Recently Señora and I were in Oklahoma. First, we made a quick visit to my mother in her nursing home in Owasso. She has Alzheimer’s, so quick or long, the visit it is all the same. In fact given her level of engagement and attention span, a short visit might be better, even if St. Louis to Owasso is a long trip.
Afterwards we headed towards Okemah, OK to go to the Woody Guthrie musical festival. On the way there I made the impromptu decision to visit Mounds, OK. “Mounds, Oklahoma,” you say, “I have never of it.” Well do not feel alone in that, in all probability most folks, even in Oklahoma, have never heard of Mounds. It has a population of a little over a thousand, and is located south and a little west of Tulsa, which is less than an hour away. Its heyday was in the very early 1900s when the railroad ran through the town and lots of cattle and wheat were shipped from there. Today it is slightly more than a wide spot in the road, but not by much.
So why did I want to visit here? I passed two summers of my teen years there. I do not want to get too much into the dysfunctional whirlwind that was my childhood. I will say that I have been wont as an adult to summarize my childhood by saying my parents had a real talent for creating neurotics. I also made the following comment in another blog posting Rev. Joe Goes to The Big House:
My folks would never have been in the running for the Ward and June Cleaver Parenting Award. The reason they had children, let alone 5, is unclear to me. It seemed then and seems now that they felt as long as we were fed, clothed, and a roof was over our head they had fulfilled their parental duties. They were more involved with the youngest two.
In the Iatter part of 1967 I went from being in school in Rhode Island to living with my cousins, Don and Paulette, and attending Muskogee High School. I spent about two- thirds of my sophomore year at this noble institution. The reality for me is that my time there is a total blur. I must have passed my classes, but I have no idea of how. Or even what I studied except geometry. I remember geometry specifically as it was one of the few high school classes that I really loved and did well in. That was in Rhode Island. The geometry teacher in Oklahoma was so horrific and incompetent that the class was an absolute nightmare. I went back to hating all things high school.
I absolutely adored my cousin Don, in many ways he was the only “father figure” I ever had growing up. Both he and Paulette treated me with respect. And Don kept me very busy. He was a lineman for the electric company and exceedingly handy in all fields of construction. He and Paulette were building their own home on some land given to them by my Uncle Bob, Paulette’s father. Don and I spent most afternonns after his regular job and weekends working on this project. For me, Don was a very easy person to be around. When I returned to Oklahoma as detailed in Rev. Joe Goes to The Big House, we went fishing together regularly and I frequently was his second pair of hands. Besides his regular job he did a lot of electric work on the side. I was very good at fetching tools, or helping him snake lines through conduit. Once he tried to convince me what we yearned for was to do maintenance work on the high towers used for TV and radio transmissions. He had the knowledge, but needed someone to help him. I just could not see myself climbing 2000 feet up on what looked like a very shaky erector set toy. With my marriage we lost touch, and he and Paulette divorced sometime in that time frame which was very upsetting to me. I do not think I ever completely forgave Paulette for divorcing him. However in my 8th decade I have come to realize that matrimony can be a very hard journey. In a life full of regrets, one of my bigger ones is not maintaining my relationship with Don who died much too young in 1998 at the age of 60.
The summer after my sophomore year I found myself staying at my Uncle Dutch and Aunt Peggy’s home in Mounds. My Aunt Peggy was my mother’s closest sister. I was not privy to all the machinations as to why this was so, but on reflection I have imagined it to be for at least two reasons. The first was probably to give my cousins Don and Paulette a bit of a break from me. Secondly, my Uncle Dutch was a Southern Baptist minister (for a bit more on him I wrote a story about him long before I started blogging, The Unintended Lesson). Probably their thought process was that a small town and lots of church would be a good influence on me. In retrospect it really was. While the religion part never really took hold, the good influence of my aunt and uncle did change the course of my life.
