Stubbornness

Mom and Dad could both be stubborn at times, but it was rare that they both became stubborn at the same time. One night they locked horns. Earlier, Dad was upset that Mom had walked into the bathroom while he was inside. He was in a huff about it, but quickly forgot that it occurred until he walked into the bathroom while Mom was inside. They started to argue. Mom said, “I can’t come into the bathroom while you’re in here, but it’s okay for you to walk in on me while I’m using the bathroom?”

Dad replied, “I can be in here if I want to.”

Mom said, “If I can’t be in here while you’re in here, you need to get out.”

“I’m not leaving until you do.” Dad retorted.

Dad refused to move out and Mom refused to leave as long as Dad was still in the bathroom.

“Kids,” Mom called. “Get me a blanket and a pillow.”

I don’t remember which of us got the pillow and blanket, but Mom laid claim to the bathtub and settled in for the night.

In a way, Dad was more stubborn. He claimed the bathroom floor, but refused to call us to fetch him a pillow or a blanket. He slept on the bathroom rug. It had to be hard sleeping on the floor, but his stubborn pride kept him riveted to the floor through the whole night.

Mom had an ace up her sleeve. This argument started Saturday night and Mom knew that Dad would not miss church in the morning and he would have to leave before her. She was right. Dad left first. All it accomplished was that they both ended up stiff and sore.

I’m glad that none of us kids had to use the bathroom that night. You know what they say, “Two’s company, but three’s a crowd.

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In a similar vein, Dad was never late for anything. His motto was. “If you’re not early, you’re late.” He worked at Walworth Valve Company in Greensburg, Pennsylvania for twenty-nine years and was late only once. (In that time he only missed three days of work due to surgery and hospitalization.)

I am not sure he would have walked into the factory the day he was late except he was the driver in a car pool with two other men. The roads were slick with snow and ice. The conditions for driving were horrendous.

On a normal day, the drive from home to work took about thirty-five minutes, but that day, it took them nearly three hours to make the trip. When one of the men got out of the car to check road conditions on a steep hill they would have to navigate, his rubber booted feet slipped out from under him and he fell.

It was normal at the factory if someone came in late, the other workers would grab a tool or a metal bar and bang on metal drum or table to loudly announce the arrival of the late worker, but those men who had made it in and were working were so surprised to see my dad that there was silence. No one banged on anything. Many of the local people who lived in town hadn’t made it in, but Dad had who had a long drive had made it in to work.

My Mom Was a Special Lady

My mother, Sybil Miner Beck was very special, not just to me, but to my family and to many others in the community. She was a true jokester with a sharp mind and wit. She liked to do things that made her kids enjoy life. One example was the day it was raining. She put on a pair of socks and sprinkled talcum powder on the long linoleum covered hallway floor and turned it into a skating rink. She would give a short run and the momentum would carry her down the powder slickened floor. Soon we were all in socks and “skating.” As kids we thought it was great and it felt as though we were flying. It was exciting and heady stuff for us.

Dad didn’t like it when he almost fell in the hallway. Even though the area was swept clean, some of the talc residue remained. Only after the floor was wet mopped did it lose its slipperiness.

We kids made beetle-boppers. Taking old stockings, we would stuff the toes with socks until they were about the size of a baseball and tie the hose into a knot to keep the socks in place. We would whack at each other without causing pain. They would make a loud WHOP when we were hit. It was fun until we broke a light bulb. Mom told us to put them away, but didn’t punish us.

She loved to read and to play with words. When one of us would say something, her mind would connect and give her an actual song that she would sing. I think I got my love of words and the desire to manipulate words into stories from her. When I was at work, I would do the same thing, singing a chorus, telling a joke, or sharing a personal story about something that a coworker would say.

My ability to connect with words helped me when I was confronted with a problem, patient concern, or a family complaint. My ability to think on my feet helped to diffuse many situations. Often the person with the complaint only needed someone to sit with them and to listen.

When as a supervisor I really listened to what the person was saying. Sometime it was an underlying fear or it was the pain that was talking. Resolution could be as simple as changing the medication time, the diet, or a change of rooms.

