I found out the other day there’s another occasional reader here shared classrooms and the seven-year drought with me in the 1950s. Surprising, the people of that town and that vintage clicking to remember.
Every kid in Portales, New Mexico, believed Gene Brown and Bobby Thomas were lower trash than they, themselves were. Including me. I can’t recall now why they believed it, though both started smoking before they learned to masturbate, most likely.
But maybe the fact both kids were considered such lowlifes explained the reason I ran around with them a while, caught those freight trains to Clovis with them. [Riding the Rap].
Bobby Thomas quit school, lied about his age and joined the army when we were 9th graders. The next time I saw him he was a different person from the buzzard-necked, shunned youngster he’d been. I’ve often thought quitting school, for him, must have been a cheap price to pay for an opportunity to be out from under the pall of scorn the town piled on him for being whatever they thought he was.
Gene Brown, on the other hand, was still vilified as one of the historical lowlifes 30 years later when I went back for a visit. Never saw him, but I was surely impressed with how the sign the town stamped on his back stayed through the decades. Likely he came by it honestly. Certainly early.
On the other hand, a lot of the higher society folk who shunned those two managed to make lousy enough choices in life to earn their later reputations as lowlifes. And some of the kicked around, not-quite lowlifes did impressive, though maybe meaningless things with their lives.
My old friend, Fred Stevens, who spent early years as a hotshot savings and loan president, went down with the ship in the mid-80s crash, was as solid a citizen as I’ve ever known. But he assured me I’d have thought differently if I’d known him as an S&L president.
I’m sorry I didn’t get up to Seattle for a chance to reacquaint myself with the other banker from our kidship, but after he’d chosen to live under a bridge instead of running a financial institution. [Could you choose to live on the street?]
But I think the one I’d like most to know before I die is the one walked around the corner from a class reunion at the Cal Boykin Hotel in the early 1990s. Reunion for the grad classes 1960-1970. Fred Stevens told me about it. One of the attendees walked into a bank branch a block from the Cal Boykin Hotel and stuck it up. Walked clean away with $1500 and a well-deserved place in local legend.
I hope he’s remembered. Wish I’d thought of it and had the brass to do it.
When Keith and I were in the fifth grade one of our classmates at Central Grade School , a girl named Ruth Durett, came to school with an ornate, silver-handled dagger she’d dug up in her back yard. It was known that Coronado had camped a while in the vicinity of Portales, and in those days Portales people had a lot of interest in Spaniards and conquistadors.
Ruth’s dagger became an object of envy, conjecture and debate. Billy ‘the kid’ Bonney had also hidden from the law and raised cattle for a while at Portales Springs. Some thought the dagger might have belonged to him.
Eastern New Mexico University was right there on the edge of town. Ruth’s parents evidently thought someone out there might be helpful identifying the age, at least, of the artifact. Took it out there and left it for examination. Vanished into thin air, that dagger.
The people who came here a while, lived their daily adventures and died couldn’t resist scattering their belongings all over the countryside. Nobody paid a lot of attention to them for a longish while, but sometime during the 19th Century a fascination became an obsession with many. Acquiring them by any means whatever became the rule of thumb, on the one hand, preserving them if they couldn’t be conveniently stolen, on the other. The British Museum’s an example of stolen ones that eventually made their way into preservation. Same with other museums.
And naturally there are legions of academians, anthropologists, who’ve developed protocols and rituals of method for stealing them in approved ways, vilifying anyone who loots the sites without the proper credentials. Nowadays they have the law on their side. Probably today, ENMU would have found a light-of-day legitimate means of stealing Ruth’s dagger.
Even so, it’s not always easy to resist picking off pieces of the past. I described in an earlier entry how Mel inadvertently tried to carry Oola’s skull home with him. Exploring Alley Oop’s Home Circa 1947and how something similar got Squirelly Armijo into all manner of difficulties. ‘Squirrelly’ Armijo Survives his own Funeral
Maybe something in all that explains the popularity of Gale’s ‘Hanging Tree’ belt buckles. A number of years ago Gale managed to acquire a mesquite tree they’d cut down somewhere with a history of having criminals hanged from the branches. Naturally he brought it home and over the years made belt buckles, all manner of jewelry items from it to sell at art and craft shows.