As I reflect on the last sentence I find it interesting, for in many ways my aunt and uncle did not quite know what to do with me. They had little experience with boys, as they had three daughters, the eldest, Nancy, who was out of the home by this summer, leaving Judy and Becky at home. Poof, suddenly there was this teenage boy in their home, a teenage boy tottering on a precipice that might have easily led him into a squandered life. Even in their perplexity they did several things right with me. First and foremost, they treated me with love and respect. They were not hands off, but it was not the heavy hand that would have caused an eruption of my rebellious streak. As the nephew of the preacher of the First Baptist Church of Mounds, OK, I was in church three times a week, twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday. I’m not entirely sure what lasting influence that had on me except I still love me some of that old time gospel music.
The other thing they did for me was find me a job with a local rancher, Bill, who also owned an auction barn. During the week I worked on his ranch along with some other teenage boys he had hired. We mostly built fence, but I also remember building a cattle guard type bridge with a gate over one of the streams(gullies) running along the perimeter of one of his fields. Occasionally, we would mount horses and move the cattle around. The pay was not much, enough to keep me in cigarette money, but the bonus was the noon day meal. His wife put on such a spread. There were generally two or three different types of meat, country vegetables, sweet tea and lemonade, and lots of different desserts. I was never sure who was getting the best part of that deal as teenage boys can eat. On Saturday we worked at his auction barn. Our job was to unload and load the animals, mostly cattle, with an occasional horse thrown in. We also ran the animals into and out of the auction ring. Besides his ranch and his own auction, Bill was in demand as an auctioneer all around the area. I really cannot think of a more idyllic way for a teenage boy to spend a summer.
I did spend a week at Falls Creek Church Camp which is the mother of all Baptist church camps. My Uncle Dutch later in life would become director of this Oklahoma institution. It was one of the few times in my life that religion sort of “took”. The non-initiated might not realize, though, that Falls Creek attendees are immersed in religion 24/7. I am sure sadly to my aunt and uncle, shortly after my Falls Creek experience, the rational part of me reasserted itself, and my agnosticism reappeared.
The other interesting detail about those summers is how popular my cousins Judy and Becky became… Becky’s words, not mine. I often say that growing up my accent was never right; in fact my nickname in high school in Rhode Island was Tex as I had a bit of an Oklahoma drawl. However in Mounds I was that exotic boy from back east staying at the preacher’s house, not an unenviable position for a teenage boy to be in. My first kiss was actually in the fellowship hall of the First Baptist Church of Mounds, OK, but it took me two summers to work up the courage to do so. Not having any sisters, girls were these exotic creatures that tied me up in knots. Thank you Fern for being so patient with me. We did try to make up lost time that second summer though, and , as I remember it, we were very successful at it.
Again I am not sure all the machinations, but after that summer I returned to my parents and spent my junior year at North Kingstown High School in Rhode Island. The next summer, again without much input from me, I was back in Mounds. I do have a regret about this summer though. Not so much about being at my aunt and uncle’s home in Mounds, but not being in Rhode Island. This was the summer of Woodstock. I am not going to call us wild, but I ran with a group of guys with whom we “occasionally” went down pathways not consecrated by our parents. I could very well have seen us at Woodstock. But then again it was probably that same rowdiness that led to another summer for me in Mounds. Maybe someday I will write about our unsanctioned trip from Rhode Island to Montreal in my father’s VW Beetle.
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Getting back to the present, Señora and I jumped off the Okmulgee Bee Line (Hwy 75) and headed into Mounds in search of the First Baptist Church and the parsonage that I passed those two summers in. The town was much the same, perhaps looking more run down and seedy than I remembered. One thing that was a bit of a shock was a marijuana dispensary in what passes for a downtown in Mounds. The parsonage was no longer on the church property, but had been moved to a different part of town. Señora and I parked the car in front of the church. We jumped out and we were taking a few pictures of me in front of the church when a gentleman drove up. He was there to take his wife, the church secretary, out to lunch. Sadly, I do not remember his name, but after a bit of conversation about why we were there, he was gracious enough to take us on a tour of the inside of the church. As would be expected, things had changed a bit. They have a new sanctuary. The locale of my first kiss had been remodeled. The church is still very active, and still is very much a part of the community. He told me a fact I did not know before, that the church was older than Oklahoma statehood (1907). While we were there the preacher’s wife came in and we visited briefly. All in all I left Mounds satisfied with my impromptu trip, but feeling very nostalgic.
And so it goes.