I was getting up at dawn to be the first person on the slopes. I loved being the first person to break new snow.
Four days later we went to Driggs, Idaho, to the Grand Targhee Ski Resort. To this day I think it is the best skiing in the world, long fields of snow that you can take forever to come down. I went back one time at Easter with Pierre and Little Ellen and had a wonderful time skiing with Scandinavian ski instructors while Ellen and Pierre went from warming lodge to warming lodge eating and buying things. On Easter Sunday the instructors skied in bathing suits.
Coming back from Targhee in the late afternoon of the Christmas trip, I was in the Mercedes with Dooley driving, Sandra in the front passenger seat, and Garth and me in the back. Dooley saw a moose on a mountain. We were on a long, narrow overpass that was covered with snow and it was getting dark. The overpass had almost no shoulders and steep drops on both sides.
Dooley turned around to tell Garth to look at the moose and the Mercedes slid off the road and went down about twenty feet, sliding in the heavy snow. I definitely thought we were dying and the car filled with white light and I had my first near-death experience.
Dooley remembers this very differently. He says the car’s front wheel hit a slick spot and only slid about five feet down the hill in the snow.
One way or the other my father was behind us in the pickup truck and stopped and he and my brother and some state troopers got us out of the Mercedes and into the back of the pickup truck camper with some of the children. I was freezing all the way home and had pneumonia when I got back to New Orleans four days later. I have always blamed the pneumonia on riding home in the camper.
We arrived at the house in Casper in a snowstorm and went inside and went to sleep.
The next morning was Christmas Eve. We worked all day getting ready for Christmas Day.
On Christmas Day we woke at dawn and the children opened their presents and ate chocolate candy ornaments off the tree and everything was very merry until my brother and my father caught Marshall and Garth smoking marijuana in the downstairs bathroom.
After that there was a lot of yelling and screaming and in the end I took my two oldest sons and my husband and flew home that night to New Orleans. Pierre stayed to ski Casper Mountain with his cousins.
This was at the very beginning of the dope problems with my sons. They were thirteen and fourteen. I wish now I had let my father and my brother yell at them and threaten them and lock them up. It was stupid of me to protect them. My husband, Freddy, and I were not capable of disciplining them. If I had let Daddy and my brothers work on them at that point in their lives I might have saved us all many lost years of bad grades, being kicked out of colleges, psychiatry, and all the other things that had to happen before they belatedly grew up and became the fine men they are now.
This was happening all around me in New Orleans with children of all classes and colors. The seventies had come and the hippies were living in Audubon Park and the Pied Piper came and stole the children. We are lucky. We got ours back. Some of them died. Many never got straight. All of them were damaged, even the luckiest of them. The real damage was to the polite, disciplined, hard-fought-for culture of the United States.
I see the aftermath in my students in 2010. They drink, take drugs, write about drinking and taking drugs, and seem to have no hope of living useful, successful lives.
And on and on and on. So it was with Athens, with Rome, with the British Empire, now it is the United States’s turn. Maybe we’ll make it. Maybe we won’t. I hope to God we do. My brother Dooley has twenty grandchildren, Bob has two, I have fifteen. I wish we could leave them the strong, disciplined world we knew. Some of them will know it, some of the older ones already have.
I am fighting for them with all the strength and hope and words on paper I can find. I hate drugs and alcohol and all the things that destroy young minds. I hate political correctness with its myriad lies and distortions. Tell the truth, for God’s sake, tell the truth.
“This above all to thine own self be true and thou canst not then be false to any man.” William Shakespeare.
