REAL LIVE ACTION HERO

On March 12, 2011, just two weeks ago, a real, live action hero passed from the shades of this dimly lit earth into the real, live land of Shining Reality. A hero on an eighty-nine-year camping trip folded up her sleeping bag and cast aside her tent forever. The frail, battleworn shell of my mother-in-law, Velva Kuhlman Doke, lay in a casket decorated with flowers from her grandchildren whose banner read "Real Live Action Hero." That's because she was- and not just to her grandchildren, but- it seems to me, after listening to a whole lot of people eulogizing her since that day- pretty much everybody who knew her. Those of you have been following this blog have read about her before. You have seen a picture of her wearing tall boots standing in a barn beside Bryson, one of her great-grandsons. If you have read Broken Jar: 365 Days on the Potter's Wheel, you read about her on her birthday, November 22. When the minister who performed her celebration ceremony came to talk to the family about what he should say, we all started speaking at once. Every now and then, we would alternately feel some compunction about interrupting and give raising our hands a go, but we were pretty much like little kids in school who have finally been asked a question we are SURE we know the right answer to: we bounced up and down in our seats and exclaimed, "Pick me! Pick me!" We all knew we had to perfect story to sum up her best quality, but we all learned that every story was better than the last. She was not a rowdy character full of mischief, as you might think by our overflowing need to tell these stories, but they were just as captivating to the imagination because she was really ...something else. She was like something from a storybook, made up a long time ago before such things as vanity and pride and looking out for Number One became virtues to attain to rather than vices to be ashamed of. To some she might have seem quite naive, but I'm not sure that's a fair assessment of why she lived the way she did. The fact that she didn't dwell on the sorry shape the world has gotten itself into or even the terrible pain she had to endure for the last few years of her life due to terrible osteoporosis doesn't mean that she wasn't aware of all these things. She just remembered a better way of living, and whether most of the world still responded quietly and positively or not to such things, she decided she would, and she did. In my estimation, this is no less than heroic. She was humble, always kind, never selfish, willing to walk into every new day with a smile and new hope, entirely thoughtful of others' needs and desires, brave, honest, and sweet. She was what Paul called, "a shining star in the universe." She always offered "hospitality without grumbling"-- just like Peter admonished all of us to do. She simply walked around living out scripture before our eyes and so, just as it is supposed to work, we all were always aware of the life of Jesus when we were around her. Now that she's gone, everyone in this family will have to find some way to gear up our loving each other by about 25% to make up for all she gave us. Here is a poem I began writing as she lay suspended between this life and the Next and concluded the day after she had left us. Of course, really, I have no idea if I am anywhere close to on target about what was going through her mind, but the way she was makes me think this must have been what it was like for her to feel all of us gathered around her, our hero, and to be so accustomed to doing all she could to comfort us, but to see ahead of her the Grand Fruition of all she had lived for. Should she stay for us, or could she really be allowed to walk on ahead into the Everlasting Arms and leave us to Someone Else?

Breaking Camp
You look both ways before you proceed
With one foot in Heaven and one still on earth.
You see us back here steeped in our hearts' need,
But ahead there is Glory and that promise of new birth.

Taking leave of this place feels strange to your feet-
Walking away from all you have known;
The faces and embraces back there are so sweet,
But ahead lies the reaping of all that you've sown:

The harvest of the seeds of humility appear;
The sheaves of service and sacrifice await.
But still...those dear voices, their eyes, and their tears
Will be out of your reach once you enter that gate!

But the call of the Lover of your soul rings so clear,
The tolling of the invitation so telling,
The welcome of His arms snuffs out every fear,
So you venture ahead to that Home so compelling.

Now you know it was worth all the ripping and tearing
That had to be borne to reach that bright shore.
Ah! Now it's accomplished, and you know all your caring
Is securely preserved forevermore.

Wrapped up securely in your Father's embrace,
Your soul arises from the bedclothes that bind.
You commit to the Shepherd the tears on each face-
Your camping all finished, and your tent left behind.

