Hattie Kolbe

I was only thirteen the last time I saw Hattie Kolbe alive, in my late 40s when I paid last respects to her as she lay in her coffin. The Kolbe family was part of my early growing up in Houston, Harris County, Texas. The Kolbes and the Oberprellers (Hattie’s family name) had been part of that post Civil War wave of German immigrants to Texas, the wave that brought my great-grandparents Benfer to Galveston and then to the Klein community of northwest Harris County. I really don’t know anything about Hattie’s family, only that she had at least one sister. They called her Fat Mama. Hattie’s son, John Jr. “Bubba” Kolbe, was one of Fat Mama’s favorites. Hattie and John Kolbe Sr. had two children, a daughter named Eula Mae and her younger brother. Bubba was six years older than I, so not a playmate. I stayed in his room when I visited the Kolbes periodically at their frame house on small acreage on Katy Road, acreage that was claimed for development decades ago and has been through as much metamorphosis as a caterpillar—only not so pretty.

I don’t remember why I went to visit the Kolbes, but I see their home in my mind’s eye. It was a typical 20s-30s clapboard, with a front porch that butted up against a bedroom to the left, front door leading into a living room, then dining room, then kitchen. To the left a hallway joined two bedrooms situated around the one bathroom. Bubba’s room must have been an afterthought prompted by his birth—maybe had been some kind of porch. Wood floors throughout the house, of course, linoleum on the kitchen floor and drainboard. A small entry porch at the back was cluttered with stacks of newspapers, bottles, other things I don’t remember, as was the kitchen drainboard. Hattie’s attitude, simply, “I don’t care”! She said it staccato: “I don’t kayuh”!

Hattie told my parents that I liked to sit in her lap and be rocked on the front porch. I kind of remember this, but I remember other things more clearly, like Eula Mae all dressed up and ready to go to her job at the bank, the smell of bacon and sausage being fried at breakfast, Mr. Kolbe telling me the story of the rat that ran up his sleeve when he was sitting at the wheel of the car in the garage. Or maybe it was his daddy’s sleeve. Anyway, it was in a year long before my birth year (1943), and the car was open enough that the rat found its way in. As I recall, the driver had put his hand to the floor, maybe to release the brake, and yeah, the rat. I cringe at the thought. Give me a snake any day.

I also remember the time that the Kolbes, our family the Hollises, my mother’s birth family the Fuchses, and our friends the Warnekes, went to Playland Park on Katy Road. The rides were for children—ponies tethered and moving in a circle, a miniature ferris wheel that Hattie and Kate Warneke got on, and then panicked with peals of laughter when they were stalled atop while new riders were getting on below.

My later memories of Hattie occurred in the early 50s, around the time that my middle sister and I were in junior high. The Kolbes had moved to land in very rural Fayette County, near the old, historic community of Rutersville. Their country Victorian house set in the most picturesque of settings, front porch facing the long drive from the county road, swept yard, Hackberry and Live Oak trees, a large two-story barn nearby. Hattie had gained a big house in the move, more room for clutter, including a kitchen cellar where she stored potatoes, onions, preserves. One time while visiting without my sister I had time on my hands and decided to rake up the variety of debris that Hattie had tossed out the backdoor, I’m remembering eggshells, but I know there was more. Hattie got angry for some reason. I guess my efforts to help out were interpreted as criticism of her “housekeeping” habits.

The Kolbes had a Black family that worked for them. They lived in a shack down the road. I don’t remember if it was on Kolbe land. One day Hattie discovered that some of her potatoes in the kitchen cellar had gone south—turned “ropey” was the colloquial term—and she instructed us (maybe that was my sister Sue and me) to take those potatoes down to the “niggers.” Painful and yet funny memory. Waste not, want not. German thriftiness, but not German tidiness, a stereotype not completely fulfilled. I can hear her say, “I don’t kayuh!” “Do you like pickles? I don’t kayuh!” She was the product of early 19th Texas southern attitudes, so for her to refer to their Black workers as “niggers” was expected. My Texas German grandmother, born in northwest Harris County, Texas in 1897 would have used, in fact did use, the same term. I love old things, Texas history, but for some reason not much was passed down through the generations—at least, not in our branch of the Benfer-Fuchs family. One time I asked my grandmother Lizzie Fuchs why we didn’t have any old stuff. She replied, “I don’t know, I guess we gave it all to the niggers.” This speaks volumes. Such memories embarrass me, yet warm my heart at the same time, because I know the intent was not malicious.

My memory of Hattie goes no farther than the summer when I helped Bubba and his daddy, along with the Black workers, make hay. We ate good food, drank iced tea, sat on the front porch during the worst heat of the day, slept in old iron beds in rooms with 12 foot ceilings, windows thrown open to catch the breeze. Maybe John Sr.’s sister Mickey—Aunt Mickey—who wore a maroon beanie with a pom-pom swinging from the back in winter time—might have been there. If not, she needed to be to complete the picture in my mind.

