Thursday, January 26, 2012

A Year of Absent Birthdays

My mother would have turned 82 this week. My dad would have turned 80 this summer. Both are gone now, so this is the first year both of their birthdays are being noted in absentia. As executor, I am wrapping up their affairs and disbursing the estate’s assets, with the able assistance of an attorney. My parents were not wealthy, but they were thrifty. Of course, I would much rather have them back — living independently well into their 80s or 90s as most members on both sides of the family have done — but it wasn’t meant to be. Instead both declined over years until their deaths, just more than two years apart, were sad blessings. And I write checks to the heirs, gifts that are a legacy to my mom’s handling of their nest egg.

It was an honor to be their primary caretaker in those final years. The journey began five years ago this month. My father had long been disabled by a botched medical procedure. For 17 years my mother cared for him at their home on South Twelfth Street in Longview, but it had become clear to me that couldn’t continue. The house was no longer clean, and she fired each housekeeper I hired. The doctor’s office called to say my mom had lost her car in the parking lot, hunting in vain for a white Maxima (she owned a champagne Altima), and didn’t have an appointment that day anyway. I drove to Longview from Lufkin on a Sunday to try once more and talk them into going into assisted living in Lufkin, at a fine facility down the street from my house. This time, in fact, I was going to insist upon it, though I really didn’t want to play the legal card and force them. But their safety clearly was at risk.

My dad was alone in the house when I arrived. He calmly informed me that an ambulance had taken Mom to the emergency room. He didn’t know why. She nearly died that day from insulin shock, received the last rites, and was taken off all artificial support as she had requested. Once again, my mom bounced right back among the living, but her collapse took the fight out of her as far as staying in the house. The journey from assisted living, then to nursing care, finally to hospice began. The house and most of the contents were sold, except for what remains in a storage unit in South Longview.

My brothers and I still haven’t been able to bring ourselves to go through that storage unit, which contains the remaining physical possessions — my father’s paintings and hundreds of prints of his pen-and-ink and pencil drawings, dozens of photo albums, boxes of knick-knacks my mother collected, a few modest pieces of furniture. We will have to do it soon, before summer returns and diving into those boxes becomes physically unbearable.

We used to joke that my mother would photograph anything that moved, and we own the photo albums to prove it. Exactly what we will do with all this stuff is one reason we haven’t yet tackled the project, eight months after my mother’s death. Luckily there are six grandchildren to share in the dispersal. It’s going to take the whole clan to empty that storage unit of photo albums accumulated over a half century.

I have since learned that it is common for the adult children, left behind when parents die, to delay — often for years and even decades — the hard task of cleaning out the closets, going through the photographs, sifting through the personal items that once marked the lives of those who raised us. For my brothers and me, this is a process we already went through once when getting the house ready to sell. That is likely why we show little enthusiasm for doing it again.

My mother used to say in her declining years that, “Growing old is not for the faint of heart,” a phrase not original with her but certainly apropos. Another dear friend who died a year ago used to have a pillow on his couch with “Screw The Golden Years” embroidered upon it in gold thread. I told my mother about the pillow once, and she laughed and said, “Amen.” I’m hoping for a better voyage, but understand now better than ever that dying is seldom pretty or easy. My parents did so with courage and grace. I learned a lot from that, though they’re lessons I’m in no hurry to put into practice.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Cruising Longview, In Search of Vanished Landmarks

I was cruising around South Longview and the downtown area the other day, whiling away time on Memory Lane before a dreaded appointment with an MRI torpedo tube. Dreaded, not because it hurts or I’m particularly worried about the results. The deal is I’m decidedly claustrophobic and have to get legally stoned on Xanax to keep from climbing out of that contraption before the scan is completed. I have abandoned ship before, much to the dismay of the medical staff. So to keep my mind off the impending test, I drove around looking for long-gone landmarks from my youth— until it was time to enter pharmaceutical la-la land.