Mom worked at many jobs besides being a mother. She was a clerk at the Red & White store as a teenager. She did income taxes for many years, was a bank teller, and kept books and did payroll for a large lumber company. She taught Sunday school for many years. She loved to teach the kids and us.

Slowly Alzheimer’s took all of that away. The stories that she loved to tell slowly slipped from her memory. The ability to do mathematics and bookkeeping was stolen away. Her brain’s recognition of the written word was blinded. She lost the ability to speak rationally. At the end of her life, she had even forgotten how to eat.

Alzheimer’s is such a hideous, cruel disease. It steals the mind and soul of the person and leaves only a husk.

Fancy Gap

We made the drive home in two days. It was the same for the drive down. Neither one of us is getting any younger. Our stop was in Fancy Gap, Virginia. It was about halfway home and would be a nice spot to relax before the final run for home.

The KOA was great. It would be a five star plus in my rating. It was a bit out of the way, but it was well worth it. The cabins were laid out like the other KOA cabins; a double bed and a set of bunk beds. It had air conditioning, a television, and it smelled of new pine. The cabin was immaculate and had Adirondack- like chairs on the front porch. The shower house had private rooms with commode, sink and shower inside. I felt like a king.

After a good night’s sleep and a hot shower, we drove to a nearby restaurant just off the Blue Ridge Parkway for breakfast. I ordered the buckwheat cakes and sausage, thinking they would be like the ones served at the Ohiopyle buckwheat festival on the second full Friday and Saturday in October, but the cakes were thick and doughy and the sausage was so spicy I couldn’t taste the pork.

The drive back was fairly routine. We were more fortunate on the way home than driving down. Although we could see rainclouds all around us, we only got a few scattered drops. Dark clouds would sweep over us, but the rain always seemed to fall before we drove into an area. Some places the berm was wet, but the traffic dried the pavement. We lost about fifteen minutes when we missed a turn and had to drive through the town of Fairmont, West Virginia, but we were soon back on the right road.

The other deal happened where route 79 and route 68 meet. The traffic was backed up for about one and a half miles. The traffic was moving, but very slowly. When a West Virginia trooper sped by us with his lights flashing, I thought, “It has to be an accident.”

I was wrong. As we edged closer to the delay, we could see that it was a checkpoint of some sort. Police cars lined both berms wit their lights flashing. There were eight troopers in the roadway, four to a lane. They were checking cars, trucks, looking inside of trailers, etc. I thought “That’s than a drunk driver check point” but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Drugs?

It wasn’t that at all. Some prisoners had escaped the jail and the troopers hoped to apprehend them and to prevent them from getting any further away.

The rest of the trip home was quiet except for squirming and trying to find a comfortable spot for my bottom. Home sweet home; well it was really not. I had to visit my dad in the hospital with pneumonia, get my prescriptions refilled and go to the bank. The joys of vacation just kept on multiplying.

 

The Arboretum

After the visit to the Thomas Wolfe home, we drove to the Botanical Gardens at Asheville, North Carolina. It wasn’t all that we hoped that it would be, but it was a relaxing experience. The park was laid out in shaded pathways and open field areas. It had plants in their natural environment. It was a nature park that had the plants that grew there labeled for identification. The labels could be read from the paths. It was less tended and more open to the elements. Foliage was trimmed or cut only to maintain the pathways and the grass cut only in the sunny field areas. It was cool and relaxing, a nice break from driving.

The North Carolina Arboretum is located just off the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway near Ashville. We went to see it next. Its plants are also identified with markers, but the whole arboretum was well maintained as in a formal garden setting. Many of the plants were in large urns and were planted and maintained for the colors of the bloom and the variety of shapes. The plants were trimmed and pruned to give shape and to remove dead bloom and leaves. Everything was placed to enhance the beauty of the garden. Concrete walkways, ramps, and stairs connected the plantings.

One area was planted in purples and yellows and was divided by narrow walkways to resemble a patchwork quilt. The pattern was repeated in each smaller block.

All along the walkways, plants were displayed and were tended so that they would give the maximum impact of color and presentation. They could be flowering bushes, grasses, or trees. Blooming bulbs, lilies, and even pipe stems in a small pool of water. Some of the lilies had pale stems that looked like skeleton arms reaching skyward with the blooms seeming to be pale orange hands.