In loving memory of Mother, Velva Doke 11/22/1921-3/12/2011

FRUITLESS FIGHTS AND THE BIRDMAN

The Birdman of Alcatraz was really a man named Robert Stroud. He had been in several prisons including Alcatraz in San Francisco and then later moved to a prison hospital in Springfield,Missouri, when he got old and sick. The reason he became known as the Birdman of Alcatraz is that while he was in prison, he got interested in canaries when some showed up at his cell window and later got sick. Somehow or another he managed to figure out what was causing their sickness and began treating them. Supposedly he was some kind of a bird genius because Hollywood made a movie about him starring Mr. Burt Lancaster.

A little while after Mr. Stroud went to the hospital in Springfield, my daddy decided to get into the nursing home business with some of his buddies. His first nursing home had been a hotel before he bought it, and one time a man traveling through killed himself on purpose up in his room right there in Azalea Heights. I thought it was eerie that Daddy was turning a place with such a sordid past into something like a nursing home where people were supposed to live out their remaining days peacefully and in cheerful surroundings with freshly cut flowers on the dining room tables and cardinals singing in the pine trees outside their bedroom windows. You could hardly feel peaceful when the place was infected with suicidal memories.

Another thing you need to remember about all this is that Shelby County was the poultry capital of the world. You couldn’t drive through town without seeing five or six big trucks loaded up with hundreds of crates full of chickens, and all the highways and byways passed through miles and miles of property dotted with big, long chicken houses. We had two poultry processing plants right there in Azalea Heights itself, not to mention all the ones scattered all over the rest of the county. Since both chickens and canaries are birds, and Mr. Stroud discovered some important cures for bird diseases, and he was in the hospital on his last leg anyway, Daddy thought it would be a nice gesture to see if he could get the parole board to let him come live out his days right there in Toledo Lodge. (I wondered if Daddy told the parole board that a man had committed suicide in one of the rooms; I bet he just conveniently left out that little tidbit of information. )

For a while, Daddy and the Birdman wrote letters back and forth about what life would be like if he got to come here. The Birdman in all those years locked up had also gotten pretty handy with leather, so he made Daddy a billfold with his name engraved on it. Daddy worked on this project for about two years and even made a couple of trips up to Springfield and visited with the Birdman, but in the end— just about the time Daddy had almost worn down the authorities—the Birdman decided he’d just rather stay there where he was than to venture over to East Texas where he didn’t know anybody. Pretty soon after that, he died, so he wouldn’t have gotten much use out of Toledo Lodge anyway.

Daddy was all involved in this and other projects so much that I guess he just never had time to do things like teach me how to fight, but there was a new girl in town whose daddy spent as much time teaching his girl how to fight as mine did getting us ready for the Russians and trying to spring murderers from prison. Her name was Kate Bloomberg, and she was taller than any fifth-grader and most sixth-graders too. Kate wasn’t all that mean; she was really pretty quiet, but she was different — folks called her a Yankee — and I decided she needed to learn how to act more like the rest of us, so I challenged her to a fight in the woods one Saturday. She had managed to make a friend — also quite a bit bigger than the rest of us- and all I had on my side was a bunch of unskilled, untrained pipsqueaks with big mouths. Still we were scheduled to fight in the woods behind Delia Brown’s house the next Saturday afternoon at two o’clock sharp. We were even charging 25 cents admission, even though it never occurred to us what we would do if somebody ventured up through the woods to watch and didn’t want to pay—just like the woods weren’t open to everybody in this whole free country.

The day of the fight, a few clumped around me and even fewer clumped around Kate, and then the next thing you knew we were both hearing some kind of imaginary bell and jumping into the ring to do whatever kind of damage ten-year-old street-stupid girls can do to each other. The funny thing was that this fight just didn’t have the fuel it needed to get us worked up into enough malice to fight with any kind of heart. She was about three heads taller and about twenty pounds heavier than I was, and it was true that she did know a few things about yelling those karate kind of words and throwing her body into stiff poses totally foreign to anything remotely related to East Texas.