Not everyone wants a hanging tree belt buckle, but a lot of people do. I’ve never been able to quite wrap my mind around why. For me, having my belly button rubbing against a piece of wood that was part of a long series of dangling partici-whatchallits just doesn’t have a lot of appeal. But I hold my pants up with galluses, anyway. Rarely wear a belt.
As for artifacts, I was never attracted to run off with Oola’s skull, either. Though I do wear this arrow head I figure offed my old prospector on the mountain hanging on a thong around my neck. [Recapping the Lost Gold Mine Search]
Maybe the reason I lured myself into allowing my hopes to include that 1977 C60 school bus was just a time warp slipped in briefly. Fond memories have a way of coming back to haunt folks as they approach the jumping off place, I reckons.
A million years ago, Back Just Before Hippies Were Invented, summer, 1964, when KoolAid was just KoolAid and acid was still just something to excite a strip of litmus paper, I had my first experience driving a school bus.
As described in the post linked above, I’d gotten out of jail in Rochester, NY, walked halfway down Ohio, been picked up by a taxicab going deadhead back to Terre Haute, Indiana, after taking a drunken businessman to Columbus, OH, to see his estranged wife and kids. He left me on a street corner in Terre Haute, where I dodged beer bottles thrown by kids the rest of the night.
Mid-morning a yellow school bus pulled across the intersection where I was standing, a car pulling a trailer pulling in behind it. Loma Linda Academy painted on the side. The door popped open and the driver yelled, “Do you know how to drive this thing?”
I had a middling amount of experience driving dump trucks and such when I was younger, and I was hungry enough for a ride to lie through my teeth. “Sure thing. Nothing to it!” He vacated the driver seat, I took it, and we said goodbye to Terre Haute.
Turned out he was a Baptist minister moving his family to Las Vegas, New Mexico. He’d contracted with the manufacturer to take the bus to Loma Linda, California, figuring he’d stack the seats in back, load up his belongings in the empty space, and get the hauling expenses paid for by delivering the bus.
Rick Riehardt was his name. Young, 30ish man with a nice family. One of several Baptist ministers I’ve met in my life I came to respect and was able to enjoy their company. But a menace behind the steering wheel of a school bus.
The rear of the bus was loaded with his belongings, forward of that, loose seats stacked, with about half the seats still bolted to the floor, up front. Rick had a five-gallon jug of KoolAid and a cooler loaded with Bologna sandwiches behind the driver seat. He was “a loaf of bread and a pound of red” sort of man when it came to eating on the road.
We struck up a salubrious acquaintance as we motored along in that bus, picking up other hitch-hikers as we came to them. Enough, at times, to fill the intact seats in the bus. College kids, soldiers on leave or in transit, bums, beatniks, people who didn’t care to admit where they’d been, where they were going.
One kid who’d just been down south working with SNCC and marching with emerging civil rights movement, marching, getting beat-hell-out-of by redneck sheriffs, getting treated like a stinking step-child by a lot of the blacks he was supporting.
The hitchers rotated on and off the bus as we drove southwest, Rick and my ownself being the only constants, me being the only driver. We hadn’t gone far before Rick began cajoling me to drive the bus on to California after he’d unloaded it in Las Vegas, re-installed the seats, and he’d leave the family behind. But I was headed for Portales, New Mexico. Figured on getting off and heading south at Santa Rosa, well east of Las Vegas.
Eventually I agreed to it because I didn’t think there was a chance in hell he’d get the bus to California in one piece driving it himself. That, and I was probably hallucinating on KoolAid and bologna sandwiches by that time.
