked up the phone there on the desk where he was working and called my mother, still confined to her bed. He told my mother that he couldn’t keep working there, that he was taking their car to Austin where he would live with his parents and look for work. He told my mother that when she was up to it, he would send for us [meaning my mother and me.]
MOVE FOUR
So my father got a job as a teller in a Bank and eventually, we moved back to Austin.
So this is at least four moves.
My father kept getting banking jobs, not because he liked banking, but because his father, My Granddaddy Norman, was Vice President of Austin’s First National Bank and he knew people he could nudge to hire my father.
MOVE FIVE
My earliest memory is when we were living in Bishop Texas, so that is at least a 6th move. I would not be surprised if we had moved around Austin several times before moving to a little house in Bishop.
When I press my mind to go back and remember as far back as I can, I am in a hot room. The shades are drawn. I am on sheets wet with my sweat, eyes shut, and I am looking through my eyelids seeing swirls of color. I was thinking, “This is what polio looks like.”
My mother’s theory was that if you let a child play outside during the heat of the day, that those children were susceptible to being infected by the polio virus. Her thought was if I was in bed, shielded from light, that I would not catch polio.
While refrigerated air conditioning may have existed at that time in history, there was nothing in my personal history that cooled the air, other than a reciprocating fan. My family either didn’t have enough fans, or they were afraid a 4 year old boy might stick his tongue in the spinning blades so, there was no fan in my room.
I remember we had a Chinaberry tree in our yard. My mother warned me repeatedly never to put one of those berries in my mouth that they were poisoned berries and if I ate even one, I would die.
I didn’t know what it meant to die, but it sounded like it was probably bad.
I can remember playing horsy with my father, riding on his back as he was on his hands and knees carrying me and lightly bucking me around the living room.
Once my father made me a bow and air out of branches off that Chinaberry tree. At least I think it was the Chinaberry tree.
I also remember standing in our yard watching men pouring concrete to create a driveway for the house next door to us. Bishop Texas is near the sea which may explain why the gravel I saw mixed with the cement was not stone, but shells.
I remember walking into the bathroom to ask my mother something and she was in the tub. I don’t remember skin, I remember her long black hair was wet and filled with suds.
Another time I recall my mother opening the door to an out building and there were dozens of mice that scattered. My mother screamed, picked up our cat, tossed the cat inside and slammed the door.
I remember going with my parents to a store where my father bought his first drafting table. The woman who sold it to him had gold wire rimmed glasses that had sides making them almost diamond shaped. The glasses were memorable, and I believe my father kept that drawing table until after mother died and he had to move into a small retirement apartment.
MAYBE MOVE SIX
I’m not sure if we had any quick moves between Move Five and Move Six, but I do know that in 1955, when I was five years old, we had already moved back into my grandmother and grandfather Norman’s home, in Dallas.
I remember I was living in my grandparent’s home because that was the year I named myself.
I don’t know if I remember this, or if it is just some story I heard my parents tell so many times that it seems like a memory, but this is the story: I was four years old and my parents and grandparents called me Richy. Now I am not sure why I hated being called Richy, but I just hated the name.
I went up and down the street and went to every house on the block, knocked on the door, and if anyone answered I told them, “My name is Tex. I gave all of my other names away.”
I thought I picked the name Tex because I went to see the Disney film Davy Crockett King of the Wild Frontier starring Fess Parker. [Years later I would see a photo of my actor cousin Jim Beaver when he was in Vietnam and Fess Parker was next to him. I guess Mr. Parker was with USO and entertaining the troups or something.]
My mother disagrees with me and said that there was a church of Christ missionary named Tex Williams who was a guest preacher at the Northside Church of Christ, and that I picked the name Tex because of that missionary. This debate will have no winners.
MOVE SEVEN
I remember living in a cement house for a little while. I remember my parents taking all their stuff and putting it in the yard, and then using a water hose to spray the walls and floors, taking a broom and just sweeping the water and dirt out the front door.
I remember one memory that really seemed odd to me. I was in my bedroom and I was hearing a commotion in my parents’ bedroom. The house was dark. I got out of bed and walked into the room with our table, and on through a living room area where the couch was, and then I was standing in my parents’ open bedroom door. My mother was sitting to my left and next to her my father was sitting to my right. They were sitting on the side of the bed. My parents were naked. I know I was breast fed, but at 5 years old, I did not remember ever seeing my mother naked. My father reached over and patted her on one of her breasts. Breasts were odd looking to me. My mother reached over and patted my father on his chest where his breast would be if he’d had bosoms.
