Category: Memories

. . . light the corners of my mind.

Through a Stranger’s Eyes

I was sixteen the summer of 1981, and active in my church youth group. As in the rest of my life, in youth group, I occupied the shadowy fringes of the social scene. I studied and admired those who shone in the spotlight of popularity and confidence, but I watched from a distance. I saw myself as a plain, but smart girl, the “best friend” but never the heroine in the fairy tale. Disinterested boys confirmed this viewpoint. I decided that I was destined to a life of spinsterhood, probably living in some remote land, ministering to needy, destitute people, probably as a doctor.

And then, I met Rita.

I hailed from Seattle, Washington, and had never met anyone from Oklahoma before I met Rita. I was quiet, kept to myself, followed rules, listened a lot. Rita and I were part of a group of teenagers who were on a short-term missions trip. Most of the others at our training session were heading to the Philippines, but Rita and I and five other girls were going to Tahiti.

I remember my first personal encounter with Rita in the Los Angeles International Airport. I remember her teasing me about my accent, which I found uproariously funny because everyone knows that girls from Seattle don’t have an accent. She thought I sounded like a Valley Girl , an accusation which I denied. I then had her perform the alphabet and laughed out loud at her rendition–she managed to turn each letter into a two or three syllable word. I had never heard such a thing, even when I watched Hee-Haw on television with my dad.

And then, we became friends. We spent almost three weeks living together in a borrowed house on a hillside overlooking Papeete, Tahiti. She photographed lizards on the walls and a giant cockroach in the hallway and we giggled about the overflowing toilet and learned that one cannot dispose of tampons in the toilets in Tahiti. Who knew? We did our best to talk to the Tahitian teens who belonged to the church we worked with. I supplied my limited working knowledge of French (I’d taken a year in school) and what she lacked in language skills, she made up for in enthusiasm. We were quite a team.

She matter-of-factly declared that I was the Beauty and she was the Brains and I was so taken aback that I didn’t argue. I’d always been the Brains in any friendship I’d had in my real life back home in Seattle. But I began to believe her when the Tahitian boys started gazing in my direction and flirting with me in a language I didn’t entirely understand. This was entirely unprecedented.

I began to notice one handsome Tahitian boy always seemed to be at my elbow. His name was Jean-Claude and he was almost exactly my age. Tahitians greet one another with a kiss on each cheek and when he’d greet me, he’d linger just a moment longer than necessary and murmur into my ear. This turn of events shocked me. The boys at home never noticed me at all and now a tall, dark, handsome boy was pausing with his lips near my ear?

Our final night in paradise, a dinner was held in our honor. I cradled a Tahitian child in my lap, sad beyond words, sad beyond explanation. When we left that small home with its tile floor and buzzing mosquitoes, I sobbed in the darkness as we walked along the path to our car. I wanted to stay forever.

Our last night, right before I cried my eyes out: Posted by Hello

I was distraught to leave this place and this new me behind, the Beauty I had never been before, the one the boys followed with their eyes. I didn’t want to abandon this dream and return to my life where my hair never quite stayed feathered and no one noticed whether I entered a room. I knew I’d step foot on my high school campus and turn back into the Brain, the Teacher’s Pet, the Smart Girl, the Blob.

Sure enough, that’s what happened. But every day I ran the last block towards my mailbox to check for mail. More often than not, I found a letter from Rita or less frequently, a letter from Jean-Claude. I wrote impassioned, funny letters back to both of them. Those letters were tangible reminders of who I was in that other place.

After I saw myself though stranger’s eyes, I never did see myself the same way again. I began to believe I was funny and maybe, sometimes, a tiny bit pretty. I realized that the small world of my high school (396 kids in my graduating class) was smaller than I ever knew. The whole wide world beckoned to me, and in that other world, I wasn’t just a Smart Girl with a 3.96 grade point average.

I stayed in touch with Rita for many years–we even ended up attending different colleges in the same town. She phoned me a few years ago and we tried to catch up on the news after the years of silence. She has twin boys, too, and a daughter. She teaches English in a high school.

I don’t suppose I ever told her how much her friendship really meant to me. Her viewpoint, her vision of me, her confidence in me changed how I saw myself. Friends like that don’t come along every day.

Jean-Claude and I exchanged passionate letters for a year or two (all in French since his English was worse than my French), until he announced his intention to come to the United States to marry me. I admit that I completely freaked out and hastily wrote him back a letter declaring I did not love him. I was seventeen, maybe eighteen. What did I know of love? Three weeks in Tahiti when you are sixteen do not mean anything when you are talking about love and eternity. Plus, my dad would have killed me if a Tahitian boy suddenly showed up on our doorstep declaring his love for me.

