Sixteen posts in seven weeks

 According to my calculator that’s a tad more than two essays per week. You may have noticed that all sixteen have titles starting with a number. That part wasn’t planned, it just happened as those first few words of welcome began to emerge on the page as I started typing. When I realized what I had done I could feel him there with me. My late husband Jim Brannon (1933-2011) was a numbers guy in every way. During our many years together, his numbers and my words often collided in amusing ways. We had quite a few private jokes about it that nobody else ever knew.  I still think often about his birth and death dates – 3-9-33 and 2-11-11.  And I often feel that he sends me ‘just the perfect words’ when I’m writing. 

You may recall that I had a little accident the next day after that first post and ended up on a walker. Four days after that, I moved into a much safer residence. And for the following six weeks, writing these little 300-word blog posts became a calm place where I could tune out the chaos of unpacking, settling in, reorganizing my lifestyle and adjusting to my new world.

And here we are on the eve of August. Going forward, I plan to continue writing as a form of self-care and therapy.  It’ll be a new chapter in my journey. Each post’s title will start with an active verb, because I’m not ready to give up on life.  Instead of counting cardboard boxes or hours at Walmart, I hope to be making or doing or planning or learning or enjoying or researching.  Or whatever else strikes my fancy.

Thanks to everyone who reads my stuff. I do it for my own mental health primarily, but knowing I have even a small audience out there in cyberspace comforts me.

One artsy-crafty project

 Notice I did not call this item art.  I am not an artist by any stretch of anybody’s imagination.  And I don’t have any delusions about becoming one, either.  Let me tell you why.

For the past sixty years there’s been an unspoken rule in my home: only original works of art are allowed on my walls or on display anywhere.  Store bought stuff is tacky, they all told me.  Early on I realized that both sides of my family tree have plenty of artistic souls and my creative talents lie elsewhere. 

My father created metal puzzles out of wire (he was a pipefitter) and did a lot of whittling.  His mother made closets full of handmade quilts she designed herself and never bought a pattern in her lifetime.  My mother was a poet, published several times in local publications.  Her mother hand-sewed Barbie dolls of her own designs back in the day when Barbie was brand new and Ken hadn’t yet been created.

One of my maternal cousins is a well-known songwriter who has won awards in country music; you would recognize most of his songs the minute you heard the first words.  Another cousin was an extremely popular local radio disk jockey for many years before he retired and decided to have a second career driving an eighteen-wheeler and traveling all over America.

One of my daughters went to art school and became a real artist.  You probably have no idea what joy that has brought me through the years and how many of her early works I shelled out good money for, and they were worth every penny.

My son plays a guitar.  He’s not famous.  To this day I’m trying to decide how that squares with having a college degree in physics.  We just never know where talent might spring up in a family, do we?

With all this creativity orbiting around in my life, I discovered along the way I enjoyed just messing around with crafts.  I’ve done macramé, crewel embroidery, quilting, acrylic painting (on anything except canvas because those are for real artists), junk journals, found object things that defy description, and probably some more stuff I just made up one afternoon and decided it would be fun.

The photo with this blogpost is one of those afternoon things.  I found an old rotary phone in a thrift store and decided it needed a little makeover.  That shade of black seemed boring, so I glued quilt scraps all over it.  I seldom sell my creations, but I do enjoy giving them away to anybody who happens to admire one.

Before my mortal clock loses all its battery life, I just might create a few more spontaneous masterpieces.  But they’ll probably be in writing and published somewhere for future generations.  Truth really is stranger than fiction, and I’ll never, ever run out of ideas for research projects.

Twenty-two empty cardboard boxes

More or less.  They were all sizes and shapes.  Strong ones and flimsy ones.  The ones people pick up on the curbs in residential neighborhoods.  Some of mine came from Home Depot brand new, and others showed up in the back of a Jeep or off some curb in my own neighborhood.  You know these boxes, don’t you?  Of course.

They were in my garage, just taking up space because t’s almost impossible to carry more than one small box when using a walker.  I was getting a few of the bigger ones out by just bumping them down the driveway with the front edge of the walker.  That wasn’t the safest thing, I know, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

When Betty came last week to help with the unpacking (no, I’m still not finished six weeks later) I asked her to put all of them on the curb.  After all, this is Alvin, Texas in the summertime, and I just knew they would disappear within hours.  Win-win situation for my neighbors and me.  I was so wrong.

