The “New” House – 1962

This house was always and forever called the “new” house, even though my family lived there for forty years or so.

This was state-of-the art sixties ranch fashion. Three bedroom, two baths, family room and living room and a full basement. In our family’s typical fashion, we found a subdivision house that was eccentric, apparently just waiting for us.

The house’s two bathrooms were connected, separated by a door, which meant that you could actually sit on the toilet, open the door (having locked the two on either end) and hold long conferences with your sister.

I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, why ANYONE draw this plan and say “Yes!” instead of “Are you out of your mind?” Visitors would occasionally ask about this strange arrangement, and frankly I’d gotten so used to it that it seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

My sister, the semi-pro singer with an amazing and BIG voice, never understood that you cannot wait until 2 in the morning for a shower, then sing at full volume in the small tiled shower with a glass door (which shared the wall with the master bedroom) without rousing our mother from a deep sleep.

She would, in the immortal words of our father, come “boilin’ up” out of the bed, ready to take on anyone who wasn’t asleep, most particularly my sister. They would full-voice argue for a while, then quiet would be restored and everyone would go back to sleep.

This fits into that file of “I don’t get it” stories that I’m posting. I even tried to ask my sister, but she doesn’t have a good answer. I still wonder, why does one keep doing things that you KNOW will only cause trouble?

I was smarter that, or at least a better tactician. I quickly figured out that if I did mostly everything perfectly – good grades, good behavior, good manners, and the like, I could slide on things like keeping my room clean. Years and years later, I was discussing this with my second-born son, pointing out to him the benefits of selective obedience, when he shocked me with, “Well, duh, mom.” I didn’t know whether to be proud or annoyed, but obviously there is something in the genes.

When it was decided that we would move from the “old” house to the “new”, I very loudly refused to go. Nope, you can just leave me behind and I’ll live in my playhouse.

Daddy had finally built me the playhouse of my dreams. Starting from the top – a perfect fake brick chimney, shingled roof, shuttered windows that slid open and closed, window boxes with petunias. I had ruffled white curtains, and daddy built a “couch” that perfectly held a seat cushion. There were shelves inside on the walls. The exterior was white and the shutters were green. No one ever, ever had a playhouse as grand except maybe Shirley Temple.

But the new neighborhood had pages and pages of deed restrictions. Among them there were not to be any “outbuildings” – obviously designed to keep people from having tool sheds and such.

Other daddies would have “put their foot down” (a favorite phrase of mine that could not ever apply to my father). They would not have tolerated this level of insubordination in the ranks. I cannot think of another father of my acquaintance that would have indulged me. But I was the lucky one.

First, daddy went to meet with whatever governing board was in charge of enforcing deed restrictions. He petitioned for a waiver and got it. He then hired a crane to lift the playhouse onto the back of a very large flatbed truck. Then down the highway they went – I like to think my ruffeldy curtains were blowing in the breeze, but I’m sure I closed the windows.

At the “new” house, the process was reversed, but this time it was harder because the enormous truck had to carefully back between two new houses. The crane operator had to carefully set the playhouse on the new foundation. Then, to meet the requirements of the homeowners association, the house was painted beige with trim to match our house, and the roof was covered with cedar-shake shingles – also a requirement. All of this was done before we moved in. And so, as any good princess would do, I deigned to come along.

Whew! Who would do that? Indulge me for a moment – whenever I hear someone talk about God showing infinite love for His children on earth, I think about daddy moving my playhouse. I guess that’s why I have no trouble at all believing in the Infinite. Just one other thing, daddy was the only person I know who never mentioned your transgressions a second time. Mind you, I didn’t do too many bad things (but when I did I am embarrassed to admit their size), but once there was a gentle discussion, it was never mentioned again.

And so, there we were, in a suburb that was growing like crazy because of people like us. My parents had no confidence that the city school district would act in our best interests. Safety and quality were the real issues, but the arguments quickly devolved into race, which was the saddest use of lowest common denominator ever seen.

If the schools had stayed safe, and if the emphasis had been on quality education for everyone, I don’t believe history would have unfolded the way it did. Shame on everyone concerned. And shame again.

Continuing to Continue

After being almost dead, part of your rehab is consensual. Here’s what I mean. If you have a broken leg, orthopedists will put a cast on it, or do surgery, or whatever they need to do to get the bones lined back up. It’s immobilized, and with any luck at all, the break will fuse and you’ll be up and around pretty quickly – and all you had to do was wait!

