THE TEAR THAT SAID I LOVE YOU

by Randy Reynolds

Violet Appling Reynolds was married twice in the same day and some say that 54 years later she died twice in one day--or was it three times?

Violet never had a room of her own until she got married.  Her father was a poor preacher and they always lived in drab places, small houses, where there wasn't enough space for the family's only daughter to have a room of her own.  From infancy until the day she left home to be married she always slept in the "front" room, on the sofa. In adulthood, she made up for the drab surroundings of her childhood.  She decorated her homes with taste and elegance, with walls supporting eye-catching groupings of all things beautiful, many of them violet, the color evocative of her name. 

Her daddy used to preach on street corners and little Violet, starting at age 4 or 5, would stand on a chair or flatbed truck and sing to help attract a crowd.  The man she would someday marry became a preacher, too, and she sang in his services in almost every state in America. 

She ran away and got married when she was 15 years and one day old, Jan. 3, 1948. She got married not once, but twice that day.  The first ceremony was performed by a Justice of the Peace who was drunk, so she got cold feet, said she didn't think the marriage was legal.  Her resourceful groom, never one to take no for an answer, simply took her to another Justice of the Peace and they got married again a few hours after the first ceremony. 

54 years later, in  2002, she was at the end of a terrible illness and her doctors were amazed that she was surviving both the illness and the highest levels of their strongest painkillers.  They observed her lying in her hospital bed thanking Jesus for her pain and they said there was no way she should still be conscious. 

When she breathed her last, her husband was in the room.  Amid the hubbub and comings and goings that accompany a death in the hospital, the nurses sent the grieving husband out of the room.  A short while later, he was in the chapel when nurses summoned him again.  Violet was alive.  He hurried to her room, but it was too late.  He had missed her brief resurrection. 

They took Violet to the hallway outside the morgue and put a toe tag on her.  Her husband sent everyone away so that he could be alone with her.  He pulled down the sheet to look at her face. He thought of the first time she had kissed him, when she was fourteen.  She had said 'I love you' and a tear had trickled down her cheek.  He bent down and kissed her and, just like 54 years earlier, a tear came out of her eye and trickled down her cheek.

And he knew for sure that wherever she was, she still loved him. 

THE GIANT

by Randy Reynolds

We were the sons of a father of girls, we Boy Scouts of Troop 336, we Shepherd’s Fold church kids, we school students who grew up wanting to be like “Mr. Bill.”  He had a family of girls, but spent so much time with us boys that I often wondered if his daughters were jealous of us.  We were certainly jealous of THEM, because we only got to spend time with Mr. Bill at Scout Meetings, at church, on campouts, at the dinner table (when the Reynolds’ visited the Barkers’ and vice-versa.)  Now and then, he’d join us for a pickup ballgame at the home of his nephews (the McLary’s.)  But Beth, Rhonda, Cathy, Mary and Laurie were with him every day. It wasn’t fair. He lived with his daughters and only saw his ever-changing cast of sons a few times a week.

Fifty years ago—(my dad and I think it was the fall that Kennedy was assassinated)—Mr. Bill played a football game with some of his  “boys.”

Bill Barker, Sunday School Superintendent/Youth Leader/Scoutmaster/School Principal/Father Of Many Daughters was the quarterback of one team of Shepherd's Fold men and boys.  E.J. Reynolds, Pastor/My Dad/Father Of Six, played linebacker for the opposition. 

Willie and Richie McLary, Wayne Jenkins, Rodney Jenkins, myself, some Keatings and Galloways  and a few other neighborhood boys got the game going going in the field next to the McLary House in the notorious Second Ward of St. Tammany Parish, identified on maps as Pulltight, now called Barker's Corner. Dad and Mr. Bill and a couple of other adults came out to play—an equal number of men joining each side. 

My dad was good at every sport he ever tried and I was glad to have him on my side.  He had been a star ever since he first tossed a basketball, swung a bat, or spiked a volleyball.  E.J. Reynolds had a competitive streak a mile wide and, minister or not, would do anything to win.  (He and I had some loud and aggressive arguments about things like whether a badminton birdie was in bounds or out;  Dad never gave an inch. Neither did I.  Lucikly the church had stashed us in a parsonage tucked way back in the woods so our badminton and croquet and basketball screaming was heard only by our own family and our nervous horses and chickens and dogs and the surrounding wildlife of Semalusa  Swamp.)

This particular football game in the McLary portion of the Barker compound in the fall of the year that JFK was killed was another chance for my Dad to ride his competitive streak to a victory; for his star to shine; for him to get that adrenalin rush—those endorphins—that make the human animal feel great, but are so hard to trigger (for our kind of people) outside of church. 

Half a century later (Whew! Time flies!) my dad says:   “I thought I was a pretty good player. Nobody was going to get past me.  But old Bill got the ball and ran to my side of the line and I went up to stop him and he just lowered his shoulder and hit me in the chest, you know, to get by me, and I never felt anything that hurt so bad.  I ended up on the ground and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to get up or not.  Then he got the ball again, and I thought ‘I’ll show him this time’ and he hit me again and I learned my lesson.  That Bill Barker was strong as a bull and I decided he could go whichever direction he wanted to after that. I didn’t try to stop him again.  When he came my way, I just stepped aside and let him go.”

  

Mr. Bill was a giant.  Maybe a little bigger than my 6’2”, 240 pound father, maybe not.  But I remember him as a giant.  And then I see pictures and realize that he was bigger in my memory, and in my observations at the time, than he is in these pictures.

