RichEisbrouch
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Just before his twenty-eighth birthday, Albie got married. It was a surprise to everyone, though Dock said, “Why? A man should be married.” The problem was that none of us really thought of Albie as a man. Maybe we were being foolish. He was a good-looking man, almost handsome. His blonde hair had turned darker as he’d grown up, but when he was around sixteen, he suddenly started getting taller and almost reached Neal’s height. That wasn’t as big as six-foot-three Del, but it never hurt Nea
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When we asked Sonny what he wanted for his seventieth birthday, he needed to think for a while. “Well, I want a party, of course,” he said, though we’d given him a big party when he was sixty-five and finally left the mill. There’d been another party for Dougie a year later, when he turned sixty-five and quit, so it wasn’t like either of them was short on parties. And Martin and Walter were going to be sixty-five in just another year, and that would be more to celebrate. So we needed something s
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Again, sure thing. As I've said before, the piece was fun to write. And, yeah, people unfortunately die, but I think writing the WWII section was harder because they were all young people. Sill, the book starts with young death, almost as a warning. Again, thanks for reading.
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Thanks. It's a long book of short chapters which stretch many years. People seem to find it easier to read them in short sittings, so you don't burn out your memory trying to remember all the people. Enjoy yourself.
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Sonny went for a walk in the woods one afternoon and didn’t come back. He’d driven into town to see Rosalind, and when he didn’t stop by again after his hike, she figured he’d gone on home. Only when Ruth phoned, near dinnertime, did Dock discover that Sonny’s truck was still parked on their street. By that point, it was too dark for Dock to go looking. “He could have gone into anyone’s house,” Rosalind told us. “You know how Sonny is. He could be sitting in Leo Kinzer’s kitchen
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Again, you're welcome. And a belated happy new year.
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For our thirtieth anniversary, the boys decided to give Martin and me a special present, a double wedding. “It’s about time,” Martin said, so I guess even he was worried about our grandchildren turning up before the minister. “It hasn’t been that long,” Del joked. “You’ve been back from Korea for almost five years,” Martin pointed out. “How long’s a man supposed to wait?” “Well, it’s not like Susan and I weren’t going to get mar
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Yep, the closest I've been has been to very large weddings. Good food there, too. And sorry about the delayed chapter last week. It was on automatic post and, evidently, I did something wrong.
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Yep, it's kind of fun to watch the values of successive generations change, and they often make progress: if the present younger generations weren't more relaxed about sexuality, there probably wouldn't be gay marriage.
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When Del came home from Korea, Martin and I expected him to marry Susan almost before he got out of uniform. But he didn’t. He and Susan stayed engaged, and they saw each other nearly every day. They just never set a date. “There’s so much I want to do, Mama,” Del told me. “There’s the farm, and there’s a business I want to start. And I feel like I’ve been gone forever. I need to catch up.” I felt like he’d been gone forever, too, though it was really less than
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Maybe surprisingly, the area that Bodark Creek is set in has only expanded. But it's only about an hour-and-a-half from Dallas.
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For me, the biggest problem with Del being gone was everyone else was just going on as usual. Rosalind was working at the mill, and Dock was poking around their house. Albie had finished with high school and was working four-days-a-week in the drug store downtown. “I really want to be at the soda fountain,” he told me one Sunday. “And the girls like me well enough to buy milk shakes and sodas. But the owner’s son hogs the fountain, and I mostly have to stock the shelves.”
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Yep, it was a strange military operation which it seems was still cleaning up the end of WW II.
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And suddenly we were at war again, something I never would have imagined. Almost immediately, Charley was called back into the Navy. He’d been working for General Electric and living just outside of Philadelphia. “What do you do?” Rosalind had asked, when Charley, Faye, and their daughter had come to visit. “Is it something with radios?” “Newer than that,” Charley said. “You’ll see.” Though it had to wait until he figured out where Faye and their daughter were g
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My children were growing up in a very different way from how I was raised. For one thing, they were living on a farm, not in town and around a mill. And while Rosalind, Charley, and I all had jobs we had to do every day, if they didn’t get done, it’s not like animals didn’t get fed or didn’t get back to where they belonged. The worst thing that happened was that one of us would get in trouble. Del and Neal got most of the heavy work on the farm, because they were older and stron
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There wasn't a lot of divorce in my family, and even into the early 1960s. I think it was still hard to get. But I'd have to check the New York City and state laws.
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“What!” I nearly shouted at Walter, when he told me he was leaving Myra. “You’ve been married for almost thirty years!” “Twenty-six,” he corrected. “So maybe it’s time.” “You can’t just walk away from your family.” “I’m not. I’m only divorcing Myra. I did it once before, with Stefanie. And everything worked out just fine. Besides,” he added, “my family is mostly grown.” I couldn’t argue with that. Walter and Myra’s youngest daug
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As I think I've said somewhere along here, anything I write in this book seems to come because I read a lot years ago, particularly the works of Harper Lee, Lillian Hellman, Truman Capote and other similar writers. The texture of their stories gives me ideas for the kinds of details that ought to fill in the skeleton of the family story my partner gave me. But, again, thanks.
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In contrast to this small Texas town, I spent about my first twenty years in New York City and its suburbs and the past thirty in Los Angeles, which is mainly suburbs.
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After the war, Charley’s problems weren’t limited to finding new teeth. All those girlfriends he never sent us pictures of seemed to come back. But that turned out to be the easy part. The hard one was that he’d left his wife. “She was too young for me,” he wrote, and I knew he wasn’t happy about having to explain. None of my brothers liked doing that. “And I was too young. And I was always being sent somewhere else.” He didn’t say all these things at once. They
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Always nice to remind people of their memories, especially when they turn out to be good, shared ones.
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Walter’s son’s death was just horrible. Frank had purposely joined the Navy, partly due to Pearl Harbor, but more because of Charley. “He can’t think it’s just about women,” Walter told us. “‘Cause I always let him hear what happened to me in the last war.” “Frank knows what he’s doing,” we all said. But there was something about Charley, in his white uniform, with his beautiful wife, that made Frank blindly want to be a sailor. He was all right for a while, ser
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Yep, and this chapter is still early in the war.
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Gordon was the first one we lost. He was Dougie’s oldest son, the one Dougie adopted when he married Virginia. They’d held together when Virginia died and even after Dougie remarried. For his twenty-first birthday, as a surprise, Gordy changed his last name to Bronner. “It was the biggest present I ever got,” Dougie told everyone at Gordy’s funeral. Gordon was just thirty-four. After Sonny’s son Lyle lured him out of the auto shop, he’d moved his new wife onto t
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It really is nice to know that this story has meaning beyond one small Texas town. Again, thanks.