But she didn’t really care a whole lot about beating me up, and I wasn’t really mad at her about anything enough to compensate for all she was in the fighting world that I clearly was not, so after a little while of bouncing around with clenched fists like I had seen Floyd Patterson do at the Rio and dodging her high kicks and flat-palmed, knifelike hands that sliced through the air close enough to cause my eyelashes to flutter in their breezes, I lost my steam and just kinda eased out of the ring. I was pretty much finished with this activity and was ready for all of us to become friends and go down and take turns tightrope-walking the pipe across the sewer, but for some reason, I’ll never understand, Mary Nell Bobbitt was just getting interested.

As I stepped out, Mary Nell stepped in with her mouth all twisted up and her eyes all tightened into little slits and her fists throwing her arms around into wild gyrations as she yelled at Kate, “You come over here to me, you Yankee smart-alec fightin’ machine you!”

It was bizarre. Nobody had ever seen Mary Nell act like this, and it just didn’t make any sense. For one thing, Mary Nell cared too much about her hair to be entertaining notions of anything of such a windy nature as fighting. Everybody there fell into a silent trance as we waited breathlessly for what would happen if Kate took Mary Nell up on her nutty threat. Then, as though it were all in slow motion, Kate just took a couple of steps closer to Mary Nell, forgot all about her fancy Yankee technique and socked Mary Nell right in the eye with her doubled-up right fist. Mary Nell went off crying, and Kate threw her hands up over her mouth in shock at herself. I suspect that her Karate antics up until that time had been more about dancing than demonstrating violence, and now, whether she liked it or not, she had been duly baptized into the Piney Woods martial arts system.

Even though “prejudice” was a word I had heard only occasionally on channel twelve out of Shreveport, I had no idea that I was a proponent of it; after all, when our colored maid’s daughter, Cornelia, invited me to come spend the night with her on Neuville Street down in East Azalea Heights, I had my suitcase completely packed and was raring to go until Daddy came home and told me I might better wait until another night. But after the fight in the woods that day against somebody who didn’t do a thing to me but talk a little different and come from “off,” I thought about how maybe I was one of those very people they were talking about on channel twelve.

IN MY EASTER BONNET

It was April, the month for Easter, and Mother was deep into sewing. She was hands down the best seamstress in Azalea Heights, and she got excited every Easter because she could pretty much make me dress up without having to worry about me talking her out of it. Easter was good leverage for her and Julie’s determined efforts to turn me into a girl. This year she had made me a white shirtwaist dress with puffy sleeves and ten rows of different pastel colors of wide lace all around. If you had to wear things like that, this dress wasn’t so bad except for the four petticoats I had to wear underneath it. It wasn’t just the way they felt that was bad; it was also the way a person looked wearing all that stiff stuff underneath that made your dress stick out like a teepee. Why did girls want to walk around disguised as a tent? Did they really think that was pretty, or what? But my mother worked really hard on this one, and so when Easter morning came, I put it on complete with lacy socks and white gloves and went to Easter services at church.

After church we went to the brand new Azalea Heights Country Club for lunch. This place was out near Flat Fork and had a golf course, a big clubhouse with a dining room, a pro shop where golfers could buy balls and tees and rent carts, and, the thing that mattered most — a big ten-foot deep swimming pool with a diving board. The luxurious new dining room had opened just in time for Easter, and Mother and Daddy wanted us to be among the first to eat there.

You might think just having a good dose of Easter morning religion at church — the highest holy day of the whole year — that I would be more sober-minded and prudent, drawing more heavily on the spiritual nourishment that only a time like Easter can manufacture in a kid whose life is otherwise more like a runaway mine train on a collision course with disaster — but this was sadly not the case. Maybe it was because we had to drive that five miles way out in the country to get there, but the fact that this was the anniversary of Jesus, our Savior, rising up out of His three day-old tomb having just kicked the teeth out of death did not hang on with me like it should have.

