Day 10, Barbara: A Birthday Blog

Tuesday, December 3, 1957: Earlier this week, on Sunday night, Buddy Holly and the Crickets have debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show, after taking “That’ll Be the Day” to the top of the charts. The following afternoon, in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, it’s clear and chilly; Elsie goes into labor and Bill drives her downtown to Piedmont Hospital. At 4:04 the next morning, they have a baby girl. They call her Barbara Ann—not a family name (there hasn’t been a Barbara Brannon in the line since 1753, just one they happen to like (Barbara is the seventh most popular name for girls that year). It will be some years before either the Regents or the Beach Boys make it a musical hit. This Barbara even predates Mattel’s Barbie doll by a couple of years.

Grandma Brannon especially rejoices. “She’s the first girl born into the Brannon family in fifty-seven years,” she takes to bragging; not since my great-aunt Fannie Lou arrived in 1900 has there been anything but a regular crop of rambunctious boys.

So here I am fifty-seven years later, alive and well in Lubbock, Texas, where several of my family have also relocated. The ’57 Chevy is a classic. So am I, then, I suppose. In the hometown of Buddy Holly I’m grateful to begin another year on the planet. Here’s wishing for a good one! Not just “That’ll be the day”—the sardonic phrase uttered by John Wayne in The Searchers that inspired that bunch of young musicians way back when—but “Everyday,” another of those great 1957 hits.

Day 9, Barbara: A Veteran's Day

Friends ask me what I’m working on right now, other than the sequel to The Paragraph Ranch that Kay and are writing during NaNoWriMo. It’s the story of my colorful and sometimes cantankerous father—and that of his three grown daughters as his caregivers when he could no longer see, or see to his own needs. For my posting in November—the month of his birth, and the month of voting and Veterans’ Day—here’s a passage that takes place in what would be Bill Brannon’s last year of life.

* * *

William J. Brannon, Fort Fisher AFB, 1956

We try to urge Dad to get out and go with us, to the beach, or a folk music singalong, or a visiting author’s reading. But he finds the effort of getting dressed to go out in public exhausting. “I’d only slow you down,” he says, and he’s right, though that’s a concession we’re willing to make—to change things up, lighten his spirits.

         “I tell you what,” I offer, as I finish stirring the spaghetti sauce for dinner, on the island stovetop that separates his kitchen from the dining table where he sits listening to a diatribe on FoxTalk Radio. “There’s a concert on campus next Friday night that I think you’d enjoy. The Air Force Band is performing, and I can get free tickets for all of us. Don’t you think that’s enough advance notice for a shower and shave?”

         “Well, maybe . . . aren’t there a lot of stairs to navigate?” He turns the radio down a notch.

         “There’s an easy ramp for handicapped access.”

         “Parking might be a problem.”

         I cut him off. “We’ll be able to get you right up front in the faculty lot. And you’ll have plenty of help. What do you say?” I fill the pan at the sink and put it on to heat for the noodles while I wait for his answer.

         “All right,” he replies with as much enthusiasm as a petulant child, before turning up the volume again and rejoindering with Hannity and Colmes.

         The water comes to a boil, and I crack the package of noodles into it.

         “What a bunch of nonsense,” Dad carps to no one in particular. The topic of the radio show seems to be the president’s sinking approval ratings and the upcoming midterm elections. “Come on, we’re the most powerful nation on earth and we can’t seem to take down one crazy religious fanatic hiding in a cave in the desert? You can’t claim that Bush has done a damn thing to win this ‘war on terror.’ Just keeps sending more troops to Iraq, getting more body bags back. And now he’s letting those commie clowns in North Korea walk all over him.”

         I tolerate the rant for about another half a minute. And then I break. “Dad—” I light into him, marching over to shut off the squawk box, “—not that I necessarily disagree. But what good does it do to sit here day after day arguing with the radio?”

         He shuts up for a second and looks at me through those thick lenses that magnify his wide expression. All is quiet except the bubbling of the pot on the stove.