After a TBI, if you are blessed with an almost-full recovery, you live two lives. The first is the more obvious – you talk to your family and friends, you go to rehab (if you’re lucky), you find which skills you still have and which are gone. And, wonder of wonders! You find new skills you never had before! I think of this as my “external” recovery – my husband can see it, my sons, my family, my friends – they are all (very discretely) watching to see how I’m doing. (It’s funny, they don’t think I know they are watching me, but they are.

The second life is entirely internal and is often hidden, even from me. I know my brain is still recovering – still healing. I can feel it changing. The way I feel (internally) changes from day to day.

One of the books I’ve been reading…or I saw it somewhere…had a woman with a TBI saying that what she has to do now is balance her ambitions with what she is able to do. I know exactly what she means. Some mornings I wake with roaring ambitions to do everything, but quickly find that my energies do not match.

But it’s not just about doing. I’ve had a lifetime of that. I’ve also had a lifetime of trying to please others, to anticipate what others will want from me, to talk myself out of my better instincts because…I don’t even know why.

Now, it’s like being alone in an art museum. My footsteps ring on the hard floors. Each room leads into another. There is beauty of one sort or another everywhere I look. But each picture, each experience, needs to be looked at again and again for understanding.

I’m not sure that’s clear. It’s like coming home after you’ve been away for a very long time. That old house on the corner has been torn down and now it’s a donut shop. Every time you drive past it surprises you again. Each new reality is like hitting your toe on a table leg in the dark.

I must have been a frustrating patient for my rehab therapists. So many of my skills came back fast and fully – and I can usually hide the deficits. I kept pushing to find ways to fix the parts that were broken – and they tried very hard – but the deficits are hidden away under layers of things I can do.

I told them when we found something that directly addressed something that was wrong it felt like someone was scratching that itch you can’t reach between your shoulders.

So now, as I continue to recover, I keep looking for the itches. It used to be understood that whatever recovery you would have would be in the first year, maybe two. Now there are some articles that say recovery may extend through ten years.

Oh how I hope that’s true! But it’s entirely by consent. Every day is a push.

It’s like rolling a peanut across the carpet with your nose. Very difficult but it feels so good when you get there.

How We Became Part of “White Flight”

So, there we were, living in the house that Daddy built which was odd, eccentric, and would never, never fall down. (It’s still there. Daddy could have taught NASA about redundancies. If one size of lumber was called for, he got the next bigger size. Except for that dead rabbit in the water tank, nothing ever failed.)

This memory doesn’t really fit here, but it is also worth noting that Daddy got my mother the newest and best of everything for the house. We had one of the very first dishwashers – a top-loading beast that had a long, mirrored tube in the middle that rotated and sprayed the water. I’ve tried to find pictures but so far haven’t been successful – just trust me on this. We also had a GE Flair stove and oven - magnificent. The cooktop pulled out from the stove unit like a drawer. There is one just like ours in Graceland and that pleases me almost as much as Elvis’s jungle room.

But, anyway, back to the late 50s and early 60s when things started to change and I was old enough to notice. Lots of things were happening, but the Civil Rights Movement touched everyone in one way or another. No matter what you think should have been done by whom and when, the upshot was a tremendous amount of dislocation and reorientation for lots of individuals.

My sister was told at the end of the 1960 school year that she was one of the white kids who would be bused into a city high school for her freshman year. Up until this point, we had gone to an all-white suburban school district, which had been annexed by the city.

At that time, children were largely assigned to schools by where they lived. Because most neighborhoods were segregated by practice, so were the schools. However, as I read up on the history of this dreadful business, there were some areas that required busing of black children from their home district to the “black” school, to maintain segregation, even if the child lived closer to the neighborhood “white” school. Shameful.

The Supreme Court’s decision that “separate but equal” was no longer satisfactory turned over a lot of apple carts. Separate they certainly were, but equal no doubt they were not. So, as politicians will do, they decided to fix this with as many moving parts as possible, as expensively as possible, without improving anyone’s educational experience, probably.

They went to work on the “separate” side of the equation. I wonder what things would be like today if the “educators” had invested that time and money into improving the bad schools, rather than coming up with unwieldy plans to transport students from one school to another, based on nothing but the color of their skin.

