A Winter Wonderland

Although we lived there almost 5 years, I have never seen a single photograph from that period of Court Street in full winter regalia, so I am left with my memories of winters in Pueblo, Colorado and a need to describe the splendor of a cherished life there.

Our home, between Court and Grand street on 22nd was a white stuccoed Tudor with green trim. It fit oddly into the cross-section of building periods represented within a few square blocks. Directly across the street a large farmhouse and its' outbuildings occupied more space than the rest of the neighborhood lots, which had undoubtedly been carved from its' original acreage. Heading south around the corner on Grand were bookended Victorian era row houses, ambling and ample, some made into apartments. To the north, after a couple of lovely and graciously grounded Victorian homes, a succession of Arts and Crafts style Bungalows stretched on,and spread, seemingly in every direction for several miles. Court street had a few brick houses that seemed that seemed to have been more recently built, but by and large it was a '30's neighborhood all the way south to Mineral Palace Park. An abundance of trees of every kind and landscaping, fountains, and statuary, to complement different homes made any stroll interesting.

In the spring I preferred the walk past the Victorians toward Thatcher Elementary school. But in the winter nothing could possibly compare with the five block walk down Court Street through a tall cathedral of interlaced branches laden with icicles and an ample dusting of snow .

Leaving the warmth of our home and dressed in wool from head to toe, we would join the silent march of people, some as young as 5 and others as old as 18, headed toward our various schools. The high schoolers walked a full mile to the old Centennial High, and the Junior High, Freed, was something more than a half mile. If you were on the way to the elementary school you avoided the carefully shoveled walks and took your trek through the mounds of snow on either side of the walk in order to enjoy the muffled crunch of the snow as you packed it with your boot prints.

The few conversations were animated, but hushed in the winter, because the snow both insulated and amplified every sound. In the white silence, the occasional drip of ice melting from a roof or breathing of the earth beneath the snow pack left an anticipation of something inexpressible. Peace and quiet reigned. The work of living was shortened by the hours allowed by the sun. Crocus and violets were months away and I willed them dormant to allow plenty of time for this long respite the earth seemed to crave. Snow left a long trail toward Christmas and a school holiday. It made evenings by the fire place with popcorn or hot chocolate and Nat King Cole or Sing Along with Mitch, or, better, the piano and Christmas carols.

In the rituals of winter our mother scattered cornbread on the snow for the birds that failed to migrate, commenting on one particularly fat robin who had stayed behind. She hung our father's starched shirts on the line to freeze, their arms outstretched in a bizarre gesture satisfied only by the singed smell of the iron soothing away the wrinkles and restoring warmth. Periodically after a fresh snow a big enamel pan was filled with the white fluff, sugared, and vanilla flavored for "snow ice cream".

My brother considered it play to shovel the walk, at least at first, and the widow next door was given a free shoveling guaranteed by our parents. If the adults minded shoveling sidewalks or driveways, we were unaware. It was with a smile that our father took off his overcoat to inform us he had put chains on the tires.

The house was kept cold, except for the living areas and kitchen. Thawing was done in front of an open oven in the kitchen, the fireplace in the living room, or grate from the furnace. Drawn together by the warmth, we sang at the piano or watched television shows that presented our portion of the Camelot dream. Walter Cronkite assured us that we were all a part of a greater whole as we contemplated the changing times. The Lovely Lemon Sisters sang sweetly. Haws, Adam, and Little Joe, all failed to marry, but stayed close to Pa doing chores on the Ponderosa. And Captain Kangaroo kept the Treasure House ready for us when we awakened every morning.

Although there were furnace outlets in our bedrooms, we preferred our bedrooms cool, at least a half inch of window open to allow fresh air in the winter. Pajamas were flannel, quilts were wool and corduroy. Once in bed we could hardly turn over for the weight of quilts that took a while to warm to body temperature.

On weekends and during the holidays it was our joy to make forts for fabulous snowball fights. A good snow could provide a virtual empire of walls and fortresses, and an inexhaustible supply of snowball fights for the entire neighborhood. Some winters our growth outstripped our parents' budget, and the right size in boots or mittens was not on hand. Several layers of socks and plastic bags tied over our shoes (or hands, in the absence of mittens) enabled survival for battlefield forays.

If we were lucky, it was the year of the Wintertime Olympics. In that case, Mother celebrated with a batch of homemade yeast rolls and butter. Or Daddy popped corn in the little fireplace pan with a wooden handle. We were fortunate enough to have ice skates and after watching the graceful presentations on television, headed to the park to skate in less graceful patterns, but with no less satisfaction than the Olympiads.

Eventually the last snow melted and the violets and crocuses presented the first colors of spring as the noise of birds filled the branches on Court Street and in the expanse of the park. We peeled back some of the layers on our beds, and shed our coats for spring sweaters. As for me, I shifted my walking arrangements to gaze at the Victorians on Grand street once more, since the park offered the main visual course in the spring, and I had to get to school on time.

The Hills Were Alive

If the Heavens are the Throne of God, and the Earth His Footstool, then the Rocky Mountains must be the very spot where He rests His feet. When we were children, the hues of deep forest green and dusky blue pines and spruces, and the flickering of green aspen leaves against white and black trunks provided a tapestry of smells and sounds that refreshed and nourished our spirits. Thirsty for water pumped through rock formations that bade us drink for the taste of springs secreted deep in the earth, we filled our cups. The cold streams and rivers that ran in abundance provided the cleansing noise of rushing water spending itself against stones rounded with the effort of a million years. Falls spilling over magnificent cliffs terrified with constant thundering that this was Hallowed Ground. We were ancient as the woods and waters once settled within the canyon walls. We roamed and climbed, finding secret places of moss hidden beneath the long branches of shrubs at the water's edge.

Evergreen and Estes Park were places we frequented, but our father and mother loved the road and we searched out places like Rabbit Ears Pass and Steamboat Springs. In plateaus we found mining towns such as East Cliff, Middle Cliff, and West Cliff. We wandered through museums where our father talked with locals about UFO sightings reported there. Through the languid, pleasant years that seemed as though they could not possibly end, we explored both sides of the Continental Divide, witnessing the astonishing metamorphosis from forest to arid Pleocene bluffs
eerily brooding over dried seabeds now watered by two rivers.

We were at the pinnacle of Earth's diversity and beauty, and most precious of all, a family. The songs of road trips often came from Broadway musicals, frequently The Sound of Music, as my sister and I harmonized together. At the end of the day we would make the drive, long or short, back to our home, colors, sounds, and sensations memorized and implanted, a part now of our genetic makeup.

How do you tell someone what a library is and what it is for? Reflections on the impact of words someone else bothered to write and probably did not get paid well for, and upon the gracious gifts to community by the wealth makers and creators of our system of economy.

As I have revisited my childhood, a dominant theme for me has been that we were just above the poverty line-maybe just a fraction, and that we were at the same time rich. Two things contributed to that truth: 1. We lived where a great industry was on its's last leg, and 2. we enjoyed the public gifts of people made fabulously wealthy by the riches of the earth: Nearly every well-known and some lesser known Moguls of the 1800's contributed heavily to civic development, parks and schools, and to libraries. Microsoft and others who give today are doing what has been done before. Philanthropy is a blessing of American life we take so for granted.

Old postcards of the McClelland Public Library show a white stone building with what looks to be a red tile or possibly a copper roof. But then the building was built about 1902. Dale Carnegie had made good on his promise to spread his fortune about the country by creating libraries where communities raised adequate seed money, and McClelland dished out a considerable sum to make it a beautiful reality. It was 1960 when we first climbed the steps of a building made of stone hewn from the not-distant mountains and entered the repository of all good things. Polished marbled floors and columns supported the weight of knowledge contained in thousands of books. It was quite simply an architectural delight.

In the basement where the restrooms were, inaccessible doors held research and precious materials I wished to prowl. In a second floor room you could plainly see through the glass a Mummy's Sarcophagus casually propped against the fireplace tile. Our Girl Scout troop would later visit that room and the story of how the Mummy had found a home in Colorado was told only to be forgotten in my adult life. But for now, where did the wings to the right and the left go? What other museum treasures, I wondered, could this fabulous and spacious monument hold? The third story and full basement must have been full of needful knowledge, all under wraps!

On the main floor, fine woods crafted into moldings and ladders, desks and drawers, newspaper racks, and card files, all with a patina told of over 60 years of earnest use by thousands of fingers that had traced their grain. High ceilinged rooms opened upon rooms with mezzanines overlooking the activities below. Quiet and order prevailed.