 As our Scoutmaster, Mr. Bill taught us all the things Boy Scouts are supposed to know--how to tie knots, pitch a tent, cook on an open fire, send and receive Morse code, save lives, be good citizens, do a good deed daily, Be Prepared.... the list is endless.

True to the Scout motto, Mr. Bill was always prepared: he made every task a game and every lesson a funny story... ‘though sometimes we misinterpreted the moral of the story:

On a mid-winter campout, he told us about a dumb thing he had done as a kid--skinny-dipping in 30-degree weather. We said that was no big deal--anybody could do that. He told us to forget it--there'd be no swimming on this trip. A good Scout is obediant, but we were not good Scouts that night. Several of us slipped out of camp, took off all our clothes and jumped into the frigid creek. Rodney Jenkins and Glenn Talley collected our clothes and went back to camp to blow the whistle.

I remember hiding in the woods, freezing wet, listening as Mr. Bill, in that booming voice of his, called our names and told us to come on in. We ran around in the swamp, from tree to tree, bush to bush, trying to decide what to do. With our extremities in danger of freezing off, we finally decided on a frontal assault, broke cover and ran for our tents as other Scouts, fully clothed and sitting by a warm campfire, hooted, whistled and applauded. Mr. Bill pretended he didn't get a kick out of it. (Or maybe he wasn't pretending.) He didn't seem all that flattered that we had emulated him. We had broken the rules, so he sent us home to explain it to our parents.

(Mr. Bill knew what would happen when we got home because parents in those days didn't take kindly to their sons breaking the rules, any rules...but that's another story.)

(The last time I communicated with him—by e-mail—he said his mother had scolded him for sending us home that night and that he had always felt bad about it.  So he apologized.  48 years later, he apologized.  He didn’t need to, of course. It was nothing but a funny story to me; and my consequences at the time were well-deserved.  But he apologized.  I was surprised at the sensitivity of that gesture, but what surprised me most of all was big, hulking, giant, strong-as-a-
bull, leader-of-everything, thirty-something Bill Barker being scolded by his old mother about how he handled his Scouts.  Grammy Barker was one tough cookie.) 

On the night of my high school graduation, Mr. Bill and his wife, the beautiful SeWilla took me and other seniors on our first cruise down Bourbon Street. Being very religious people, they may have been hoping that our look at the wild side from the safety of their station wagon would educate us about sin. It did. And we would have subscribed to as much of it as we could afford if Mr. Bill had let us out of the car.  

As my wedding day approached a few years after I'd left the Scouts, I wasn't sure whom to pick for Best Man. My mother said, "It should be your best friend." Which made the decision easy, if unorthodox: somewhat to his surprise, I chose Mr. Bill.

And one of the first things I did after I moved away was help organize a Boy Scout Troop.

5/11/2012     
You never think of giants and heroes dying, but one did today.   R.I.P., Mr. Bill.

MAKING THE BARKER GIRLS BEHAVE

RUNAWAY (Another Mr. Bill story):  http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/runaway.html

SHERRY'S GETTING MARRIED

by Randy Reynolds

Dora Mae Wells heard her 16 year old granddaughter's boyfriend (me) on the radio only once. Mistakenly assuming that I, the son of a preacher, was going to do a religious show--the only kind she ever listened to--she heard me spinning records and reading news, weather, and live commercials. She endured my jokes and my barely disguised on-air messages to Sherry. Finally, impatient to hear the gospel, she looked around at the rest of the family in the sitting room and said, "Well, when's he gonna sang?"

But I was just a deejay and there would be no singing from me that day in the fall of 1966 nor ever. She figured out that I was not going to become the preacher she'd hoped that I would be, but she was happy that her oh-so-young granddaughter was happy with me.

A few weeks later, shortly before Christmas, 1966, Dora Mae's large family gathered around her deathbed in the Bogalusa, Louisiana, hospital and tried to understand the little ditty she was singing over and over. It was, "Sherry's gettin' mar-ried. Sherry's gettin' mar-ried. Sherry's gettin' mar-ried." She left this world with those words on her lips.

Now we're older than Dora Mae was when she died and we're celebrating Christmas Eve alone--well, as alone as you can get in a candlelit room decorated with dozens of angel what-nots, statuettes, carvings and pictures. (Sherry desperately believes in angels.) In the flicker of the candles as the angels listen silently, we're talking about our 45 Christmases together--especially the first one when her grandmother sang us her blessings as she went to her reward.

Someday we'll put together our whole story, the bad with the good, but tonight as we reminisce, the things that have us laughing (and feeling mushy) are the following few memories that have been posted on this blog from time to time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. The day we met: I knew her name. I knew her parents. I knew the boys she had dated. But I had never spoken directly to her before that day, that day she stood there, glowing, in the middle of the yard, with that hair just the color of the hair I always dreamed about whenever I dreamed of girls, and her clothing, modest though it was here at church camp, still not modest enough to obscure her allure.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/12/permission-to-marry-famous-writer.html

2. The night we got engaged: We leaned against an oak felled by Hurricane Betsy and I said, "Will you marry me?" And she said, "Me? You want me?" She made me tell her twice and then she said, "Okay!" And it started raining and we ran for the Volkswagen and turned on the radio to hear the Lovin' Spoonful singing "Rain On The Roof." We thought it was a sign. Of course, when you're in love, everything's a sign.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/purple-poodle.html

