Over the last several post, I’ve been sharing memories with my readers. Some have been stories from my childhood. Others are tales shared with me about my parents’ or my grandparents’ lives.
Today, I return to my earliest post. This one was published over two years ago. It asks readers to join me, to share their stories and to share photographs that illustrate those stories. It’s a BIG ASK. But, boldly, I do it again.
somewhere over the rainbow
Like a rainbow, families begin and end in misty places we never actually see. Some of its colors we perceive quite clearly. Others are not so easily defined. But together all these hues represent who we are and what we can be.
Every known human society has had distinctive ways of constructing family relationships. All have recognized this web of intimate inter-connection as essential to human survival.
Our own contemporary Western culture is no different. The turmoil of immigration and mobility has severed our links to our ancestors. Feeling uprooted, yearning for connection, we turn to genealogists to find out who our great-grandparents were and where they came from.
That only gets us names and dates. It doesn’t connect people to one another. Even if I unearth some photos to go with the names, I mostly find myself staring at …..strangers.
Back to the Future
I cannot undo the past. But there’s another impossibility I may be able to pull off. I can travel “Back to the Future.” Before you start calling in the guys with the straight jackets, let me assure you that I am not planning on building a Time Machine.
Rather through memory and imagination, I will visit the past as I knew it and bring back stories of those times and those people, preserving them for today’s children and also for the children at the other end of the rainbow.
I invite you to companion me on my quest. Share your stories of our families’ past adventures and everyday events. Send me photos that illustrate those tales. Don’t limit yourself to the past. Today will soon be yesterday. So let’s hear what’s happening in the family right now, especially the funny stories that will tickle the ribs of future grandchildren and great-nieces and nephews as well.
sundays at nana’s house
Many of us remember a time when almost every Sunday, the extended family gathered at a grandmother’s or great-aunt’s home for Sunday dinner. It takes events of great joy or deep sadness to bring us all together today. This blog will be a virtual “Dinner at Nana’s House,” a place and time to celebrate that in some way everyone here is family.
I am reaching out to everyone I have been fortunate enough to call “family.” Here we’ll ask real questions, not fill in some fantasy quiz. We ask because we truly want to know the answers.
Asking is not probing. There will still be secrets. Every family has them. But we will so much more about each other than we do now. Day by day we’ll be more and more connected. Knowing will enable caring. Caring will engender a tradition of support. This will be our legacy.
abundance of connection
John DeJager’s Lake Cabin
My life’s journey began in the midst of abundant family. On the day I was born my four grandparents lived nearby, my two uncles were fighting in World War II, one in Europe and one in the Pacific. As the first child of two oldest children, I did not, as yet, have any aunts, siblings, or cousins. Those would come later. I was, however, blessed with an abundance of great-aunts and great-uncles, a slew of second and third cousins, and best of all, two lovely great-grandmothers. It is my great hope that all these wonderful folks will star somewhere in the dramas to appear on these pages.
No more photos without names. No more names without faces. Future children of the clans will inherit the rich narrative of their origins. knowing where they come from will give them true direction as to where they can go.
Over the last two blog posts, I’ve shared two events in my own “coming-of-age” experiences when my world suddenly became much wider.
This week a guest blogger, Nancy Louise, weaves a tale similar and yet very different than those stories of a time in her childhood when the door to a possible new life opened up for her.
Hitting Rock Bottom
Right before my ninth birthday my Daddy was killed in a car accident in Shreveport, Louisiana, one of the many towns I’d lived in over the course of my short life. His death left my Mama with six young’uns, under the age of ten to raise on her own. I was the second oldest. Unable to consider employment and with no means of support, Mama moved us into ‘The Projects,” free housing for indigent families. We froze in the winter and sweltered in the summer, but we stayed together with a roof over our head.
Photo by Joel Muriz
The Federal Housing Projects of the 1950’s was very basic. Everything was concrete and hard metal. And HOT! Hard Edged. Teaming with kids. And noisy. Always very, very noisy. I loved to escape—if only for a little while, if only in my imagination.
a trick of the imagination
Photo by Magdalena Manchee
Of course, we had no car. We lugged our groceries home on foot. As the oldest girl —that task frequently fell to me. From our apartment house, in one direction on Southern Avenue stood the A&P, the source of most of our groceries. But in my fantasy world, I trekked not to a supermarket, but to deepest Africa. On my way home, I strode down Southern Avenue precariously balancing dry goods, such as a 25-pound sack of flour on my head. As I bounced along, I swayed my hips and sang nonsense words what I told myself was “jungle language.” I was no longer a Southern school girl; I had morphed into a bearer on Safari! The blessing of a great imagination lit up my dull, everyday life!
In the other direction on Southern was “The Cotton Boll”—an early convenience store with higher prices and, therefore, only used for “emergencies” —like when we ran out the baby’s milk a.k.a. a can of Pet.
secret garden
Photo by Wil Steward
One fine spring day Mama sent me up to the Cotton Boll to fetch something-or-other—she probably hoped quickly! On the four-block walk, I passed by a huge empty lot that backed up to a ridge with the railroad tracks on top. The lot looked nasty, filled with high weeds, scrubby bushes, rusted out car parts and trash.