MOVE EIGHT
Again, still in 1955, I remember my parents loading up a trailer, and driving to Dallas. I can still remember that 1955 Dallas skyline.
It is, of course, far different than it looked then, but even then, I’d never seen such tall buildings. We moved, I think, to a suburb of Dallas, a place called Pleasant Grove. My dad pulled up to these apartment houses. The structures were probably new then, the Daingerfield Apartments. There were several structures shaped like a U and there were apartments upstairs and down stairs. We had an end unit down stairs. I could look out my window and see the monkey bars. The bathroom was next to my room.
My skill at worrying started in the Daingerfield Apartments. I remember one night my father came home from work. I guess he had called my mother, because she had me dressed to go out. My father came home, and together, my mother, father and I went out to our car. It was dark, very windy and cold. I complained about going out. Why are we going out at night.
My father explained that we had to drive to the Gas Company and put a check through their mail slot, or else the gas company people would turn off our gas, and then mommy can’t cook for us, and we will go hungry.
I was terrified. I had a growing sense that something was wrong, all the time. I remember people coming to the house, and calling on the phone and these visits and phone calls upset my parents. I know now they were being dunned for late payments on their debts. The worry and fear that started there has remained with me all of my life.
We were still living in the Daingerfield apartment when Tim was born.
I remember once my mother was hanging clothes on the line, and Tim was fresh home from the hospital. My mother told me to watch the baby. If he cries I was to yell to my mother.
Well, Tim cried. I yelled to my mother. She came in and the baby stopped crying just as she got to the door. This happened again, and again Tim stopped crying just as my mother got to the door. My mother said she would spank me if I called her to come in one more time if the baby was not actually crying.
Tim cried again. I called to my mother. Tim stopped crying. My mother was not at the door. I pinched the baby and Tim let out a wailing cry. Tim got held and comforted and I was comfortable not getting a spanking. It was win/win. During this time, my father was working for TI - Texas Instruments.
In 1956 I started first grade. I remember my teacher was Mrs. Moon. I am not sure of the name of the school but it seems like it was Nathaniel Hawthorne Elementary School. I remember my parents and I walking to the school after supper because the polio vaccine was available. My mother had read all about it in the Dallas Morning News. The vaccine was put on a sugar cube and you ate the sugar cube. My mother told me that some people are diabetic and they can’t eat sugar. For those people the vaccine is dropped in a small cup of water and the diabetics drank the water.
I didn’t know anything about diabetes. Little did I know it would one day be a constant issue in my life. In fact, around age 40 I came down with diabetes [Type 2]. The only thing I knew about polio is that my parents were afraid I might get it.
MOVE NINE
I know I didn’t live in the Daingerfield apartments too long, because i started second grade in a different house and school. It is possible we lived in a couple of houses in this period, but the one I remember was a duplex. It was red brick, and there was an upstairs. I liked the home. It seemed nicer than all the other places we’d lived except my grandmother and grandfather Norman’s house. We were in the duplex when John was born. My father brought home a metal easel that I think someone at TI had made.
I remember Life Magazine had a story on the artist Jackson Pollock. I clearly remember the magazine and looking at the paintings reproduced in those pages.
My father, who was a fan of Norman Rockwell, was puzzled by the art and even tried his hand at painting some nonrepresentational art that he painted on masonite. My father painted some while we were in the duplex house. I went through second grade there, but not successfully. I remember my mother being called up to school and hearing the teacher saying she thought I was slow and would benefit from going into the special education classes. My mother refused to consider it, and instead suggested that they hold me back, make me repeat second grade.
I did repeat the grade. I remember being sad to see the kids I’d seen last year in a different class, with a different playground time, and a different lunch schedule.
MOVE TEN
Before I finished my second time in second grade we moved. I don’t remember what area of town. I remember the house had figs in the backyard and next door to us was an abandoned two story house that was just enormous. There was a Four Car Detached Garage on the property. I turned out to be a kid given to climbing. I started climbing pretty far up in trees and I found out I could climb a tree in my yard, and then step on to the roof of that garage. I took my first really big fall from the roof of that garage.
This was the time of the Baby Boom and the public schools were not prepared for the mass of children showing up for classes. I remember one class was in the auditorium, and we sat every other seat. There was a blackboard rolled in, and we were taught math and reading in the auditorium. A PE teacher walked around the theatre seating carrying a wooden paddle. If you talked you got licks. You were told to stand up, touch your toes, and pop, pop, pop.