We parted as friends, him offering to buy me a bus ticket back to Portales, me insisting I’d ride my thumb. Caught a ride in Needles, CA, with four drunken US Marines in a new Mercury Station Wagon on 72 hour pass. Headed for Colorado Springs. All they wanted from me was for me to stay sober and awake watching for Arizona Highway Patrol airplanes. Every time I dozed they’d catch me at it and threaten to put me back afoot.
We made it from Needles, CA, to Albuquerque alive, about 1100 miles in 12 hours. I was ready for a rest. Crawled into a culvert and slept until I had my head back on straight enough to stick out my thumb again.
Rick and I used to exchange post cards for a decade or so, but I lost track of him somewhere back there. Never lost track of the KoolAid and bologna, though. I still keep it around in my head in case I ever need it.
If I were prone to regrets of things done and undone I’d regret not being more observant when something was going on around me worth observing.
I was on a business trip in a New Mexico State vehicle meeting city officials in Portales, the town where I grew up. I visited with my old friend and classmate Fred Stevens and, we ate out together the previous night at a local restaurant.
Next morning hanging around City Hall I chatted with my 6th grade teacher, Bill Walman, then Parks and Recreation Director, and Mack Tucker, director of something else, with whom Kurtiss Jackson and I had worked for Skeeter Jenkens on the ranch ’way back when [ A Sobering View of Y2K].
If I’d been paying attention I might have noticed something at the meeting. Or maybe during one of the chats with friends I mentioned the route I’d be taking home. Maybe I’d have examined the car for something attached to it. Years of hindsight would have been helpful. Some of the details of the following sequence of events might be out of order, might be inaccurate by having dimmed with the years. But it’s a fairly close portrayal of something that I still don’t understand with whatever’s been gained by the passage of time.
After the meeting I left late-morning and headed west to go home to Socorro. Probably there was a lot I could have noticed if I’d had my senses tuned. But I was on autopilot.
The road between Portales and Roswell seems a long one to motorists and I probably was exceeding the speed limit. There was almost no traffic, and I didn’t notice whom I passed and what they might have been driving.
I’d consumed a lot of coffee that morning and somewhere out beyond Elida I stopped and walked to a tree along the fenceline to relieve myself. A battered old truck pulled up behind the state car and stopped with the engine idling. When I finished I went to his window.
“Anything I can do to help you?”
The guy was dressed in a shabby bodyshop shirt, bad teeth, nasal twang accent of a local. “Ah was just wondering why someone in a government car passed me going 80 miles an hour.”
“What makes you think I was going 80 miles an hour? The speed limit’s 55. If I passed you going 55 I might have been speeding to go past just to get around you.”
“What gumment agency you working for going that fast? I jest want to know why you’re driving so fast in a state car!”
I told him to take the tag number and call it in if he had a complaint, but he went on and on with a nasal, makes-no-sense questioning.
I got back into the car and drove on, but stopped again at Kenna. The village had become a ghost town, but it had a lot of memories for me because Skeeter’s ranch was outside Kenna, and when Portales was ‘dry’ most Portales teenagers used to drive here to buy beer because the Portales bootleggers wouldn’t sell to them.
I’d begun to awaken a bit, though, and was wondering about the guy in the truck. I watched as he drove past on the highway and probably considered the fact he was now ahead of me again. A few miles out of town I passed him again, this time carefully not exceeding the speed limit by much.
Once he was out of sight far behind me the coffee was working on me again, and I pulled down a side road and behind an abandoned schoolhouse for another bladder call.
I paused and poked around the old school yard waiting for him to go past, figuring I’d wait until he went by, let him get out of sight in front of me, then drive on to Roswell with him well ahead of me. I don’t recall why I did this precisely. I wasn’t alarmed yet at this point. Maybe I was just enjoying the bits and pieces of school yard litter from so long ago. Even the old outhouse was still standing.
I drove on, taking my time now. But when I arrived at the intersection north of Roswell where traffic goes north toward Santa Fe, south into Roswell, or west into the mountains, there he was, pulled off and waiting. He somehow knew, I suddenly realized, I’d gotten behind him. So instead of going on I drove into Roswell and got some lunch, figuring he’d be out of my life by the time I headed west.