We moved to South 12th Street in the fall of 1968 from New Hampshire, after spending a summer living in Greggton with my grandfather, while my dad found work and a house to buy. By fall I was a 13-year-old kid with a banana-seat bike, operating a paper route through downtown for the afternoon edition. Most of the stores, bars and businesses I peddled papers for a dime through downtown are long gone or moved. There was Riffs, a hoity-toity women’s clothing store; Hurwitz, clothing for men, now out on Judson Road; Dillards, now in the mall but for years downtown at Tyler and High streets; Kelly Plow, whose furnaces conjured up visions of Hell as I tiptoed past; the Arlyne Theater and Brass Rail up the street from the paper. The latter was my favorite den of inequity and failed dreams. Both are long demolished.

A magnolia tree towers still on the corner of Tyler and Court streets. It was once the centerpiece of a ramshackle bar on Tyler Street. The tree is more than twice as tall now, the building long gone. I believe it was called the Tree Top Inn but don’t trust my memory. It could have been the Magnolia Saloon. But I am certain the tree grew out of a hole cut in the tin roof, and the bar had a hard-packed red-dirt floor. It catered to workers from Kelly Plow, once located a couple blocks away in the parking lot where a Farmers Market sprang up last year. I have a hand plow from the factory that my late mother got at a rummage sale somewhere. Someday I need to build new handles for that plow.

Traveling down Mobberly Avenue, I try to figure out where Tony’s Sporting Goods exactly stood. Tony was quite the character, with the most impressive set of nose and ear hair I have witnessed. His store was near the old Gibson’s — later a Howard’s store — a precursor to Walmart. I loved going to Howard’s as a teenager, pining over the selections of guitars, wondering if I should spend my paperboy money for the latest Steppenwolf LP or take a chance on Three Dog Night.

One Christmas, when I was 14, I saved my money and bought my parents a new stereo system from Howard’s. It was solid plastic and medium fidelity, but it was a step up from what they were using. It probably set me back $75 or so. I remember my parents were flummoxed I had spent that much money on them. I recall simply wanting to do something nice for them. Now they’re both gone, and that is one of my fonder memories of growing up, so it was certainly money well spent.

Howard’s didn’t survive the onslaught of Walmarts, of course. Not much did. Certainly the S&H Green Stamp Store, once on High Street near Birdsong, didn’t survive, though I don’t know if Walmart is to blame. My Beautiful Mystery Companion and I attempted to explain the green-stamp concept to our 14-year-old daughter recently. You shopped at Brookshires, which was the grocery store in Longview in the 1960s, and received a certain number of green stamps depending on how much you spent.
As you saved, you spent months poring over the S&H catalog, which in the 1960s was the largest-circulation publication in the country. When you had saved up a sufficient number — about 82,800 stamps or 69 books, if memory serves — you would head to the S&H store to redeem the stamps. I remember my mother buying a table lamp with green stamps. Green Stamps are long gone, though the name survives under the concept of online points.

On to the old site of the River Road Drive-In, now occupied by an apartment complex. My buddies and I used to cut through the LeTourneau University (then college) campus and peek over the fence at the racier movies being shown. Finally, back down Mobberly to where Burger Chef stood, at the intersection with Birdsong Street. I would ride my bike down there after supper and buy three little cheeseburgers for a buck. Like most teen boys, my stomach was a bottomless pit that needed to be replenished every few hours.

By then it was time to head home, get zonked on Xanax, and allow my wife to drive me to the clinic. Inside that tube I dozed fitfully, daydreaming about those little cheeseburgers and Tony the Sporting Goods guy, trying to ignore the clanging and banging that goes with an MRI.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Buzzards, Sno Balls and American Pie

The New Year has gotten off to an inauspicious start, though I remain optimistic. The Hostess company, maker of Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Sno Balls, is about to enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time in the past 10 years. (To steal a line, I guess that makes it Chapter 22.) Hostess products have been staples of vending machines in newspaper break rooms where I’ve toiled over the last 30 years. They appear to remain popular, with 36 million packages of Twinkies consumed in 2010. The fancy-pant equity investors who own — and owe — for Hostess are trying to shed debt to hold on, all the while blaming the rising price of sugar and flour. Whatever. Bunch of greedy muffinheads, far as I can tell.