We were ushered to the youth area, but at 9 years of age I had read the Funk & Wagnall's obtained by frugal parents one at a time at Safeway with qualified purchases, and the Bible had broadened my vocabulary and reading skills well beyond most of the fiction offered there. A good dictionary with the origins of words was part of our home library, as was the National Geographic and a rotating supply of Readers Digest Condensed Books--many too old and boring for my taste.

Restlessly I joined my sister with stacks of 5 or 6 books to last a week or two until I became bored with that section. Nancy Drew, the Boxcar Childeren and the Bobbsey Twins seemed trite. Louisa May Alcott and Robert Louis Stevenson seemed worthwhile and I quickly burned through them. Rusty's Spaceship is the only other book from that section having any lasting impact on my imagination. At the old age of 11 I was ready for more serious reading.

Growing up during the Civil Rights Movement with a father whose evening never started without a heavy dose of Walter Chronkite had made it impossible not to be alert to the meaning of certain words. But somehow I failed to grasp what a ghetto was. In our lives in Denver and Pueblo we were not really far from what must have been the poorest of the poor. But the prosperity of the Gold Rush Years had left rather nice housing for even them--and us, and an abundance of fresh crops from the surrounding plains made it possible to feed a family fairly inexpensively.

But one day, dressed in a red fabric hardback was a book whose name arrested me then and there;
The Ghetto. I thumbed it's pages, small print and thickness undaunting. Maybe I just needed that book this time. So I took it to the checkout desk where it was duly stamped when I showed my library card, then went to sit in the foyer to read while my siblings finished their searches.

It wasn't the Ghetto being spoken of in the nightly news, as it turned out. Instead, it was The Warsaw Ghetto. Very quickly I was being drawn into a world I had thought existed in the distant past. My friend, Helen, attended Sabbath School and spoke Yiddish at home. Her parents were nervous about Gentile visitors, and I scarcely remember her mother having spoken English. Both Helen and I were born in 1951 and that, to us, was long after the War had ended. But Helen's parents both bore the numbers scorched on their skin to identify their precarious place in Nazi concentration camps. They had managed to survive and Helen and her older sister, Frieda, were the ages of myself and my older sister, Mary.

Our father always called us to the television any time a program dealt with the atrocities of WWII. I was not born yet when our great uncle, a Colonel, brought home 18mm film of the liberation of a camp (we believe Dachau) which he was present for. The family had watched impossible wretchedness, never to forget as he projected it on the farmhouse wall. He told of gathering up the townspeople and marching them to and through the camp to impress upon them what their cooperation had wrought.

Now I was reading the stories of countless individuals, adults and children who learned to resist, who tied up German resources and time, and who gave their lives trying to preserve the lives of their families and friends. It was compelling and life changing. I felt older and more wary than my class mates who were still engaged in childhood games. Throughout our city were many Eastern Europeans who had immigrated before and after the war. We all had more to be grateful for than we could possibly imagine, I thought.

Now were books like the Diary of Anne Frank, and books like An Episode of Sparrows. But we lived in a peaceful vacuum where we could sell pop bottles for enough cash to take a stroll down a shady street with a friend and have a Coke and some peanuts, or save money from lunch for Beatle records, somehow immune to the Cuban Missile Crisis. My gratitude for this lucky life increased measurably. And I would finally learn about a different kind of ghetto not from books, but from the news as blacks demanded and obtained freedom they were already guaranteed under the Constitution. And already simmering in Southeast Asia was the next war......

History began to have weightier relevance as we watched the evening news and I wondered how the seemingly simple concepts our forefathers had fought for were so twisted and complicated when politics and media mixed. The books, the films, the stories of both happiness and imagination,
and those tragic accounts of barren, bleak worlds where someone could do something to change it all, combined to help me do the one thing my father wanted me to do.

So many times he would turn from the news report or look up from a newspaper and say, "A lot of eople are like sheep. They say, "I think..." and then repeat what they read in a paper or book or heard on the news. The fact is, " he would say, "they really don't think at all. They just read or hear something on the news and repeat what they've been told." Our parents read, and they made sure we read and watched and asked what we thought, expecting us to think.

Not every book was weighty and ponderous. There were Lewis Carrol tales and Robert Lewis Stephenson poems. The Brontes and the Brownings, all familiar friends to visit. And sifted between, other books by lesser known authors to take away the boredom of a sweltering summer evening or long winter's night and leave behind thoughts and musings over subjects we might never have approached alone.. Check out, read, gather up, check in. Up the stairs, through the doors, down the stairs, into the light of Day.

Today we blog on, still unpaid and unappreciated authors chronicling what we are witnesses to. We had moved away when the library was torn down and replaced with a new and comparatively undistinguished edifice. It was replaced with one more suited to modern needs, part of a system that included satellite buildings to serve a growing geographical area. The financial moguls who give now include Bill Gates, the Hunt Brothers, and T. Boone Pickens. They have it right: giving back is sweet. Someone after us will want to read what we did, hear what our music sounded like,and learn what a hero really is. The laptop and the computer terminal are now the McClellan Public Library. Books are sold in the stores, but long afternoons are spent honing computer game skills and evenings searching topics to understand homework assignments.

It feels strange to look back into that room with the Sarcophagus. Was the mummy still in there, or was it an empty box? I don't remember the answer--I just remember the wonder.

Movies at the Aladdin and Other Exotic Places: Check more links!

By 1956 they were called “The Movies”. Sophisticates might have said, “The Cinema”, but we knew little of what they were talking about. The first one I remember going to was that year, and I was four.

We were used to the grand buildings of Denver. We lived only two blocks from the Governor's Mansion. Our sidewalks were of red sandstone. The Museum of Natural History was ours, and so was the Denver Public Library and the Aviary at the City Zoo. The hills and mountains that surrounded us were placed there specifically for our exploration. They belonged to our world just like the next door neighbor's house because they were all rightfully parts of an enchanted childhood.

So when my father ushered us toward the large building with a fabulously decorated onion dome, lighted torch lamps, and exotic tiles suggesting what waited within, it was a certainty that this, like so many others we had during those years, would be a choice experience. He strode confidently toward the ticket booth in his Fedora hat, took out some bills, and our little family of five was admitted, a uniformed attendant opening the door as though we were royalty.

Wafting through the air was the enticing aroma of freshly popped corn. Treats were a carefully measured part of our lives, but that day required the purchase of a small paper bag for us to share. Mother quickly took control of it to assure it would last through the cartoon to at least the beginning of the movie. Something like Koolaid was produced in a Tupperware cup, also to be sipped and shared.

Within the walls of the Theater, the décor was plush as a Sheik's tent. Heavy crimson drapes hung over the screen. Ornate balconies hovered to the right and left, and behind, where gum-chewing, sometimes popcorn-throwing teenagers staked out their territory. But this was mainly a family place, and dozens of other families filled in around us as we took our places center front, my big sister and I well coiffed and dressed by our tall, slender, and fashionable mother. She murmured soothingly to our brother, just two. He happily took a seat next to her and the theater darkened. 

A cartoon ran, I'm very sure, from all subsequent experiences, but it was this movie I would always remember. Beautiful orchestral music lilted as images of a pastoral Indiana farm unfolded. A male voice sang a hymn to everything beautiful in nature and wedded love. “Thee I love, more than the meadows so green and still, more than the mulberries on the hill, more than the buds on the May apple tree...” The pleasing farm before me now was a familiar reference to our grandparent's farm. The hay in the fields, the barns and the streams, the leaves on the trees, the same, the same, but on a scope permitting you to linger over every detail longingly and evoking the sounds and smells so basic to peace and order.

Then the parade of characters set in another time—a man, very much resembling my father in both looks and character, and a woman who was not unlike my mother spoke to one another in language that resembled prayer. Their handsome eldest son, clearly a hero in conflict, their daughter, though considered “grown”, a romanticist I could already relate to at my tender age, and a freckled boy, the youngest, harassed by Samantha, the pet goose. Too young to understand the story fully, I remember quickly loving Anthony Perkins, body and soul in his portrayal of Joshua. When the war overtook him, his tearful and dogged loading and shooting, loading and shooting set him apart as an actor for me, and I breathlessly waited for moments to see his lanky frame again on the screen.

In a while it was all over. There was clapping and cheering from a well-satisfied audience. The lights came on and we filed out past the crimson velvet, golden trim, and sconces resembling lighted torches. Murmuring voices spoke of praise and admiration, laughter tittered over the pants-nipping goose. My own mind ranged over the landscape, the fields, and rested on the people I had come to know in some way. In a different context than the line in the movie, I wanted to say, “Let's go back there soon.”