But a few miles west of Roswell, there he was again. He let me go past, so up the road a way I pulled off and parked behind a convenience store, went inside to let him go by while I had an ice cream bar. He did go by, and I finished my ice cream and headed west again. But at the intersection going to Ruidoso into the mountains, or Lincoln and westward to Carrizoso there he was again.
I drove on by, pretending to be going to Ruidoso. I pulled over again a couple of miles up the road, out of sight of the highway and waited for him to go past for half-hour, but he didn’t. So I figured I’d lost him, headed back through Lincoln, and there he sat in front of a museum, engine running. I pulled in behind him, determined to confront him.
I drove out of town behind him and a few miles up the road he turned into a picnic/camping area and turned around, stopped at the entrance facing the highway. By now I was pissed, but also damned confused and slightly alarmed. I couldn’t understand how he could be doing this.
I was armed and I walked up behind his car so he could see me in the rearview, but with the firearm behind me out of sight.
“Why are you following me?”
“Ahhhm not following yew. I just stopped here to take me a rest.”
“You waited back there at the intersection. You waited again in Lincoln. Why are you following me?”
“I’m not follering yew. But I still want to know why a person in a gumment car passed me going 80 miles an hour.” And so on.
“I’m warning you. Don’t follow me anymore.” I shrugged it off, curious how far he’d go with this.
We played cat-and-mouse, me in a busy parking lot in Capitan during a thunderstorm as he went by, him waiting for me in Carrizoso. He wanted me to know he had a fix on me.
I was convinced by the time I passed him on the hood of his truck west of Valley of the Fires that he was a cop… couldn’t see any way a private citizen could have the equipment it would take to do what he was doing.
It’s a long drive through that desert between Carrizozo and Socorro and my mind was working 90 miles an hour. As I approached Socorro I became convinced I was about to be arrested for something.
I called a friend with the City of Socorro and asked him to go look at my house to see if there were a bunch of cops waiting there. There weren’t, and I didn’t see the follower until several years later in Albuquerque during a much later phase of what came to be a decade of that sort of crap.
A week later I described it to my Bureau Chief in Santa Fe. When I’d finished telling it I asked, “Do you know of anything I ought to know? Could this be Internal Affairs following me around for some reason?”
He thought about it frowning. “No, I don’t think it could possibly be that. I’d know it if any questions were being asked about you. They’d have asked me.” Then he looked me in the eye. “You need to be careful about that speeding, though. If you get stopped for speeding in a State car working for DPS it’s no questions asked. They’ll fire you.”
What began that day lasted almost a decade. Long after I’d left DPS and through several post-Y2K years.
But back in the beginning, all manner of other mysterious happenings intruded into the lives of those who climbed that mountain with me, and to me. I don’t know to this day whether the two parallel sets of happenings were connected.
Maybe if I’d been paying more attention from the beginning.
In case you’re one of those people who hasn’t been staring at the sun, here’s a brief update before I tell you about an interesting tidbit in my life: Finding myself a character in a ‘memoir’ [actually a novel] written by my step-brother published as non-fiction. But important things first:
As you can see, the south pole stuff’s maintaining itself, still doing what it was doing when I last mentioned it.
Here’s today.
Still something going on down there, but the grandstanding is still north of the equator.
Strangeness
SINUOUS SUNSPOTS: A line of sunspots stretching across the sun’s northern hemisphere appears to be an independent sequence of dark cores. A telescope tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen, however, reveals something different. The sunspots are connected by sinuous filaments of magnetism:
“These sunspots writhe and squirm energetically as they rotate away from us!” says John Nassr, who took the picture on Nov. 28th from his backyard observatory in Baguio, the Philippines.
The connections suggest an interesting possibility. While each sunspot individually poses little threat for strong solar flares, an instability in one could start a chain reaction involving all, leading to a widespread eruption. Readers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor developments.