Hattie Kolbe was a short chunky lady, medium skin tones, fair colored hair, blue-green twinkling eyes. She was all about love and nurturing, even though she didn’t care so much about keeping a tidy kitchen, back porch, and dooryard. “Do you like my pickles? Oh, no you don’t! You don’t like my pickles. I don’t kayuh!” Rest in peace, dear Hattie.

Hattie Kolbe
Harold Hollis (December 8, 2005 – Normangee, Texas)

Brokeback Sunday Afternoon

Amazing the simple things we take for granted, like being able to sit in the midst of others, yet undisturbed, on a Sunday afternoon, collect our thoughts, and maybe even commit them to paper or to disc. Before leaving the city almost five years ago, for what I innocently thought would be a relatively idyllic life in the country, I wasn’t particularly drawn to test this truth in Houston, Texas. In fact, I didn’t even use the laptop that I had already owned for a year. Back then, although I had periodic urges to keep a journal, I was too distracted—perhaps unfocused, perhaps lazy, or even lacking purpose. That’s a scary thought—living quite literally in the middle of the 4th largest city in the United States, exposed day in and day out to all kinds of stimuli, yet feeling no compulsion to simply document or purge, examine or raise an angry fist. It took almost five years of routine, frequent isolation—oh, if only life were as uncomplicated as relative isolation would afford—to hit the wall and discover that I have to collect some thoughts and put them into words, if for no other reason than to maintain my sanity. If memory serves me well, this is one of only three epiphanies I’ve known.

This epiphany hit hard in the pre-dawn hours of December 3, 2005. I experienced a flash—call it spiritual—that would change the way I viewed myself and what I am doing with this precious life—or what remains of it at age 62. I’ve looked over this precipice before, gotten a glimpse of resolve, but then become lost in the day to daze of earning a living, chasing this dream or that, taking the road more traveled. So on this day of December 3rd, I realized that I had to make some changes, unload some excess of things, and get rid of some baggage. I understood anew that I simply can’t go on in the same way. Does this mean I volunteer—not more, just volunteer? Does it mean that I give away more of my worldly gifts? “For Sale—All My Earthly Possessions”. Does it mean that I consciously seek to influence those around me in a positive way—be a positive role model? Does it mean that I stand in the window and shout to the world, “hey, I have something to say here”? Does it mean that I just need to grow up?

So here I am this Sunday afternoon, waiting to see “Brokeback Mountain” for the third time. I didn’t expect to be here in College Station, Texas this afternoon—humorously yet sadly referred to as Closet Station. So someone described this bastion of conservatism on one of the blogs carrying discussions of Ang Lee’s 21st century rendering of a late 20th love affair, set in the desolate and apparently deadly world of West Texas and points farther north and west.

It is a homosexual affair. The lovers are both men, cowboys even. They fall in love in 1963 while sheepherding over a summer on Brokeback Mountain, somewhere in beautiful Wyoming big country. Later, the widowed wife of one of these still relatively-young men is caused to reflect that she thought Brokeback Mountain might be “some pretend place, where the bluebirds sing and there’s a whiskey spring”. Her husband Jack’s long-time affair with his friend Ennis has escaped her, at least to some degree. Jack always traveled to Wyoming from Childress, Texas to “fish and hunt” with his long-time good friend Ennis Del Marr.

When these guys met they were just short of 20. Poor, mostly uneducated, feeling their seed, and for some reason fate had brought them together. When Jack dies on a lonely back road, apparently at the hands of “gay bashers”, he’s only 39, yet still dreaming of a life more complete than what he has been dealt thus far. We’re talking about life unrealized—life only marginally fulfilled, chronically repeated poor choices—choices that numb, living in fear—fear of living from the heart and gut, blind sacrifice, indecision.

After their first coupling, one is quick to say, “I’m not queer.” The other, “Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours.” The summer ends, each goes back to other lives already in the making, and for the next 20 years they steal chances to meet and love, making havoc, robbing not only themselves but the ones whose lives are closely linked with theirs. Jack would have them together, making a ranch of their own—“Listen, I’m thinkin’, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation, your horses, it’d be some sweet life”. Jack marries prosperity, the spoiled daughter of a spoiled, ignorant man, and Jack and Lureen have a son. Ennis married only three months after the summer on Brokeback—a plan that was already in motion—and quickly fathered two daughters, whom he loves and adores. Sadly, his wife Alma gets the truly short end of the stick. Her witness of Ennis and Jack’s first reunion—arms locked and lips devouring, only partially hidden in the alley behind their apartment—stuns her, but doesn’t really prepare her for what follows. At this point she’s lost her man, temporarily lost her sense of herself as a woman, and she’s immediately forced to come to terms with this realization on her own as Ennis goes away with Jack, first for the night, and then for the next few days.

