Cinderella and Grace

As a full time student at HBU, Ann was required to attend chapel once a week.  They brought in some of the best known speakers in the Southern Baptist faith community.   One day the guest speaker was a man who served a church in Hereford, Texas.    He explained how he got to Hereford.   According to him, Baptist preachers were sent there for disciplinary purposes.  He proceeded to skewer his own faith community with gentle humor.   If he had been sent to Hereford for disciplinary reasons, he probably got further demoted after speaking to the students at Houston Baptist.  He went over big with the students, but I don’t know how well he went over with the administration.  

Having thoroughly entertained his audience, he closed with an illustration on grace that I have frequently borrowed.

 He told the story of Cinderella and described her shameful treatment at the hands of her step mother and the ugly step sisters.  Then she got a visit from the fairy godmother – Well you know what happened next.  At the midnight hour, her coach became a pumpkin and Cinderella returned to her poverty and mistreatment, but of course dropped her glass slipper on the way, and somehow it didn’t morph back into something else.   The handsome prince immediately launched a kingdom wide search for the girl who wore the glass slipper.  He arrived at Cinderella’s home only to find that the shoe wouldn’t fit the privileged occupants.  Of course the tyrannical step-mother and her ugly daughters were crossed off his list.  So asked, if there were any other maidens in the home.  Reluctantly, they took him to Cinderella.  He kneeled on the floor, put the glass slipper on her foot and it was a perfect fit.   Of course he married Cinderella and they lived happily ever after.  The preacher closed his message by saying, “Young people, that’s grace.”  Of course told he told it much more eloquently than I’ve related it here, and I told it after hearing is second hand, but I’ve never forgotten it.

Ann finished out the year at HBU, and then we moved to Iowa where she received the rest of her college education at Mount Mercy College – a Catholic institution, but that story will have to wait.

Avogadro’s Number

While we were living in Houston Ann decided to go back to school, so she could become a certified RN.    They offered a program that allowed a person to receive both bachelors and nursing degrees.  At the end she would have a BS and would be an RN.   She enrolled in the program and began serious studies as a full time student.   HBU was only about five blocks from our house, so it was convenient for her to attend school there.

Some of the academic work she had previously done transferred to HBU, and she was able to challenge some of the other courses.  She attempted to test out of physics.  When she sat down to take the test, the first question was, “What is Avogadro’s number?”   She had no idea who Avogadro was, much less what his number might me.  Obviously she would have to take the natural science course, which was on her degree plan.

When she took the course, it was taught be an adjunct professor. His real day job was at NASA, where he was employed as physicist.     At the end of the first class, she hadn’t understood a word the man said.   He asked her to stay after class.  He went to the board and started explaining everything in shirt sleeve English.  She passed the course.  

One day we were driving along on Interstate 45, when a hub cap came off the car.  I turn around, and we drove to a certain point.  She said, “According to the laws of physics the hub cap should be somewhere along her.”  Sure enough it was right where she said it would be.  She claims that’s the only practical use she’s ever made of her studies in physics.  We left Houston before she completed her degree program, but HBU was a good experience for her.

Perhaps one or two you are as dumb as I am, and have no idea what Avogardo’s number.  It’s 6.0221415 × 10²³ 

 Now you know. No longer can anyone claim this blog is without redeeming social value.

Sports in Houston

The first time we lived in Houston, the Houston major league baseball team had only been in existence for a year.  They were known as the “Colt 45’s.”  They played in Colt’s Stadium, and hastily built stadium that wasn’t much more than an enlarged high school stadium, but the great teams came there and I saw some of the great ball players I had admired in my youth.  Stan Musial is the one I remembered most.  He was in his last year with the Cardinals.  I was amazed at the way this man went all out on a routine fly ball.  I also saw Sandy Koufax pitch a one hitter. I got to see the great Willie Mays.  I even saw Pete Rose when he was a rookie.

Quite often I went to the games with Truman. Of course I’m a teetotaler, but beer flows freely at the ball park.  One night Truman told the beer guy that I wanted to buy a beer.  I turned red and declined the opportunity.  I looked over at Truman he was broken up with laughter, which was a funny experience within itself.

When we returned to Houston, Colt’s stadium was gone, and the team had become the Astros.  Astros tickets were easy for us to come by.  For one thing, the Astros were terrible at that point in time.  They were cynically called the “Lastros.”   But the good teams kept coming into town.  These were the days of players like Johnny Bench, and Joe Morgan who moved over to Cincinnati from Houston. We were also there during Hank Aaron’s quest to break Babe Ruth’s home run record, although I don’t remember actually see Hank hit a ball out of the park.