Writing Maketh an Exact Man
OCTOBER 14, 2010
IT IS IMPORTANT TO WRITE DOWN IMPORTANT MEMORIES, TO store them on paper as well as in our mortal brains. The idea of people in the future finding pieces of paper we left behind has always fascinated me. Who will someday dig up my and Connie Beth Ingram’s and Cynthia Hancock’s time capsule in Harrisburg, Illinois? Who will unearth the one Donna Dustin and Donna Brummette and I left in Seymour, Indiana, during a cold February day in the middle of the Second World War? I was hoping it wouldn’t be Japanese soldiers but you had to be prepared for any eventuality. I was in the second grade and fiercely self-protective. I was ready to be nice to the conquerors, learn their language, teach them to plant corn and carrots, show them where there were orchards, how to run the projector at Connie Beth’s father’s outdoor picture show. I worked at the concession stand when I spent the night with Connie and knew all about how to show the movies.
There would be no need to kill a useful little girl like me. I could saddle horses, change tires on trucks, make mayonnaise, learn languages. I was studying Latin with my mother and she said if I learned it I could learn any Romance language easily. I knew Japanese wasn’t a Romance language but chose to ignore that information as I lay in bed at night planning what to do if we lost the war.
My father was not afraid we would lose the war. It worried him that the government spent too much money doing things but since he was one of the ones who built the army and air force bases and poured the concrete runways where we taught young men to fly airplanes, he did his job eighteen hours a day no matter how many wasteful frills the government made him add to the bases, such as canteens for the officers and soldiers. His brother was a pilot and his cousins were soldiers. They were Scots like him. They didn’t need canteens. They needed to get the job done and get on to the next job. Get up, eat breakfast, go to work building a military for the United States of America. Go home, have one drink, eat dinner, call your children in one by one and ask questions and give advice, say your prayers, especially for the safety of all our soldiers and your brother and your cousins, go to sleep, get up in the middle of the night and drink water and make lists for the next day, go back to sleep, get up at five o’clock and go to work.
Forty-five years later my father had not changed one iota. He lived on war time with war rations. Same khaki pants, same belt, same ironed white shirts, same white tee-shirts, same pencils and pens and folded envelope in his left-hand shirt pocket, same short beige jacket in case it got cold, same jewelry, an Auburn class ring.
He had made several million dollars but had never spent a cent of it on himself except to buy a ranch in Buffalo, Wyoming, and a lot of ski equipment at yard sales in Buffalo. He bought horses but mostly he bartered for them.
My mother didn’t let him live on the ranch long. By the time he was eighty he was back in her house in Jackson, Mississippi spending his time and energy taking care of his fifteen grandchildren and six great-grandchildren and buying houses and cars for people who needed them. He bought real estate and a huge place for all of us to be buried. He turned all his investments into gold coins and couldn’t believe the rest of us wouldn’t do so too.
He liked to get people alone with him on car trips and talk to them about the federal reserve and the need to buy and hold gold coins in bank vaults and home safes. He liked to get my husband’s law partners to build secret vaults in fireplaces in which to store gold coins. Many of them did it. They thank me for that every time I run into them.
I lived four hundred and fifty miles away from my parents in a mountainous town in northwestern Arkansas that was hard to drive or fly to. I didn’t want Daddy coming to see me or giving me advice about God and money management.
I drove the eight hours down to Jackson every month. There were always birthdays or celebrations or weddings or reasons to go see about my own chi
ldren and grandchildren.
I couldn’t work around them. There was too much energy and testosterone and estrogen and teenage crises and new babies and wives and new husbands going on in my family to get anything imaginative done. The reality was way more exciting than anything I could think up or write down.
Sometimes Daddy needed me to do something for him. The phone call would come at seven in the morning. “Sister,” he would say. “I need you to do something for me.”
I would always go and do it. No matter how much it messed up a good writing spell or any work I had to do, I got in the car and drove down to Jackson to do whatever my daddy needed.
One of my great memories of doing things for Daddy was a January day in 1996. He was eighty-six years old. He had had a pacemaker for several years, had been having trouble with his arm and leg, his unbelievably strong arm and leg, and he wanted to go to Cleveland, Mississippi, to have lunch with his (all male) first cousins at the Cleveland Country Club. I had just won several big awards for writing and they wanted to talk to me, which was why I had to be the driver and not one of my brothers.