It surprises nobody that I was frequently caught talking and given the licks. The coach, as he preferred to be called, liked to really make the paddling an experience. I would touch my toes and he would rub my butt with the paddle. “OK,” he would say, “I’m warming your little butt up, I’m looking for the right place tuh---” he tried to make it a surprise when the blows started landing on my rear end.
In my classroom my teacher looked like she was 100 years old. Her face was wrinkled and stern, like she was an undertaker and not a teacher. I don’t remember the teacher’s name. The teacher was asked to teach both first and second grade in the same room at the same time. This two grades at once should not have been all that shocking because not long before this, there were lots of one room school houses that taught all the grades at once first through 6th or 7th or sometimes even 8th.
The teacher was probably exhausted and looking to cut corners and make things as manageable as she could with wall, to wall kids in her room. One way she did that was the spelling test.
For some reason, I had a lot of problems with spelling. What the teacher did is give out first grade words and second grade words. If you made a failing grade on your second grade words you were demoted. If you were failing second grade words you had to go back to the first grade spelling lists. It didn’t take long before the whole class was taking tests on the first grader word list, with one exception: Neil Oler. Neil Oler went to my church, and he was smart. He could read. I was almost as poor a reader as I was a speller. Neil mostly made “As” and the teacher loved him.
When my mother found out that I had been demoted to the first grader spelling lists, she came up and fussed at the teacher. I didn’t hear my mother fuss at the teacher, but that night at supper my mother told my father that she had let that teacher have it, she told her “how the cow ate the cabbage,” and she demanded that I be placed back on the second grader spelling words.
I was not sure what the fuss was about. The first grade words were easier. I was still having lots of trouble with the first grade words. I sat on the floor in the hall while my mother met with my teacher. When she came out of the room she had the second grade spelling book in her hand.
That same evening I heard my mother tell, perhaps brag to my father about how she insisted that if her son was in the second grade that he would be taught second grade material.
The following morning my classroom filled up with students, but the teacher did not show up. We waited. Sometimes a teacher next door or across the hall would stick their head in and tell us to be quiet. After what seemed like a long time, a man came in to the class with a woman none of us had ever seen before. The man, probably the principal, told us that this woman, he said her name, was our substitute teacher. Then the man told us that last night our teacher died and she would not be coming back. We were told we would have substitute teachers until a teacher could be hired to take over our class.
When news of my teacher’s death reached my mother, she thought she’d killed our teacher because she had yelled at her the day before.
MOVE ELEVEN
We moved to a house near Love Field. Was this before we moved to Abilene, or after? I’m not sure. I remember that we lived in a house right under the pathway of landing jet plans. The jets seem to be just a few feet above our house. It was probably more than a few feet but it didn’t feel like that then. I could look up and see details in the wheelwell of the landing gear. The noise was deafening. The window panes of the house vibrated. Glasses in the kitchen cabinets clinked together.
I remember several things about this house. There was a large field behind the house. It could have been a backyard, but it seemed like after a normal backyard would end, this one went on like there were several empty lots left to the weeds. It must have been property that belonged to the rent house, because once the weeds were waist high the landlord contacted my father and insisted that he mow the weeds down, that it was part of his rental agreement to keep the yard mowed. Neighbors complained. The weeds seem to hid mosquitoes, snakes, and even rats possums and skunks. I liked several things about this field of weeds.
The Indian Blanket flowers were everywhere, and I thought it was a beautiful flower. Both bumble and honey bees were thick within the field and I would catch bees in a jar, sometimes getting stung.
At night the field was filled with what we called lightning bugs, but much of the world calls them fireflies. In my youth I remember the lightning bugs were everywhere. Every night if you were around a field or pasture there were millions of lightning bugs everywhere. I would use a Mason Jar to capture the glowing bugs. I used an icepick to punch holes in the jars to give the little guys air. When I checked on the bugs the following afternoon they were usually all dead.
It was common, while driving in the night, for a lightning bug to bash itself against the windshield of your car and the goo left on the glass would glow green with the magic guts of the lightning bug.
“Fireflies in the Garden
By Robert Frost 1874–1963
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.”