The whole time my mouth was in the dining room chewing on prime rib and green beans, my mind was taking three perfectly-measured steps toward the end of the diving board, then leaping straight up with pointed toes and coming down with the exact position and spring needed to catapult me high into the perfect arch that would take me through my intricately-engineered swan dive and into the water with precise perpendicularity and only a teaspoon full of splash. And this was no ill-conceived delusion of grandeur, either. I could do this. I knew it because I had executed just such a work of art many times at the city pool on both the low and the high diving boards. But the city pool had cracks everywhere, the water was yellow and grungy and smelled funny and was always packed with little kids who wouldn’t stay out from under the diving boards, so I had eagerly awaited this new venue and was exited beyond words that Daddy loved golf as much as I did diving because if he hadn’t, I doubt very seriously that we would have joined the country club.

So there I was in a trance. Yes, I was completely finished eating, and no, I did not want any dessert. All I wanted was to get out of there and go look at the pool and salivate about the diving board and the ten feet of water just beneath it that would most likely, because of the price of membership, not be overrun with misplaced little kids I would have to dodge and thus throw off my balance.

Diving was not like most everything else I did. If I missed a squirrel or a light bulb or an egg with my b-b gun, I didn’t take it personally or stay up late doing target practice to improve my average. If I missed twelve questions on my arithmetic homework or couldn’t remember any of the state capitals, that was okay; I wouldn’t need to worry about the ramifications of those things until my report card came home, which wasn’t but six times a year.

But diving was another whole matter. About diving I was a perfectionist. I had for two summers studied with great attention the sixteen-year-old boys at the city pool as they did their front and back dives, their death-defying cutaways, their jack-knives and one-and-a-halfers. I was enthralled with the way their toes gripped tightly to the board while the rest of their feet extended out backwards into thin air and how they would purse their lips, hold their muscled arms stiffly in front of them for balance, look determinedly straight ahead, and then blindly and courageously hurl themselves upwards into a graceful back flip which ended with their bodies cutting a path, ever so lovely and narrow, into the deep yellow water causing hardly a ripple. I knew in only two months I would be out there commanding the attention of golfers coming up on the ninth and cutting through the pool area to go back and tee off for the back nine. I had proved that you didn’t have to be sixteen, and you didn’t have to be a boy to be a diving daredevil with the grace of a gazelle.

I guess my parents overheard my loud dreaming because they suggested that I go have a look at the pool while they finished up and paid the bill. I nearly tore the door off its hinges getting out there, and when I arrived, there were Frankie Potts and Billy Jack Samford shuffling around in their Easter best with their hands in their pockets all cool and talking trash about what they would be able to do off a board with that kind of spring. I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but there was another Whisperer breathing down my neck telling me to climb up on that board and take a couple of trial bounces right there in their faces just so they would know that there would be a little competition this year from a most unlikely source: a ten year-old girl named Jen Crocker.

All of this sounded like such a good idea that I wouldn’t doubt that I was finishing the enemy whisperer’s sentences for him. With all the commotion of both the Enemy Whisperer’s and my own inner voice prattling on at the same time, I wouldn’t have been able to hear the Great Whisperer at all, even if He was trying to get my attention, and I don’t know that He was. He might have just decided to sit back and see if I really had learned anything that was sticking from all the waywardness I had fallen into this year. But then the Enemy Whisperer must have decided I was doing a good enough job on myself, so he slunk over and began working on Frankie and Billy Jack. About the time I kicked off my shoes, climbed up on the board and began my small bounces that I had planned to work up into big ones, Frankie yelled, “Bet you wouldn’t dive in!”

Billy Jack one-upped him, “I dare you to just dive in right now dressed just like you are.”

Everybody knows you can’t just ignore something like this. When you get the opportunity of a lifetime to shock some smart-alec kid who thinks he already knows all there is to know, you don’t sit around deliberating. You must act without hesitation; strike while the iron is hot.