His cousin Charles Clark, who was chief justice of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, would be there. His beloved cousin Lavalle House, who had gone to Annapolis and then to the Korean War where he contracted polio and came home a decorated hero with a rank of lieutenant commander. His mother met him at the boat in New Orleans, bought them a house and they lived in New Orleans while he learned to be a librarian at Tulane University. Then he and his mother went home to Cleveland, Mississippi where he was the base librarian at an army base near Cleveland. He hired an architect and rebuilt his family’s white board mansion into a wheelchair-accessible place to live. When it was done he could leave his third-floor bedroom, go down an outside elevator to a chute that took him to his automobile where his wheelchair was lifted automatically into the car and fitted behind the steering apparatus and the gas pedal controls. Then he drove himself to work.
My father and the other cousins worshipped Lavalle. He was a beautiful and charismatic man and I fell in love with him every time I was in his presence. He had an ability to make you know how vitally interested he was in you that I have never seen again except in Bill Clinton, whom I know and also love.
There were many other powerful exciting men at the meeting of the cousins. Their wives were there also but I didn’t notice them.
These were the sons of my grandmother, Louise Clark Gilchrist, and of her sisters, all descendants of General Charles Clark who was the wartime governor of the state of Mississippi during the Civil War.
How did these women raise all those sons to be such useful and powerful members of their society? One was the speaker of the House of Representatives of the state of Mississippi, one a physician who became president of the state, county, and local medical societies, my father, a Caterpillar Tractor dealer and philanthropist, a colonel in the United States Air Force who flew bombing missions over Germany and then flew with the Flying Tigers in Asia under General Claire Chennault. Two or three generations of lawyers in Cleveland and surrounding towns, whose daughters would also become lawyers.
I know it began with discipline, self-discipline and high expectations and a work ethic that always finds fertile soil in men and women with Scots genes.
Next was a learned devotion to good deeds and courage and a sense of responsibility to the society as a whole. These were deeply held Presbyterian beliefs. Presbyterians believe they are a chosen people, chosen by God to lead others to charity and goodness and hard work. You don’t have a choice if you are a Presbyterian. You have to work hard all your life to make the world a better place. You have to live up to expectations. My father’s father used to say he would rather have a son of his be dead than be a drunkard. I share that feeling and wish more people admitted that’s the way they feel.
Good deeds are what my father did. He did them every day and to anyone he met. He picked up hitchhikers until the day my brothers took away his car. He burned the skin off his hands pulling a truck driver from a burning truck he saw crash on the highway. His hands healed. It wouldn’t have mattered if they hadn’t healed. He did what his upbringing told him to do.
I think about those women a lot, Grannie Clark Gilchrist and her Clark sisters who became Houses and Allens. There were also Clark cousins as the girls had had a brother.
I think more than any other thing these women taught by example. They were educated women and they continued to educate themselves. They read books and magazines and newspapers. They kept up with the world even when they didn’t approve of where it was going.
Their own lives were examples of thrift, good humor, kind words and deeds, good works, and church attendance. They kept up with each other’s families and were always ready to lend a hand in emergencies.
What a lucky girl I was to have these women for my role models. It took awhile for the lessons of their lives to make sense to me. I had to have it taught to me the hard way but I did learn it. I am trying to make my old age an example for any young people who pass my way. Pass it on, my mother’s Episcopalian Church says, when they pass the peace.
Pass it on. Pray for peace. Good will toward men.
ADDENDA
I know a secret about how parents teach children their culture and belief systems and good manners and morals and ways of being. In the first place the DNA is there with the blueprint of what your people learned and knew and believed. In the second place, if they are good parents, the examples they set, day after day, month after month, year after year, are teaching and imprinting unforgettable knowledge. My parents taught me how to be old and how to be courageous in the face of the problems aging brings. If you are really lucky the things your parents teach are the way they are. They aren’t telling you one thing and doing another.
