"My water broke!" she cried, as she startled up from dinner with all us kids at our old round oak table. I had no clue, but Linda, my oldest sister, ran across the street to get Lee.
The tall Texan arrived, striding through the back door, and helped Mom to his car. Just as they left, "Hold on 'til tomorrow!" my insensitive 10-year-old voice cried out and she disappeared, wrapped in a blanket.
That was on the eve of my eleventh birthday and my mother of five and (I didn't know) two miscarriages, headed to Tacoma General. She did wait, we found out the next morning, and Art forever became my birthday brother.
Some 40 years later, when Eileen and I visited Tacoma and my old haunts there, we dropped in on Lee's wife, Marilyn, the Over-Watch and Historian of the old neighborhood. When I related this tale, it was like Paul Harvey's "and now the rest of the story" as she filled in some missing pieces… of the undercurrents of my life.
"Oh yes," she recounted, "Lee was back from the hospital (about a 20 minute trip back then) in about 25 minutes." This huge man had been scared to death that Mom would deliver in his car! When ER staff picked her up outside, never getting out of the car, he split!
She went on. Later in the evening Dad suddenly burst through their back door, "What did you do to my kids? They're all at home crying!" "Marsh," Marilyn interjected, "your wife is at the hospital having a baby!"
Marilyn said that he was drunk. "Drunk?!" I emoted. "When was he ever drunk?" "Well, he was quite often." I was stunned. "... and of course, you were off somewhere... like you always were." she added. "You'd just disappear, often when your parents were fighting with each other." "I always went off somewhere? Really?"
I had only learned the previous day, from younger brother Chuck over lunch, that fact about my folks... and more. He’d told me in response to my question about what my siblings meant when they kept saying, "You were just oblivious," I asked him to give me an example:
"Well one day, Dad was beating Mom, and I expected you to do something, but I turned around, and you'd disappeared. I took a broom myself and beat him off of her." "You could never do that to Dad," I replied. "You'd never get away with it." "Well, I did... and he never mentioned it again!" I was shocked about everything he revealed.
Marilyn went on, "The next day your Dad knocked at our back door. I opened it, and he peered into the living room at Lee and told him that he was sorry... three times, but Lee never answered. When your Dad asked me why, I told him that he couldn't."
It seems that they'd been trimming a sugar cane-like house plant when Linda frantically came to their door. Lee left his knife there and rushed off. When he returned he started stripping the stems and chewing them, as he'd done growing up near the Texas cane fields. Soon he couldn't even talk!
The plant, Dieffenbachia, they learned later, was called "dumb cane" because its sap is toxic and inflames the tongue and throat causing temporary loss of speech. Lee missed work that week for the only time in his life.
… and Eileen and I left Marilyn’s place holding dearly onto some long-silent, missing pieces from the unspoken puzzle of my life.
© MLee Dickens’son 10 Sept 2019 (Daniel J Ricketts)
······· ·······
|