 We had a brother who had access to all the season tickets help by General Motors car dealerships in the Houston area.  If we wanted to attend a baseball game, we just called him.  He would see that we got tickets and they would be good seats.

And the team was playing in the Astrodome, which was billed as the world’s ninth wonder.  We went to several events there, but the biggest crowd I ever saw wasn’t at a sporting event.   Elliott and some of his friends got tickets to a demolition derby.  He wasn’t driving at that time, so I went down to the dome to pick the kids up. It was toward the end and they let me inside without paying.  It was the biggest crowd I ever saw in the Dome.

One year Elliott played in the pep band for the Houston Rockets.  I would drive down to the Summit to pick him up after the games.  The ticket takers usually let me watch the fourth quarter without charging me.  One night I walked out by the side of Bill Walton.  I thought I came up to about his waistline, and I’m not short.  We saw lots of sporting events in Houston and we didn’t pay a whole lot to see them.

My Mother Breaks Her Hip

During our time in Houston my mother had and broke her hip.  Mama had been in a bad state of mental illness, but she took care of the laundry.   She had gone to the clothesline to hang out clothes.   On her way back, she decided to pull a careless weed.  It broke and she fell in the middle of a red ant bed.  That was somewhere around 10 in the morning.  Their neighbor found her about 5:30 in the evening.  She was rushed to the hospital where they had to do surgery.  Strangely enough, when the neighbor found her she was totally rational, and remained that way for a long time.  There’s no telling how many times she was stung out there in that ant bed.  The temperature was over a hundred, and she had nothing to drink.  She had been there at least six or seven hours.  It was nothing short of miraculous that she survived.

Jim, Ruby, Gary, and I drove through the night to get to Clyde.  Ann and Elliott remained in Houston.  I visited her at the hospital, and we tried to help Daddy with household needs. 

Clothes needed washing.  Daddy had bought Mama an automatic washer, but she refused to use it.  She had and old ringer type washing machine.  I had to ask her how to run the thing, but I managed to get the clothes washed without getting my fingers caught in the ringer.

           We stayed there most of the time. I washed the clothes and we cleaned house.  An amazing thing happened.  Although she had been complete disengaged mentally earlier that morning, when Jasmine found her, she was totally rational. 

WATER MIS-ADVENTURES (3)

BOATS AND I DON’T GET ALONG

It seems like anything that can go wrong does go wrong when I get in a boat.  If the lake is too choppy that’s the day I’ll rent a boat.  If a boat motor decides to quit, it will happen when I’m in the middle of a large lake.  I had always wanted to go on a canoe trip.  Someone told me that Glenwood Springs, Arkansas would be a good place to rent a canoe.  We could put in on the Caddo River, and float down about eight miles which would take all day, and the canoe people would pick us up.  I made the necessary arrangements.  

I had planned the trip for Elliott and me, thinking the others were still a little young for such an adventure, but Nannie wanted to go.   The next canoe trip I took after the Arkansas misadventure was my second one.   There were only two seats in the canoe, but the canoe guy said that a third person could sit in the bottom of the canoe.  We did a little improvisation to improve my mother-in-law’s seating arrangement.   We sat her down on a minnow bucket and she made it just fine – well at least most of the day.

We put in just before daylight.  For some reason I had enough presence of mind to tie down the minnow bucket and the ice chest.  We hadn’t gone a hundred yards before we tipped the canoe over.  We had to hunt for our stuff in the dark.  The minnow bucket and the ice chest were firmly tied to the canoe.  We had to hunt for our rods and reels, but we did find them.  Of course we were soaked, but it didn’t matter, it was summer and we dried out pretty quickly.  I was really concerned about dumping a sixty something woman in the water when you couldn’t see fifteen feet ahead of you, but she came up laughing like a school girl.    As far as she was concerned we were creating a memory. Water had gotten into the ice chest.  We had packed sandwiches in plastic bags, but they didn’t keep the water out.  We ate soggy sandwiches, but they kept us from starving.   The rest of the day was pretty uneventful except for some remarkable scenery.

Mother never let me forget how sore her bottom got after sitting on a minnow bucket for eight hours.  She wasn’t afraid to try anything.  When she died there were only two dreams that remained unfulfilled.  She wanted to put on a black riding habit and ride a rose, and she wanted to jump out of an airplane. I’m glad I never wanted to do the parachuting thing.  She would have insisted on going with me if I had.