3. The night we told her parents: ..Me, suddenly chicken-hearted, "Honest, ya'll, I never touched her." .Sherry held my hand and wrinkled her cute nose at me. "Yes, you did, you big liar!"."I'm going to throw up," said Mary Louise. (Sherry says this story is slightly exaggerated & I'm hurt that she thinks I would exaggerate. LOL)

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/01/permission-to-marry-famous-writer.html

4. The rumors: The common wisdom at our daddies' churches was that we wouldn't last six months together.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/six-months-at-most.html

5. Moving on down the road: I got fired for asking for a raise two weeks before the wedding. We got married anyway and moved 500 miles away where I started auditioning for jobs and Sherry enrolled in high school.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-i-was-run-out-of-covington.html

6. Shy and scared: I heard a relative say of Mrs. Randy Reynolds "That girl is shy as a rabbit." Well, the rabbit became a tiger.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/i-hope-you-dance.html

7. It happened so quickly; it seemed like we blinked our eyes and suddenly we had grandchildren.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/01/treehouse-full-of-miracles-all-my.html

THE PURPLE POODLE

by Randy Reynolds

At the 1960 St. Tammany Parish Fair, I lost all my money first thing in the morning at the shooting gallery and walked around hungry the rest of the day with the smell of corndogs in the air. Traumatized by hunger (no money, no food, no way home until the bus delivered me back to Lee Road late in the afternoon,) I promised myself I'd never again waste all my fair money before I even had a chance to eat a corndog.

Six years later,when I took Sherry to the fair, I ate two—mine and hers, (taking advantage of the fact that she was still too shy to eat in front of me.)

Later, on the Tilt-a-whirl, as she joyously screamed bloody murder and held onto me for dear life, my stomach rolled independently of centrifugal force and I gripped the safety rail in misery. (Lord, why did I eat that second corndog?)

When the Tilt-a-whirl stopped spinning, Sherry said, “Your face looks kind of green.”

I opened my mouth and responded, but not with words. Spewing up corndog, Co-Cola and souvenirs from meals gone by, I looked to her for sympathy before I died, but all I got was, “Be careful. Don’t get it on my shoes.”

When I was at my lowest, on my hands and knees, dry-heaving in the midway, she said, “It’s after eight. We better be getting home.”

I panicked. It wasn’t time to leave. Nine o’clock was her curfew and I had big plans in mind for this girl, this night... before the clock struck nine. I couldn’t take her home yet. I had to get her in a better mood so I could spring my trap. What could I…

My gaze fell upon the shooting gallery. I hated that shooting gallery for taking all my money in 1960. I had come back each year since, seeking revenge, but never got it. What made me think things would be different now? Nothing. But I needed more time with Sherry and so I said the first thing that came into my mind: “Let’s try the shooting gallery.”

“We really need to get going, Randy.”

I spat the last of the bile from my mouth and pointed to the wall of prizes. “I’ll win you that purple poodle.”

The purple poodle was the largest stuffed toy on the wall.

“Okay,” she said, matter-of-factly.

My bluff had been called. I could stand there and shoot in that rigged gallery forever and never win a prize; which would be more time with Sherry, but I’d be spending it making a fool of myself, getting ripped off again, like all the times before.

But miracles happen: Either Jesus came down and directed my shots or that carny was so distracted by the pretty girl at my side that he didn't do what he should have done to make me lose, and I won the purple poodle!

Sherry, whose belief in me was apparently (and unaccountably) unlimited, said, “I knew you could do it.”

We took the scenic route home from Covington to Robert by way of Mandeville, stopping on a strip of Lake Pontchartrain shoreline that, despite its lack of sand, we called “the beach.” We ran and played among limbs and tree trunks left over from Hurricane Betsy’s passage the year before. Stopping to catch my breath, I leaned against a fallen oak, reached out for her hand and said, “Will you marry me?”

“Me? You want me?” she said.

She’d seen me at my worst that night, throwing up the last corndogs I would ever eat. She’d heard and believed my outrageous promise to win the purple poodle, a valuable clue, if one was needed, about my personality. And now this rash (?) proposal …because I could no longer imagine life without her… Could she square all that with whatever dream she had of the life she wanted for herself?

She made me tell her twice that I was sure and then she said, "Okay." And it started raining and we ran to the car and turned on the radio in time to hear The Lovin' Spoonful's Rain On The Roof, which we took to be a sign. (Of course, everything's a sign when you're in love.)

She named the purple poodle Pierre and slept with him, holding him desperately tight, as tightly as she could, every night from then until the following June, when I took his place.

I HOPE YOU DANCE

By Randy Reynolds

Until Donna Archer plied me with girl-drinks at The Bleachers—Monroe, Louisiana’s favorite hot spot in the early 1980’s—I had never danced before. Unless, of course, you count the Hokey-Pokey, which I don’t. Or that time with Mary Alice Dubuisson’s mother, but that was only practice.

When my first-grade teacher said we were going to “dance the Hokey-Pokey” I tried to opt out on the grounds that I didn’t want to go to Hell, but she assured me that God loved the Hokey-Pokey (…and He probably does…along with a lot of other dances) so I did it.