I gave up eating Sno Balls after conducting a science experiment while working in the newsroom of the Lufkin Daily News, circa 1989. I bought a package of Sno Balls, with that sickly pink coconut covering. Then I formed a betting pool with fellow ink-stained miscreants on when the Sno Balls would develop the type of mold one finds on normal bakery products, such as bread. You know, the type of green stuff that spawned the invention of penicillin. If memory serves, the city editor had the most absurd prediction, something like nine months.

The Sno Balls sat on a shelf for the equivalent of the human female gestation period, never actually looking the worse for wear. The city editor won the pool, though nobody had the nerve to actually take a bite out of the cupcakes to see how they tasted. I concluded that unless it is beef jerky, dried fruit or red wine, one should avoid consuming anything that can survive nearly a year sitting on a shelf. So I have not eaten a Sno Ball, Ding Dong or Twinkie since. I reserve my empty calories for chips and salsa. They are essential to survival in these harrowing times.
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I spent the first full weekend of the New Year apart from my peeps. My wife and I both needed to work, so I stayed in Austin while she prepared for classes in East Texas. We don’t like to do that, but there you go. On Sunday morning, after my morning walk and a light breakfast (actually it was two burritos from McDonald’s, but don’t tell her), I showered and prepared to spend the day in front of a computer screen.

While toweling off, I idly glanced out the second-story window over the tub at the sky, wondering if it was going to rain. (Not to worry. A curtain hides me from chin down.) My neighbor’s roofline is visible from that vantage point. Perched on the roof were three turkey buzzards, two of which seemed to be staring at me. I could see into their bloodshot eyes, practically smell that carrion cologne.

Hoo boy. Here I am feeling sorry for myself because I’m away from my family, as our lives seem to pass at warp-speed, and a trio of buzzards is peering into my bathroom window. And I’m in the middle of reading a Stephen King novel to boot!
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In between bouts at the computer, I continued my quest to learn how to play Don McLean’s “American Pie” on my resonator guitar. I have discovered what most everyone who cares already knew — that one could find the chords to just about every song published on the Internet. I don’t know what possessed me to try to learn “American Pie.” It was a fine song the first 7,000 times I heard it, all 12 minutes of it.

At least that is how long it takes me to play it, since my chord-changing abilities are still at the rank-beginner stage. My fingers now have calluses, which allows me to play longer than 10 minutes before the pain becomes too much. And it is fair to say that I have improved 200 percent in the past four months of near-daily practice and biweekly lessons that just ended. I now am approaching the level of most 10-year-olds who have been playing for about a month.

A friend asked me what I planned to do once I became adept at playing. I told him I played guitar and banjo — albeit badly — at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor while in high school in Longview. You never know when a career change is in order.

Actually, there is probably a reason Shakey’s Pizza Parlors disappeared from Texas and can only be found in California and a few scattered spots in the South. They kept hiring doofuses like me to sing and play badly as the bouncing ball skipped over the lyrics up on the screen. I was doing karaoke way before karaoke was cool.

No, I will confine my guitar playing to the privacy of the home and only torture the family with my caterwauling and missed notes. I actually played “American Pie” all the way through last weekend. I had to take a nap afterwards to recover.