         “What I mean is, how can you just let a fine mind go to waste, doing nothing with your energy and your intellect?”

         I’ve built up quite a head of steam, and he lets me continue. “Look. All my life you have spouted off ideas about this and theories about that. Criticizing the way our government is run, armchair-quarterbacking how it could’ve been done better. Kibbitzing from the sidelines. But I have never seen you serve on a jury. Never seen you so much as volunteer for the P.T.A. Never even seen you vote.” I punch my finger on the table in front of him for emphasis.

         Silence again for a beat. And then he murmurs, “I’m not registered.”

         “What?” I ask, genuinely not sure what he’s said.

         “I’ve never registered to vote. Ever.”

         I’m astonished, really . . . but I shouldn’t be. If I think back about it, my excitement at age eighteen, coming in the door after casting my first vote in a presidential election, for our fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter—he’d never said a word about going to the polls himself. I just assumed. Fathers served in the armed forces, they married and had a family, they bought a car and a house, they voted. All essential elements of the American Dream.

         I let my anger deflate.

         “Take me to register,” he says in a measured tone. “Drive me down to wherever you go, and I’ll fill out whatever I need to do. And I’ll vote.”

* * *

         It is an arduous undertaking—first, locating a birth certificate among Mom’s old papers, then securing a new Social Security card when Dad admits his original had been lost in the surf along with the rest of his wallet years ago and his driver’s license is long expired; then getting him into the car and out again at the Board of Elections. But he emerges at the end of the day a registered North Carolina voter, just under the wire for the national election that will take place the week of his seventy-fourth birthday.

         We accompany Dad the following week to the Air Force Band concert, escorting him to a seat well forward where he can hear reasonably well and make out some of the shapes of the performers. Beverly sits on one side and I on the other, happy to see his obvious enjoyment as the evening opens with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” We all rise and sing, hands over hearts.

         There comes another patriotic favorite midway through the program. The conductor announces the Armed Forces Medley, a stirring arrangement of each service anthem, during which veterans from each branch are invited to stand and be honored. But as the music segues into Off we go, into the wild blue yonder, Bill Brannon keeps his seat.

         I lean over to him. “Are you having trouble getting up?” I whisper in his ear. “I’ll help.”

         He stage-whispers back, “But . . . I’m not a vet—I didn’t serve in combat.”

         I look over at Bev and signal for her to grab an arm. We haul him to his feet and stand alongside him, as applause for all airmen present thunders through the auditorium. We will draw him out of his self-containment, his churlish and perverse isolation, if it takes every one of us to do it.

* * *

         On November 7, 2006, William Joseph Brannon, ceaseless political spectator, from a walker in the company of his two eldest daughters, punched a ballot for the first time in his life. He did not reveal his choices to us. It didn’t matter: he’d participated in the process. And when he held forth in debate ever afterward—from that day to his last—it was not with that damned radio, but with one of us.

* * *

Day 8, Kay: Time to Vote

How many of you remember the first time you ever voted?

We all do. The likelihood is that if you’re reading this blog you’re a voter.

My first time to vote was in 1978. My parents had never voted. They were passionate about politics and felt rescued from the ravages of the Depression by FDR, but had never voted. They had a variety of reasons not to vote, but I think they simply felt intimidated by the process.

When they were in their sixties and I was in my twenties, I helped them to register to vote, and I think they took some pride in being regular voters after that. The last vote my mother cast was in 2008 when the county clerk brought the ballot to the car, and she voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary.

But thirty years earlier I had steered my ’72 Vega across John Ben Shepperd Parkway in Odessa and entered the gymnasium of an all but empty elementary school. It had taken quite a bit of effort to register as a college student to be able to vote in a town that wasn’t my own, but I was committed.

With great pride I plunged into the prospect and cast my ballot for John Hill for governor, and the electronic ballot punched William P. Clements for governor. I could not convince the poll worker that my ballot had been cast wrong. She assured me it was right. Was it? I’ll never know. But my guy didn’t win.