In junior high (at Lee Road,) I was elected Mardi Gras King one year, and Mary Alice Dubuisson, the queen, invited our “court” to her house for a dancing lesson a few days prior to the ball. No way could I let my parents know that I was going to a Catholic girl’s house to dance, so I arranged my own transportation (horseback, through the swamp.) Smelling like a horse, and—in retrospect—probably dancing like one, too, I spent a fearful, guilt-ridden, afternoon at the Dubuisson home doing the shimmy-she-wobble (a synonym for dancing that my dad, the preacher, often used.) When word reached my folks that I was “involved in the Mardi Gras” and that dancing was expected to break out, they forced me to resign my kingship. Or abdicate. Or whatever eighth-grade Mardi Gras kings do when their parents won’t let them shimmy-she-wobble.

I took my girlfriend Sherry to Homecoming and the Prom at Covington High, but we didn’t dance. She sat demurely behind the stage while I took the microphone and emceed the event. After my welcoming remarks and introduction of the king and queen and so on, we fled into the night to be, like all good church kids, alone. Away from all that sin.

At those events, Sherry would be the only girl in the gym without makeup—her folks, as a religious principle, didn’t believe in it or allow it (and even as an adult she was scared to use makeup until, at 31, a neighbor took her by the hand, sat her in front of a dresser, and showed her what to do.) Sherry was 15 when I met her, and her only makeup accessory at the time was an eyelash-curler that she used obsessively. If she wanted to highlight her cheeks, she pinched them until they turned red. The only thing she was allowed to put on her lips was chapstick.

She went hungry at school because she was too shy to take a single bite in front of anyone else. She’d go through the lunch line at the CHS cafeteria, take her tray to a table, and sit there looking at her hands in her lap, afraid that if she looked up she’d see somebody laughing at her. When the kids around her finished eating, she’d get up as they did, and throw her food away.

I gradually, during that last year of high school, helped her become at ease eating in front of people. (I have a picture of her in a blue jersey dress mugging for the camera with her mouth full, one of the first times she ever took a bite of anything in my presence.)

She never had a fancy dress (much less an evening gown or formal) until I took matters into my own hands when she was a junior in high school. With savings from my $12.00 per week salary, I bought some red velvet and lace, took Sherry to a seamstress to be measured, and paid to have a dress made. She was the belle of the ball (that is, the church-sponsored/no-dancing Christmas banquet sponsored by a Covington church.) Midnight struck at 9 p.m. for us (her rigidly-enforced curfew), but to make sure that I would never forget our Cinderella night, I arranged, soon

afterward, to have her sit for a portrait in that red-velvet dress. (Ogden studios painted in some makeup, even though she wasn’t wearing any when the picture was taken, and Sherry felt guilty about it. I thought it was pretty sad to fear that even makeup on a picture was a sin.)

Buying material together? Taking measurements? Commissioning a dress and a portrait? Teaching her to eat? Was I somewhat controlling? Yes. I told myself she needed it and I was perfect for the job because in many ways I was just like her—I knew where she was coming from—shy and repressed, a loner, a preacher’s kid, self-conscious.

Like her, I wasn’t allowed to go to “worldly places of amusement” such as the movies, bowling, skating, swimming in the presence of the opposite sex, dancing, or to parties where dancing was going on. Like her, I felt out of place associating with people who didn’t interpret the Bible the same way we did, because those people, based on what we’d been taught, were going to Hell unless they had a last-minute conversion. (This caused me to feel very sorry for the Catholics—especially the nice ones.)

I'd had even more trouble fitting in at high school than she did, thanks, in part, to arriving at Covington High in the fall of 1964 with my bandaged big toes sticking through holes cut in the tops of my shoes. This footwear, which put a serious crimp in both my social and athletic life, was designed by Dr. Kety and necessitated by the repeated toe surgery that he had none-too-delicately performed on me... but that’s another story.

I was still a loner when I met Sherry. But I was the loner who was also band announcer, student emcee, Boy Scout leader, WARB deejay, chorus member, jokester, writer. I was also an off-and-on athlete on school teams (mostly off); I was a daredevil; and I was freakishly competitive at anything that ended with a winner and a loser--tennis, badminton, archery, horse-racing, swimming, darts, cards, chess, paper football, hangman, Scrabble, hula-hoop, bouncing a ball off the side of the house, shooting baskets, throwing rocks. Winning something—anything—was a validation that I needed every day.

So the preacher’s daughter who was way too shy and tender, and the preacher’s son, who was overly aggressive and daring, realized we complemented each other perfectly, got married at the end of the school year and moved 500 miles away to begin life anew.

By her thirties, when she was a mother three times over, married half her life and still poor as dirt, things changed. Better stated, she changed things. In a breathtaking arc of self-motivation and determination she transformed herself into a successful, and—surprise!!—aggressive businesswoman.

One day at the beginning of this transformation, she was forced by a caring neighbor into a seat in front of a mirror and taught the mysterious rituals forbidden to her under pain of hellfire as a teen: the neighbor taught her to use makeup. Something about the process, the look, or maybe just stepping across that line, accelerated the emergence of the real Sherry. (Patricia, wherever you are, thanks for doing that for your repressed little neighbor!)

Sherry’s first boss in Monroe—Donna—dragged her into The Bleachers in the early 1980's, convinced her to fortify herself with some sweet-tasting drink, and pushed her onto the dance floor to commit the mortal sin of dancing. Some nights, the two of them gave me dance lessons, too—my first since Mrs. Dubuisson.

Obviously, learning to dance as a thirty-something would not normally be considered an earth-shattering experience. But it was for us, because no fire and brimstone rained down and the earth did not open up and swallow us whole.