I personally think the whole business was insulting for all involved. For the black kids who were bused to predominantly white schools – was the message that the sheer whiteness of the other students would be the defining factor of improved education? The implicit assumption here is that because white students attended these schools they (the schools) had more resources. They were, by definition, “better”. They probably were, I don’t know, but if so, the only students who would “benefit” from busing would only be the black kids who were actually bused. Their home schools, filled with their friends, would still be (I presume) “bad”.

The “educators” put on the shoulders of these school kids the entire weight of desegregation.  

Similarly, dropping the white kids into city schools (mostly black but not entirely) – exactly what was the message? The only possible message was that their whiteness was a commodity that could be moved around via a yellow school bus, and the school they were going to would be improved just because of their presence. Nonsense.

The upshot is that in the last fifty years millions and millions of dollars have been spent on nothing but buses and gasoline. Really? Is that the best they could do?

I’ve never believed anybody cared a damn about the education of any of the kids – black, white, purple, or green. It’s interesting, looking back on those times – comparing what I was experiencing as a kid and what I know now from history and from being a parent. I think every adult was demonstrating that they had lost their minds.

Just in case you need proof of that – reading about busing history I found the nugget that there were some black classes bused “intact” to white schools – that is, they stayed in the same classroom with each other, just in a different building after a long bus ride.

The only school district I’ve ever heard about that used any sense was in a smaller city in Texas. They decided that everyone in one grade level would go to one school. Then, eventually, everyone went to the same high school because there was just one.

But, all these reflections were long in the future back then. In the fall of 1961, my sister was stepping on a bus at 6:15, returning home late in the afternoon. There was a lot of worry about safety on the road and safety at the school. Mother and daddy worried about not “knowing” the school Susan was going to. (They’d always been involved in school activities and knew some of the teachers at our area high school.)

But, they tried to make the best of a confusing situation until a girl with a log chain in her purse threatened Susan in the restroom. (This is a very clear memory. I thought the End Of The World was commencing.)

And that’s when mother started house hunting.

A Tale of Two Houses

I grew up in two houses. Sequentially.

The “old house” was built by my father – and I mean that literally. With the exception of an occasional set of extra hands, he built the house. That’s one of the really cool things about my daddy. I believed as a kid (and still believe now) that he could do anything.

He bought 3 acres or so of land in about 1940 in an area that was then so far outside Kansas City that it was probably prairie-dark at night. I think he had a plan that eventually he would make a fortune building houses down the road that defined the property, but he never did. He did build one house in the mid 50’s but that’s another story of handsaws and hammers.

As to the “old house” it is worth noting that this was before any power tools. If you need to cut a board, you sawed it. You hammered nails. You used an amazing hand-operated drill for holes. No one, no one would do this now. And I would also note that even into his very old age he had amazing muscles and strength. Perhaps the fitness freaks among us should hand-build houses.

He started with the basement. He “dug” this basement with a plow and a mule. I am still not entirely sure now this was done. The basement wasn’t very large or deep, had an earthen floor and cement-plastered walls. This sort-of basement held a monstrous old furnace and big pipes but nothing else I can remember.

Next, he dragged a shack from another part of the property (using the mule) and positioned it over the hole. Once fortified and nailed in place (?) he added a kitchen, bathroom and tiny bedroom and called it home. There was a beautiful fireplace surround in the living room. It never occurred to me to ask whether he’d built it, but he certainly could have.

At about this point he married my mother. It was 1943. Because of war restrictions on building material, and perhaps the mule being tired, nothing much was added for a while.

It is worth pausing to get a visual of this. My very strong, handsome father married my MUCH younger mother, who had probably never walked on anything but cement in her life. She was a city kid, at the time when kids were apparently unsupervised. She was about eight or nine when my grandmother would send her to the beer joints about 4 blocks over to look for one of my uncles when he’d be called in to work on the railroad.

She was smart, too sassy for her own good, lied about her age and started working when she was 12, and ended up being beautiful. In fact, my father saw her for the first time at a music store and told me she had the most beautiful legs he’d ever seen. Shortly after that, he was at the ballroom where all of the big bands would come to play (my eventual godfather was the bouncer and daddy knew him) and he saw her waitressing. He wrangled an introduction from my eventual godfather and the courtship commenced. She’d lied about her age to work there, too.

And so they were married. (The wedding story will have to wait for another day, but it’s worth the waiting.) He brought his bride to this house in the middle of nothing and nowhere, and she told me it was a day-to-day thing whether she’d stay or not.