But I thought of Jean-Claude today, because today he turns 40. I like to imagine him on that black sand beach where we once spent an afternoon playing a game that was a mix between Tag and Capture the Flag, using a flip-flop. I can picture him playing with his children with their shiny black hair and lumimous brown eyes. I hope he’s living happily ever after.

I know I am. And there is just a teeny, tiny part inside me that pipes up every once in a while and says, “What would have happened if . . . ” And I say “Hush, you silly girl!” and then I yell at my kids to be quiet because they are driving me crazy and is it bedtime yet?

Topsy Turvy Family

The Topsy Turvy Family  Posted by Hello

That’s me in red on the left. My mother’s head is cut off, which seems an appropriate metaphor. My dad is upside down, my drool-faced sister is the baby and my brother is the other kid.

This month is Father’s Day and perhaps that explains why I’ve been thinking about my dad so much lately. Or perhaps watching Nancy Reagan and her daughter hold hands as they stood by the flag-draped coffin of Ronald Reagan has sparked my melancholy. I hadn’t planned to watch the Reagan coverage–I am so easily and so quickly bored when the media goes on and on about any topic–but there it was, the pall-bearers and the coffin and the moment when Nancy Reagan buried her head on her daughter’s shoulder and shook with sobs.

And I cried, too.

I miss my dad. The dad in this picture was the Real Dad I loved so much. He was silly and crazy and goofy. He laughed with such gusto that actors in community theater loved to have him sit in the audience because his laughter was infectious. I used to save up little tidbits of my day to make him laugh at the dinner table. I would tell him my favorite joke: “I sure am glad I wasn’t born in France.” (Why?) “Because I don’t speak French!” I called him “Daddio” and he called me “Mel.”

He was a complicated man, though, prone to bouts of depression and withdrawal. He had been accepted to the University of Washington’s technical writing program just before he died. He’d spent so much of his adult life trying to figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up. And then he ran out of time.

When I went to college, he sent a hand-written letter expressing his regret, his sadness, his loss, his longing. I had no idea that he loved me as much as he did. He hated that he could not remember ever holding me on his lap and reading me a story. He told me that he cried a river of tears on the night I left. He thought he was a failure as a father.

He would have been a fantastic grandfather, partly to make up for his shortcomings as a father, but mostly because he’d grown up and his heart had finally expanded to fill his whole being. But he died before he had any grandchildren.

My parents were divorced a dozen years before my dad’s death. When he was still in the hospital, dying, he was barely conscious. We spent our afternoons sitting with him, though, and on one particular evening, my mother and a few others were there. Now, my father was an artistic soul and a great Pictionary player. When he and I teamed up, we were unstoppable. We liked to play with my mother as our opponent because she was such a horrible drawer. My dad and I found great humor in her inability to draw and tremendous satisfaction in our teamwork.

So, this particular evening, my dad was propped up in a hospital chair (I have no idea why–hospital protocol?) and his hands were splayed on each armrest. His eyes were barely opened. My mother said, “I bet I could beat you at Pictionary now!” and he slowly shook his head side-to-side. The image still makes me laugh. His body failed him, but his wit remained to the very end.

He was the gravity that we depended on. And I still can’t believe he left us to orbit on our own, even after almost fifteen years. I miss him.

A Childhood Memory

One of my favorite childhood memories just came to mind.

When I was a child, we used to go out to eat at those buffet-type restaurants, especially on Sundays after church. We particularly loved Old Country Buffet because the dessert area featured an ice cream machine and you got to swirl the ice cream into your bowl all by yourself (a Big Deal when you are seven).

On this particular day, we sat in a booth. My sister, Harmony, brought her bowl of swirled ice cream back to the table and climbed into the booth, where she began to scoot on her knees, facing away from our table. She clutched her ice cream in her grimy little hands as she attempted to traverse the wide expanse of the plastic-leather seat. She faced the backs of our neighboring diners.

And then she lost her grip and dumped her ice cream down the back of the man at the next booth. He wore a suit. A suit with melting ice cream smeared on the back.

I have no further memory of that day, but I imagine my mother’s mortification and that man’s horror and my sister’s tear-stained face.

And it all makes me laugh.

See? I told you I was seven years old.