I could write a lot about this but none of it would necessarily be true, so I’m doing my best not to have an opinion while keeping my foot in the door for afterward saying “I told you so,” if I can get by with it.
Okay. Now for the main thrust of this post. Before beginning the post I visited the Bobby Jack Nelson Forum on Amazon to see what was being said about him: http://tinyurl.com/7zj2la3
A while back I got an email on an old email address I rarely check anymore from a lady who wanted to discuss my step-brother, Bobby Jack Nelson. She explained he’d offed himself in a nursing home in San Saba, Texas, and that she’d had a long-term relationship with him.
But Bob had told her a lot of things she’d begun to think were lies. She just wanted to bounce some of them off me because she knew he and I had associated considerably during the 1980s and early 1990s when he was writing Keepers – A Memoir. http://tinyurl.com/d82tcsk.
To be honest the whole thing qualified as strange enough to keep life worth living. Bob and I saw quite a bit of one another during those years, and I knew he was writing a novel about, among other things, his childhood in Portales, New Mexico. I considered him a friend.
But one day in the late-1990s [as soon as the novel had been accepted by a publishing house, I later discovered] while I was living in Socorro, New Mexico, I got a call from Bob. He didn’t mention the novel, but he said he was going off to South America and wouldn’t be returning to the US, so I wouldn’t be hearing any more from him.
I got reports from various mutual acquaintances they’d seen him in Texas here and there, so I figured he just wanted to break off our association, which was puzzling, but okay by me. Then I got a call from a Dallas reporter asking what I thought of the book, which I hadn’t been aware was published.
Naturally, I bought and read a copy. Suddenly it was clear to me why the reporter had called me, but also why Bob had suddenly taken a powder. My first reaction to reading it would have been to trip up to that mountain town he was staying in while writing it and beat hell out of him.
I was honestly dumbfounded the man could bring himself to publish such a pack of lies as non-fiction. But a person would have had to have been there, or remembered what he’d said back earlier had happened, to recognize there was barely a grain of truth in any of it.
Gradually I cooled down and just forgot about Bob until the lady contacted me to tell me he was dead, and how he’d died.
We exchanged a lot of emails over several months, and it was a journey of mutual discovery. But the discoveries came in the form of Bob being an even worse liar than I’d have thought possible knowing already he was an accomplished liar. And for her, not knowing he was a liar at all, I suppose it provided her some closure to find the man she loved, somewhat idolized, was in awe of, was not the person she’d believed him to be.
Oddly enough, I think Bob tried to warn me a number of times about himself. Several times he told me over the years that he was a liar, but I didn’t grasp the extent of what he was saying. Other times he told me he wasn’t what I thought he was, and I shrugged that off, too.
But what came as a shock to me, first with the book, and later with what the lady told me, was that Bob absolutely despised me. That, I’d have never guessed during the years I wasted pieces of my life associating with him in what seemed a mutually warm, friendly relationship.
This is all leading up to the summation of Old Jules’ Unified Bullying Theory.
Hopefully this will be my last buildup segment before trying to summarize something I’d call a theory about bullying, supported by the interactions of animals here and childhood memories that included plenty on the subject.
My childhood friend, Keith, was reflecting on how he remembered the two of us as kids recently when we met in Fredericksburg. Fiddle-Footed Naggings and Songs of the Highway. This pretty well dated Keith’s first clear recollections of me to the sophomore year of high-school, though we’d actually been in classes together since the 4th grade. He remembered the two of us as being a couple of nerds, getting pushed around a lot.
What I’m riding there just about says anything needs saying. That kid I was at that stage of my life was no bully in the making.
The picture with my two sisters might be about the time I was getting chased home by Floren and his brothers. At that point there was nobody I was likely to bully. Anyone can see the kid needs chasing home and a few beatings on the way can’t do anything but help.