I forgot about Bertha.  Lurking out in the Gulf of America.  Then nearing New Orleans.  A few more boxes disappeared.  The storm made it to Beaumont the next day and a few more boxes disappeared.  My plan was working. 

The wind gusts came along with the rain and lightning, right on schedule and right out of Galveston Bay.  Not too bad, but oh-so-messy.  I felt helpless.  There wasn’t any way I could get them all back into the garage, much less hide them in the big garbage bins.  So I just looked out the front window and watched them all get soaked.  I may or may not have uttered some unladylike words.

The next morning I couldn’t get out of my driveway without backing over a big pile of sodden cardboard.  So I did the best I could and knocked a few of them away.  Drove to breakfast anyway.  Around noon I was back home and got to watch the mailman as he pulled up and gaped at the mess.  But what could I do?  If I had tried to get out there and tell him what happened he would’ve been long gone before I ever reached the front door.

So there they sit.  And they will just have to stay there until Tuesday when the trucks come.  And I’m grateful there’s no HOA in downtown Alvin.  I’m embarrassed enough already and I’m planning to find a refresher course somewhere about Making Good Decisions.  My journey continues.

Three personality types at the Senior Center

For more than ten years I volunteered at our local museum almost every day.  Volunteers came and went.  Everybody got along with everybody else, it seemed to me, and it never occurred to me to sort people by personalities.  Why would anybody do such a thing?

Six months ago, I retired from the museum at the age of eighty.  I took a month off before I finally decided to get involved in the Senior Center.  It happens to be across the street from the museum and I’d been there to many events and programs through the years.  So I signed up for the crochet group, the lunch gang, the monthly trivia contests, and several day trips on the center’s bus.  Spent lots of days working jigsaw puzzles in a room set aside just for that purpose. 

It was great.  I met new people and laughed my way through learning to crochet for the first time.  I had lots of sewing and quilting experience but wanted to try something new.  Left-handers are always good sports about their ‘hand-icap’, right?  I went to a few exercise classes and promptly dropped out.  Maybe I’ll write a post about that someday.  Or not.

The trivia games were fun.  Four people to a team and four sets of questions.  Winners got a $10 gift card from Walmart.  Lots of laughing at silly answers and groaning when we finally heard the right answers.  The bus trips always included a great lunch in a nearby small town.  Adventure!  Live entertainment!  Excitement!  Once in a while we even went to the Big H - HOUSTON.  Not my thing, but everybody said a good time was had by all.

In the puzzle room there were fond memories for most of us, serious discussions about the merits of the 500-piece box versus the 1,000-piece box, and whether it was cheating if you looked at the picture on the box or stored it away out of sight.  Yes, indeed, these are important topics and issues for all us boomers.

After a few months of all this activity, it struck me one day how certain sub-groups had formed within the larger group.  That caused me to start paying attention.  It seemed to me, for example, that the puzzle-workers shunned the exercise rooms and vice-versa.  That the trivia players liked the bingo games.  That the bus riders and karaoke folks were more likely to get all dressed up in holiday or special event garb than the dominoes and card players.  And so on and so forth.

I finally sorted everybody into three neat categories.  Just for my own reference and edification, don’t ya know.  I think of them the Visible Ones, the Lonely Ones, and the Thinking Ones. 

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.  Do you ever sort large groups of people into categories?  

 

Zero Whelms on a Sunday

This morning I woke up early, around half past six.  I realized it was Sunday.  No plans.  No pressure.  No hurry.  Not even a small list in my head of things to do, things to buy, things to clean, things to think about, nothing at all.  I rolled over and thought about spending the entire day in bed.

My bladder had a different idea, and once I was up, I was up.  Soon I was dressed and ready to do nothing again, just vertically instead of horizontally.  The word ‘whelmed’ popped into my head, so I wandered over to my unabridged dictionary.  It is a hardbound book, 5.5 inches thick with 2006 pages not including a bunch of maps, charts, diagrams and tables that add another couple hundred pages to its heft.  It sits on its own custom-made wooden stand.  I take a minute to fondly remember the man who made it for me.  His name is David, and he was a master carpenter.  Alvinites might remember him as the fellow who restored and crafted all the delicate gingerbread trim on the museum’s Slover-Rogers Cottage several years ago. 