---------------

And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance

I hope you dance

Time is a real and constant motion always

Rolling us along

Tell me who

Wants to look back on their youth and wonder

Where those years have gone
I hope you dance

~I HOPE YOU DANCE, written by Tia Sillers/Mark Sanders

-----------------------------------------

She held him desperately tight in bed each night from October until the following June when I took his place.
http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/purple-poodle.html

When, despite all the prophecies at church, the world did not end that year, I began to breathe normally again, without the nervous snort that had driven off all my friends. I also quit believing every little thing I heard at church.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/sneak-preview-of-elvis-syndrome.html

Parking to watch the 'submarine races' was a sin, but I figured it would be overturned someday like all the others and I wanted to be ahead of the curve.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/hokey-pokey-shimmy-she-wobble-and-other.html

Eddie came to school the next day wearing a neck brace but refused to give me credit: he said his neck was already sprained before the fight.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/07/preachers-kid.html

I got a fulltime girlfriend, a really jealous one, carved her initials into my arm, and stopped trying to impress all the other girls with my respiratory skills.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/acorn-trick.html

I settled onto the ground beside Alex' grave and ate my lemon, peel and all, while looking over the spelling words on the mimeographed handout. The first word on the sheet was misspelled, but I assumed it was supposed to be "Audacious." I also assumed I didn't want to waste a perfectly good afternoon studying words I could already spell better than my teacher, so I said goodbye to Alex, bridled my one-eyed horse Ranger and rode up the road to Johnny Johnson’s house to play with his monkey. http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/audacious.html

I threw the baseball as hard as I could and someone yelled, “Coach, look out!” Coach Whittington turned just in time for the ball to hit him in the eye. He dropped like a sack of feed. http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/daredevil.html

In retrospect, I don't believe there were as many virgins at Youth Camp that year as Brother Ernie thought.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/03/blackberry-wine.html

I rushed into Holden's bathroom and locked the door behind me. Being alone, at last, with the condom machine felt weird. I could hear my own heartbeat. The back of my neck felt hot. So did the forty quarters in my front pocket.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2009/03/forty-condoms.html

A self-confident little thing, she had no qualms about slipping into the bedroom with me in the middle of the school day and testing her resistance to temptation.

http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2011/07/out-of-closet.html

Conventional wisdom at my daddy's church and hers, was that we were too young to get married. They gave us six months at most.
http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/six-months-at-most.html

Everybody in radio knew that "housewife music" was the smooth, slow, calming, middle-of-the-road stuff. But the lonely, bored housewife that I left at home each morning taught me different. When she was down, Sherry would call during my show and say, "I feel so bad. Play something to get me going. Play Crocodile Rock." And I'd play one fast song after another, only the fastest, funnest dance tunes, the hot hits! No soft stuff! She'd get the housework done in record time, blindfold the dog and beg me to hurry home. When I invented a format based on Sherry's preferences, we became the number one station in the nation.
http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2008/04/magic.html

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1583176009

OUT OF THE CLOSET

by Randy Reynolds

The problem with living in a small town like Covington was that everyone knew what everyone else was doing. And when they were doing it. And where. It was pretty pathetic, for instance, that I couldn’t even skip school to meet my girlfriend without being noticed by Coach Salter, who certainly hadn’t noticed me for those few weeks that I had sat on his bench dying to get into a game. Somehow, though, as he watched me walk away from school in the middle of that day in 1965, his memory was restored, my name came back to him and he reported me to the principal, Louis Wagner.

A beige, eight-passenger 1964 Chevy station wagon crossed the intersection in front of me as I neared my girlfriend's house. I noticed the car because we had one just like it, and whichever model we had in a particular year, it seemed like those were the cars I noticed the most.

(What are the odds of a truant crossing paths with his dad a half block away from his girlfriend’s house en route to a romantic tryst? Like I said: small town.)

Dad continued on to the hospital to visit some sick church members, stopping at the front desk to borrow the phone to call my principal.

Mr. Wagner was a former Navy Captain. He took pride in running a tight ship at Covington High and he did not appreciate men (or boys) going AWOL. He especially did not appreciate being put on the spot. So when my dad said, “Can you explain to me, sir, just why you allow your students to roam the streets of Covington in the middle of the school day?” the wheels of military justice began to turn in Captain Louis’ head.

On my girlfriend's front porch I popped a Lifesaver into my mouth, intending to stand there just long enough to crunch it and give my breath that sweet Wint-o-green smell, but the girl hadn't invited me over just to be a porch ornament. She flung the door open wide, looked both ways, up and down the street, and jerked me inside, double-locking the door and lip-locking me all in one fluid motion.

(Rendezvous underway! It would be jeopardized by yet another witness, but that was later, minutes into the future and I was in no position to heed the future. All I cared about was 'now.' My biological clock was ticking.)

She stripped the school books from my hand, flipped them onto the couch and maneuvered me toward her bedroom, a place where we both knew that nothing much was going to happen because the instant it could happen, she’d give me her “Respect” speech-- the one about how much my respect meant to her, how it meant more than all the joy a boy and girl could have; how it was 'forever;' and ‘forever’ was more important than ‘now.’ That speech of hers could have stopped Pharoah’s army at the edge of the Red Sea. The way she delivered it could make a grown man cry. And I, a lowly sophomore, was nowhere near being a grown man. She, therefore, had no qualms about slipping into the bedroom with me in the middle of the school day and testing her resistance to temptation.