On today’s Election Day I will have to make myself vote. Frankly, I’ve lost my stomach for it. Money, zealots, and cynics have hijacked a process I used to respect. One party controls Texas, and other choices and voices seldom have a chance.

However, the only way Texas will ever have two viable parties is for everyone to vote. The only path for the process to be credible is for everyone to vote. One of the reasons why extremists who talk about secession with a straight face have a platform is that off-year elections have such abysmal turnout.

Take back Texas. Vote.

Day 7, Kay: This year the squirrels are lazy as town dogs, and I love them for it

When my family moved to town from the farm, and our mother wanted to chide us for any less-than-industrious behavior, she’d say, “You’ve gotten lazy as town dogs.” Apparently country canines had more pressing responsibilities.

As a working writer, I find my inspiration often comes from—in addition to childhood nostalgia—looking out the window and seeing what is transpiring in my own backyard.

I have seen next to no squirrels this year. Let me be perfectly clear, this is not due to increased hunting stealth of our two felines who share a sense of simpatico with town dogs.

Legend has it that you can forecast how harsh the winter will be by the gathering habits of the squirrels.

Snowflake takes it easy

In 2010 squirrels started collecting pecans from the trees near me in April, as soon as small green fruit would appear on the tree. The winter of 2010 had its last snow May 1, 2011. That was the year that Snowflake, the all-white stray cat, swam in snow across the street to greet me, and ultimately took up residence here awhile.

This year we have plenty of pecans on the trees, and I haven’t even seen the telltale green husks and half-eaten nuts strewn on the deck.

The squirrels are slackers, and I am thrilled. I am no fan of the harsh, cold days of winters with slick and treacherous surfaces.

When it comes to battling winter, I am a town dog.

Day 6, Barbara: Me ’n’ Sookie and a toe-tappin’ time in Texas

Kay and I are just back from a stint at the State Fair of Texas, an extravaganza of fried foods, Ferris wheels, and my annual tour of duty at the Food & Fiber Pavilion on behalf of heritage tourism in the Lone Star State. (Did you know that travel & tourism is Texas’s second largest export product, after energy? But that’s another story.)

While we were in Dallas Big Tex debuted a sporty new shirt. Ebola made a nasty appearance. (Another story too.) The world’s largest commercial jetliner landed at DFW from Australia on the world’s longest commercial aviation route. (Yet another story.) And Sookie wouldn’t stop licking my feet.

Now, Sookie isn’t a vampire—she’s just named for one. You see, on the last night of our Dallas visit we accepted the gracious invitation of some of Kay’s kin to stay overnight in their home, which has plenty of extra bedrooms now that the kids are grown and gone. Things are pretty quiet at their house now, except when the granddogs visit.

Barnabas, the six-pounds-when-soaking-wet Silkie, yips and nips when semi-strangers show up. He takes after his namesake that way. I should’ve been mindful to bring closed-toe shoes. (Years ago, when I was a stage mom working with the ever-gallant Jonathan Frid on a college production, I don’t recall having to take any such precautions.)

But Sookie, the winsome Boston Terrier, loves everybody to death. Sookie wags. Sookie slurps. Sookie licks. No fangs in sight.

When I first made the acquaintance of puppy Sookie some years back I hadn’t yet cracked open a Charlaine Harris novel, much less watched an episode of True Blood. Sookie? I asked her pet human. He and his family clued me in.

So I had to know more about the telepath from Bon Temps. Since then I’ve followed the fortunes of Sookie Stackhouse’s prolific creator, and Kay and I will get to meet her at the Books in the Basin festival this weekend in Midland-Odessa's Wagner-Noel Performing Arts Center. We'll kick up our heels at the historic Yucca Theater and stick around for Literary Death Match. We’ll look forward to learning how a mystery writer from Mississippi made it big in the world of the undead.

