Saturday, June 12, 2010
Always Farmer's Market on Saturday morning!
I purchased corn on the cob, cucumbers, tomatoes, potato, onion, and peaches this morning in a quick trip to market as Doc was off to Fresh N' Easy to get his favorite bread, sourdough green chili, yes!
My neighbor came home with some fresh beets that looked awfully good. I would cook the greens, too. I do believe in the very freshest vegetables you can find and just across the street, too!
I will have to take my little water cart and go get fresh water, too, over to the Circle K where you can buy it for 25 cents a gallon.
The newspaper reported indignation from the government in Mexico over the shooting of a 15 year old boy who was throwing rocks at the border control agents. Another story on the Internet reports another Mexican teen confessing to killing a border control agent somewhere by San Diego. He is on trial.
I am still gathering stories on the Immigration problem. There will be another Stand with Arizona rally today at Bolin Park across from the state capitol in Phoenix with the weather expected to be considerably cooler than to the last one. Out of state people are in danger of expiring if hit with one of our early 110 degree days when they are not prepared for it.
I am getting settled in for the usual hot summer in Phoenix with the only relief for me in our giant sized swimming pool, newly renovated and all ready for use. Hardier souls are already jumping into it, but they don't have Hashimoto's as I do!
I was talking to another resident out in the patio who told me she has Hashimotos and that it affects your body temperature so that you get cold and stay cold longer than other people. (I knew that!) She said it tends to run in families. She was told that both parents have to have it in their genes to pass it on.
I talked to her long enough to hear a very sad story that almost completely echoed one that Doc and I had just seen on a true crime station on cable. She married a guy from a foreign country and went there to live with him. When their son, born there, was so old she found photos her husband had taken of him that bordered on porno. She called the police, but they did nothing, and she was thrown out of his home by her husband who retained the child. Her parents paid for her passage home, but her child remains beyond her reach. She is a fighter who just keeps thinking of things she might be able to do. But she has quite a serious weight problem related to Hashimoto's, which affects the thyroid and causes hypothyroidism which I also have.
The different stories of disability that affect the younger residents are always interesting.
I also promised my mother (passed) that I would interview her sometime in my blog as she is now up to going around and visiting her daughters and grandchildren, accompanied by my sister LaRae who has also passed. She thinks I just as well interview her as I have other relatives since she was so involved in my memoirs of childhood. I reported that she was a mean mother. Let's see what she has to say.
GERRY: Mother, how do you like this photo? It is my favorite of all I have seen of you in your 'twilight' years.
MOTHER: It will do. It might surprise you to learn that I do consider myself to have been quite mean to you, not realizing all you were keeping from me in an effort to 'protect' me, namely that Bill Isabel molested you at the age of 5.
GERRY: It was a decision I made at the time that I have to stand by now, even though I did make some attempt to start surfacing what had happened at the age of 8.
MOTHER: Which I never heard about. I must confess that I learned a lot about the Kings marrying into the family but what you say you saw I did not, so I was handicapped in dealing with the man I married.
GERRY: It just struck me the way they were both acting that something was going on when Daddy took us along to go visit him so often.
MOTHER: I was not aware where you were going all the time, but I trusted Clyde to take you girls when he was sober. That way I was able to go ahead and work in the house and get things done.
GERRY: I got the idea he was a little nervous about going to see him during the day but took us along to kind of add respectability. Which caused me to feel quite indignant. This was the first time it occurred to me that he might be having some kind of affair with this man. I remember thinking that I was not too aware that men might have sex with each other but I thought something unusual was going on, since they were going inside and staying around an hour or so. Daddy said they had some kind of business, and we weren't to knock on the door or bother them in any way. Years later, another bit of information surfaced suggesting that Bill might have been making moonshine and selling it, and so Daddy could have been involved with that, too, but I would still say some hanky panky was going on, since Bill was later so sexual with me, and he also said something to Daddy one day that was the most obscene thing I had ever heard an adult man say, as they were walking up to the cabin door. I was walking along beside them so Bill had to know I could hear it.
MOTHER: I have had a lot to say to Clyde about taking you girls along with him and involving you in whatever he was doing.
GERRY: I never expected us to have this conversation right off about what happened during those visits. I recall running all over that property to play, including down in the bottom of the hill where we found some very deep gullies. Daddy never came out once to see where we were. He trusted us to take care of ourselves, but I thought later, we were only 4 and 5 when we were running all over that property. I even asked Barbara Coleman to go along with us once so I could show her the gullies, when she came to visit once. Barbara told her mother and her mother told her she was never to go over there again, and to come home when we said we were going to Bill's.
MOTHER: That's what made me so furious, to think all this was going on under my nose and I did not know hardly a thing about it.
GERRY: I am getting awfully tired of going over and over it, so everybody will know just what happened.
MOTHER: If you are going to write a memoir you want to get published, you had better talk about it first, before you take it that far.
