Dianne

Mama learns to drive…

Mama was a wonderful homemaker, Southern cook and an artist with a brush, needle and thread. Although, she could read music by “shaped notes”, she sang and played the piano and organ “by ear”. She had a wonderful sense of humor and a quick and ready smile. For the most part, I think she was content to stay at home for she considered taking care of her family the most important role in her life.

Daddy was mellow and easy going. As the father of four daughters, I suppose he had to be. He was quiet but also had a good sense of humor. Sharon and I could easily get him to laugh. He had always been protective of Mama as well as his daughters; and perhaps that was the reason she had never learned to drive. She had never considered the fact she couldn’t drive a problem, until Daddy began riding to work with a fellow employee…leaving the car at home.

Having a perfectly good automobile left sitting in the driveway and plenty of places she wanted to go was a different story…a motivating factor I would say. There were the fabric stores she loved, grocery shopping and a local shopping center with nice department stores. I was in college and not there during the day to drive for her, so Mama decided she would learn to drive. When Mama made up her mind to do something, there was no stopping her. The police academy offered driving lessons for adults and she enrolled. Mama didn’t do anything halfway and became their star pupil.

She loved her newfound freedom in our 1957 Chevrolet, and now insisted on doing the driving herself…even when I was with her! I understood the feeling of those new wings and it would have been fine with me…if only she had driven faster than 25 miles per hour. With her genteel Southern upbringing, she could not understand why people were passing her or giving her unkind looks when she pulled out in front of them at a snail’s pace. I believe, eventually, she did pick up her speed and gained her confidence behind the wheel.

I am my Mother’s daughter in a lot of ways (no, not the driving – I drive much too fast). When it comes to a paintbrush, needle or thread, I find joy. It’s almost as if I don’t have a choice…I simply must be in the midst of creating something. As of yet, my quilting projects have been small ones, but I enjoy the process. I love to sew and made many of my daughter’s clothes…and even a few for my sons…when they were growing up. I love to cook, especially Southern style. Most importantly, I have found my greatest joy in my role as a mother…and now as a grandmother.

Looking back after all these years, I think that it took great courage for Mama to conquer her fear and learn to drive at the age of sixty. I hope if I were faced with a similar challenge, that I might just have a little of her courage…

(Just for fun, check out the You-Tube black & white TV commercial on the 1957 Chevrolet link above!)

Saying goodbye…

My Southern Heart, Reflections

The last semester of my freshman year was almost over. I had finally accepted the fact that I would have to transfer to a state university there in Memphis for my sophmore year. Financially, there was no other way. I could work through the summer and save enough for my books and tuition and live at home. It certainly wasn’t what I wanted to do, but it seemed the only solution.

Jimmy, Linda, my roommate, and all my other friends pleaded with me to apply for a school loan. Looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t. Perhaps, transferring seemed the “easiest” thing to do at the time, and so I set the paperwork in motion.

It’s odd that I don’t remember how I got home from college those 45 years ago…there were obviously clothes and boxes to pack, but I don’t remember that part. I do remember being sad to leave.

Those were the days before email and instant messenger. So over the summer, Jimmy and I wrote letters. Jimmy also came to visit me several times. He invited me down to visit his family in Florida sometime during that summer, but my parents said no. I suppose it was the distance from Memphis to Florida, for they liked Jimmy. It wasn’t easy being the youngest daughter of overprotective parents.

Fall came and I registered at the university there in Memphis. I had close friends from church who were also going to school there and I would be riding to campus with them. It took several weeks before I began to stop missing my friends I’d been so close to for the past year. I became involved in the Baptist Student Union there and slowly began meeting people and making new friends.

Jimmy had been hurt and upset with me that I wouldn’t at least try to find the funds to return to college there. Over the weeks that followed, we exchanged a few letters, but slowly grew apart. In February 1965, I had a school break and went back to college to visit my roommate and other friends. Evidently, they had told Jimmy that I was coming. I remember seeing him and briefly meeting the girl he had recently been dating in the cafeteria.

After supper, Jimmy came over the dorm and walked me to the campus movie that night. According to the old diary I’d found, we also stopped at the library for some reason on the way over to the movie. Later, after Linda and I had returned back to her dorm about eleven o’clock, Jimmy called. The dorm was situated around an interior outdoor courtyard. The telephone was in an old-fashioned phone booth on the second floor balcony – outside. We talked for a good long while. Jimmy wanted to talk longer, but it was very cold outside and I was freezing. He wanted to come over, but it was past visiting hours in the lobby…remember this was 45 years ago and boys weren’t allowed in the dorm rooms.

I‘m trying to remember if when we said goodbye that night was the last time that we ever spoke…I do believe that it was.

Roses in a fruit jar…

My Southern Heart, Reflections

Spring had come and with it, the warm days that felt like an early summer. The campus was ablaze with color…beautiful pink and red azaleas, flowering dogwood and fragrant magnolias. Yellow daffodils lined the historical brick streets in the nearby town and all the brick walkways across campus.

Everything on campus seemed in high gear. My weekly routine continued to include 18 hours in class, working 15 hours and trying my best to find time to study. I continued in the BSU choir and kept one mission trip a week in my schedule – to the nursing home. Trying to find time to even do my laundry was a challenge, and Jimmy continued to make sure that I didn’t have any “down” time.

We frequently double-dated with his friend Raleigh and Raleigh’s girlfriend. Jimmy was on scholarship and certainly didn’t have much money. He was creative and found interesting places to go that didn’t cost that much…like the zoo, movies and plays on campus, fishing, flying kites. The photo below was taken at the college swim and picnic day at a large nearby lake in late Spring. It was very warm that day and felt more like summer.