And that is exactly what I did at that moment on Easter at the new country club pool dressed in my Easter dress with four petticoats and ten yards of pastel lace. I did the deed. In carefully measured and confident strides, I approached the end of that diving board — one, two, three perfect steps, one hop with my right leg, left toe up and pointed, down with both, high spring, arch, arms extended and then together just before piercing the water as sharp pointed as the needle full of penicillin Dr. Wheat’s nurse would slide into my arm.

This was no softly sung lullaby, no haunting flute melody or muted bluesy trumpet. This was the heartrending throb of full-bodied French horns and the reverberating passion of the tympani climaxed by the clash of cymbals. It was the rhapsody of a lifetime. I was in the water in my Easter dress, and it was cold. It dawned on me as I swam to the ladder to get out that I had not once thought of the fact that it was still April when I approached the end of the board. All I could think about was how it would feel to look up and see the surprise on the faces of those big, cool, teenage boys who thought they were messing with some wimpy little girl. As I clambered out to face them, neither the yards and yards of crinoline and lace nor the piercing scream of my tortured, chill-bump laden body could drown out this symphony.

Something I never thought about until the boys left and I was standing there alone dripping like a sieve was what my parents would say and do when they saw me this way. I didn’t have long to wonder, though, because about that time, they appeared. Daddy was more fascinated than mad; Julie was shocked and threw both hands over her mouth and started shaking her head; but, Mother quickly scanned all that meticulously stitched, starched lace sagging from what once was a snow white dress, now tinted greenish from the chlorine, and then she cast her eyes downward and let her shoulders slump so low, she seemed to lose about ten inches of height. She didn’t start crying and carrying on; she just stood there all short and quiet.

Right then, a type of amnesia came over me that I was not familiar with. I forgot all about how it felt to execute the perfect swan dive; I even forgot how it felt to intimidate those boys. All I could think about as I stood there being my stupid, thoughtless self was what I looked like through my mother’s eyes. I didn’t just see myself as my mother saw me; I saw things way down deep inside my mother that made me feel like I had just dissolved right there down into that newly poured cement and become her.

I saw my daughter who cared only about what might be fun to her at that particular moment; my daughter who never one time thought about anybody but herself and how she might show off effectively enough to get as many people as possible to look at her and swoon in amazement; my daughter, whom I had brought into this world in no easy fashion, who was growing better and better the older she got at completely ignoring all instruction about gratitude and thoughtfulness.

I wondered if this might be a little of what Mr. Pete meant in Sunday school when he talked about a word called “compunction.” We all just thought it was a funny sounding old-fashioned word that we would certainly never use and therefore could pretty much just let go in one ear and out the other like 99% of everything else he said. And yet, here it was right here with me at the country club. It had climbed in our car and followed me all these miles out here in the country and had jumped out to bite me on the rear end. I guess there is something to be said for just going ahead and teaching kids stuff that they don’t understand or care about. Maybe sometimes a lot of it burrows down inside us and grows into something we will recognize someday. Right then, I’ll bet the Great Whisperer was all excited and clapping His big hands up there in Heaven because I had found out about compunction in spite of my inclinations to shake it off my shoulder when it came rolling out of my second ear, but I was miserable about this new information. My swollen rhapsody had quickly shrunk into a direful dirge.

And this was a kind of misery that I knew nothing about. It had nothing to do with fear of punishment; in fact, I would have felt a lot better if Daddy had just snatched off his belt and beat me black and blue right there at the Azalea Heights Country Club swimming pool. But he didn’t. I saw Mother nudge him and shake her head a little like she didn’t want me to see her, and we just climbed in the Pontiac and drove home. Mother tried to undo the damage to my beautiful Easter dress, but somehow, it never really looked the same to me after that day.

TARGET PRACTICE

With a handle on my stealing, I tried to squelch any visions of wickedness, but like the springtime that was blooming all around me outside, a terrible restlessness seemed to match it in my insides. My curiosity about living all of life that could be lived was eating away at my decency.