Shortly thereafter, (the war was still on) daddy undertook to build a second story on to the house. Please note that he also worked full time selling electrical supplies, so this house addition would be an evening and weekend project.

To provide some help, daddy hired a wino named “Old Man Shurr” who was supposed to be doing framing and such during the day. I suppose he did. His fame was really in his prodigious need for alcohol – he drank what he could but also ate cold cream and Sterno with a spoon. From time to time, when he had to pee, he would walk over to the edge of the house and let go. At least once he was directly above the kitchen, so mother saw a golden stream through the window over the sink. No wonder it was day-by-day. In fairness to Old Man Shurr, I cannot imagine this happened more than once, at least on that side of the house.

Eventually, the second floor was finished, a wide-open copy of the rooms downstairs and a half bath. That is to say, the upstairs had the same footprint as the downstairs, but no separating walls.

Hardwood floors, plaster walls, big windows – my child’s memory sees it as a huge open space of light and breeze.

There were a couple of attics. One long and low attic was where they kept the stock tank water reservoir when they were still on well water. A pump would bring the water up to the tank, then the water would come out when the tap was turned. Early in their marriage, mother noticed that the dog wouldn’t drink her water. After some investigation, they found a dead rabbit in the tank. It’s a wonder they didn’t die of typhoid or something, or that mother didn’t kill daddy.

The last addition to the house was a playroom/rec room that daddy did in the 50s. He took a garage that was about 3 cars wide and 3 cars deep, and turned it into the rec room of a child’s dreams. We had a pool table. We had a “tap board” where we would practice our tap dance routines. Lots of comfy furniture, the TV, and eventually a room air conditioner; on one wall were two giant maps – one of the U.S. and one of the world.

It was knotty pine with green and white checkerboard asphalt tiles, able to withstand anything, including inside kickball games if mother wasn’t looking. I think all children should have a room like this – essentially an indoor gym.

That room will forever be tied in my memory to cleanliness and a long-ago Girl Scout Christmas party. The house was spotless for the holidays, but for reasons unknown mother thought it might be fun to have a piñata. I’d never seen such a thing, and I’m sure mother had never experienced it, either. Ultimately, when the piñata burst, the room was filled with candy, little toys, glitter, and sawdust and flaky little crumbs.

I thought Mother would have a stroke. Finally, when the party was over, a full-on cleaning began, and no one went to bed until every last crumby, glittery bit was gone.

Never have a piñata inside.

The house was like a comfortable shoe – at least to me. So why did we move to the “new house”?

A Bow Around the Package

This blog is not ending. You may relax now. I have many more stories to tell, and then there’s that book that will start in the next week or so. (You’ll recall, that’s the one that has been reviewed by my friends as “disturbing”.) I know you can hardly wait.

But I need to put some kind of bow around the brain “unpleasantness”. I thought about this on Friday, when I was asked to speak to the current clients at neuro rehab. It was hoped I would be encouraging, and I did my best. I do feel encouraged by this entire experience. However, a long time ago, I read something that said life has to be lived forward but can only be understood looking back. I think that’s right.

It’s now been almost 18 months since this craziness started. I’ve been “recovering” for 15 months or so – which is only important because the books say brain recovery takes one to two years to fully happen. But (and there is always a but in these articles) the experts say recovery can continue after that time. Your brain (and, more importantly, mine) can continue to improve long after that.

Now, I’m not a neurologist (don’t even play one on TV), but my suspicion is that one’s brain continues to find new connections to work around damaged parts. If that’s true, and I think it is, there is hope for us all – even mean people who haven’t had a TBI but act as though they haven’t a brain in their heads.

When I left the Dallas hospital, confident that I was fine, just fine, I had no idea how far I had to go. The rehab center was a blessing – if for no other reason than it put me “on ice” for six months as I continued to heal.

And maybe this is my final thought about having a TBI, almost dying, being in a coma, paralyzed, recovering, now exploring a new future…I am just so grateful. For the medical professionals who saved my life, for the therapists who showed me how to go on, for my family who makes everything worthwhile, for my friends who have shown unlimited patience…I am just so grateful.

For my not-so spiritual friends…you can stop reading here.

But for the rest of you – I know that we are eternal souls. I know there is grace shown to us every day. I know there is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I’ve met them.