We were getting close to her self-imposed limits--the "Respect" speech was probably on the tip of her tongue--when someone banged on the front door. Our tongues retreated into our own mouths, our lips came unglued from each other and all four of our feet hit the floor at the same time.

“Who IS it?” she yelled. The person on the porch kept pounding.

Despite her petite build, my girlfriend had the strength of a sumo wrestler--or else her adrenalin kicked into high gear like those people who do superhuman things in emergencies, like lift a car off their baby when it falls off the jack. She grabbed me by the front of my shirt, dragged me across the room and threw me into the closet. “Get in! And if you make a sound, I’ll kill you.”

I knew she meant it: she would not think twice about killing me if I did anything to jeopardize her reputation.

The knocking continued. “Just a MINUTE!”

She opened the closet door again, threw my books and shoes at me, and hissed, “Stay!”

Crammed in among the women's clothing, trying to will myself not to scratch what itched, and trying not to sneeze, I poured out my soul to Jesus. I made Him every promise in the book, everything I could think of to make Him happy, and all I asked for in return was for Him to keep my dad from marching into this house, yanking me out of the closet and belt-whipping me in front of my girlfriend. I was saying, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus..." just like the old ladies at church, when I heard the front door open.

My girlfriend greeted someone way too cheerfully. Then a voice that definitely wasn’t my dad’s asked if he could come in. The voice got closer, so I figured the answer was yes. He was in.

It was her other boyfriend. Supposedly her ex, but if he was an ex why was he stopping by in the middle of the day when she was skipping school? How did he even know she would be here? Was this a habit of hers? Had she skipped school with him, too? He was a friend of mine, but a couple of years older than me and I had to ask myself what I would do if he opened the closet and found me. Should I say something clever, or just knock him down and run for my life? Unable to think of a good one-liner, I decided that violence was the way to go.

Someone turned on the TV set. What the hell? The Cardinals were playing the Yanks in the World Series. The volume got louder and all I could hear was Curt Gowdy describing Bob Gibson's high hard ones that the Yankees couldn't handle. This was infuriating: were my girlfriend and her boyfriend really interested in this ballgame, or was it on just to keep me from hearing what was really going on? I couldn't stand this any longer!

I eased out of the closet and over to the bedroom door. Opening it just a crack, I could see the two of them still standing. It looked like he was trying to get further into the house and she was blocking his way. If the fool got to the bedroom and discovered me in there, the girl would kill us both. She’d get a butcher knife and slaughter us where we stood rather than allow her reputation to be compromised by one boyfriend’s discovery of another in her bedroom. She was that concerned with her reputation.

Deciding to save her the trouble, I put on my loafers, picked up my books and snuck out the kitchen door. I made it back to Covington High in time hear the final bell and blend in with the crowd that erupted from the school.

Riding the bus back to the country that afternoon, I was oblivious to the other kids around me. Half-listening to Robert E. Rabbit on WTIX, I stared at my slyly smiling reflection in the window between me and the Lee Road scenery that I knew so well. After every emotion I’d felt that day—fear, anger, jealousy, a couple of minor heart attacks, a chance to test the “Respect” rules again, I felt relieved. Triumphant.

Life was good for a boy who knew he was too smart to get caught.

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REMEMBER THAT SNAKE?

by Randy Reynolds

My brother Ricky and Uncle Donnie, both 13, were impressed that Daddy had let me drive the station wagon to Atwood’s store in the rain. Except for me, age 15, there was no adult in the car. And to prove just how grown up I was, I sped up and slammed on the brakes several times to make the car spin and slide. They screamed and begged me to stop, then begged me to do it again.

We were on Lee Road beside the Campground when the brightly-colored snake crossed in front of us. I slammed the gear into park, jumped out of the car, put my foot on the snake’s tail and yelled for Ricky to get me a stick.

Donnie jumped to the Campground side of the ditch, away from the action, and lit up a Winston.

“Watch out!” he yelled.

I looked up in time to see a huge gold sedan sliding across the center line toward me and the snake. It barely missed us, fishtailed to a stop and backed up.

A woman leaned out the window and said, “Watch out, boy! There’s a rattlesnake by your foot!”

“No ma’m. It’s just a corn snake,” I said. “I’m catching him for a pet.”

She looked at me like I was crazy and spun away.

After Ricky used a stick to pin the snake to the pavement, I grabbed it by the head and it wrapped itself around my arm, coil after coil, a brilliant, twisting, pulsing orange armband that I wore home, driving with one hand.

I strode into the kitchen like a hero, placing the bread upon the sink then thrusting my arm and the writhing snake over my mother’s shoulder from behind.

She bleated and, as her knees buckled, threw a handful of raw spaghetti into the air; my grandmother screamed for Jesus; the tea kettle whistled. My father and grandfather and four younger sisters rushed into the room, saw the snake, and fell all over each other reversing direction.

Above the pandemonium I could hear Daddy threatening to do some very creative things to me, so I exited in the opposite direction.

Ricky and Donnie followed me into the yard laughing and punching each other in the arm like Gomer and Goober, imitating Mother’s scream and Daddy’s threats.

I put the corn snake in an army trunk in the shed and fastened the latches securely.

After a meal during which Mother looked at me like I was the spawn of the devil and Daddy alternately berated me and snickered, we three boys hurried back to study our prize. I unlocked the trunk and opened the lid an inch at a time, so as not to give the snake a chance to get out.

“What the…?!!” I threw the lid open wide.

Ricky and Donnie gasped.

The trunk was empty!