Planters and urns, filled to overflowing with bright flowers, were tucked in niches for more visual stimulation. There was an area set up to display Bonsai creations. Different artists used different types of trees and plants to shape and dwarf into creations of beauty. One unusual thing that I especially liked was the metal gates. The bars were decorated with metal plants, frogs, and turtles. They were painted a soft olive green that almost blended with the plants that they protected.

The education center and the information center were both newer buildings. The education center had a small cafeteria. The food was delicious. I had the chicken sausage sandwich. It was spicy and good flavored.

After leaving the splendor of this place, we returned for our last night in the “rustic” cabin.

This story is a bit out of order, because I forgot that I had written it.

Look Homeward, Angel

We drove into Asheville, North Carolina and visited the Thomas Wolfe home. The receptionist showed a short insightful film on the life of Thomas Wolfe. The guide that gave us our tour was very knowledgeable about this writer and his family. The Wolfe family owned two homes in Asheville, one was the home place where William O. Wolfe, Thomas’ father did his stone cutting and a seventeen room home that Julia Elizabeth, Thomas’ mother, ran as a boarding house.

Julia added to the house after she bought it, the difference in the quality of the construction was apparent. She had the rooms added as frugally as she could. She wanted to make money, not spend it.

The house often held up to thirty guests, some having to share beds. One room called the “jail” was a narrow room with a single bed and a small dresser. There were three bathrooms and all the rooms had chamber pots.

To make more room in the dining area for paying customers, she had a small room barely big enough to hold a table and six chairs in which the family would eat. The dining room was spacious and had a hand carved, ornate mantle for the fireplace. The dining room held ten smaller tables. The dining room had to be reconstructed because an arsonist had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the dining room’s window and much of the original furnishings perished in the fire. The family helped to refurbish the house into nearly the original design, which included the fireplace mantle that had been destroyed.

The dining room was just off the enormous kitchen. Julia often got up at five a.m. and would work into the wee hours of the morning. The kitchen held two stoves; one coal and wood and the other gas. It had a long preparation table, a large pie safe, a liquor cabinet, and a corner for laundry with sinks and ironing. She would use bits and pieces of food to stretch the food budget and make croquettes. It was said she made the best croquettes in town.

She had electricity installed throughout the house for lighting. Three of the rooms she had constructed had walls of windows to allow for light and circulation of air. In one of Thomas’ Wolfe’s books he, as a young man, stepped out of one of the windows, onto a parapet to enter a girlfriend’s room.

Many of the oak tables and dressers hat tops that were of marble carved by W. O. Wolfe. They smooth and of various colors. W. O. had many books that he kept in glass fronted cupboards. He was a well read man. Often he would read the classics of Shakespeare to the children. On the mantle in his bedroom was an oval, gray marble frame he had carved holding the picture of Cynthia, his second wife, who died of tuberculosis.

Thomas Wolfe’s first book was Look Homeward, Angel. The book was an autobiography and gave insight to the secrets of his hometown and its citizens. It was actually banned from Asheville’s library for seven years.

It was said after the release of his second book. Of Time and the River, more people were upset that they hadn’t been characters in his books.

When Julia Wolfe was asked what did she think of her harsh portrayal in the book? She said, “Thomas just exaggerated to sell more books.”

Visiting Joy and Norm

Waking early after spending the night in the “rustic” cabin, we made breakfast and had a clean-up in the shower house before driving to Shelby North Carolina. We wanted to visit with Joy and Norman Johnston. Norm was our pastor before he moved south to teach at a Bible college. We have remained friends over the intervening years and we wanted to strengthen those ties.

Neither one of them has changed since we last saw them although Norm said he has put on some weight because of some of the medications that he is taking. He also is wearing hearing aids. Part of the cause was due to an accident with fireworks. A student who was staying with them wanted to see and set off some fireworks. He bought a box of the explosives and started to set them off. Somehow, a spark ended up in the box of fireworks. It caused the explosives to blow up all at once. The box was right beside Norm and the noise of that blast caused the hearing loss and his need for hearing aids.