But I digress.  I’m on my way to discover if I can be just whelmed.  Not overwhelmed.  Not underwhelmed.  Turns out I can.  My friend Noah Webster tells me the word is medieval if not ancient.  It means being submerged, engulfed or capsized.  And yes, I’ve felt that way often the past six weeks or so.  I’ve seldom felt like my old self since I fell. 

Having satisfied my curiosity about the word, I wandered into the kitchen.  Took my pill and my blood pressure (121/70 thank you very much) and cut up a banana and an avocado.  Opened a can of ice-cold pineapple chunks and went to my office with no idea what I would do when I sat down.

And for the rest of the day, I did whatever thing emerged from the cosmos and floated into my brain.  I sewed for the first time since the move, just mending one of my shirts.  I organized another box of craft supplies.  I did a load of laundry and gathered up five wastepaper baskets worth of trash.  I read Lesson 22 in ACIM.  To feed my genealogy addiction, I posted several obits on Find-a-Grave for the local LDS library.  Worked on the history of an old building in Rosharon.  I did my online Microsoft Word Games and patted myself on the back for solving all the Daily Challenges.  Those Word Twisters are perplexing.  But I never, ever got overwhelmed.

Two hours in Walmart

 

She was right on time, my newly-hired driver.  It was 9am and I was ready.  She rang the doorbell.

The first thing that struck me was how much faster things went.  For weeks I had been grabbing my purse, sunglasses and keys, walking myself through the house to the garage, unlocking the door to the truck, and heaving the aluminum walker over the driver’s side panel before securing it with a recently-installed carabiner (which had been a story of its own).  Probably took five or seven minutes at least.

But with the new routine I found myself out of the house, seated in Betty’s little Camry in the driveway, buckled up and in motion within two minutes.  Now, those three extra minutes might not seem like much to you, but to me it felt like warp speed. 

Walmart is 1.8 miles from my house.  Same no matter what vehicle I’m in, right?  Even though the Camry doesn’t have handicap plates like the pickup does, we still easily saved another five minutes.  By the time she parked and joined me inside, I was already paying for my sausage biscuit.  Because who wouldn’t if they hadn’t been out of the house in several days?

After a brief discussion of options, we decided the walker would fit inside the shopping cart and I wouldn’t have to use one of those big clunky store scooters.  Off we went to the shoe department.  Because I hadn’t had much success with ordering online, I felt it necessary to actually try some on my actual feet.  What a concept!  Maybe when you are my age you’ll have your own quirks.  There wasn’t any place to sit to try on the ones I picked, so off Betty went to solve that little problem.  She found one little bench way over in the Men’s Shoes area, so we high-tailed it over there.  Five minutes later, there was one pair of $25 shoes in an actual shopping basket in an actual Walmart store.  Success.

Next on the list was to look at rollators.  Real ones, not pictures of them online.  I had no idea if I could even lift anything heavier than the aluminum one.  Long story short, we discovered I can lift a sixteen-pound one but not a twenty-pounder.  Who knew? 

Mission accomplished.  Two items seen in person, one purchased.  Two hours on the time clock for Betty.  Money and time well-spent.  Plus, I got out of the house, ate a meal, and had a nice little nap when I got home.  God bless patient people like Betty who are willing to help slow folks like me.  Amen.

PS:  My new shoes are not much to look at, but they feel safe and comfy and they fit well. My journey continues.

One Surprisingly Quiet Business in Downtown Alvin

 It’s scarcely two blocks from downtown Alvin, hidden from traffic and noise by 100-year-old oak trees and a bunch of old frame houses.  It’s been sitting there quietly for almost forty years, minding its own business. 

There’s extraordinarily little traffic on these city streets.  No retail stores, no advertisements in the local papers and no foot traffic or sidewalks.  No civic events or nonprofit fundraisers.  All those kinds of events happen nearby, and they tend to ignore this quiet neighbor that doesn’t hanker for visitors in the first place.