It was in the Love Field house that I got the worst beating of my life. While I was always more afraid of my father, it was my mother that beat me with the buckle end of a belt. My crime: my cousins Renee, Denise, and Jim came over with their mother, my aunt Dorothy, to visit. We cousins were playing outside a chasing game, like “tag, you’re it.” We started chasing through my aunt Dorothy’s car and on one trip I saw what looked like the handle of a cane, and I put my hand on the emergency break and pulled it to the place where it released the break. Now, at 65 years of age, I know my mother was relieved that no one had been hurt by my criminal act, but she was also embarrassed by my actions, she was ashamed of what I’d done.
I was drug into my room and the lashes hit me everywhere. The buckle was not the usual end for a belting. I think now that she grabbed a belt and did not notice or care which end she had and which end was hitting me. I was hit over and over again, and then as suddenly as it started the beating stopped. My mother flung herself on my bed and she was sobbing, her shoulders shuddering with anguish I had never witnessed in her before. My aunt Dorothy came into the room and she ignored me, went to my bed and sat beside my weeping mother. Aunt Dorothy started talking with my mother in soft tones.
I remember thinking, “Why is she crying? I’m the one who ‘has something to cry about.’
The following morning I had purple bruises all over me, with a particularly painful purple bruise under the point of my chin. When I came into the kitchen to pour myself a bowl of cereal I made a grunting sound as I eased my sore body into the chair. Mother was clearly still angry with me. She barked at me, “Don’t you dare moan and groan around me, after what you did. You almost killed Denise!”
I was clearly an awful person.
Another memory I have of the Love Field house has to do with depression. I believe I was depressed almost from birth, but at the Love Field house I started thinking about what it would be like to be dead.
I thought if I were dead that I would no longer be a disappointment to my parents. I would no longer worry. I had two brothers and my parents were always talking about money and bills. My parents seemed so unhappy. Life seemed so hopeless. I would imagine that if I were dead it would be better for them. The clothes, the food, and the toys that were purchased for me would no longer have to be bought. Me being gone would save my family from their money woes.
I had no plan to kill myself. I was afraid of pain, and I was afraid of hell. My church taught that suicide was one of the unforgivable sins because if you kill yourself that is murder, and since you would then be dead you could not pray for forgiveness and have the sin of self-murder forgiven.
NOTE: the other two unforgivable sins were:
- blaspheming the Holy Spirit and
- divorce
My ideal scenario for the future was that I would have some accident that I did not see coming, like getting hit by a car, that I would die fast, so I wouldn’t hurt long, and I would be alive just long enough to beg God for forgiveness. This would result in my relief from this life, and I would also avoid screaming in hell for all eternity.
My first thoughts of running away from home happened while I was living in the Love Field house. I thought about running away because of grades. In school the dangerous or dreaded times were when report cards came out, when failing papers were sent home for signatures, and when there parent teacher conferences.
Yes, sometimes I was hit with a belt several times for my poor school performances, but usually I was just yelled at, shamed, fussed at, raked over the coals, and given a tongue lashing.
I used to wonder what a tongue lashing meant. I knew what a lashing was from the many times I was hit with a belt, but would you be hit with a tongue? Eventually I understood that, yes, in a way, I was beaten with the tongue, pummeled with words.
I think I may be, and have always been, hypersensitive. Maybe I am too sensitive bellicose remarks, well deserved spankings, constructive criticisms, and it is my hypersensitivity that is the root of my depression and the cause of my negative memories of my parents. I have brothers that urge me not to write about the negatives of my past, not to share unflattering things about my parents, that I am wrong, and that I am dishonoring people who sincerely and deeply loved me. It is possible. It would make perfect sense to me that everyone in my life was perfect, or mostly good, and I was totally flawed, or mostly bad.
I remember once being sure that I would run away before my parents found out how poorly I had done in school. I took a long time riding on a bike, thinking about never going home again, and there were big holes in my plan.
Where would I go? Where could I sleep. Where would I get food? When I was thirsty, where would I get drink? When it was cold where would I get warm clothing. Eventually, I realized I was trapped. There was nothing else I could do, but go home. Whatever happened to me would happen to me and there was nothing I could do about it.
You’d think, ‘hey, if you were getting mistreated over making poor grades why didn’t you make good grades?’ The truth is, I may have been smart enough to get average grades. I probably was smart enough to earn C’s and B’s, but I didn’t believe that was true. I was so sure I was incapable, so positive that I was a stupo, idiot, moron, that I saw no benefit in trying to do better. Better was out of my reach. You might as well have asked me to pick up a car and toss it across town. Good grades were just not something it was possible for me to achieve.
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