Always a curious child, I forgot my mother’s urgency, and I decided to “explore” the lot, just as any self-respecting adventurer would do. Also, I was in search of blackberry bushes, which I knew grew plentifully along the top of that ridge on the rail road tracks. Blackberries were the only fresh fruit we could afford growing up because they were free for the picking. But I didn’t find any blackberries.
Instead, there in the back corner of the lot I found something I never expected to see. An enormous patch of purple irises in full bloom! I have no idea how they got there. Perhaps in the far distant past there had been a house on the lot and had irises graced the back yard. Or perhaps one bulb floated in on a strong wind one day, took root and multiplied as irises are wont to do.
a place for dreaming
Photo by Roberta Guillen
But for whatever reason…there they were. Totally unknown to the world. . .except me! I got down on all fours, crawled past the brambles and weeds into the patch, I carefully turned over on my back in such a way that all I could see was a wide, open sky framed by the purple blooms. As I lay in total quiet of my hidden garden, my heart swelled and out of nowhere, as though spoken by the wind, words swept into my head, “THE SKY’S THE LIMIT”.
I never shared the secret of the irises with anyone. But each spring for years after, I would make a pilgrimage to “my garden,” lie in the blooms, and dream – very big dreams of a life that would take me far beyond “the projects.”
the journey begins
@Eurpeana
As a first step toward the dream, at sixteen I entered the convent. While I prepared for a life of dedicated sisterhood, “progress” came to my old neighborhood. Southern Avenue was ripped up. The A&P and the Cotton Boll were torn down to make room for the Interstate. My irises disappeared forever.
After four years, I left the convent, a good, but heartbreaking decision. The move thrust me unawares into the American 60s. New things were “Blowing’ in the Wind”. I couldn’t go back home. My dreams still tugged at me. I went into training to become an airline stewardess. (Never a “flight attendant” mind you. But that’s another story!) My “stew” job launched me into a career in travel.
Photo by Nick Pryde
Just as I dreamed in my garden, I left the projects far behind. I spent my life leading tour groups to every corners of the world. With each and every trip, I grew more and more aware of that God always walked with me, showing me those Limitless Skies.
On the February day I turned fifteen years and six months, “Let’s get Jule driving,” became a rallying cry of my family.
a family project
Photo by Jon Siler
My mother and all my siblings had a stake in the endeavor. Mom wanted to delegate some of the responsibility for errand running. She also planned that I would help to ferry the other kids to and from their many activities. My brother John, just twenty months my junior, knew if I had a little more freedom to come and go from our far-flung ex-urban ranch house than he could hitch a ride on those forays.
My grade-school age brother and sister plotted visits to our small- town cinema for the Saturday cowboy matinees. They went so far as to hope to swing through the drive-in for a milkshake after the movie. If Mom didn’t have to drive us herself, she might be less reluctant to watch our allowance go for such frivolities. My toddler sister caught the enthusiasm from the rest of us. She knew from experience that Mom expected me to take her with me wherever I went.
a nervous dad
Photo by Morgan de Lossy
The only one not wholeheartedly cheering on the project was my dad. And with good reason. Between the fifteen and a half-year old who didn’t know the first thing about piloting an automobile and a sixteen year old, who could pass her driver’s test, was a gigantic void. It would be his job to fill that void, if not with expertise, then with enough skills that I could get around without killing myself or anyone else. He didn’t relish the opportunity.
Dad himself was a self-taught driver. Neither his parents nor my mother’s drove. Dad had lived on a farm as a teen during the Great Depression. He learned to drive, starting with farm vehicles before moving on to cars. At first, he had mostly driven around the farm or just as far as a neighbor’s place. By the time his family moved to Detroit, he had several years of driving under his belt and didn’t find the city quite as daunting as it might have been. That is, until he had to teach his new wife to drive. Memories of those harrowing weeks haunted him as he contemplated teaching his eldest daughter the rudiments of the road.
here we go
Photo by Tyler Nix
On the plus side, he had moved his family to a small Indiana city two years before. I would not have to learn to drive in Detroit. He had also built a home for us at the far edges of that city, Muncie. So, there were relatively quiet roads for me to practice driving.
That didn’t make it a piece of cake. For one thing, my mom refused to let him to use the family station wagon as my learning vehicle. A beautiful scarlet model with wooden paneling and tons of chrome, it was only slightly less fragile than a china tea set. Jeopardizing its sleek looks by letting a young teen get behind the wheel wasn’t happening on her watch.
built to take it
Photo by Brett Jordan
Instead, I learned to drive behind the gigantic wheel of a 1948 Chevrolet four-door sedan. The color of an Army tank, it highly resembled a military vehicle with its blunt lines and no-nonsense massive proportions. I felt like a midget as I crawled behind the wheel for the first time as my dad slid into the passenger seat.