And hey, Sookie the Terrier, watch your back. We've read there are Living Dead in Dallas. And we hear Ms. Harris’s first book, way back when, was published in the UK as, um, Dead Dog.

Sookie wants to make sure all her friends know there’s an entire museum devoted exclusively to Boston Terriers in Floydada, Texas. 

Day 5, Kay: Happy October from West Texas

Happy October, everyone, from The Working Writer and The Paragraph Ranch.

With the calendar turning toward autumn, I can’t help but remember my earliest memories of the season. Growing up on a cotton farm brings back very different recollections of fall. Autumn meant picking cotton.

The year I turned six was a triumph for me when I was big enough to join the family in pulling those fluffy white bolls from the plants. We had just moved to town from the farm but still had to go back and harvest one last crop. One October afternoon after school, we four kids changed into working clothes and rode with our parents out to the field to pick cotton.

I was too small to haul a traditional white cotton bag, but pulled a burlap tow sack instead. By sunset I had picked 58 pounds—more than my own weight—and enjoyed the kudos from all.

When we drove back into town to our new house, children were running across the streets in costumes, and I didn’t know what that meant. My parents explained that it was Halloween, and “town kids” got dressed up and went door-to-door asking for candy.

“And they get it?” I asked in wonder.

Those days were a lot more isolated on the farm. Now with media immersion, no child escapes commercial culture. But I was the poster child for rural naivete.

My dad stopped at a store on the way to our house for milk and bread and bought one of the biggest bags of candy I had ever seen. It even had wax teeth in it. “Here, this is for y’all,” Mama said, opening and offering the bag around.

“How many pieces do we get?” my brother said, as was the norm for our frugal family.

“All of it,” Mama said. “Pass it around and share.”

Fall always brings back memories of this moment, this gentle kindness and sense of largesse. It can take so little sometimes to make a person happy.           

Guest blogger Arleen Williams: Writing at Louisa's

Seattle is a city replete with readers, writers, and coffee shops. In many of these coffee shops, writers meet on a regular basis to do timed-writing practice, a style of shared and supportive writing first promoted in 1986 by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones.

Some of these writing groups are open to anyone interested in stopping by with pen and paper to give it a try. Others have a set membership and shared culture of writing and sharing work. These are not critique groups. Instead, they offer a sense of community in what can be a lonely profession. And the best part? You can start your own group anytime, anywhere, by inviting other folks to gather at a designated place and time to write.

The following piece first appeared in an anthology titled Sunday Ink: Works by the Uptown Writers, published by one of my writing groups in 2010.

Writing at Louisa's

The room hums with creative energy as I rush into Louisa’s Café & Bakery five minutes late. Diners sit chattering at the scattered tables along the outer walls of the room, the hum of music barely audible over the clattering of pots and pans from the open kitchen. But as I join the group of writers at the center tables, it is not those sounds I hear. As I sit and open my own notebook, I tune inward, listening for my inner voice. Instead I feel the whispers of other voices. the voices of my fellow writers, the voices of their characters fill the air, their stories surging from head to hand, from pen to paper.

We gather twice a week, year after year, to bleed our stories, ink onto paper. We write and share these stories, knowing we are supported and nourished by the experience. The timer is set at two-thirty and sounds at three o'clock. For thirty minutes stories float through the air and find rest on blank pages. Stories that must be told because silence kills, because truth and art free our souls.

We are a fluid mix of Seattle writers, young and old, female and male, experienced and first-timers, published and still-to-be. What we share is the desire to find voice and to express our soul in words. We play with language to record or create lives and worlds that, prior to that moment when pen grazes paper, live only in the diverse worlds of our individual memories or imaginations. We come to Louisa's, we scribble our stories, real and imagined, and we breathe life into them.