One day after work as I walked into the dorm, the student desk clerk said, “you have flowers”. There were a couple of bouquets there – one that closely resembled a funeral arrangement and a beautiful bouquet of wild pink roses. About that time she giggled and said, “yours are the ones in the fruit jar”. Thank goodness I thought. They were beautiful…tiny little wild pink roses…dozens of them. I took them to my room and put them on my desk. I was sure they were from Jimmy and certainly meant to thank him as soon as I saw him.

Two or three days passed and each time we were together, I would forget to mention the roses. That Saturday, Jimmy said he had something special to show me. I was swamped with work and needed to spend the day in the library. One look at his face though, and I said yes. He drove to a little lake surrounded by a grove of trees. It seems I remember hiking a long way around the lake to get there and then he said, “look”.

There it was…an absolutely enormous wild rose bush covered in hundreds of tiny pink wild roses. I’ve never seen anything to compare to that bush since that day. I felt two inches tall. I’d forgotten to say thank you, and he had gone to all this effort just for me. I hugged him and thanked him for the roses. I assured him that I had loved them. He said “I thought you hadn’t liked them because they were in a fruit jar…that’s all I could find”. “That was the best part,” I said.

I learned a hard lesson that day and one I’ve remembered all these years – a gift from the heart is not to be taken lightly…especially if they’re roses in a fruit jar.

Feeling the wind on the end of a string…

Family, My Southern Heart, Reflections

After meeting Jimmy, life on campus changed. He made sure I was never lonely or bored…not that I had time to be bored. With his energy and pure passion for life, he celebrated everything.

One day, not long after we’d met, Jimmy asked me if I’d ever flown a kite. I had to think for a moment, and then I realized that I’d totally missed that experience in my childhood.

“We’ll soon take care of that” he said, and that Saturday morning, he picked me up at the dorm armed with two kites, each with a long tail, and lots of string. It was perfect kite weather…warm with a wonderful breeze. We walked to a large hill behind the campus where he proceeded to attempt to teach me the basics of launching and flying a kite. I’d run as fast as I could and try to get my kite off the ground, and he’d end up laughing at my antics.

Finally, my kite caught an updraft and the wind took it…higher and higher and higher. I felt the strong tug of a kite hundreds of feet in the air and realized what an amazing thing I’d missed as a child.

Meeting Jimmy…

My Southern Heart, Reflections

Classes resumed after Christmas at a furious pace. The professors piled on the assignments making up for lost time. I was struggling in botany and hated it. There didn’t seem to be enough time to get it all done, not with working three hours each day, and I had no choice about that.

Looking back, it seems that my work at the infirmary helped pay for my meals, because I only received a small check once or twice a semester. So, if I received a dollar or two in the mail, which I did from time to time, it was needed and welcomed. For a brief time, I found another parttime job typing for an accountant there just to have some spending money, but that only added to the frustration of not enough time to study. Two jobs and 18 hours was altogether too much and overwhelming.

The occasional outings with the Baptist Student Union were good for me, and I tried to reserve the time for them. I loved going to the pediatric floor at the hospital where the children always made me laugh. Visiting with the women prisoners at the jail was a heartbreaking experience, listening to the stories of their lives and what they had experienced. I had nothing to compare to it, but I listened and hugged them. Somehow, that seemed to help and they welcomed us back each week. My favorite trip was probably to the nursing homes. Never having really known my grandparents, I had a tendency to adopt anyone older than 75. I loved them all, and they were so excited each week when we came for our visit.

The weeks had tumbled quickly by and it was March already…March 16, 1964. We were having a blowing rain storm…the kind that turns your umbrella inside out and wrenches it from your hands. I had managed to get across campus but was pretty soaked and freezing by the time I got to my speech lab. There, we would sit in our little carrels, wearing headphones and listening to difficult vocabulary words, repeating them quietly into microphones. I wasn’t real thrilled with this exercise or too sure of the use of it, but I complied. Sitting there in my little cubicle, I had my sweater wrapped around me, still trying to get warm.

I was quietly repeating the words I heard in the microphone, when I heard these words in my headset: “WHERE have you been?”.

“Huh?” I thought to myself…am I supposed to repeat that?!

“WHERE have you been? I haven’t seen you on campus, and I KNOW I would have seen YOU!”

“Okay, what’s going on?” I thought to myself. I looked up and there in the instructor’s booth was a very handsome young man, looking directly at me and smiling.

“Where would you like to go?” he questioned…speaking softly into his microphone. “I’ll close the lab and take you anywhere you want to go”.

Now that I’m older and a little wiser, I would probably say, “you’ve been watching too many romantic comedies”, but I was eighteen and he was cute!

Jimmy did close the lab class that afternoon, making all the students happy. By that time, the sun had come out and a beautiful rainbow made a timely appearance. We went for a long walk around the campus, and Jimmy pointed out things that had been there all along…but I’d never even noticed. A junior and a speech major, he was from the coast of Florida. He was there on a speech debate scholarship, and he was very good at it. A Methodist ministerial student at a Baptist college, his plans were to go to Duke University after graduation for his masters and to become a Methodist minister.

With a quick wit, beautiful blue eyes and a disarming smile, Jimmy was the proverbial tall, dark and handsome. He invited me to go to a play on campus that night…MacBeth. As I recall, it was a lovely evening…and the start of a close friendship.