We emerged different, albeit still very little people. Through Aladdin's magic lamp we had found a new, profound world, not just a fabulous building. We had stepped across time, and had become sincere Quakers. We had seen both Edenic beauty and Hellish war. We had seen both innocence and brutality. And yet we sighed with satisfaction as though we had eaten a meal to satiate desperate hunger and quench dire thirst while we pledged in our hearts to the belief that man was basically good.

“Now, that was a good movie,” our father said. We nodded in agreement, and felt his equals in judgment. He and Mother glanced in the rear view mirror at us, smiling little smiles of approval. It was a short ride home.

We were lucky to have parents who pinched enough pennies to take us to the Aladdin several times over the years in Denver. When later we had moved to Pueblo, the drive-in became a staple for family fun when  Ma and Pa Kettle or Tugboat Annie movies came into town.

Mother would make enough  popcorn to fill a paper grocery bag, fill the gallon Thermos jug with Kool-Aid and make her version of Rice Krispie snacks with cheaper (and tastier) puffed wheat.

Once she had made a bed in the ample back seat of our red and white finned DeSoto, we piled in with  pillows and blankets before sunset to head for the movie. 

The drive to the edge of town seemed endless, but the sun was still up as we arrived, and Daddy paid the $2 to get his carload of kids in. We flung the doors open and poured out to get to the swings before there was a line, but usually we had to take turns anyway. As the sun sank behind the mountains and images began to appear on the screen, we hurried back to the car to bunch our pillows up for our perfectly comfortable seating. And even though we had eaten the customary hearty farm-hand style meal, we liberally ate from the sack of popcorn poured into Tupperware bowls that matched our Tupperware cups with lids to prevent spillage.

Two cartoons, usually Porky Pig and Popeye or Buggs Bunny and Tom and Jerry, played followed by the backward, clueless family we loved to not be--Ma & Pa Kettle. Their eldest son seemed to be normal, but the other kids were mainly a little off. They were named Clem and Slim or something along that line. Ma couldn't remember who she was addressing half the time, so after she had run through two or three names, the addressee would protest "But I'm not Clem!" 

She would then shout back, "Which ever one you are!"--which also became a regular line our mother used when she started the litany of names at home and couldn't get it right because she, like every mother, was doing three things at once. Maybe we saw a little of the Kettle family in ourselves. I am not sure they had a daughter named Juanita, but it must have been only because the writers didn't think of it. I never understood with sisters with average mid-century names like Nina Bell, Betty Ann, Alma Jean, and Mary Beth, I got the Juanita Ruth one. Maybe those names were just a little before mid-century, but I digress...

The Kettles were good-hearted and good-natured,, prolific, and entertaining. They kept an Indian around (Native Amerian-not to be confused with our family's on Real Indian, Azar,) who had a lot more going for him than Pa Kettle. Pa didn't seem to have any visible means of support although Ma may have washed and ironed for their living. The eldest spoke normally and went to college. We were rooting for him all the way.

Our exposure to the cinema was not  limited in Pueblo to the drive in. We also had the good fortune of having a mother who seemed in constant search of Something For Us To Do. For 10 cents, I kid you not, in the early 1960's you could go to a Saturday Movie at the Uptown Theater, across the Union Street Bridge and in front of the McClellan Public Library and next door to the Skating Rink.

Sponsored by KDZA radio, the movie was   mobbed once or twice a month by children of countless grateful mothers who went off to shopping at Globe Discount City or J C Penny's, unfettered for at least 2 hours. The attendant in the booth who took our dimes did not ask what was in the large paper bag we carried in. We hurried to get seats toward the front, and after the theater filled, balcony included, we were often delighted to see a DJ in a Gorilla Suit do a short warm-up before the movie began. 

We all clapped and cheered his antics, and then the lights dimmed, the heavy velvet curtains parting, and the cartoons signaled the beginning of the show. The movie itself was normally Tarzan, and there must have been ten or  more different ones, a Swashbuckler with Errol Flynn, or less often a Western with Roy Rogers or Zorro. Hopeless romantic, I went for Errol Flynn over  Johnny Weishammer any day. How I longed to be a pirate's wench! But we were landlocked, and the lights too soon came on and we were turned out to the bright sunlight and reality. 

Across the street awaited reality and a fountain of knowledge: The McLellan Public Library.

Music as the Spice of Life * Check Links for some Sample Music

Like a pantry full of exotic seasonings our lives were laced with orchestras and bands, Mariachi's and musicals. The Philco floor model radio brought us background music for the day's work and the hymns at church music for worship. In Sunday School came the songs about Jesus and little children, building our faith. There was singing in school, Brownies, and Girl Scouts. Happy songs, and sad songs, and songs of romance and far-away places. When was it, I have to wonder, that people first began to sing?

The first orchestrated singing I remember came the day that Daddy appeared in our living room on Josephine Street with a guitar. We gathered around him when we started hearing him tune it. Then he began to first strum through several chords before picking out a tune. The day before, we had no knowledge of our father's musical capabilities, and now we were hearing and seeing someone with a fair mastery of at least basic principles of music.

The next thing we knew, he was first singing and then having us sing back the words to a cowboy song, The Maple on the Hill. He taught us the beautiful, reassuring hymn, "Whispering Hope", which we loved to sing and later learned to play ourselves. We already knew Down in the Valley, and we expanded our repertoire from there. The songs were portable, and went on to fill hours on long road trips to New Mexico and Texas.

Daddy's new boss moved us from Denver to Colorado Springs, and finally to Pueblo. One day in Colorado Springs Daddy announced one Saturday that we were going to hear a Mariachi band. We had no idea what that meant, but by the look on his face, it was going to be better than Disney Land. He drove us to the Antlers Hotel where some kind of festival--probably Cinco de Mayo--was going on, and we were thrilled to be able to feel the polka rhythms reverberate through the ground and into our bones. The impressive Mariachis wore white rhinestone and sequined suits with gold braid accents and large matching sombreros. It was an unforgettable introduction to Mexican music, and curiously about the same time, Daddy began to listen to Mexican radio while in the car. Or while outside working on the car, turned up a little too loud while confused school acquaintances said within my earshot, "Well, Juanita doesn't look like a Mexican."

Although he always had his fiddle I first heard Daddy play Ragged Bill after we moved to Pueblo, in 1960. He said he used to play in a band when he was younger. We drew the mental picture of him fiddling at a string of barn dances, his laughing eyes and grin in place. But the instrument that most changed our lives was the player piano that appeared one day in our Pueblo living room soon after we moved in. Mary, it turns out,  had been given lessons through the public schools in Denver and was already "fluent" in piano.  One of  her best friends was the daughter of a piano teacher so  I was set up for lessons immediately.

Meanwhile, Daddy brought out the paper rolls and hooked the beautiful mahogany monster up to the vacuum in blow instead of suck, bypassing the pedals to make it electric. And he added tacks to the hammers to give it the tinny sound of a honky-tonk while Mother rolled her eyes. Not a lot of time went by before the tacks were gone and Mary Beth and I were vying for time to practice our scales.

Naturally, Mary Beth was a much more disciplined pianist than I was, and in a short while she was accompanying the girl's glee club at school. I continued to practice but deferred to her. Fortunately for us, she had access to some great Broadway music,  and we always had the old blue Baptist Hymn Book that included great key-pounders like Flee as a Bird to Your Mountain, and Master the Tempest is Raging. I could play these as well as my sister if I worked long and hard, but my fingers could not really span an octave at 10 years of age. So while she played, I belted out Climb Every Mountain, Flee as a Bird, and On the Street where you live. Daddy and Mother must have been Very Satisfied with their investment.

Daddy, restless soul that he was, had to have something new now and then, so while the grand piano sat upright against the east wall of the Living Room, leaned against the south wall was a banjo. Daddy prowled the hock-shops and junk stores for treasures like this, and he was soon picking at the round and tinny-sounding oddity with some success. Next came the Mandolin, from which Daddy could immediately coax the sweetest sounds ever. The banjo went but the mandolin stayed. Finally, he brought home a blue box with a handle and latch that slightly resembled an over-sized suitcase. When unlatched and opened fully it was a field organ, complete with foot pumps. It was there a little while but didn't hold a candle to the player piano where we worshiped the keys and tenderly polished the finish.

In the summers we would often lay quilts on the grass and lay looking up at the stars while we listened to the Symphony Orchestra concerts amplified from the Art Deco rainbow shell in the park just a few blocks away.  The elementary schools still taught classic Christmas Carols in the 1950's and 1960's, so we sang, sometimes in harmony, as snow fell to make our long walk home from school shorter. Even the junior high schools put on a completely costumed and staged musical each year so we participated eagerly, and sang in the church choirs regularly. It was reassuring to have our parents in their Sunday best attending a performance, whether we were performing or watching seated beside them.