That’s the only logical explanation for my response to Carla’s mentioning the noisy chickens in the hatchery behind her house: my trigger finger suddenly got strangely itchy. The next thing I knew we were ensconced in the bushes behind the post office with our b-b guns drawing a bead on the hens all stacked up in crates across the street. (At that time, Shelby County was the poultry capital of the world.) Our idea was not to shoot the chickens themselves but to see if we were good enough to bust the eggs beneath them when the hens would stand up and stretch their legs or whatever that is they do when they prance around in circles the way they do. And we were. Mostly. But I’ll have to say that it’s a good thing that we weren’t strong enough to pump up our air rifles a few more times or we’d have laid out a few of those unsuspecting chickens. As it was, we’d either bust an egg or pop a hen just enough to shock a sudden squawk out of her. Of course we had to be sure not to fire when a car was coming up the street, and sometimes that took a lot of waiting since this was right downtown just barely off the square. You have to wonder what the men running the place thought to find all of a sudden this one day a bunch of busted eggs under their hens when this was never the case before. After the redbugs and the ants started pestering us, we decided to do something that didn’t require lying in the grass, so since it was after five and the courthouse was closed, we went around to the front for a while and shot at squirrels in the sycamore trees, and then we went across the street to the courthouse.

For some reason, probably the square dances they used to have up there, there were lights strung all around the whole area on all four sides of the square. Unlike the tough-skinned squirrels, the light bulbs succumbed easily to our b-b’s, much like the eggs but better because we could get closer, and we didn’t have to wait for hens to stretch or cars to pass. Totally disregarding the washer-pitching, tobacco-chewing, whittling old men who were camped on the benches twenty feet away, we began systematically destroying each light bulb with one of us shooting while the other would pump up her gun for the next shot. I don’t know what took them so long —probably for some sheer shock and for others pure delight — but we had almost made it to the third side when a couple of old codgers finally sauntered up to us and asked us our names.

The Bible says that there is no greater love than one who will lay down her life her friends, and that is what happened next when Carla opened her mouth and answered them: “I’m Carla Nations, and this here's my friend Mary Nell Bobbitt.”

Why, if she was going to lie anyway she didn’t just go ahead and lie about her name, too, is a mystery for the ages, but even though she put her own life on the line, she did manage to kill two other birds with one stone. First of all, Carla was jealous of Mary Nell, and I guess she mistook my pandering to her out of fear that she’d reveal that I was a thief for the desire to become her best friend, so she took shrewd advantage of this opportunity to cause her some trouble, and that was the first bird. The second bird was that she showed me loyalty by protecting me from the consequences of having the county judge, who was my cousin and right up there in his office thirty feet away, call my daddy and tell on me.

One thing you need to consider in all this is that Carla’s parents were pretty loose on disciplining her ever since her brother, Nicky, had gotten killed a year earlier in a car wreck when he was just sixteen. They seemed to think the best way to live without regrets would be to leave Carla to her own designs and let her live life to the fullest as she saw fit just in case her life was snuffed out prematurely too. What they might not have figured on was that by giving her all this slack she could wander into dangerous territory — maybe so dangerous that she might not even make it to sixteen. Carla also knew that my daddy believed in a little tighter rein and that I was likely to get worn out before dark if he had found out.

And maybe it was the Great Whisperer again, but somehow, my cousin the judge did find out, and he did call my daddy. He said, “Pep, you need to come down here and get Jen and her gun off the square.” When we got home, he bent me over Julie’s bed and gave me a lickin’ with his belt, but I noticed that as I was telling him the story, and even as he was lightin’ into me, he had a smirk on his face that looked a lot like pride. I think he was thinking that even though on July 3, 1951, I came out a girl instead of the boy he was hoping for, I was going a long way in satisfying his need to have a son to follow in his footsteps.

(From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights by Jan Doke, Chapter Fifteen)