When the timer jolts us back to present time, we share the words we have written, each voice unique—some soft, smooth, and soothing, others deep, rough, or halting. We laugh, we cry, we get embarrassed, and we find the support we need to pull us back each week to scribble more words in what seem at times to be nothing more than illegible ink stains. We return each week not for any illusions of notoriety, not even for the dream of publication, but simply because the voices inside our heads will not be silenced in any other manner. Those voices demand to be heard, so we come together and give them life—our stories intertwined in the gentle scratches of pen on paper at Louisa's Café & Bakery.

* * * * * * * * * * * * 

Arleen Williams is the author of three books: Running Secrets, Biking Uphill, and The Thirty-Ninth Victim—all written in Seattle coffee shops.

Day 4, Barbara: Sometimes File is the only way to unscramble Life

I just can’t stand it anymore.

The snowpile of receipts, bills, coupons, bills, catalogs, bills, business cards, bills, letters, bills, newspapers, and bills that my desk has become. That’s spread  somehow to my coffee table. Kitchen table. Dining room table. And we’re supposed to be shooting for a paperless world? When it spills over onto the sofa or the bathroom countertop, it’s time to act.

It’s time to file.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

For me, that means hauling out the pocket folders, labelmaker, stapler, Sharpie and highlighter, hanging files, and shredder. And the Gripper bags and the outsized garbage can from the laundry room. No ordinary trash receptacle will do. That cute little basket my daughter once labeled with a History subject sticker in her college dorm room, which I’ve repurposed for my home office all these years, won’t serve today. No, this is a job for Hefty and Rubbermaid.

Bring it on, baby. I roll up my sleeves, clear the decks on a folding picnic table, and start separating the sheep from the goats. Paid bills in this stack, unpaid ones in that. Tax-deductible receipts for the business, over here. Personal, there. Receipts from Starbucks, Coldwater Creek, Walmart (oops, that ream of paper’s a business expense), Chuck E. Cheese for grandson’s birthday party, trash. Receipts from the liquor store, debatable. Maybe under Deductible/Medical.

One time when I’d used up every available flat surface in the house I had to resort to the patio table for sorting. Everything was going fine until I ran in to catch the phone and an afternoon shower blew in. The piles got drenched. I read somewhere that you can reclaim wet books by freezing them, letting the dry air eventually suck out the moisture. Two months later my son came over to help cook dinner. “Mom, why you have these, um, stacks of receipts in the freezer?”

And about all those dead-tree records in the first place, you might ask. I am a committed citizen of the digital era, after all. I am dedicated to online bill pay. Much neater than dropping an old-fashioned check into the black hole of the USPS. But if someone’s going to charge me money, I want them to request it in a more tangible manner than a few pixels that might disappear into the spam ether and leave me with no reminder a due date ever existed. I’ve also wondered, when given the opportunity to “Go Green!” and get my confirmation by email, how it’s supposed to help if I have to print it out on a full sheet on my own printer?

Fundraising appeals, alumni newsletters, book catalogs, One-Day-Only Sales, invitations to gallery openings and community theatre and pet adoption days . . . I meant to see if my schedule and purse could accommodate them, all those weeks ago, I really did. Now they’re consigned to the Circular File.

The archaeological dig progresses, each layer of slick circulars, each tiny, crumpled scrap of thermal roll peeled back to reveal the shards of my existence. I expect at any moment to come upon a Plainview Point or a pre-Columbian midden. Yep, that bad. I hope I do not unearth an invitation to some friend’s wedding that took place last month. I did, once, uncover an unrecognized sender’s nondescript envelope that, when opened, contained a twenty-dollar check. “Congratulations on being awarded Honorable Mention in our writing competition.” Well, that ought to teach me.

Soon I can see the wood surface of the kitchen table gleaming through. By the time I’m down to the home stretch, I’ve located my missing silver earring, a dollar bill (bonus!), and a flyer promoting a “Get Your (Second) Act Together” empowerment seminar for women. Yesterday.

Too bad. It’s History. And File has neatly transmogrified to Life again.