GERRY: Just where have you talked to Daddy over there?
MOTHER: After I recovered enough so I could talk I requested that I be allowed to see him. He agreed to talk to me since it was about you.
GERRY: Did he get mad? Was he on the defensive.
MOTHER: No, he just let me say what I heard happened. I told him this was a major crime had it been reported and just because it wasn't didn't mean that we shouldn't treat it like one. Since it had done so much damage. I told him I felt it had affected your health in time. It and his alcoholism. He of course said he did not know what Bill had done. I am not clear who took it upon themselves to scare Bill out of the country by taking a shot at him. This was supposed to be after you began to tell some garbled story about him molesting the little Baker girl older than you which she said never happened. But whoever heard this story must have thought some molesting happened, only since Bill had worked for your dad, it more likely happened to you. Clyde just listened to me. I guess he had been here long enough he had gotten tired of denying what happened. I told him that I had decided he had not been on the up and up with me when he married me. But I married him in haste without knowing a lot about him, and was no different than other women who married men like him. I think they thought it was not necessary to tell a prospective wife what their previous sexual activities had been. Otherwise they would likely not find anyone to marry. So I think Clyde decided it was time for him to get married, and I thought he was smart and had prospects of earning a good living, so I took the chance. I have since talked to my dad about the whole thing. He agreed that he didn't think I would be happy with a bad drinker, which certainly proved to be true, but I was a headstrong girl who was determined to marry who I wanted to.
I think marriages like that are still going on, but I was just unfortunate enough to marry a drinker as well as one mixed up with such goings on. I was too young and naive to be suspicious, even after. So this is a mighty dreary story of a marriage.
GERRY: Do you think I am doing naive women a favor to write my story? That's what I am going for.
MOTHER: If any of them will listen. It is a horrifying enough story. Probably the only thing worse that could have happened to me is if I died of pneumonia or flu like some did, because that was before the invention of antibiotics.
GERRY: It's no wonder you have not recovered enough before now to come and talk about it. Good Lord, it is no wonder I can't go to Utah. I am still recovering from that child hood ordeal.
MOTHER: I always felt I was a very strong girl which I had to be to survive marriage with your dad.
GERRY: Well, he surely had to be strong to survive his life of ranching in such primitive ways camping out for days.
MOTHER: His father was an exceptionally strong man because he did not drink or smoke, but he was a mean one, a ruthless man. You had to be so tough to run cattle the way he did it. So I don't know exactly how he was involved in what happened to Clyde and his other sons, but I know I told him he was never to take a bullwhip to Clyde again which he had done when Clyde was 32 years old. What kind of father does that?
GERRY: I don't know. Grandpa is probably the key to what happened to Daddy. My impression was that Grandpa may have gotten into homosexual activities camping out with other men years before he married Grandma. She was a very naive religious girl, so I think he was able to continue on with those after he married her with little problem. He established her in a home in Escalante and then he homesteaded the ranch in Salt Lake and added another ranch in Boulder to his holdings later on. She came to the ranches in the summer which were over 30 miles away by bad roads and left in the winter so the children could go to school in 'town.'
MOTHER: Men tend to get into mischief when they are away from their wives any time at all which is why most women try to keep them at their side at all times.
GERRY: Everybody was very impressed with him because although he did not drink and smoke, he did not seem to need church to keep him straight. He would support town projects with money, but he just would not go to church, even though he did not stop his wife from her church going. But his boys, living in town all winter, got to running wild and out of control of his wife and sampling alcohol. I think that since alcohol releases inhibitions they were more susceptible to whatever bad influences they ran into, either in town or on the ranch. I don't know how involved Grandpa was in all this, but if he was in the habit of mixing it up with the hired men when he camped out, which was a lot, or in the winter when they were gone, the boys might have become aware of it, especially Daddy who probably was drafted to go do the riding on the range a lot. His older brother Glen married young and started a family, and his other older brother Reed was very frail from severe childhood illnesses so was probably not even able to go camp out in the winter. Daddy's younger brother Max might have been more protected since he was the youngest in the family, born nearly ten years after he was.
MOTHER: Clyde was 'managing' that ranch when I married him, since Grandpa was too old by then to do a lot of the heavy work. But Grandpa did not want to pay him hardly anything. He wanted control of all the money that ranch earned. He felt Clyde was unreliable because he was a bad drinker. I intend to go and study his dad more, since I have five daughters by his son. I need to know what happened to him and why as much as you do. I have always been one to send away for books on the subject, and I intend to seek knowledge about this condition in the other world. In a few years I will probably know a lot more about it than I do now.
GERRY: Well, thanks, Mother, that sounds like a good idea. I am sure you will. We will surely meet again in the sweet bye and bye.
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2 comments:
Hope you're having a good weekend.
sourdough
green
chili
bread
sounds
good
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