But by the time this picture was taken I was hanging out at the school cafe with the Lindsey kids, smoking, and everyone knowing who was tougher than whom else. In those days any kid who could ride bareback was probably in danger of doing some bullying, too. I’m guessing all those kids from Lindsey Grade School could ride bareback.
I was bareback because the horse was stolen, though the person taking the picture almost certainly didn’t know it.
I was keeping three hogs for an FFA project in one of the buildings in the background, though the place was otherwise abandoned. I kept the horse there a couple of weeks before things got too hot, then took it out to the dirt road between this place and the neighborhood I was living in and slapped it on the rump to run it off. But the owner and authorities had already decided it hadn’t just strayed. A while later that picture glued me to the missing horse.
Sometimes I still wonder how the family adults could have been so damned stupid in those days. Where the hell did they THINK I got that horse? On the other hand, a copy of the picture became a small piece of a lot more damning evidence of how I’d been spending my adolescent years. By the time I was caught it filled up a corner of the Roosevelt County Sheriff’s Office.
Somewhere between this picture and the one above it things went south. Coincidentally, I was attending Central Grade School when the picture was taken, where I considered everyone rich kids, which they weren’t. But two years in a row I had teachers famous for their bullying.
One, the fifth grade teacher, gave me a spanking in front of the class at least once every day that year. Me, and any other kids who admitted when they were asked the first day of classes whether their parents would give them a whipping at home if they were told they got one in school. I didn’t realize until a couple of decades later it was a ruse to find out which kids wouldn’t tell their parents what was happening.
I used to want to go back to the graveyard in that town and spit and puke on his grave until a lot later in life than you might guess.
That’s me on the right at the pinnacle of my hellion/bullying times. Even that snake and the baby rattlers we found got me into a peck of trouble. Within a couple of months of the time this picture was taken I was being held in the Roosevelt County Jail for a couple of weeks waiting for them to decide whether I needed to get the rest of my education at the State Boys Reformatory at Springer, New Mexico.
They decided to keep me around on juvenile probation instead. That ended the bullying completely. If I’d looked sideways at anyone, or let myself get provoked into a fight I’d have been in Springer in a heartbeat. It was open season on me for anyone who felt the urge to kick someone around, and there was no shortage of those who did.
Here’s a year later while I was working with Kurtiss and some other youngsters for Skeeter Jenkens. A Sobering View of Y2K
That fall would be the school year Keith almost certainly remembers. Just another nerd. A peaceful, inconspicuous nerd doing his best to stay out of reform school. Midway through the Junior year it was clear I had to get out of that town, and I did. Nobody at all was sorry to see me gone.
The next bullying post is going to pull all this together with the animal bullying into Old Jules Unified Bullying Theory.
I’m going to get away from the brave new world of the 21st Century and the animal kingdom for this segment and go back a few million years to my childhood. I explained a little about that farm on the other side of the railroad tracks here: Could you choose to live on the street?, but to pursue the bullying issue I’ll elaborate a bit.
The kids who lived on the other side of those tracks were overwhelmingly tough, poor, and ‘bad’. The families were farm laborers or otherwise unskilled, lots of kids, and Hispanic or considered ‘white trash’. The kids living there went to Lindsey Grammar School, and the RR tracks defined the boundary between Lindsey and the other two grammar schools.
In 1949, when I was starting school my mother went to war with the superintendent of schools and the school board to make certain I went to East Ward, not Lindsey. She succeeded.
Meanwhile, on this side of the tracks and the highway there were a few neighborhoods of kids who belonged in Lindsey, but were doomed by geography to go to school with the regular population at East Ward. One of those was a boy named Floren Villianueva and his siblings. A tough, bad, mean as hell youngster with older brothers meaner than him. He and I entered the first grade in the same class.
Floren and I somehow got crosswise with one another almost the first day of classes during recess. He gave me a blow to the stomach that knocked the wind out of me, doubled me over and might well have been responsible for the hernia of the goozle that’s caused me trouble to this day.