I always talked back to both my parents, especially my mother, and told them the advice they were giving me was wrong or imprecise or out of date but they just kept on telling me the same things over and over again, and, of course, it turned out everything they told me was right and as the years go by I do what they told me to do. This is advice to parents I am giving right now. Go on and keep saying it and they won’t forget it and when they need it it will be there, reinforcing the blueprint in the genes.
My parents and grandparents and the great-grandparent and great-great-grandparent that I knew well were all teaching the same Christian ideas, which other cultures share, about being kind and being forgiving and working for other people and helping other people and, from my father, tithing, an idea he loved because he made a lot of money and he loved to give it away to people who needed it.
Both he and my mother devoted their lives to their progeny and to anyone who worked for or with them. Money and property were to be shared with other people. My father loved a place called Boys Town and kept a photograph of a young man with a child on his shoulders on his desk. It never occurred to either of my parents to not help people in need, whether it was with advice and help or with money.
What they didn’t tell me is that generosity makes you happy. There is nothing in the world more fulfilling than to right wrongs or fill needs.
Albert Einstein took that idea further. He said nothing in life makes people happier than to be involved with other people in a project that makes life better for everyone.
Another gift my parents gave me is a sense of humor. I really do see the whole show as fabulously amusing. I was out for a walk one afternoon recently and was walking behind a pair of lovely young women. I wasn’t eavesdropping. I was just looking for a way to pass them on the walking path without being rude.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” the tall blonde said to her friend. “This day has been a complete waste of makeup.”
Human beings are just too good to be true, most of the time. As for the bad ones, I don’t know. Personally I stay away from them and am grateful to the men and women who protect us from them.
No end to that discussion.
/> As for your children. Love them until the day you die or they die. If they need anything give it to them before they can ask. Then they will do the same for their children and the DNA will keep on keeping you alive forever. I believe that, so I am not afraid of death. So what, I say to death. I always did love to sleep. Just bury me near my mother and my daddy near the huge gravestone my father had made with the names of his male ancestors going all the way back to Scotland.
If I have time before I die I’m going to get a piece of Carrera marble and have it engraved with my female ancestors going back to Scotland and England and Ireland and Wales and put it near Daddy’s wonderful stone. Not for any reason, just for a joke.
A Store of Treasures
WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD I BURIED A TIME CAPSULE IN MY backyard. I can remember every minute of that day. I can remember I was wearing a plaid dress. I can remember going up the stairs to my room and searching for things to include. I can remember carrying the capsule out to the yard and digging the hole and putting it in and covering it up and patting down the earth but I cannot remember what was in it, except perhaps my Girl Scout badge and a copy of the photograph I had mailed to Margaret O’Brien to thank her for the one she mailed to me after I wrote her a fan letter for her role in Journey for Margaret.
What did I put in that time capsule? God only knows. I hated to part with my prized possessions but I wanted it to contain enough so the future would think well of me and know I was educated. Of course, I must have written something. I thought of myself as a writer and wrote things all the time. I would not have minded parting with something I wrote, as I knew I could write it again anytime I liked. Even though we were in a war and everything was rationed I always had plenty of paper and pencils.
I would give anything to have that time capsule. It’s somewhere in a backyard in Seymour, Indiana, on a rise of land, behind the remains of a victory garden and near the alley where I once found a card shuffler. I doubt if much remains of it since it was buried in a cardboard matchbox. There is a chance, however, that I had some sort of tin box covering the matchbox because I remember my brother Dooley telling me that it wasn’t going to last. During those years I was obsessed with impermanence and the imminence of death and loss. We were in the middle of a world war, my uncles were flying bombing missions over Germany, everything was rationed, and we had moved ten times in my eight years of life. My father was in charge of building airports to train the pilots to fly the airplanes men and women were building in places like Seattle, Washington, and Lansing, Michigan.
Things like the Truth Page 7