The seasonings of beautiful and enjoyable music still permeate our lives. Although the piano didn't make the move to New Mexico,  the fiddle and mandolin did and and both now belong to one of  my brothers. Mary Beth and I still play the piano a little, and the boys play the guitar. I have a similar piano in less than beautiful condition that my children learned to play "a little". One chose choir, two of went on to study violin, and all enjoy a variety of music. When they were little, like my dad, I made them sing. Everyone sings.

Quiet Endurance: The Story of a Very Determined Woman named Anna

I cannot tell you about our mother without saying that if Daddy was fun, she was mainly all business. If he was sometimes a little rough around the edges, she was grace and dignity. Both of them were unafraid of work, and I was an adult before I knew what unrelenting challenges they faced. They were typical of that Greatest Generation who survived the Great Depression and then threw themselves into a national machine that helped win WWII.

Both sets of our grandparents were born in the last two decades of the 1800's and witnessed the advent of electricity, the telephone, radio, and automobile. Our maternal grandmother nearly blew off the head of her future husband when he chose the wrong direction to approach the house as she took a shot at a fox that had invaded the chicken yard. Children growing up on the Texas prairie were likely to encounter rattle snakes and carried pistols as a matter or course when crossing the ranches. Yet our Great Grandfather and his boys ranched and farmed in suits, his a 3-piece, and they had fine furniture and china until unfortunate times overtook them--but that's another story. The perspective of these hard-working, church-going people was rather fixed, but they were far from being isolated or bogged in the 19th Century.

Even on the farm, our mother was a Fashionista, and a talented seamstress. Somehow in her youth, the railroads had brought enough catalogs and magazines for her to get a taste for great clothing and coiffures. She was 13 when she got her first flapper dress, while living in Spur, Texas. (Her mother's youngest sister, who bought the dress for Mother was, during the same time period, writing notes to her girlfriends about certain young men who were "Some Sheiks!" and asking who had a car at his disposal so they could go Kodaking.) The movies brought far-away places close, and you could take a snapshot and have it developed into a post card to circulate to friends and family.

Our Mother, Anna, was a modern woman, the first Southern Baptist woman on record, as far as her new mother-in-law was concerned, to get a divorce. Mother's divorce was coincidental with the tragic death of Daddy's first wife, Modena. Each of them was alone with two children and working at Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, New Mexico when they met during WWII. They were married within two years of becoming single.

They bought land where the Holiday Inn was later built, and built a little house of mainly salvaged materials. And they brought all four of their children together: Son, whose first name was really James, and Jack, from Daddy's first marriage, Nina and Doyle from mother's.

Jack once told me that when he first met our Mother that he thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. A more quiet version of Doris Day, she was tall and Teutonic, with blond hair that carried a slight hint of strawberry, a shade some people referred to as "Champagne Blond" I have seen only on one other person. Our father, who worked with Boeing before coming to Roswell, was a handsome man who would remind you of Humphrey Bogart both in mannerism and looks.

Their first baby was born with Hyaline Membrane Disease. The baby, whose name was Alma Jean, never came home from the hospital. I was a young mother with children of my own when I asked Mother about this time. She said she was inconsolable, unable to stop crying for days at a time. Finally, she dreamed of her own grandmother, who said, "Why are you crying? She is here, with me!" Mother said her grandmother was holding the small baby, but beside her was another baby, just a little older. She was comforted, but she also knew that she would have this experience again.

There was no time to even ponder that, because The War was winding down, and no job awaited. Since they were both civilians, they would have to wait to be hired behind a veteran for any job. Perhaps it was one of the other mechanics who told Daddy about the farm in the Ozarks of Missouri, but somehow life began again not only for the older children, but for Daddy's parents and his sister and her family, who followed us to their own farms, our grandparents just across the pasture from us. As though they had always belonged there, a clan of Walkers now lived near Exeter, Missouri.

As the second born and first daughter in a family of nine children, Mother would not have considered four children a handful at all. But Son, as James Frank, the eldest was still troubled after his mother's long illness and death. There were several years between him and Jack, and now he had two additional siblings with Mother expecting another baby.

And our eldest sister hotly reported that our grandmother took pot-shots about divorced women repeatedly within our mother's hearing. I would not have known though, because Mother had long since won her over by the time I was old enough to remember. There was peace and mutual respect between them as I grew up, but I was separated in years, nearly a decade, from these situations.

Betty Ann was born in 1947, a blue baby. Her struggle to survive of course took in the whole family. Mother told me that Papaw, our grandfather, often drove her with Betty Ann to see the doctor. They hoped that someday, when she was strong enough, he could do surgery to correct the hole in her heart. But after eight months Betty Ann was in heart failure and had to be held on a pillow. Mother said she could not stand to see her suffer any longer. She said that every breath seemed to hurt,so she silently prayed that the Lord would take her, and He did. She said that Daddy came and sat beside her while they held her, surrendering her at last to God. It was Son who ran across the pasture to tell our grandparents. No wonder it was hard for him to get close to us!

The day following Betty Ann's funeral, the older children were sent back to school. Clouds were gathering, rain forecast, and hay was in the field. Daddy had to help his father bring in the hay. Mother was alone.

For some reason, Joyce Lacy, who taught at the one-room school house, asked one of the older kids if anyone was with their mother. When Mrs. Lacy learned that Mother was by herself, she left the class, drove to the farm, and took Mother the short distance to our grandparents home. Our grandmother had gone into town (Cassville) with one of the family who had come for the funeral for something she needed. When I asked what she did, since she was still very much alone, Mother simply said, "I just sat in the kitchen and waited until the men came in from haying."

When Mary Beth was born a few months later she lived, but did not tolerate milk of any kind. So desperate was her condition that our aunt sent a dress for Mother to bury her in. Thankfully, someone thought to try goat milk, and it saved her life. When I was born about 2 years later, and didn't give anyone reason to dread and fear for my life, they must have joyfully fed me and fed me. I look quite plump at about a year and a half.

Once I was an adult, I looked with a heavy heart at the fracture that had taken place between the older and younger offspring of our parents. Tentatively I would ask when the moments seemed right, and gradually the story came from mother, one of our brothers, and from our sister. Daddy was unable to speak at all about it.

Around the time of my birth, the drought in Missouri had taken a serious economic toll. Daddy was selling Watkins products in addition to farming. It was inevitable that the farm would fail when a herd of pigs that was sold to Daddy all died of hog cholera. He and his brother-in-law decided they would try to sell televisions in Kansas City.

About the same time, Mother's family came to take Doyle and Nina to "visit" with their father in Ft. Worth, whom they had neither seen nor spoken with during the 6 year interval in Missouri. It seemed as though he had a good job with General Dynamics, and could provide comfortably for them. Mother told me she had felt defeated and as though there was no other choice. Son completed high school and joined the military. We lived briefly in Kansas City--maybe 5 or 6 months, before going on to Denver to pursue the hope of better work as an airplane mechanic at Stapleton Airport. Jack went with us to Denver for a brief time, and then on to New Mexico to join some of the extended family there, where he finished school.

After 6 years together, this big Missouri farm family had in a matter of months shrunken to a family of four with two small children and a baby on the way, who lived in Denver. I was so small the memory of the older kids faded right away, and I was only conscious of the here and now. Both of our parents were undoubtedly filled with worry about the unseen future and anxious about the separation from their children, but we did not know it for many years.

The Airport job didn't work out since so many veterans were well-qualified, but, undaunted, Daddy began his life as a salesman of Filter Queen vacuum cleaners and ultimately, life insurance. Mother was used to working, so she balanced work and three young children somehow without me ever remembering day care of any kind.

Mother seemed ever looking for an opportunity to make life better. Denver was so rich in culture it really did not matter what you didn't have. All around were museums and the library, zoo, and parks to take us to. The Little Mermaid and Wynken, Blinken, & Nodd were our playmates at Washington Park's fountains, bringing our adventures in books to life.

She became involved with "The Opportunity Club" which provided entrepreneurs with support for their own micro business. Of course sewing was Mother's forte. Mother worked at May D & F demonstrating sewing machines and producing glorious dresses for us that began as model garments for the store. For herself, some spider-web silk was the expression of loveliness in two different dresses--one of wine and the other royal blue.

During the Depression, mother had learned to shop ready made clothes stores to see what she liked, buy different material, and cut a similar pattern from newspaper. She sniffed, "Who would want to wear a dress just like everyone else had on?" Mother's hands were never still, constantly crocheting borders around towels or washcloths. She kept a light bulb to darn my father's socks, and a basket of mending for the evening hours when we gathered either around the radio or, later, the television.