Tammy Faye Bakker Messner

Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker Messner are on “Larry King Live” tonight. I used to work for Jim Bakker, back in 1985 and 1986 when Heritage U.S.A. was at its heyday. I was just a college student, then, with no awareness of who the Bakkers were, but some recruiters came to my college to find students to work for the summer. I had no plans–and I didn’t want to work as a nanny again as I did during my first college summer–so I went to the interview.

That’s how I ended up driving across the Smoky Mountains with a guy named Bill Potts in May of 1985. My roommate was a girl from Iowa named Lisa Beasley and we lived in student housing in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Our apartment complex had once been a Motel 6, I think. Our door opened to the outside, to a balcony. We had aqua shag carpet. It was a cheap hotel room. But we loved it anyway.

Once all the students had arrived, they herded us all into interviews to determine exactly where we’d work. All the girls with really big hair and small waists wanted to work in Public Relations. I had hoped to work with children, but when it came down to it, I volunteered to work on the grounds crew, because the grounds crews were promised overtime and overtime meant lots of money and I needed money. Besides that, the alternative was to work at a restaurant on the grounds of Heritage and I didn’t come all the way to South Carolina to work in a greasy fast-food place. I already did that in high school.

A girl named Kendra and I volunteered to work on the grounds crew, so there we were, two college girls working with a bunch of men. After the first day, I hardly even noticed them staring at us. I kind of liked working outside, digging around in the dirt, smoothing long pine needles into little nests around trees. I’d only been working a couple of days when I noticed Jim Bakker and his entourage driving up to the Grand Hotel. I said to Kendra, “Hey, I should go introduce myself to Jim Bakker.” And she said, “I dare you.”

She dared me. So, I did it. I put down my gardening tool and marched my dirty self right over to Jim Bakker and stuck out my hand. I said, “Hi, my name is Mel and I think you know my uncle.” My uncle was a well-known missionary, and in fact, he was now employed by Heritage U.S.A. Jim Bakker did not really acknowledge me, but another man said, “You’re S.J.’s niece?” And I said, “Yes.” And then he told me that he knew my uncles and my grandparents from way back. His eyes crinkled as he smiled at me. His name was Dick Dortch.

A few days later, all the college students attended an orientation of sorts. By then, I regretted my work on the grounds crew (no days off, working ten hour days) and I wondered if there were some way I could finagle myself a job working with the daycare. I spotted Dick Dortch when the meeting was over, so I made my way to him and said, “Hi, remember me?” He did, so I said, “Hey, are you important here? Because I really want to work with children.”

He burst into laughter when I asked if he were important. I didn’t realize then that Dick Dortch was the number two guy at Heritage U.S.A. In fact, he served prison time when the whole empire collapsed a few years later.

Dick Dortch led me to another man, Eric Watt, and explained to Eric that I wanted to work with children. He told Eric to make this happen. Eric did. The Human Resources woman was extremely perturbed with me and yelled at me in her office, but she transferred me to the day camp, where I worked for the rest of the summer.

Later in the summer, I met the man who would become my husband. My roommate, Lisa, pointed him out to me one day. I peeked out from behind our curtains and saw a dark-haired man, sweating profusely, dressed in shorts and running shoes. And then he spit. She thought he was cute. I thought he was a sweaty guy who spits. Yuck.

Tammy Faye Bakker Messner has now been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer.

I only have a sore throat which will not go away. When viewed in this light, that is good news, indeed.

Childhood and Happy

I’ve always said I had a happy childhood. I’m not sure why I think that. My parents moved twenty-five times by the time I was five years old. And not just down the street. We moved from Wisconsin to Kansas to Montana and points in between until finally, we landed down in Washington state like the house that settled on the Wicked Witch of the East. I remember very little of the tornado that was my early childhood.

When I was five years old and halfway through kindergarten, we moved to a house in a housing development called “Whispering Firs.” My dad teased and said the house was haunted. It was the first house we owned–three tiny bedrooms, a living room with a fireplace that had two sides, so you could enjoy the fire from the family room, too. Not that I ever remember a fire burning. Small kitchen and sliding glass door leading to the back yard. When I was very small, at night I was scared of the side of the yard that sat on the other side of the garage. No light shone there at night.

I loved animals and one year, my dad asked me in the hallway what I wanted for Christmas. With uncharacteristic boldness, I said, “A puppy” and he said, “Don’t count on it!” But he presented me with a small black poodle anyway, a black poodle that my mother doesn’t remember at all. She was named “Midnight” and one day when I came home from school, she was gone. My mom had a new baby and the dog was just too much and so they just made her disappear without warning.