The three of us get together now about once every decade, usually at a funeral. If we're outdoors, Donnie will light up a Winston as we talk about the dearly departed. And when the conversation lags, one of us always says, "Remember that snake?"

How it got out of that trunk is one of the enduring mysteries of our lives.

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THE BB GUN

By Randy Reynolds

The first Jenkins I slept with wasn’t Sherry, the one I eventually married. It was Raleigh Jenkins, an evangelist who came to run a revival at our church in Macon, Georgia, just before Christmas, 1957, when I was eight.

I had no idea that company was coming and I didn’t see him arrive because I was already asleep in my rabbit pajamas with the big ears and footies when he got there. In the middle of the night when a crack of thunder woke me up, I scrambled out of bed and down the hall as fast as I could move in the thick pj’s. I slipped into my parents’ bed and snuggled up against Daddy’s back, where I felt safer than anywhere else. I went to sleep to the sounds of Daddy’s soft snores and rain pelting the tin roof.

What I didn’t know was that Mother and Daddy had given the evangelist their room and I was snuggled up to the back of Brother Raleigh. He was a very surprised young preacher when he woke up soaking wet the next morning with an equally wet bunny rabbit snuggled against him. He sat up in bed, which woke me up. I took one look at him and screamed and Mother came running.

She made excuses for me. “He comes to our bedroom when he gets scared at night. The thunderstorm must have woke him up and he thought you were Gene and, and…”

At the breakfast table, Brother Raleigh described how it felt to get peed on by a large rabbit and my daddy roared with laughter. Preachers are, first and foremost, performers and Brother Raleigh, gratified by the response, told the story over and over. I hung my head in shame, anxious for breakfast to be over so I could go touch the BB gun again—the one that I was going to get for Christmas that I had discovered hidden in my parents’ chifarobe.

I wanted that Daisy BB gun more than I would ever want anything in my life, with the possible exception of horses (which were out of the question) and the Jenkins girl (whom I would later marry.) Many years later, when I first saw The Christmas Story, in which Ralphie begged for a Red Ryder BB gun, it was like someone had written a chapter of my life. I had gone through the same ordeal as Ralphie, begging my parents for a BB gun. My mother, like Ralphie’s, had argued against it, saying I might put my eye out. I was bitterly disappointed that I wasn’t going to get it. But then, while plundering their chifarobe, I found it—a no-frills, lever-action Daisy BB gun. My heart nearly leaped out of my chest the first time I saw it and touched it, and since that day I had frequently snuck into the chifarobe to hold it and pet it. I kissed it, too. It was soon to be mine, all mine. My very own BB gun. Proof that I had become a man.

An evangelist living in the house all week can’t be ignored by his hosts, so Brother Raleigh went where Dad went: on hospital rounds, visiting church members, paying bills—he shared Daddy’s schedule for the week. Which meant he heard a lot of talk, because my daddy was a nonstop talker. They say 40,000 words is a novel? Well, my daddy spoke about a novel a day or more. From one subject to the next, he just talked and talked and talked and talked. And people liked it, because he was a good talker, with lots of great stories and a first-rate mind and could talk about things that other people hadn't learned yet. The problem was, once he started talking, he didn’t hold anything back. He even told Brother Raleigh about the BB gun in the chifarobe and about Mother being against it because I might shoot my eye out.

And so it came to pass that the day after the revival was over, I gave my little brother and sister the slip and snuck into the chifarobe to hold my BB gun. But it wasn’t there. I went into the living room and examined all the presents under the Christmas tree, but none of them was shaped like a BB gun.

I looked under the beds, behind the couch, between the stove and refrigerator.

“What are you looking for?” asked Mother.

“I know y’all bought me a BB gun,” I said.

“Oh, sweetie…” she began.

“But it’s not in the chifarobe anymore. I think Ricky took it.”

“Now, Randy, you know I didn’t want you to have a BB gun this year. You’ll put your eye out.”

“But you already got it. It was in the chifarobe and now it’s gone!”

“I know, sugar, but your Daddy and I, well, we just thought you ought to wait a year or two.”

“Nooooooo!” I wailed.

“Your Daddy mentioned it to Brother Raleigh and he has a little nephew that wants a BB gun, so he bought it from us and we’re going to get you something better.”

I ran away from her, threw myself onto my bed and cried till I ran out of tears.

Many years later, when I was co-owner and General Manager of a radio station in North Georgia, a middle-aged fellow down on his luck applied for a job as a deejay. I didn’t recognize him at first, but the resume’ revealed that he was the same Raleigh Jenkins who used to be a preacher and had run that revival for us in Macon. He remembered the bunny rabbit peeing on him the night of the thunderstorm and we had a good laugh.

I forget now why I didn’t hire him. I hope he doesn’t read this and think it was because of the BB gun.

BLACKBERRY WINE

By Randy Reynolds

Richie Maklary made an excellent blackberry wine in his Granny Barker’s canning jars.

The 1963 edition was opaque with a hint of toxic fungus and a slushy consistency highlighted with blackberry pulp. The flavor profile was fruity with notes of yeast and sweeter on the palate than pure Domino sugar scooped from the bag. The finish was gaseous and the result on the digestive system was, to put it mildly, odiferous. But it was the effect on the imagination that was most notable. Under its influence we thought we were invincible--and we almost were.