Our hair was carefully curled around soft plastic spools that inverted to become what looked like little turtle shells. The end result was a head full of tamed curls to top the beautiful garments she produced for us. We made our television debut representing her sewing club with bright lights blinding us as she hissed from the curtain on the side, "Turn around! Turn around!" We turned around.

Mother was the stalwart who made sure we went to church and to Sunday School each week, and to Bible School each summer. She usually always went with us, but Daddy held out for the rare Easter or Christmas service, protesting, "But I haven't been bad enough!" She took it in good humor and plodded on. In the pew beside us we could hear her clear soprano voice singing not too loud.

Around the house Mother hummed to the music on our radio. She taught us to enjoy keeping a home, standing in a chair at the sink to do the dishes, scrubbing the woodwork clean from our own little hand prints, feeding the starched white shirts as she cranked them through the roller atop the old Maytag washer out in the yard.

Whenever we moved Mother found a church home for us to belong to and insured we learned our Bible verses. We attended Brownies and Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts for our brothers. As we got older she made sure we went to youth activities at church. She was not a cuddly Mother--and neither she nor Daddy learned to express their love for us until we taught them to from our own adulthood. But Mother spent her whole life making do, going forward, and anticipating and providing for most of our needs and many of our wants, usually under less-than-ideal circumstances.

What were her gifts to us? To seize the opportunity to find something good. To get all you can from your education, whether it be spiritual or secular. To get over it, whatever it is, and move forward optimistically. To bite your tongue and bide your time while you wait for your adversaries to become allies. To have good manners, and grace in the face of crudity. To trust in the Lord, and expect His plan for you to work out well. In so many ways she was the quietly working heart of our home. I would like to think I could manage that well, but it would be hard follow an act like that. Instead, for me, it is something to strive for.

Why life was beautiful, or the Wit and Wisdom of a Man Named Clifford (c) Nita Walker Boles

Laughter was a staple at our house. Our father enjoyed coming home to his children and apeing around. He would swing one arm , his knuckles grazing the floor, assume a hunch back, drop his jaw and become a wild-eyed and pursuing gorilla from whom we would flee, shrieking. Mother would chuckle and sputter as he chased us around but continue with her crocheting, cooking, or sewing, a reserved smile escaping now and then from the corners of her mouth.

That he delighted in us was self-evident, but we were as exasperating and annoying at times as any other kids. Still, he had a wry way of handling us that delivered the message without diminishing our worth. When I was found with scissors, cutting out paper dolls, he would shake his head as if amazed and describe me as "always cutting up little giblets of paper," meaning I'd better clean it up when I was done.

From our earliest memories, any car trip of consequence also included a narrative of our father's experiences in a parallel world where he once roamed with tribes of Indians (that was before we knew about political correctness) and Jim Bridger or Paul Bunyan. He was there personally to assist as Babe, the Blue Ox dug the Grand Canyon alongside Paul Bunyan. He and Jim Bridger once got caught in a Blue Norther and had to shoot a Buffalo, crawling inside the hide to keep warm. They later took the meat home to the Tribe. When banter erupted between him and our mother, she often got the best of him. Not to be outdone, he would remind us that "We used to drown squaws for less than that!"

Of course we knew Indians never drowned their wives, and that Daddy was only kidding, and that nothing he said when spinning these elaborate tales was entirely true, but his lore sent us to the library for books to read. Mark Twain and Tennyson were regular sources for quotes. And Daddy was seriously fascinated by Native Americans.

The National Geographic was well cared for in our home, and read by all. Books that included all the Indian Tribes and their locations were standard. Speculation on the origins of the cultures of the Incas and the Mayas, along with the Cliff Dwellers was regular conversation in the evenings and at supper. It was our father who first told us about the reception Cortez received as the Native Peoples assumed to their doom that he was their Bearded White God, returning as he had said he would. History was not boring for us in school with Daddy to put it into context for us.

His adherence to both Alley Oop and L'il Abner provided fodder for the unique vocabulary of our lives. A visitor in our home could easily be confused by asides and references in conversation. You sort of needed to be in the loop to get it all. We were entertained and educated by his close personal friendships with Pappy Yokum and Foozy. (For the last 20 years of his life, he was known affectionately as "Foozy" by certain family members.) For breakfast we often had Pterodactyl eggs with a rehearsal of the story of how Daddy and Alley Oop witnessed one drop an egg on a volcano. (This story was actually combined at times with a similar Popeye cartoon in which Popeye takes out a vulture who keeps company with Sinbad the Sailor.)

Even with all this media to stimulate political (both comic strips were highly political) and social commentary, and to provide euphemisms galore, Daddy had his own vernacular that we all still faithfully employ. If he thought what we were doing was funny or peculiar to the extreme, or that a demand was particularly challenging, he often exclaimed, "Oh, my right eyeball!"

Daddy would also invoke assistance from Deity in coping with the travails of a parent: "Lord, help the sick and the afflicted and them whose got kids." (Mother adopted it but shortened the plea to "Lord Help!")

He calmly deflected our attempts to involve him in our frequent searches for lost items by looking over his newspaper and directing us to "Look for it until you find it and when you find it, say, 'Whoopee, I found it!'"

When we came home with an astonishing account of some encounter or event in our day he would remark, "Well, I've been to two goat ropin's and a county fair and I ain't ever seen anything like it."

Fun and good humor permeated nearly every communication with our father, and when he was serious we hung on every word. Although he seldom darkened the doors of a church, Daddy was deeply religious. The big family Bible is so worn from his use that I have had to put a temporary binding tape on until I can get it repaired. Any of us in recalling what we would see when we entered our home after school would reply, "Daddy bent over the Bible, marking his place with a finger to greet you."

Although he was never preachy, when we had questions about doctrine being bandied about at church, he consistently had the reference close at hand and could quote what the Savior or Isaiah said about it. The most profound experience I had relative to this was when I was about 6 and a "Revival" was taking place at the church we attended.

Already so shaken by the threat of hell and damnation dished out from the pulpit I had asked to be baptized at the ripe old age of 5. Believing me to be too young the preacher had asked me if I knew the 23rd Psalm. Of course I didn't, and he didn't think I could read. So he hedged and postponed my baptism until I could recite the 23rd Psalm. Several weeks later I was baptized.

Now the guest preacher was asserting that if we didn't give more to the mission fund that thousands of individuals in the jungles of Africa would perish and go straight to hell because of their ignorance of Jesus Christ. I was stunned. I hardly had any money at the age of 6 and didn't believe my parents were especially wealthy, much less my friends and neighbors. How could God be so mean when those poor people in Africa could not help what they didn't know?

I went home to Daddy and explained the situation. I knew he had the answer, and in my heart I knew what it was, but I needed to hear the confirmation from Daddy. He looked steadily and tenderly at me over his open Bible and said, "Nonnie, God got blamed for a lot of things He never said." Then he looked down at his Bible and back up at me and said, "You know, Jesus said,'Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.'"

The time of day, the look of the room, the sound of his voice, the redemption of the moment are all so familiar still to me. I had just been given permission to think and believe for myself by the person I most respected in this life. In fact I had just been given the keys to personal revelation. In the Scriptures I would always find the truth and in my heart I could trust the Holy Spirit to verify it.

Life was beautiful.



(c) Nita Walker Boles

Two Ladies: A memory in collaboration with my brother, David Walker (c) Nita Walker Boles

Perhaps it was at the Capitol Building in Denver that I first learned there were differences between the races. Our Brownie troop was there in 1957 to climb the stairs to the dome, some three-hundred if I remember correctly. We came in on the basement level and my eyes saw the label above a pristine white ceramic drinking fountain: Negro.*

Before I could ask the question forming in my mind, we were ushered toward the monumental task ahead. The climb did not obscure the thought, though, and I went home to ask what it meant. There, I received a simple answer. Negro people had to drink from that fountain because some white people didn’t want to drink from the same fountain.

Oh.

In those days we often took the bus that ran in front of our house at 311 Josephine. My older sister, Mary Beth, took it to tap-dancing lessons because she was big enough to ride alone. My younger brother, David and I rode it to the library with our tall, beautiful Mother for “Story Time”. And in the summers, we all boarded it for the swimming pool at Congress Park.

Whenever we got on the bus we were seldom lucky enough to make it to the back bench before the Negro people beat us to it. They were usually older people, gardeners and maids who worked in the lovely mansions around Capitol Hill. Their quiet laughter belied some private joke having to do with our attempts to run from the front door to the bench before the best seats were taken. We would snap our fingers and sink down into a side seat, about two-thirds of the way back when we saw our efforts were hopeless.