Founded in 1989, (yes that was almost forty years ago), Alvin Chemical, Inc. purchased 4.7 acres of land along the south side of the railroad tracks.  The seller was Dr. Granville Hayes, who was well-known around town as the owner of the old Alvin Memorial Hospital and the Gulf Coast Furniture store on Gordon Street.  

A chemical company?  Downtown?  Yes.  It wasn’t until twenty-five years later that the area began to awaken just a bit.  This time the corporation purchased the north half of another city block adjoining the complex.  This time the seller was another well-known citizen, Warren Stanton.  The City of Alvin agreed to make the eastern parts of Talmadge and Snyder streets disappear, and more warehouses and tanks began to appear on the new property.  The growth was steady and subtle, and again the local news made no mention of it.

And so it goes.  Trains continue to load and unload their cargo on the two-track outer spur and the one-track inner spur.  Twelve blending tanks continue to hold inventory.  All six warehouses are busy all the time.  Every day, eighteen-wheelers travel quietly along W. Willis in both directions, headed out to Highway 6 and then their final destinations. 

This is the story of just one of Alvin’s hidden gems.  There are several more.  And your octogenarian historians are busy taking notes and saving the past for future generations.

Eight young men of Alvin started 4th of July rodeo

 

The year was 1922.  World War I was done, and the Roaring Twenties were well underway.  All over America the jazz age was in full swing and Prohibition laws were in effect.  Flappers were dancing, smoking, drinking, cussing, and voting.  Housewives were getting new-fangled appliances like washing machines and vacuum cleaners.  Yes, indeed, the U.S. of A. was in high cotton in those days.

Here in little ole Alvin, Texas (population 1,519) John Owen lived on the corner of Hood and Cleveland, and bought himself a new Ford Model T to park in his new garage.  It was the first residential garage in town, and legend has it that people came all the way from Angleton and Columbia just to get a glimpse.  The Gem Drug Store even had a radio! 

Perhaps to match John Owen and his wealth, eight other prominent men decided that Alvin needed a rodeo.  As reported in the Alvin Sun, Gerald Abbott, W.K. Flora, George Pennock, Kiddo Tacquard, George Seibel, Johnny Wehrly and Armour Savell (son-in-law of Alvin Morgan himself) pooled their resources and started organizing the construction of rodeo grounds way out on Mustang Road.  The American Legion pitched in and the project was finished in record time.  For many years the Rodeo Parade was held on the Fourth of July. 

Eventually the old Mustang grounds were moved to Tovrea and eventually closed to make room for a housing development.  But to this day, several generations of Alvin’s little buckaroos (now called elderly citizens) fondly remember the excitement of the annual parades, the hot dogs and fireworks and of course the thrill of watching that old wooden gate open with another cowboy hanging on for dear life. 

One more lesson in ACIM

Today I am eighty years, six months and twelve days old.  If I die before midnight (very unlikely) my Texas Death Certificate will probably use those very words to fill in the blank that asks “Age at Time of Death”.  I’m not sure when or where or why this peculiar tradition started, but I’ve seen it thousands of times in certificates and family Bibles as I’ve researched my own family heritage back through the history of the American South.  Not to mention hundreds of other families during my time as a historian and biographer.

But I digress.  Having said that, tonight I’m remembering one particular rite of passage I’ve been going through every decade or so since the early 1980s.  For those of you in the back, that’s fifty years or five decades.  Ha.

If you don’t recognize the acronym ACIM, you might want a hint: It means A Course in Miracles.  It’s a spiritual program that transformed my life back in the day and still governs it today.  Without it, my life would’ve undoubtedly been one hundred percent different than it is today.  The Course was (and still is) a major highway in my life’s journey.

This morning I woke up feeling the call of my spirit to take the Course again, maybe for the final time in this bodily form.  Or maybe I’ll make it to Decade Seven.  Who knows?  In that regard, the Course and the Twelve Step programs agree: One Day at a Time. 

There are 365 lessons in the Workbook.  I plan to share some of my reflections and thoughts here on this blog as I go along, maybe once or twice a month.  You may subscribe as you wish.  Or unsubscribe.  This is absolutely not about me getting any likes, comments, shares, bells, feedback or other social media perks.  Remember I started the blog to take a break from Facebook and share my journey over here where it feels more in-depth and more like real connections can be made.