After school each afternoon Floren and his brothers walked home the same route I did, and for a few days they went the extra distance to chase me home, throwing rocks at me when they couldn’t catch me, beating hell out of me when they could. Me finding safety only when I went through the door to the house.
That naturally came to the attention of my mom after a few days. One afternoon she was standing on the porch shaking a rug and saw me running across the tracks chased by Floren and his brothers. They came right into the yard, and she grabbed a broom and chased them off, yelling insults.
When they were gone she turned on me in a fit of rage, grabbed me by the ear and dragged me into the house where she kept her switch. While she was beating hell out of me she was yelling, “If I ever see or hear of you running from a fight again this is nothing compared to what you’ll get.”
When my step-dad got home she told him about it and he just shook his head. “Running from a bunch of God-damned Mexicans!”
I went about in disgrace a few days, the story circulating among the adults with me in hearing distance, all of them dumbfounded by my cowardice.
But I never ran from a fight again. I started carrying a heavy stick with me walking home and only had to whack one of those other kids upside the head with it one time. Afterward Floren and I fought a lot of times during recess and I never whipped him, but I took the beatings rather than the alternatives.
This is too lengthy for me to continue where I’m going with it, but it’s necessary background to get in place before going forward in this segment.
Hated Saturday nights;
Being third to
The bath-water
After Mom and Dad
But before the older kids
Felt poor;
Deprived.
He thought he was.
While down the road
His buddy, Joe Cordova
Didn’t have to feel so poor
Because the family
Didn’t have a tub.
Lucky Joe.
The e-newsletterShelf Awareness occasionally includes author interviews where a standard question is “What book have you faked reading?” This brought to mind something I can tell now because I don’t think they can take my high school diploma back from me.
When we students who began school in the first half of the 20th Century in Portales, New Mexico entered Junior High in 1957, they explained a lot of what we had to get done during the next few years if we wanted to graduate from high school. If those years passed and we hadn’t done each thing on the list we’d be pumping gas the remainder of our lives.
Among the various academic requirements was Major Book Report every year. I didn’t see this as a problem up front. I was a heavy reader and couldn’t imagine a deadline arriving on that one without me nailing it in plenty of time.
But somehow the 8th or 9th grade came along and spang, there I was, with Mrs. Wilbanks standing before the class announcing day-after-tomorrow our big book reports were due. Suddenly I was in a panic. I’d read plenty of books, but none that came to mind as qualifying for a big book report. Those normally had to be cleared with the teacher ahead of time, which somehow slipped by me for one reason or another.
I don’t know what made me decide to invent a book that didn’t exist. It seems insane all these decades later. But I suppose I concluded I just hadn’t read any Big Books after I went to the library and saw the lists of the ones other kids had been thumbing through and dogearing.
But I got out my Esterbrook fountain pen with the turquoise ink and set to work inventing a Big Book I’d read. “Chessman”, by Borden Deal . It was a good book and I regret Borden Deal never wrote it. I turned in the book report on time and sighed thinking I’d cheated death one more time.
A few days later Mrs. Wilbanks brought the graded book reports in and prepared to pass them back, but she cautioned us to just look at the grades and corrections, then hand them back in. They’d go into our permanent files with our other Big Book Reports until we graduated High School.
Then she pulled out a book report from the stack I could recognize from my desk near the back of the room. Sloppy, turquoise handwriting on yellow paper.
“I don’t give A+ on Big Book Rep0rts, but I’ve made an exception this time.” She lighted up the room with her smile and gestured toward me with it while I sank into my seat. “I believe this might be the best Big Book Report ever written by one of my students.”
Knowing that book report was up there hanging over my head as evidence bothered me a lot. When I left Portales and headed for another school my 11th year, I hoped they’d let me carry my records so I could snag it, but it wasn’t to be. Next year I changed schools again and again didn’t get an opportunity to steal it back.
Not until I graduated in 1961 did I again get my hands on my Big Book Report on “Chessman”, by Borden Deal. I packed it away with all my other important papers and kept it until Y2K, when it went into the fire after one last read.