A serious problem presented immediately. I couldn’t see over the wheel. There was no way to adjust the height of the seat. So, Dad got an old guilder cushion from the garage and propped it under me. Okay, now I could see out the windshield, but I could barely reach the accelerator. Another cushion wedged behind me somewhat corrected that difficulty. And we were off to the races.
hours spent going nowhere
Photo by Eric Marty
Not literally, of course, because that first afternoon we never left the driveway. For hours, I simply practiced turning on the lights and windshield wipers, learning the correct signals for a right turn or a left turn, and learning to read the many gauges on the dashboard. The whole time my siblings formed a semi-circle around the hood of the car as though I was a circus act. After a long two hours, I thankfully ended the show, ran into our house, and flung myself across my bed in tears. I felt certain I’d never learn to drive such a complicated machine.
Bit by bit, however, I mastered the basics of driving although the other lessons weren’t burnt into my memory like that one. I do remember the struggle with shifting gears. Because he was a pretty smart guy, my dad had backed into the driveway so I could drive out. After all, backing out before I knew how to go forward would have been a formula for disaster. At first, I couldn’t even get out of the driveway because coordinating the shifting of the gears with alternating my feet between pedals felt like juggling on a unicycle – impossible for someone with so little synergy. When I did make it out of the driveway, it took several days’ practice before I could drive around our sparsely- populated block without stalling.
uphill and down
Photo by Apollo Photography
The elation I felt when I finally achieved it was short lived. Now, pointed out, I needed to learn how to change gears going up and down hills. Is there anything scarier than feeling the car you are driving start to roll inexorably backwards because you can’t get it into gear? At almost sixteen, I didn’t think so. Fortunately, my father knew a lot of the less-trafficked hills in the area.
After the longest six months of my life came my sixteenth birthday. I had already completely memorized the state driving manual. Dad felt he’d taught me all he could. It was time for the test. Despite a wildly beating heart and sweating hands, I passed! When we returned home and I held up my license for all to behold, my brother John gave a wild cheer and the little kids clapped. My dad collapsed into an easy chair and Mom brought him a ginger ale.
maiden voyage
Photo by Adam Bouse
The next morning, Mom suggested I drive John to church with me because she wanted to go to a later Mass. I almost didn’t understand her, but my brother did. He grabbed the keys off the mantle where my Dad had flung them the night before, “Let’s go before she changes her mind,” he called. We were late for service because I couldn’t quite get myself to go over thirty miles an hour even on the rural roads, but we got there in one piece. Thus, when we headed home, I was feeling pretty confident that I’d turned a new corner in my life. We rode past Ball State College on our way to home. My eyes were on the road straight ahead as I maneuvered between the cars parked at the curb and the oncoming traffic.
I felt and heard the sickening crunch at the same time. I had sideswiped a parked car. My brother let out a string of words I didn’t realize that a fourteen year old knew. We both jumped, leaving our doors wide open. Horns started to blare. John slammed his door. I jumped back in and tried to pull forward. More loud crunching of steel on steel. I stopped. Leaving the keys in the ignition, I turned off the engine and slid out once more, closing the door behind me as I sidled along the driver’s side of the Chevy.
beginner’s misfortune
Photo by Sergei Wing
John stood gaping at a long-slung, gleaming white and pink auto with huge tail fins. The lines of burnished chrome that minutes before had detailed its classy styling, were now scrunched, torn and tattered in front of my car’s front wheel bumper.
My head whirled, my mind blanked, for a moment the world was silent. Then suddenly a string of profanity erupted behind me. The college student, into whose car I had plowed, had been dragged from his bed by friends to come survey the wreckage.
unforeseen rescue
I shrank back against the protection of our Chevy and started sobbing. A police siren cut through the shouts of the college student and his friends as a cruiser pulled alongside us. An older uniformed officer jumped out. When he saw the big guy towering over me and shaking his fist, the policeman strode over grabbed the college guy by his shoulder and pulled him away from me. He patted my shoulder, “It’s okay. Calm down. We’ll figure this out.”
“So, what happened?” He addressed the crowd at large.
My brother, never at a loss for words, piped right up and gave his version. “My sister was driving very slowly and carefully, but this is a pretty narrow street and there was a lot of traffic coming at her and just a little bit of room between them and the parked cars. I guess she misjudged it a little bit. It’s her first time driving by herself.”
The officer surveyed the scene and scowled. Then he took out his ticket book and scribbled furiously, tore off the ticket and shoved it at the irate college student.
“What the…!” the kid yelled.
town over gown
“You students have been told time again to park in the school parking lots. This street is a no parking after 6 p.m. Looks like you got what was coming to you for flaunting the law.” He turned to me. “I’ll get in and maneuver your car so we can get it unhooked and you can be on your way.
Once he’d freed the Chevy, we could see it had a couple of scratches, nothing more. The Impala was a disaster. “I’m going to drive you and your brother home,” he told me. “My partner will pick me up after I get things straight with your folks. These college frat boys come to town with money and fancy cars and think they own the place. Maybe this will make them think twice.”
My first encounter with the phenomenon left me somewhat bewildered, but mostly relieved. It didn’t hurt at all to have an officer of the law assuring my parents that the accident was totally the fault of “those irresponsible frat boys.”
“Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.” ― Werner Herzog
I would love to hear about your first forays into driving.