It was a cold autumn day when the dark lady came to our front door. She had well-coiffed hair and her sturdy brown working shoes were neatly polished beneath the thin herring-bone coat she wore. Mother answered the door, and in rich, southern tones, the lady explained that she had stood waiting for some time for the bus to come.

The cadences of her voice were familiar. Our family often visited friends and relatives in Texas, where our parents had been reared. It was always interesting to hear how different the same words could sound from one person to another.

The lady said she could hardly wait any longer. The cold wind had made it necessary for her to ask, “Could I please use your bathroom?” Mother said, “Well, of course!” and ushered her toward the back of the house. We sort of paraded behind and in front of Mother and the lady, David leading the way. Mother shooed us away, saying, "Go mind your own business!" and trying to allow the lady some privacy.

I knew the way, still know the way, though the house was demolished years ago. You walked past wallpapered living room, through the dining room where oak woodwork arched the passage into the kitchen. Just to the right were the attic stairwell, and the door with a glass knob to the bathroom. But we had been pointed to the quiet of the living room to be out of the way.

It was unusual to have a stranger come to the door and ask to use the bathroom. That she was dark skinned was not unusual at all to us. Our parents worked with a couple who had a beautiful daughter, Cleo who was less dark than her Negro father, and a contrast to her blond, German mother. Like our parents, they had met during WWII. Negro,we had been told, was Spanish for Black.

Cleo’s father played with the Denver Symphony Orchestra, making him a more elite musician than our father, who just played the guitar and the fiddle. Cleo and her siblings were sometimes over for supper with their parents. Afterwards, the grownups usually had a hot game of forty-two while we all played together.
The visitor was darker skinned than Cleo, but lighter than Cleo’s father. But whatever her skin tones, she was clearly one of those people who always got to sit at the back of the bus and drink from a reserved water fountain.

When the lady emerged from the back of the house, we stood, seven and five years of age, our backs pressed against the green and white gardenia wallpaper. The lady thanked Mother heartily for her kindness, and Mother assured her it was no bother at all. The lady wrapped her coat tightly against the autumn wind, and Mother shut the door.

For a moment she stood looking at our blank faces. We were mute, but we sensed we had just seen something out of the ordinary. Kindness to others was one of the main lessons of our rearing, but we couldn’t have known how difficult this moment was in 1958. Although David and I assumed this was a courtesy extended to anyone, Mother was not sure how to feel about it.

“Well, I had to let her use the bathroom!” she insisted, defensively.
We walked silently away to find things to read, toys to play with. But there was no question in our minds. It was perfectly logical. The lady needed to use the bathroom. We had one. She used it.

The people on the back bench of the bus have faded into history, and we have long since figured out the joke of institutionalized bigotry. There is no longer any evidence that there were ever separate drinking fountains as far North as Denver. And the house, as I said, is gone with the era we witnessed passing.

Still, the moment remains frozen, no, concrete. It will never melt away from us, since my brother remembers it as vividly as I do. We know the weather that day, and the time of day, and the color of the wallpaper. We have visited this scene many times as a frame of reference for our own conduct.

“It seemed like a privilege to show her the way,” David told me when we discussed our perceptions of the event. David had intended to lead the way to the bathroom. But he was a little boy, and it was ultimately Mother who claimed the privilege, with a kind of discretion only women show one another in time of need.

In each of our lives there must be hallowed moments of which we are completely unaware. Although we, her children, have placed the dark lady’s visit next to such monuments to the Civil Rights movement as Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” oration, Mother remembered it not at all.

* I contacted the historian at the Capitol in Denver several years ago to verify my memory of the drinking fountain. During the civil rights movement, many pictures were shown of drinking fountains labeled "For Negroes Only" or some similar thing.
He stated there was no record of white ceramic drinking fountains, but that it was possible there was such a thing. He also could not confirm or deny there were separate drinking fountains. It is possible associations have made this particular part of this memory. One of the people who rode at the back of the bus could tell you. I did see those fountains somewhere in my childhood firsthand.

Going to the Mountains (c) Nita Walker Boles

Other than an Ansel Adams, have you ever seen a black and white that really looked like the landscape enough to call it beautiful? We didn't have anything but a brownie camera anyway, when we did have one, and if the relatives took pictures of us in the mountains in the 50's and 60's we didn't get any copies. In the early 90's we went back and shot a few pictures of Evergreen. The visuals were the same but it was disturbing to hear what sounded like urban traffic bouncing off the canyon walls and see houses glistening with satellite dishes where it had been National Forest. Even more disappointing was to go to Red Rocks Amphitheater and lean over to look out on the prairie only to find you were looking into someone's back yard. Times 500. There was no prairie left-just an ocean of houses.

So you see, I have to tell you how it was in its' glory or no one will remember. Our car was cream colored in those days, a beetle sort of shape with a visor over the front windshield. The seats were horsehair and smelled heavily of my father's chain smoking. We would sometimes just find ourselves in the car before dawn headed toward the shelters at Evergreen, a few miles up in the mountains. A bed made over the picnic baskets and cooler was cushioned by quilts made of wool and corduroy. We would doze back off to sleep, still in pajamas and under heavy covers until we arrived and mother woke us to bathroom and dress in the frosty morning air as the sun lightened the sky a little.

The bathrooms were permanent structures, a slightly nicer-than-an-outhouse small log cabin with a painted concrete floor and a metal lidded toilet. I was always afraid of falling into the seemingly endless hole to stinky nowhere. We washed hands at the water pump just outside.

The shelter was a different story. Rock with heavy log frames on a slab, wooden benches built in, and a picnic table. No wonder they got us up early to ensure we got one. There was a fire pit and a grill. I never remember the grill being used but it might have been so. Building a fire was an art both parents were adept at. Within moments of our arrival they had embers flaming and a coffee pot percolating. A dutch oven held the biscuits and an iron skillet sizzled with bacon. When it was done there would be scrambled eggs followed by gravy, the drippings for the bacon having been saved in a jar or can. We had milk from the cooler to drink as the sun came up and we huddled beneath our quilts. When we could see the sun over the tops of the gentle foothills of the Rockies, we would be warm enough to run and play, but first our bellies were filled with the unequaled biscuits and gravy, bacon and eggs.

We didn't have much to do with the clean-up since we weren't allowed near the fire.
Mother had an enameled pan full of sudsy water to wash and the rinsing was done at the pump before the dishes were put aside. We would stay all day. Three square meals worth.

Along with us frequently was our teenage brother, Doyle, our Great Uncle Rufus and Aunt Esther, and sometimes Great Aunt Jessie, and while he was living, Uncle Smitty.
But often it was just our little family. The rocks just a few feet from the shelter were red, rose quartz. The eons of time had created hollows in the sandstone tops where rain had pooled, just the right size for a child to sunbake on the warmth of the rock. We ran up and down the mountain sides. We laid on quilts or the rocks and declared to one another what the cloud shapes were. The wind rustled the trees, ebbing and flowing like an ocean that would start it's stir in a distant bend and work its' way toward and through you. The soft, cleansing breeze would pull at you dreamily, making you one with the trees and the birds and other creatures of the wild. An occasional deer would come near the camp, unafraid. We would sit still and watch until he ambled away.

Daddy would sometimes bring a book or newspaper to read, but often just lay under a tree to nap in the healing surroundings. Mother was busier, usually having something she wanted to get done for the next meal and always with an eye on us. But Daddy would make sure she had a little time under the tree as well, and take over chasing and teasing us.

So familiar were our surroundings over time that we could anticipate the next turn, depending on our destination. The road toward Estes Park was a maze of pink and gray granite that climbers frequented. There were several stop-offs where we would picnic and watch the chip monks eating our bread crumbs. Daddy was ever in search of a mountain stream to camp near. It was a ceremony with him to take off his shoes and put his feet in the icy water. The sounds of water over rock were calming and soothing. Every sound and sight testified of a Divine Creator blessing His children with unspeakable beauty. This was one of His sanctuaries.

We were so lucky, so happy, so blessed. Only on this side of life can I understand that while we were the recipients of this simple happiness, this was a great time of healing for a man and woman who had both suffered great and repeated losses, and who carried burdens we would take years to fathom. Ever in their minds with our presence were the four other older children, each entering their teen years and young adulthood elsewhere, with other family members.

For each of those children a separation from their family was its' own trial, and each of them also carried the memory of two infant sisters born and gone within the first few years of the family coming together--we couldn't know. We were too young to possibly understand.