If you haven’t read the book I recommend you write it. It’s a winner.
During the early 1990s I had a lady friend with whom I was close enough to
exclusively share a few years of my life. Interior decorator lady who grew up in the same town and entirely different social strata than I did.
I first remember noticing her in the fifth grade, and from then until the time I left that burg as a high-schooler, I don’t believe she ever spoke to me. She was upper crust and I was somewhere down there below the lower crust.
Anyway, 30-35 years later we spent a few years together seeing one another every day and night. She had a lot of strong points, beautiful woman, smart, and well-intentioned. I’d mentioned to her once that it used to really hurt my feelings in school on Valentine’s Day. I hated it, all those kids getting valentines from one another and I didn’t get any.
Valentine’s Day, maybe 1993, ’94, I headed down to her house after work. Came in the door and fell over. She’d decorated the house with valentines, fed me a piece of cake shaped like a valentine, and handed me a box shaped like a valentine wrapped. Made me open it.
Crazy woman had filled that box with old-timey valentines like were around when we were kids…… full, chock full, that box was, with valentines claiming to be from kids we went to school with, all addressed to the kid I used to be …… the lower-class scum of yesteryear. Crazy stuff.
I’ve cried maybe twice during my adulthood, but for some reason I was having to hold back tears on that one. But that isn’t why I’m writing this blog entry. I just wanted to preface the next thing with that one, so you’d understand she wasn’t a bad person underneath everything.
Anyway, she had two habits I found particularly irritating, aside from being miserable and liking to spread it around, toward the end of our relationship. She pronounced the “G” in guacamole. “Gwakamohlee.” Drove me nuts. Knew better, but maybe couldn’t remember, maybe didn’t care.
Secondly, she had this thing I figure came from being upper- crust as a kid.
“You find someone to work on the roof?” I might ask.
“Oh yes,” she might warble. ” Hired this little Mexican man.”
When I see the guy, he ain’t little. He’s 240 pounds. But he is Hispanic.
“Oh!” she might say. “I hired this little Indian woman to do some bead work for me.” Turned out the little Indian woman was taller than she was and weighed in heavier than the roof repair man.
You get the picture. Non-Anglo-Saxons were little, particularly if they were hired to do something.
No, the lady wasn’t a bigot, precisely. She wouldn’t sit still for racial slurs unless they were subtle, oblique, or less so, but about Navajo folks, whom she generally disliked. She conveyed the impression instead, that she found little men who did repairs to the plumbing so cute, so lovable, so adorable and quaint. Something akin to looking through the big end of a telescope at them standing there so tiny doing their assigned jobs.
When we parted company after a few years it wasn’t pleasant, but I learned a lot about myself from her, once she began explaining what all was wrong with me. It was worth a lengthy listen because she probably knew me as well as anyone ever has.
After I decided it was over I continued talking to her every night on the telephone for about a month, an hour-or-so per night, determined to listen carefully and consider everything ugly she could think of to say about me without any argument. She mightn’t be right, or she might be right but about something I didn’t want to change, or she might be right and I might want to change it.
But we don’t get many opportunities in this life to have someone who knows us well go into loving detail explaining every flaw and wart, everything we haven’t noticed about ourselves. There aren’t any little people a person could hire to do that.
Eventually I came to realize she was enjoying those protracted nightly diatribes more than was possibly good for her. She’d begun repeating herself, also. So I told her it was over.
I mostly remember her for the valentine side. The going up big was worth the coming down little.
Old Jules
P.S. For you bloggers, a note from Jeanne (Admin):
P.P.S. Another note from Jeanne (Admin):
We’re getting a few new readers from the contest site who are probably confused about my linking to some old guy’s blog… so I wanted to mention that I’m a background partner on this blog and no, I didn’t write most of these posts! I didn’t really understand the submission forms, so the blog is listed under “Jeanne Kasten”. I don’t know why. Sorry for any confusion!