Norman still teaches and prepares young men and women for the mission fields. He helps give them the background and foundation to succeed in foreign lands. He helps them discover their strengths and how to use them. He directs the students to their internship with established missionaries already on the field. Each student must do an internship worth six credits before they can graduate. He said that he has students and missionaries that he has taught are living as missionaries to other countries. His students are in Parts of Canada; Newfoundland and Labrador. They are also in the Baffin Island, Greenland, Africa; Malawi and Togo. These are the places that I can remember.

The one story that I can remember that Norm shared was of one of the young campers that he met at the first year that Norm was a counselor at a summer youth church camp. This young man Chris was in the first that passed through the newly constructed camp. Chris is now the pastor at the church where Norm pastored in Shelby, North Carolina.

We shared updates our families and our lives. Norm and Joy want to sell their house and move closer to Charlottesville, North Carolina where he is pastoring a Korean church. (Norman was a missionary in Korea for many years.) He is overseeing a young minister who is shepherding a multi-national church with parishioners from several countries. Norm said that there are people from Togo, other South African countries, and even one man from Afghanistan.

We went to lunch in Shelby at a local diner before we started our trip back home. The food was very good and we talked as we waited and ate our food. I had liver and onions, because I hadn’t had any in years. It was delicious. It was so hard to say goodbye to such good friends, but we did and began our drive back to Pennsylvania.

We drove to Fancy Gap, Virginia where we had a cabin reserved at a KOA campground to spend the night. This KOA had the best cabin I have rented. It was immaculate, had an air conditioner, and even a flat screen television. The cabin smelled like fresh pine. It had the usual bed arrangement; one double bed and one set of bunk beds. It is about a mile away from the Blue Ridge Parkway and from a diner where we ate our evening meal.

Rustic, are you kidding?

We stayed at a “rustic” cabin near Chimney Rock, North Carolina. Rustic wasn’t the word I would use to describe it. We had stayed at a KOA campsite in a primitive cabin. Primitive is a no frills cabin that had no air conditioning. It was clean but had a stale, musty smell until we opened the windows and turned on the fan. It had a full bed and a double bunk.

Now to describe the “rustic” cabin, it did have amenities that the KOA cabin did not have. It had a small refrigerator, a tiny microwave, and a kitchen table and four chairs. There were two bedrooms with two full beds; one bed in each, a couch room, and air conditioning. The beds were made-up with fresh linen. The cabin even had a fireplace for use on cool nights. It sounds great right? Let me continue.

The rustic cabin had a wooden overlapped siding, but it didn’t have a solid floor. As I stepped from the kitchen area that sported large black and white tiles and onto the thin pile, blue carpeting of the bedroom, I felt the floor was weak and sagged as it went into the bedroom that would be mine. My room had the air conditioner and the other room didn’t. There was only one window, closed off with the air conditioner.

The cabin had a stale, sour smell that only dissipated after running the air conditioner. We couldn’t open the door and the window to air the room. The walls and ceiling was the type of paneling that looked like wall paper and was fastened to the wall with screws. There was a ceiling light/fan unit in my travel partner’s bed room, but the light didn’t work. There was a bedside stand holding a table lamp with green hanging prisms. That light did work. The roof was rusted metal and ribbed.

When we drove up to the campground office, we were greeted by a man on a golf cart. He had long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail and sported a two days growth of stubble. His shirt and pants were soiled. He was the maintenance man. He stepped into the office and returned with the key, saying “Follow me.” And we were introduced to our cabin. I think he was the handyman and was very polite and eager to please.

It seemed that the cabin was made and furnished with what the owner had at hand, but the bath house was solid and kept clean. The showers had hot water and benches. Solid walls separated the different stalls and had curtain pulls for privacy. The shower house had a newer metal-ribbed Mansard roof and at its peak where all sides met was a windowed sky light that allowed the light to keep the interior bright.

Because we were making visits to surrounding areas, we would be spending two nights in the cabin of Shangri-la. The area had been booked solid because of a near-by festival. Finding a vacancy and moving was not an option. The one redeeming quality was we could make our own breakfast and ice in the microwave and fridge.