If we'd had BFF’s back then Richie would have been mine except for the year I couldn’t breathe because our Sunday School teacher told us that Red China was going to nuke Lee Road before the end of the year; I know my nervous snorting for air made me a pariah all that year and I can’t blame Richie, or anyone, for not wanting to be around me. However, when both Jesus and Red China tarried and Lee Road was saved and I could breathe again without sounding like a rooting hog, Richie once again became my best friend.

He and I went to the same church (Shepherd’s Fold) where we whispered and cut up on the back bench and my dad would stop in mid-sermon and order me to the front—memorable embarrassments for me, great amusement for Richie.

In the woods one day near the home of Lee Road's first grade teacher Miss Lewis—who had the only brick house in our extended community—a blacksnake crossed our path and Richie just reached down and picked it up. I was fascinated that someone could be that crazy. And I’ve been doing the same ever since.

(A friend of ours would later try to burn down those piney woods around Miss Lewis’ house—apparently just for the sheer joy of watching it burn—but a deputy happened to drive by just as said friend was throwing gasoline onto the bushes. Our friend was arrested and the woods were saved. But never let it be said that Lee Road was boring.)

Richie and I were among the culprits who got caught breaking the rules on a camping trip by skinny-dipping in an almost-freezing creek because we wanted to prove we were as manly as our Scoutmaster who had told a tale about doing the same thing at our age. Mr. Bill didn't buy our argument that we were just honoring him by following in his skinny-dipping footsteps and he sent us home early to explain ourselves to our parents.

It was at Richie’s house, on a Sunday night, that I first saw The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Richie had feigned sickness to get out of going to church that night and I had been visiting with him all day, so I took the liberty of staying with him despite knowing that I'd be punished for it later. Our church was very down on anything related to The Beatles—and this was years before John commented that their fame was so ridiculous that they were more popular in Britain than Jesus--a money-raising, attendance-boosting statement our churches are still cashing in on! Although they performed in suits and ties, The Beatles’ appearance was ridiculed from the pulpit--hair halfway covering their ears; those communist Beatle boots; songs designed to corrupt young people, with titles such as I Wanna Hold Your Hand, P.S. I Love You, She Loves Me, Do You Wanna Know A Secret and Love Me Do. Why, that trash would make a single girl want to get married and a married one want to shimmy-she-wobble (the word my dad, the pastor, used for dancing, which we regarded as a sin even for married couples)!

When Richie burgled the Fussell's storage shed on Jarrell Road, I was right behind him. We stole a few whatnots and decorated his tree house with them. This was the first time I had stolen anything since the age of 5 when I had slipped a roll of Lifesavers into my underwear at the grocery store and Daddy, noticing my remarkable bulge as we walked to the car, had made me go back in and apologize. Now, feeling guilty about our burglary, I decided to put the stuff back where we got it. So one day when Richie wasn’t around, I went to his tree-house and stole it all back. But a funny thing happened on my way to the Fussell shed: I got the better of my conscience and took the whatnots to MY tree house. It was a proud moment: I had stolen the same stuff twice without getting caught.

We found a set of bedsprings and a mattress in the woods—who knows who put them there, or why they left used condoms for anyone to find. We dragged the bedding to a strategic position beneath Richie's tree house and executed daring swan-dives and heart-stopping back-flips, knocking the breath out of ourselves each time we landed on the mattress and springs. A slight miscalculation could have killed us.

(My mother, when I whined “All my friends are going, why can’t I?”, never knew how useless it was to say, “If your friends were going to jump off a bridge, would you jump off it, too?” Of course I would! After following Richie out of the tree-house, backward, with my arms folded in death and my eyes closed, a bridge was no big deal.)

It was Richie, on his cousin’s mare Lucky, who talked me into a race on my brother’s gelding Kawliga on the paved portion of Lee Road. When Kawliga fell, I suffered a massive blow to the head and now I wonder if that damage is the reason that I think differently from everyone I know who came out of the Lee Road area--(which, in turn, makes me wonder if all they need is a whack on the head to straighten out their thinking, too.) Also, that was the fall that busted my knee, an injury that was to keep me from being drafted during the Vietnam War. Who knows how differently I would have turned out had I not, under Richie's leadership, cracked my skull and knee on Lee Road that day?

Richie and I got many of our life-lessons at the same time, including the sex education offered at the amphitheater at Youth Camp in which Brother Ernie Miller was touched by the Holy Ghost and "spoke in tongues" after warning us what would happen to “these boys who go around deflowering our virgins.” (I don't know if "our virgins" referred to America's, or the South's, or that particular Youth Camp's virgins, but--in retrospect--I don't think there were as many of them there as Brother Ernie thought.) Richie and I weren’t even sure what the word meant and had to go for further clarification to some of the older boys—maybe the very culprits, themselves.

That was the year that Brother Ernie, like all young preachers that I remember, preached about his wanton early years and how God had saved him from all the terrible things he used to do that WE hadn’t even had a chance to do yet. The saved part didn’t sound nearly as delightful as the sins he was saved from—such as mixing Aqua Velva aftershave with Coca-Cola as a substitute for liquor. Richie and I spent the rest of that Youth Camp drinking Aqua Velva and Coca-Cola and talking about virgins. For these and certain other reasons, it’s a wonder we didn’t go blind that year.

Back home after Youth Camp, we got off the Aqua Velva and started back on Richie’s blackberry wine. There was nothing that loosened our inhibitions as effectively as sharing a jug of Richie’s wine before committing a burglary, picking up a snake, falling backwards out of a tree-house, racing horses on the highway or speculating about virgins.