When I awoke, the buzzards were gone.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Crape Myrtle Mutilation Continues Unchecked

A harbinger of the New Year unhappily but inevitably arrived when I was back in East Texas over the holiday break. I headed with my wife to jointly risk our mental health by shopping at the Big Box Store during the Dead Week after Christmas, when sales abound. We were not shopping for bargains but simply trying to find a holiday six-pack of bottled Coca-Colas to give to someone. No luck. When Christmas ends, for the big-boxers it is out with the old before the eggnog has been digested. Gone are the decorations, cards and artificial trees. In place by New Year’s: Valentine’s Day cards and candy. These days in retail America, merchants uneasily lurch from one holiday to another, imploring folks to “Buy, buy buy!”

But I digress.

What caught my eye, as we pulled into the asphalt wasteland, were landscape workers busily mutilating crape myrtles planted in the strip of dirt bordering the fast-food restaurants near the Big Box Store. Perched on stepladders and armed with lops, they happily hacked away at these lovely trees, cutting the past year’s growth back. What remained was an ungainly skeleton. Most people apparently continue to believe that, for this loveliest of Southern ornamentals to bloom in summer, it must be pruned in January.

Most people are wrong. At least about crape myrtles.

Crape myrtle mutilation is a Southern tradition from Georgia to Georgetown, Florida to Floydada. Google “crape myrtle mutilation” and dozens of links arrive, most from conscientious arborists and landscapers who decry this barbaric practice. I once belonged, by virtue of slapping a bumper sticker on my Jeep, to a loosely formed organization led by a Deep East Texas landscaper and freelance gardening columnist for the paper I published in Nacogdoches, aka the Oldest Town in Texas. Pink and green “Stop Crape Myrtle Mutilation” bumper stickers soon graced, well, dozens of vehicles. Thousands of words were published in various newspapers and elsewhere, begging people to quit hacking away at the myrtles. I contributed my share of commentary to the cause. Talk about a tree falling in a forest. The hacking continues unabated Behind The Pine Curtain.

Crape myrtles come in various sizes. Folks who want mini-myrtles should buy the variety bred to remain modest. Left unchecked, most crape myrtles over years will become stately trees reaching upwards of 40 feet in height. Their blooms are luscious yet hardy, able to thrive in 100-degree summers with little water. And yes, they can survive an annual mutilation, but the end results are trees with thick trunks and spindly branches.

I admit that I am a recovering crape myrtle mutilator. I lived in Nacogdoches at the time, and as a single man had purchased a modest house. January arrived, and I hacked away at the half dozen large crape myrtles in the backyard, as instructed by a couple of my buddies who were trying to be helpful. I spent most of a day risking a spinal-cord injury perched on a rickety stepladder, snipping off branches. Then I had to haul the detritus to the curb. While complaining later that week about my sore back, our gardening columnist — the originator of the famed bumper sticker — overheard me.

This is the way I remember it, acknowledging he might have a different version:

“You don’t have to prune crape myrtles,” he said. “You can just let them grow. Pruning them doesn’t help them bloom; it just makes them look ugly.”

I was delighted to discern that I had spent my last weekend sweating in January while carving up crape myrtles. The gardening columnist had a convert, and over the past 15 years or so I probably have convinced perhaps 10 other kindred souls to stop this insidious practice. That leaves the vast majority of Southern landscapers still whacking away, along with the non-believers and those who just haven’t yet learned the gospel: No pruning necessary.

As for the landscapers, not to be uncharitable, but there isn’t a lot of landscaping work to be done in January. The grass isn’t growing, leaves have quit falling, and it’s too early to plant for spring. Mutilating crape myrtles provides an excuse to keep hard-working folks on the payroll during those slow months. I appreciate the need to keep money flowing for workers, to buy gasoline, etc. I just wish landscapers could think of something else to justify their pay other than turning tens of thousands of crape myrtles into ugly stumps until spring arrives. As for the homeowners out there who own crape myrtles, I hope you read this before spending hours engaged in a totally unnecessary activity. Just think. You can use that time to head back to the Big Box Store and check out what is on sale.

Or you could read a book. That’s my plan. Our front-yard crape myrtle might reach the roofline by this summer. At least I hope so. No trimming necessary.