It is good to remember those days with gratitude. For our parents and for our older brother,Doyle, when he could come, the much-needed respite was found in the cleansing beauty of the Rocky Mountains. For us, still very small, they were a foundation we would need to build on in a few years when beauty and peace were harder to find.

Alice in Wonderland-Or, The World is So Full of a Number of Things, I am Sure We Should All be as Happy as Kings! (c) Nita Walker Boles

The course of day to day life when I was small was usually quite pleasing. To say that the world was my oyster would be accurate. Whimsy and mimsy were to be expected. Our sidewalks, leading toward the red Governor's Mansion, were red Slate. So when my little brother rode on his bullet-shaped vacuum cleaner/train each joint in the sidewalk made the appropriate clackety-clack sound and the wheels sort of created train-on-the-track noise as he went. David was usually deeply engaged in whatever endeavor he chose, a wrinkle of concentration on his brow as he imagined his role of engineer.

Mary Beth, my beautiful big sister had curly chestnut brown hair and a matched set of beautiful dimples. She was old enough to take the bus to her tap lessons at the YMCA. As with my brother, I was fascinated and in awe of her beauty,capabilities and accomplishments. We must have walked to school together although I remember that I walked home from pre-school and kindergarten alone.

My birthday came in late November, but because at the time, Colorado allowed enrollment from Jan-Dec of the year you were born, I was allowed to start preschool at age 3 and kindergarten at age 4. To say the least, many of my classmates were nearly a year older than I. It was some 7-8 blocks but I don't remember feeling lost or afraid, because I knew the street signs and landmarks.

Our proximity to the Capitol put us in prime seats for some excellent side shows. The sounds of a marching band drew me outside one spring morning, and I ventured to the corner east of us on Washington Street to look toward Grand Street, about 5 blocks away, where the parade was taking place. The green canopy of trees momentarily blocked my view but instead of a parade toward the north, just to the south I caught the astonishing vision of an Indian--that is, a Native American--in full War Bonnet and sitting atop or a beautiful brown horse. His horse had undoubtedly become nervous with the brash sounds of the band. Several yards behind him were two more of his tribe, less regally dressed and sitting motionless on their horses waiting for this one to calm. They all looked steadily, silently at me.

Even at 4, I thought to myself, "No one is going to believe this." After a moment I turned on my heel and ran to get my brother, calling his name as I went--and alerting the horsemen that trouble was surely coming. By the time I returned with him they had vanished, and I was left with an indelible, incredible memory.

Our mother took every advantage of the resources close by. We were enrolled in Brownies and Girl Scouts as soon as eligible. School field trips included the Colorado History Museum, Molly Brown's Museum, a trip to the Denver Mint. One special class trip was to the Hull House Museum, privately owned by the grandfather of a classmate. I was impressed to see baskets woven so tightly by the Native Americans that they held water. A beautiful white doeskin dress was displayed. Sadly, at the Museum of Natural History at that time, the bodies of Cliff Dwellers were still on display,including that of a child, and I remember thinking if I were dead I would not want my body put on display.

The Girl Scouts took us to the Supreme Bakery where Girl Scout Cookies were made. We went from room to giant room where great rollers cut quilt-sized sheets of dough into shapes with delicate impressions. In one room the creme was added to sheets of crisp wafers in various colors from a plastic tube descending from the ceiling. A woman with a hairnet controlled the flow of the white goo with a foot press.

Our guide was droning on about something and the other Brownies had their heads turned and listening attentively but I was quite interested in the goo dispenser, which had, to the consternation of its operator, stopped dispensing goo. It was just at a level with her head. She stooped beneath it and attempted to dislodge a clump with a wooden tool. Still nothing came out, so she placed her face beneath it to look for the problem just as....well,I don't have to write it, do I? I elbowed the Brownie standing next to me with her head pointed toward the boring tour guide.
She hissed at me while I kept my eyes fixed on the exasperated goo operator who was mopping her face with a rag. I looked around and not one of the other girls had seen! Why was I always the only one who noticed things??!!

The Museum of Natural History was so familiar to me that I could anticipate which room was coming up next. How could our eyes see enough of beautiful amethyst and rose quartz? The 12 foot long core samples that lay in the floors showed an amazing array of geological formations. Crystals in abundance, collections of staggering proportions all lay before us to absorb.

We lived in a wonderful world where there were so many insects, particularly beetles, moths, and butterflies, that Victorian collectors had sorted and classified them by rooms full. Our parents loved to take us there, and to the Denver Zoo. On one visit I observed a polar bear walk out in the summer heat to perch on a rock, but as soon as his bottom hit the surface of the rock he sprang up and jumped into the water. No stranger to cartoons at the age of 4, I burst into laughter and explained what had happened: "The bear sat down on the rock, set his hiney on fire, and made his britches smoke!"

T-Rex was a companion who followed me to the mountains. When we went to Evergreen for breakfasts with our extended family, my siblings and I climbed on and around him, his flesh frozen in rock formations, his bones displayed at the museum below on the prairie. During those years the sounds of the mountains were that of wind through a thousand trees, and water rushing over rock. From Red Rocks you could see a grassy expanse that led to a distant city. But we were within the walls of the mountain fortress, where granite and quartz made climbers of otherwise sane men, and where roads wound in predictable, tight turns, taking you higher and higher, past buffalo that spoke of days not long ago and streams that turned into rushing rivers below.

We ate and drank of the feast before us. Anything was possible.

So I admit it: not only am I an anachronism, I'm a writer and a poet. (c) Nita Walker Boles

My life began on a little farm in the Ozarks of Missouri. I was the third child born on that farm in Exeter, the second to live, and the first to thrive from the beginning. My oldest siblings could still cry at the thought of Betty Ann's death forty years later. My mother would later tell me of the near death of my sister, Mary Beth, who was not able to tolerate any form of cow's milk or formula. So dire was the situation, she said, that her sister sent a dress to bury her in. But she lived, and thrived when someone thought to try goat's milk. The pictures of me show a very plump baby...Mother must have been giddy to have a baby do so well.

The baby before Betty Ann was named Alma Jean, and she never came home from the hospital in Roswell, New Mexico. That is where my parents met, both single, each with two children of their own, and both working at the Air Force Base as civilians during WWII. After the war they bought a beautiful little farm near Exeter, Missouri. They had several years there to meld their families together, and to farm the beautiful land where my eldest sister says our father had to paint the fence posts to keep them from sprouting. But a drought set in and ravaged the area so long that we could not secure a living.

In a twist of hard fate, the drought drove us from the Edenic pastures of Missouri to Colorado. The older children scattered and the family was reborn in Denver with three young children. One older brother came home to finish high school but the rest progressed to adulthood living with relatives in Texas and New Mexico. In Colorado most of my memory of life as a thinking person begins. We did not know how poor we were, because life was too rich to imagine otherwise.

(C) Nita Walker Boles

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Azar, a Muslim Prince of India (c) Nita Walker Boles

The house on East 12th Avenue was just two blocks from the Governor's mansion. Since we lived there, rented or not, it was ours in my 3 year old mind. We lived there for several years, long enough for me to go to Pre-school, Kindergarten, and first grade at Dora Moore elementary school. The Arts & Crafts home was a staging place for fantastic beauty and wealth, yet our family, unbeknownst to our child-minds, was rather impoverished.

Our parents had left behind a bucolic farm in the Ozarks, driven out by drought, and their four older children, ranging from 12 to young adulthood, had scattered for material support to relatives--or to the Army, and the specter of the Korean war, in the case of the eldest. There were just three of us children, a brother and two sisters, as we started life in the house with benches built into the front porch and the first floor staircase landing.

It was a place of welcoming, inviting you to sit and visit. The staircase alone would give you pause as you entered, oak banisters gleaming with the lemon oil polish my mother applied lovingly as she hummed in her quiet soprano vibrato. The glass from the dramatically placed windows streamed in light as if from heaven into a chapel. A simple Art Deco lamp hung from the ceiling of the foyer, not to detract from the understatement of the room.

Our feet fell on wooden floors, also polished with care. In the living room, a couch and a single chair framed the floor model Philco radio-phonograph that was tuned to KOA radio during the day and served Strauss and Sonatra at night. A Dutch door opened from the living room onto an encased porch, with green milk-painted floors and bead board, and screened windows that were kept open in the summer for ventilation.

A long, narrow dining room paralleled the living room and adjoined the kitchen where a butler's pantry led upstairs and down to the basement. From the kitchen door you could step out onto a fully screened back porch, also painted milky green from floor to ceiling.

