Friday, June 25

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June 25, Friday - Washed this morning and went to store this afternoon. Johnson wasn't too happy that I wouldn't be back until the 12th. Stayed home last night - no fishing. Talked to Marie.

June 26, Saturday - Marv and I ironed and I packed Bud's and my suitcase. Went to Doctor Allen in afternoon. Delivered bait and sat on back porch with neighbors till 10.

June 27, Sunday - My birthday. Started trip. Doesn't seem that I should be 50. Breakfast in Junction City, lunch in. Supper and stayed all night in Limon. Bud is traveling better this trip.

Damn, I can't believe mom was (only) 50 at the time. Age perspective is entirely relative, and skewed when approached from a position of ignorant youth. Happy Birthday, mom.

For the record, if mom were still with us, she'd be 105 on the 27th.

Westward hoo boy! Getting from Kansas City to Colorado in 1965 wasn't the straight, flat, superslab adventure it is today. Interstate 70 (the first Interstate highway in the country, thanks to President Eisenhower, semi-native son and local hero) was still being constructed, and much of the trip west was on U.S. 40, a two-lane highway with a 60 mph speed limit, and a town every six or ten miles. We saw them all. "The Victory Highway." It took forever to get anywhere once you got past the smooth, fast, Kansas Turnpike at Topeka.

Our trips Way Out West* usually went something like this: Assemble the members of the traveling caravan at Tom and Pansy's house at 1501 Garfield in Kansas City, Kansas. The target time for this was around 4:30 a.m. This gave the participants, which could number anywhere from six to fifteen people, a chance to have a cup of grandma's hot, brown liquid that she claimed was coffee, have a pre-travel prayer and bible-verse reading, usually led by my dad, and head out the door to the waiting cars. It was a Baptist Le Mans start.

The largest of these groups was the Great Yellowstone Vacation of 1959. There were twelve or fourteen of the Patton Clan in a caravan of five cars.We didn't take our car, a 1947 Chevy Stylemaster of questionable roadworthiness. Instead, we got to drive grandad's fairly new 1958 Chevy sedan. There was a catch, though. It had to be the lead car, and my grandma had to ride shotgun. Meanwhile, grandpa Tom rode with some of the others. I thought this was odd for many years, but now I understand. Grandpa loved riding with my uncle Bob in his big, lime-green, 1958 Pontiac Bonneville. Wider than a locomotive, and made of pure Detroit chrome, it laid down the miles like a flying carpet from One Thousand and One Nights. Blink, and you're in Denver.

Grandma absolutely loved to travel. Grandma had also never learned to drive. This meant that, as we traveled, grandma's eyes were on the horizon, thinking about where we should be headed, not about how tired the driver may be, or how many miles had lapsed since anyone got a break of any kind. About the time the driver would be looking for a place to pull the wagons in a circle for the night, grandma would have a look at a road map, and say, "Let's drive on to (insert name of distant town here)." As the days passed, and this routine repeated itself several times, my dad lobbied for a different arrangement, and somewhere near Independence Rock, Wyoming, grandma became the subject of a secret morning coin toss. Whoever lost got Pansy and became the de facto lead car. Another Patton Family legend in the making.

Grandma's love of traveling became part of Patton Family Legend at her 1971 funeral. She died in August of that year, and friends and family gathered at the Nichols Funeral Home in Kansas City, Kansas to have a few laughs and say goodbye. This is how we did things. Funerals were not moribund group-crying events. They were celebrations and a whole lot of fun, really. My date said she had never laughed so hard at a funeral. Yeah, I had a date for Grandma's funeral. After the services, the cortége lined up and headed north for Leavenworth County and our Family Reserve. (Hi, Lyle.) My dad was in the lead car with the funeral director, giving driving instructions. He was wholly unqualified for this job.

 To prove this, he instructed the limo driver to take a left turn off of HIghway 92 in the middle of Downtown Leavenworth. The driver did as instructed and soon, the snaking line of vehicles was jammed into a couple of side streets. One was a dead end.

One by one, the cars, limos, and hearse started turning around on the narrow back street. I was in my Mustang a few cars back. An older woman who was pulling weeds in her front yard stopped what she was doing to watch the processional mayhem. She motioned to one of the limo drivers. He rolled down his window. 

She yelled, "You can't go this way. It's a dead end." 

That was the end of any kind of decorum for the rest of the day. As the family car passed me headed back the other way, I could see my mom and my uncle Bob laughing their asses off. My date looked at me in wonder. 

When we finally made it out to our oak-shaded cemetery near Easton, Kansas, and the casket moved to the gravesite, the minister started the service: 

"Pansy Patton always loved to travel. Especially in Leavenworth County." 

That was it. There were so many people howling with laughter that it took several minutes to get things calmed down enough to finish the funeral. We laughed about it for years. It was that kind of family.

Dudes, Wyoming, 1959
Uncle Walt, Uncle Bob, great-Uncle John, dad,
Grandpa Tom and The Black-Hatted Barefoot Bud - Five Feet tall at age eight.

Anyway, back to 1965. Mom and I were riding this trip with my aunt Patty and my cousin Susan. This was the tightest pod of the Pattons, and we often vacationed together. We laughed a lot. My cousin Susan was two years older than I was, and we had been best buds for as long as I could remember, longer actually. Susan was the big sister I never had.

Himself, my cousin Susan, and Aunt Patty at the top of Pikes Peak

We lost Susan a few years ago, and though we had drifted apart as adults, I still miss the great times and the laughter we shared. She was an amazing cook, and passed that gene on to her daughter.