Then somehow, years later, my dad presented me with another dog, a Miniature Schnauzer he named Mitzi. He’d made some arrangement with the breeder and contrary to that arrangement, the breeder bred her while the dog was boarded and one day, shortly after I remarked that Mitzi’s tummy sure was getting fat, Mitzi gave birth to four tiny puppies on my twin-sized bed while I slept. But the time I fully woke and ran through the house to my mother’s bed, Mitzi had licked off the last pup and placed it in my slipper for safe-keeping.

But Mitzi eventually became too much, too, and she was sold.

My dad had cancer when I was in the second grade. He had Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and he was extremely ill. He endured chemotherapy and wasted down to a skeleton of himself. He shaved his head one night while we were at church and then he wore a hand-towel over his bald head and scared me by yanking it off his head and making a face.

I hardly knew my dad because he worked graveyard shift from midnight to 8 a.m. Then he worked in his own shop, tinkering with ham radios and electronic equipment and eventually, computers. He never ate dinner with the family. He was sleeping then. I was kind of scared when I had to sit next to him at the dinner table because he was so unfamiliar to me.

Once, I jumped out my bedroom window to join my siblings in the back yard. I bit my tongue hard when I landed and blood spurted everywhere. I ran inside where my dad gathered me in his arms and sat me on his lap, though I was much too big to sit on his lap. He rocked me in a chair while I cried and he kind of laughed at me and asked me if I was going to live. I can’t remember him ever holding me or rocking me at any other time.

My mother stayed at home and took care of us. She was stern, yet she gave us a lot of freedom. We rode our bikes until the streetlights came on. We walked down to the creek and got muddy. We played all afternoon in the “honda fields”, pressing down the waist-high grass to make little rooms to play in. Her friends came over while we were at school and drank coffee and ate cookies and made crafts.

Every week, my mother would bring home friends from church, or my dad would invite some of his ham-radio buddies over and the grown-ups would play cards and eat snacks. I’d try to linger outside their attention, but I’d always give myself away by crunching giant pretzels in my mother’s ear and then she’d shoo me away to play with the kids.

We played a lot. Outside, inside, in the backyard, in the streets. I read a lot. I had friends in the neighborhood and I remember them trying to get me to dance, but even then I was too self-conscious and had no rhythm, so I would just watch while they danced to the Jackson 5.

When I was in fifth grade, my parents divorced. We lived with my mother for maybe a year, but by then, my dad had remarried (six months after my parents divorce) and my mother soon remarried, too. My childhood essentially ended when we moved out of that house and into a rental house a few miles away. My room had hot pink carpet, but the rental house did not have my mother, but a stepmother who hated children and who had no idea what to do with an 11 year old girl.

By then, I lived almost entirely inside myself. I remained self-sufficient for the rest of my school years. I even bought my own shampoo and my own clothes from then on.

But the thing is, I remember my childhood as being happy. I thought I was happy. I was happy. Did my parents even think of my happiness? Did they obsess, like I obsess about whether or not my children are having a happy childhood? It seems like parents used to just live their lives, dragging their kids along for the ride. And we survived. We scared ourselves sometimes when we went too fast down the Big Hill and crashed our bikes with banana seats, but that was just part of being a kid. If bigger kids threatened us, we just adjusted our paths and put on a tough face and averted our eyes and dealt with it.

Sometimes, I think I am still eleven years old, wondering what I will do, now that I am so alone. Is it possible to avoid any more pain? Is it possible to do everything just right so I will never stub my toe again? I guess not.

I wish my kids had a guaranteed Happy Childhood. I wish I could be sure I was doing everything right. I wish I could let them eat chocolate and potato chips all day and never tell them to turn off the t.v. for their own good. I hate being the Mean One who makes the rules and then reinforces them. I hate it when they yell that they hate me.

We don’t have quite enough money and they don’t get to have enough fun, nor do we travel as we should. I yell too much, I am not consistent enough, I am tired too often.

But here is what I know I’m giving them that I did not have:

1) Parents who stay married forever.
2) A mother who does not leave.

I don’t know if they are having a Happy Childhood. God, please let them remember it that way, though.

Last Year at This Time

Last year at this time, Babygirl had just learned to sit up.
Now, she crawls onto a kitchen chair, then onto the table and sits there.

Last year at this time, Babygirl was bald.
Now, she has a wispy, gold baby-mullet that shimmers with red highlights.