At the upstairs landing was the bathroom and the door leading from the butler's pantry, a library with woodwork complementing the glorious staircase, and two additional bedrooms. In another time, the library would have been a refuge for study and quiet for our father, but in post-war America the competition for jobs was stiff. Our parents took turns selling vacuum cleaners and Tupperware to support us. And the library became the renter's room. Fortunately for us, for most of our years on East 12th Avenue, Azar was our guest.

From this stage, our lives intertwined with the Denver Public Library, the exquisite city parks, and the sounds of Strauss at night played on 78 rpm records. Azar and my father talked and listened to the music while Mary Beth finished her school work and my brother,David,and I slept. On one of those evenings, Azar taught my sister, Mary how to do the box waltz, so she in turn taught me the simple steps.
How beautiful our lives were!

Mother explained to us that among his own people, Azar was considered a Prince. He had been sent to learn how to better the lives of the people of India, she told us.
When later we saw Shirley Temple in "The Little Princess" on TV we were delighted to see that she, too had an Indian Prince living nearby.

I was very young when Daddy told me, "You know, Azar is a Mohammedan." *  I nodded. He went on, "Mohamed was their prophet, and they worship the God of Abraham, but they call him 'Allah'." Again I nodded. It seemed simple to me. I was being instructed that for the rest of my life I would respect all who worshiped Allah the same as I would respect Christians and those of the Jewish faith. Our God was one and the same.

Azar was a student at Denver University, where I am told he studied post-graduate Engineering. He was tall and dark, with a beautifully toothy smile. I only remember his voice and his presence in our home, especially at mealtime, as though a member of the family. He was courteous and gentle, but as all students, more engaged with studies than anything else. Appropriate that his room was the library.

Azar was called home to marry and sent a wedding invitation to my delighted parents. Unfortunately, Lucknow, India was far, far away. Although they did not go to the wedding they corresponded for years with him. Azar stew always brought mention of his time with us.

I remember Mother putting up the Room for Rent sign that brought another polite student, whose name and fame did not carry with our family. Soon we were renting another house not far away, and a big brother who went to high school, worked ad a car wash, and drove a '57 Chevy was living with us. Time was pushing us, ever forward, enriching us as we went.

*  Since I wrote this memory, I have learned that Muslims do not like the term the English formerly  used to describe them because it implied they worshiped their Prophet, Mohammed. Daddy thought he (in 1953) was being quite urbane using this term, respecting that they believed their Prophet and worshiped quite the same God as we do.  Certainly his instructions for respect toward others were nothing but sincere. But Daddy was born in 1909. 

I include the conversation in it's context now with this footnote because it irks me the same way when others presume we who belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saint either presume we worship our own founding Prophet, Joseph Smith, or that we don't believe the Bible and are not Christian because we believe also the writings in the Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Apologies to my Muslim friends for my previous ignorance.

Food and Soft Cloths (c) Nita Walker Boles

Why do I remember so well the summer light angling from the west and our south-facing dining room window, and the presence of other people who I knew were at the table, but the feeling of being in that moment as though it was gladly never going to end? With me was my sister, Mary, who reports she remembers it about the same way—a verifier of facts, of a truth that I did not imagine any of it, and the sights and sounds and smells and tastes were all true, very, very true.

We were seated at the table with Azar. Like the Little Princess Shirley Temple movie, we had our own Indian Prince living just upstairs. With him he brought a love of spices and tastes my family so enjoyed that we regularly made something called 'Azar Stew'. He and our father often met in the kitchen brandishing the tools of chefs and cooks, stirring up smells to make our bellies churn with hunger.

Tonight there was other food to eat as well, but Daddy entered the room from the kitchen carrying the Piece de Resistance, a great big smile, not a grin, but a smile of pride and joy on his face. “Oh, you are going to like this!” he prophecied. Whether it was Azar who was getting his first taste, or we, his children, Daddy was the true Prophet that day.

The bowl of greens was beautifully presented, a boiled egg chopped and scattered over its leafy tufts. The smell of cured bacon wafted up mixed with a faint vinegar strain. I knew and believed everything my father ever said was true, and that this was going to be true as well.

He sat down at the head of the table and dished out our servings. I eagerly took a forkful and stuffed it in my 4 year old mouth. Any other 4 year old would have spat and sputtered, but for me the mix of flavors was heavenly. Raw mustard greens, finely chopped, mixed with a slurry of red-eye gravy and vinegar, topped with chopped egg and bacon was absolutely heaven! It was true. I loved it just as he said I would. It was not a show of willful compliance because you had to do what you were told, or because of adoration of a beloved parent. It was a simple truth. It tasted REALLY good.

I never forgot it, and wondered later why we didn't have it more often. He had gone, he explained as we ate, to the “Jap farm” on the edge of town to get the greens. “The Japs”, we later learned, were part of the Nakamura family, whom my father had befriended. In post WWII, they were probably just emerging from the camps where they had become destitute of their belongings and means of making a living. Our father sought them out to buy first from them, yet he found no inconsistency with using the denigrating term common to the time to describe their race.

Thanks to them, for the rest of my life I would love the taste of raw greens and think of them as an exotic food, grown first for me by the good people of Japanese descent.

In about 15 years we were living in Lubbock,Texas when Daddy called me up one afternoon and said, “Nonnie, how would you like to go and pick some greens with me?” I was a young married woman, living in my own home. He came by to pick me up, and we drove south of town to a sandy Field of Greens.

For a dollar a sack we could pick all we wanted. I had a freezer, and I loaded my sack eagerly as Daddy exclaimed over the quality of the bounty. We squatted on the ground together, our backs bent over, our fingers running through the sand in the dry heat. I understood his love for the soil, for growing and farming. The giant leafy fans plucked easily and became the promise of a salad revisited.

In just a few more years I was a young mother and I saw the evidence that my father was not going to be with us much longer. I took every opportunity to quiz him about his life, his past. He sat one day in my kitchen as my son came through with a dirty face. As we talked and I cooked fresh beans from our garden, I reached for my son and delayed his travels long enough to grab a wash cloth, wet it, and clean him up in a matter of seconds.

My father paused, eying me, “I used to hate it when my Ma would get a cold rag and screw my face off like that. My grandmother kept a bucket of warm water on her wood stove, and she would say,'Come here and let Grandma wash your face.' Then she would take a soft cloth and dip it in that warm water and gently rub my face clean.”

Of course after that I could never just quickly clean a kid of any kind. I always had to run the water through the pipes and wait for it to get comfortably warm before coaxing them to cleanliness.

He went on, “She kept sweet potatoes in her coals, and she would fetch one out dripping that brown syrup and ask, 'Do you want one of Grandma's sweet potatoes?' Lord! They were the best sweet potatoes anybody ever grew!”

At my own table I had enjoyed the brown sugary oozing volcano of flavor when just the right sweet potatoes were found. My mother's father seemed to grow them effortlessly, but I was not to learn the art of growing them, only eating them.

It was a matter of a year or two it seemed before my father was gone. I knew where he was—we had a long goodbye. At his graveside I pictured the morning of the Resurrection and his healthy body coming forth, a smile of amazement and joy on his face. The things of the flesh were gone for now, so far as he was concerned.

For a long time I could not eat sweet potatoes without thinking of him, and they simply did not taste good for years, and for that matter, neither did fresh mustard greens in a salad.

Then came the comfort of laughter as life's moments brought memories of what Daddy said about this and that situation. We could sit back at a table in satisfaction together and remember good stuff, really good stuff. I could enjoy the greens and the oozing sweet potatoes once again.

I am reminded of a call I once took at my Pediatric office from a mother concerned that chocolate milk might cause a problem for her 1-year-old. The nurse in my head was wondering what would cause a mother in her right mind to start offering chocolate milk to a baby so young. But it wasn't the mother, she explained. It was the father!

Then a picture of hilarity unfolded. She had gone to the store leaving the baby with Daddy. Dad had decided to let Baby try a little chocolate milk. The baby had a taste, then chugged it down, draining every last drop and leaving an imprint from the glass on his forehead and nose.

Mom wasn't planning on coaxing her baby to drink milk by flavoring it—Dad was just enjoying Baby savoring the fabulous taste he could never have imagined. “No,” I laughed. “No harm done.” I didn't bother to instruct her to avoid letting this scene repeat itself since the edge in her voice assured a severe consequence awaited the indulgent father.

It is the really good stuff of life we crave and need. It is the companionship of dirt touched together, or food passed around the table, of a good drink of cold mountain water, or thick chocolate milk when we are thirsty.

It is the stories of our never-known relatives and their soft cloths on little faces, and gooey sweet potatoes drawn from warm hearths that make us want and pray fervently, oh please let me be like that!