We drove out in my aunt Patty's red 1962 Chevrolet Impala SS convertible, and a couple of hours after after the ungodly middle-of-the-night start, we rolled into Junction City, Kansas for breakfast. We had a regular downtown cafe stop there, and though I can't remember where, I do remember what - pancakes, always pancakes. Butter, syrup, cold frothy milk. I usually woke up again around Hays.

1962 Chevy - Image:http://allamericanclassiccars.blogspot.com/

The topic of conversation around our meals was always what we were going to do for the next meal, though this time around we had either packed sandwich stuff and ate at a city park somewhere along the way - Hays, Russell, or Wakeeny - or mom skipped a groove and didn't finish the sentence. An overnight stay at Limon included a ceremonial "We made it this far." dinner and a trip to the local municipal pool to wear out the road-hyper kids, then off to bed for another early start the next day.

"Bud is traveling better." is mom-code for Bud isn't having his violent episodes of car-sickness this trip. Nice. Oy, I could tell you stories.

* Do you have any idea how difficult it was to work in a Laurel and Hardy reference in a blog post about a road trip in 1965? Be amazed. I could connect even more dots and add Tilda Swinton to the narrative, but it's getting late. Besides, if you know, you know.

Monday, March 22

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March 22, Monday - More blood - and an Xray. Al Mathis stopped, Marv and Bud sent flowers. Marie and Betty J. came up and paid for TV for me whenever I want it. Nice group of people I work with.

23 March, Tuesday - Surgery at 8 a.m. Everything that has ever happened to me has made me a better person in some way. Whatever happens today will be all right  do the same and be all right.

24 March, Wednesday - Not much good today. Bud and Marv came over and spent the day. Oodles of flowers from so many nice people. All my family has been up at least once.

There are few things that will make you feel more helpless than spending the day visiting someone you love while they're in the hospital recovering from major surgery. Mom lost her left breast and a major amount of chest tissue and lymph nodes to cancer.

Dad and I spent as much time as possible on the fifth floor with mom, and then we'd retreat to the coffee shop in the lobby to decompress.

At one point dad went out to the parking lot to smoke his pipe. I stayed inside and tried to do homework, but I was so distracted, I went to find him. He was sitting on the curb, sobbing. It was the first time I ever saw him cry.

I only saw him cry one more time - the day in September 1972 when I left home and moved to Colorado. It shook me to see him like that, and it's only recently that I have come to understand the depth of hopelessness and painful despair that causes emotions to spill out like that. For all his faults and myopic shortcomings, my dad truly loved my mom.

Sunday, February 7

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February 7, Sunday - Damp and foggy. Went to church - communion. Mom took Bud and me to see Mary Poppins. Outstanding. When we got out of the show, freezing rain. Supposed to snow. More war in Vietnam.

February 8, Monday - Took Bud to school, got a permanent, cashed a bond - (didn't want to) did the laundry. Picked Bud up. Marv doesn't feel well, real peevish.

February 9, Tuesday - Wore my glasses all day. Got along pretty well. Business slow. Marie and I are in the dog house (home). Bud joined the Speech Club. So foggy I couldn't see across the street.

Couldn't tell you from Mary Poppins. I remember seeing it, but it felt like a fever dream to me. Flying nannies and all just didn't resonate with a kid from a tough blue-collar neighborhood.

Baptist communion was grape juice and teensy little host wafers - about half the size of Chiclets. Low-sodium, and not at all filling. The "Welch's wine" made it through the horseshoe-shaped sanctuary of Bales Baptist Church in one of several chrome trays with little half-shot glasses and the wafers were passed around the church on plates with little doilies on them. I often wondered if there were official Baptist doilies, or if these were off the rack. My confusion grew quite a bit the first time I attended a Catholic mass at Holy Trinity, right around the corner from home. That was really hard for my tiny Protestant brain to wrap around. They got big crackers and a visit with the priest, but no table service. Catholics had all the cool stuff - statues, candles, medieval vestments, and a standing routine that parishioners could recite in their sleep.

Several times, mom refers to cashing bonds. These were mature U.S. Savings bonds, and mom and dad burned through their nest egg just trying to keep their heads above water. This was particularly evident in winter, when dad couldn't make fish bait. We always ate better in summer.

Marie Cook and mom were the glue that held the front end together at the store, but somehow when one of them got in hot water they both did. This was most often because of a short till, or for a bad check that came back.

Speech club was a branch of Mrs. Womack's speech class, and went by the all-too-clever name of "Taming of the Crew." During the pledge phase, established TOCs, who always traveled in packs like coyotes, could stop you in the hall, and require you to perform "buttons." A button was a maneuver where you stuck one arm out to the side, placed your opposite index finger on your nose, and then proceeded to do deep squats, the number determined by the sadistic drama-nerd coyote ringleader. Since I was fresh from my broken foot, I was exempt from the buttons embarrassment. Instead, I was usually handed a script of some kind, and ordered to recite, as loudly as possible, in the middle of the cavernous concrete halls of Northeast Junior High School. One "I'm a little teapot" is plenty, thanks.

One morning, I was lassoed  at the close of the morning pledge to the flag assembly, and dragged up on the auditorium stage, where I dutifully recited, in my pre-pubescent tenor voice, an excerpt from "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in front of probably 800 or 900 students. They stood in rapt attention, watching the pudgy fourteen-year-old spew Tennyson, while flop-sweat poured down his face. My voice cracked when I read "theirs is not to reason why,". When I completed the assigned performance, some of the kids in the auditorium clapped, others catcalled and whistled. A few yelled. I earned my badge. Later that day I received my official TOC pin - a pin-back felt badge in red and black of the classic Comedy and Drama mask. It was quite an honor, and validation of my innate hamminess. The show must go on.