Last year at this time, Babygirl woke up every two hours throughout the night.
Now, she sleeps from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Last year at this time, I was the only adult that mattered to Babygirl.
Now, she adores her daddy and hollers “da-da! da-da! da-da!!”

Last year at this time, Babygirl’s babyhood seemed like it would stretch on forever.
Now, she’s a tiny girl, not a baby.

Last year at this time, Babygirl had two teeth.
Now, Babygirl has a mouthful of teeth and she does not want them brushed.

Last year at this time, I wished time would hurry. I wanted to sleep again, I wanted to go places alone again, I wanted her to be able to talk to me, to tell me what was wrong.

Now, I miss her being six months old.

And next year, I will miss her being eighteen months old.

(Reminder to self: Please, do not wish your life away.)

Painting the Town Red

Glory be! The baby still takes naps! She goes to bed awake with no fuss! I feel like I’m on perpetual vacation, all because the baby has embraced naptime again. I hardly know what to do with myself, so today I painted the wall behind the recliner. I layered on a second coat of tan and tonight, I will paint it red.

My family room has red walls next to the fireplace, then red stripes on the long wall. The more tactful visitors tell me it reminds them of “Farrell’s”, an ice cream place we used to have in this area a long time ago. The less tactful visitors say with awe, “Did you paint all those stripes?” I don’t care. I painted red stripes to give the room a little zip, a little pizzaz, a little whimsy. At least it’s not boring. When you can’t afford a room makeover and Trading Spaces is not coming to your rescue, you improvise with a can of red paint.

So, tonight I shall paint the wall red. This will be not quite as fun as painting the town red, but not as bad as falling into a giant vat of red paint.

Which reminds me of my dad’s song. He used to sing: “I fell into a vat of chocolate. I just fell into a vat of chocolate. What’d you do when you fell into the chocolate? I yelled, FIRE, because no one would save me if I yelled, CHOCOLATE!” At this point, he would shout with laughter. We’d all laugh along, too, because we could not resist him when he laughed.

I know. He was a wacky guy.

I don’t watch The Seventies Show. I lived it. This is me in the middle and my dad:

My grandma (still alive at almost 98 years old) sewed the hideous green dresses, complete with scratchy lace at the necks. I hated that dress. (Notice my clenched fists.) A lady named “Freida” (who had hair down to her backside) fixed my mother’s hair at the dining room table. Then, my mother would sleep very carefully with a satin wrap around her head so she wouldn’t muss the style. My brother is on the right. He’s sixteen months older than me, and my ex-sister is on the left. She’s sixteen months younger than me. I was so jealous of her young beauty–she had blue eyes and blond hair which was longer than my straggly mop. Being the vindictive type, I talked her into cutting it all off when she was a little older. I told her she’d look really cute with a shag. That was a lie, but at least my hair was longer then!

A Walk Down Memory Lane

Lately, I have been thinking about my dad. He died when I was 24, which is now 15 years ago, though he died in September and my birthday was just a few days ago. So, I was 24 and a half. He was 47, just barely.

I miss him so much. He never got to experience Seinfeld or the internet or being a grandpa. And that’s just the beginning of all he missed.

But this is not about missing him. This is about the time he took me out to have pie.

When I was about 10 years old, he invited me to go with him to have a piece of pie. This invitation struck fear into my cautious little heart. My dad had never taken me anywhere alone. He worked the graveyard shift and slept all day and hardly ever sat at the dinner table with us. I was a little scared of him because he was a tall man who was never home. He was stoic and unaffectionate.

And then he wanted to take me out to eat pie. I was suspicious because I’d already found a spiral bound steno pad under the couch with my mother’s handwriting in it. There were two columns: “His” and “Hers.” She had divided up their meager possessions into these two lists. I realized with horror what this list must mean, but I shoved it back under the couch without a word and figured if I pretended I hadn’t seen it that my world would not spontaneously combust. But, of course, I was wrong.

On the way to the restaurant, my dad asked if I’d prefer to eat or talk first. I said eat. So, I choked down pie. I can’t remember any small talk. I can’t even remember the pie. What I cannot forget, though, is my dad telling me that he and my mother would be getting a divorce. “We still love you,” he said. As if that made the catastrophe somehow better. Yes, your world will collapse, but we still love you. Okay, then. I will just stay here buried under the rubble while you love me. Thanks so much.

I used his hankerchief to wipe my tears and snot. You’d think that a father informing his daughter about his divorce from her mother would remember to bring a box of tissues, but no. He was not the kind of dad who would think of that.

They were divorced when I was 11. And I’m still not a big fan of pie