Day 3, Kay: Is the Paragraph Ranch a real place?

Happy Friday from the Paragraph Ranch.

I've had several folks say they'd like to visit the Ranch and have asked me if it's a real place. That's a good question.

The “home place” in the novel The Paragraph Ranch is loosely based on the West Texas farm where my family lived until I was six years old. It was a ramshackle place my parents received as a part of their cotton farming lease.

But for a kid it was pretty amazing. I’m the youngest of four children and each morning would watch the older three walk down the dirt road to the bottom of the hill, open the gate, and wait for the school bus.

If it was arctic outside--and I mean it had to be arctic--my parents would pile all four of us into the single cab of the pickup truck and ride down to the gate to wait for the big kids' ride to school.

The half mile to the bottom of the hill wove through mesquite trees and cactus and split-wood fenceposts that were piled up in the shape of teepees. Fertile ground for a toddler's imagination.

Now, all that's left on that hill about ten miles south of Snyder is part of the windmill, surrounded by rolling, wooded terrain that’s been put into the CRP program (if you’re not from Texas, Google it).

But the white frame house, barn, peach orchard, dirt-floored storm cellar, and cow pen made from rusted box springs live again in the pages of The Paragraph Ranch.

On a more conceptual level, the Paragraph Ranch is the place in my mind that sparks my imagination and fuels my writing.

I'd love to hear from writers and readers about the places that you have known and loved that now live only in your memories.

Day 2, Barbara: The Hectograph Duplicator

I imagine every one of us has a memory of how we got started writing. My co-author of The Paragraph Ranch, Kay Ellington, remembered the time in fourth grade when she launched a handwritten newspaper. (I, in fifth grade in a different city and state that same year, created an illustrated book about a dog and announced my plans to be a children’s book author.)

So as long as we’re digging back into ancient history here, I’ll share. This is from a memoir-in-progress, Editing Elsie:

. . . . . .

I tell Cat about publishing my first work for nothing when I was in kindergarten, in an edition of a dozen copies. A clandestine enterprise.

My mother owned, for use in her club activities, a neat little device called a Hectograph Duplicator. It consisted of a metal pan the size of a coloring book, filled with a beige-colored jelly that, when you pressed a special waxed paper onto it, yielded an image that would transfer to other pages.

I was mesmerized by the machine. There was something organic and fleshy about the gelatin layer, with its reverse-image tattoo bleeding beneath the skin, that was irresistible to touch. You mashed it and it wiggled slightly. It had a not-unpleasant chemical smell.

I observed carefully how my mother rolled the dark-blue sheet into her typewriter, clattered out the recipes or bowling league schedule or whatever, then pulled out the finished master and laid it gently across the gelatin-filled pan. When she lifted it up it left behind a mirror image of her typing. She would sometimes let me help smooth out the white pages that she laid one by one over the inked surface to pull a series of positive impressions, moist and bruise-blue.

One morning when my mother leaves me home with Doris I steal to the hall closet and spirit away the Hectograph to my room. I labor all day writing out a poem on one of the magic pages, leaning hard on my pencil to make a good transfer. I smooth the master out on the gelatin surface the way I have seen my mother do. I lack her deft touch in lifting the copies up, however, and as I mash each piece of tablet paper into the tray my stubby fingers make little gouges in the duplicating surface. To make matters worse, when I finish printing my edition, ready to be folded into little booklets, I realize I haven’t learned how to erase the master image.

In a panic, before my mother returns home, I shut myself in the bathroom and turn on the hot water full force. I plunge the pan under the faucet to wash off the ink. I watch in horror as the gelatin melts away. The likelihood of getting caught solidifies to absolute certainty. All I can do is return the tray to its closet shelf, empty.

I never do fess up, though I’m sure Mom figures things out when I give her one of the blue-inked booklets for Mother’s Day.

. . . . . .

I’ve told you mine—now it’s your turn. How did you write your first story?

PS  Wanna make your own hectograph? Here's how.