This story ends tragically, of course. How could it be any other way? Ennis and Alma divorce while their daughters are relatively young; she remarries and has at least one other child. Ennis doesn’t escape the scrape-by mindset that has defined his life. In spite of Jack’s efforts to bring them together, Ennis can’t come to terms with it. Early only he has told Jack that life has taken him down a different road, with a wife and two children. It just can’t be. “I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop.” And “if you can’t fix it you got to stand it,” Ennis says. If you choose not to fix it, then you’ve chosen to try to stand it.

Remember, though, our setting is the American West, conservative, God-fearing country, one where Ennis as a nine-year-old boy was made to witness what happens to men who try to live together, even ones who are “tough old birds”. This is West Texas in 1983, where a seemingly regular guy like Jack Twist can catch the attention of the wrong eyes and wind up beaten to death with a tire iron on an isolated back road. Not so different than the Wyoming of 1998 where Matthew Shepard was savagely beaten to death by two men claiming to be gay who lured him away from a campus bar. Or for that matter, pick any city—New York, Houston, Chicago—where anti-homosexual crimes occur on a regular basis.

Hate is so much larger and more pervasive than Jack’s untimely, brutal, hate and fear-filled death. Hate is waged on a world scale in the name of some God. Hate apparently is in the human genes, it is generational, it is infectious, it is a killer. Hate comes at us from the pulpit, from the stadiums filled with revivalists, from the political stage, from the neighborhood café, from the school board meeting room, from the playground. We stand proudly on our ignorance and prejudice, so proud that we want to model it and inculcate it. Some are so bold as to attempt justifying it by turning to the Scriptures and using proof text to make a hate-filled, self-serving point.

So what is this epiphany thing? Could it just be a conscious decision to make a difference? Repentance is associated with sin and Biblical New Testament teachings. The Greek source is Metanoeo, meaning “to change one's mind and purpose, as the result of after knowledge.” Do we have to become born-again Christians to escape the shackles of hate and fear? Some would say so, but as a friend said to me some weeks back, “I suppose that’s fine, if that’s what you believe.” Decency, tolerance, compassion, respect are not the sole property of Christians, or any other faith. How much do we have to witness to realize that we can’t make this journey failing to escape ourselves and fighting to cling to our self-imposed ignorance? What does it take to wake us from this sleep walk that so easily becomes a way of living?

Brokeback Sunday Afternoon
Harold Hollis (January 11, 2006 - Normangee Texas)

Taking Things to Completion

A few years back, a friend who shares my compulsion for projects revealed that she takes things to 96% completion. I had just commented that I can’t seem to get past 80%, or maybe it was 72%, so I was embarrassed by comparison. Now how you actually measure such things escapes me. I just know in my bones that I rarely get projects to the point that I can stand back, survey the landscape, and say, “I’m pleased”. The problem is that just about all the things I do have to stand juxtaposed to one another. Gardens, people, oh what a tangled web we weave.

For seven years, starting around the time I began converting this 2-story barn into a home, the shovel has been my best friend at times. What you can accomplish with a shovel and a wheelbarrow is amazing. During times of stress and boredom, I have dug my way through the landscape, building bed upon bed, all joined by garden paths, all of which support grass, weeds, call them what you will. That which befriended me at times has become a monkey on my back.

Feeling contempt for this garden embarrasses me and leads me to curse my lack of forethought. Why did I have to make it so big? Why couldn’t I just put down the shovel? In spite of efforts to give away plants, they do what plants do, reproduce. One of my sister’s has asked, “Couldn’t you just let the grass take over the beds and let it go back to the way it was?” Well, not in my mind I can’t. A big part of this dilemma is that old invader of dreams, Expectation. Why start a building and abandon it after erecting the framework? I can’t do like my Aunt Mary who threw her knitting into the fireplace, needles and all, because she couldn’t get the hang of it. Some people are just not cut out for knitting. Like life, gardens aren’t supposed to be perfect. Instead, they are works in progress, sometimes really messy, other times not as messy. Sometimes they’re downright cleaned up and on their best behavior, although temporary.

Recently I recommended to a friend that he read the collection of essays, PEOPLE WITH DIRTY HANDS, by Robin Chotzinoff. Among the assortment of passionate gardeners Ms. Chotzinoff includes are antique rose rustlers in Texas, a family that grows chiles in Hatch, New Mexico, a guy in California who raises and sells lady bugs, and most importantly for this conversation, an array of eccentrics, I am reminded, who eschew deadheading and weeding. So I go out and look at the 30-yard-long bed I finished weeding early this morning, and I think, “Damn, that looks good.” Relax, breathe slowly, deeply.

For some time now, I have felt an especially strong pull to brush my hands against each other, to be done with one thing or another. Given my struggle with Expectation, though, backing off from taking things toward completion is oh so complicated. I am reminded that I am overly concerned with how my decisions affect others, probably a victim of my own sensitivity. I’m also advised, “Harold, you’re hard on yourself. You agonize over how your efforts to take care of yourself affect others. It’s okay to take care of yourself. Yes, your choices that lead to gain also result in loss. That’s okay. It’s about balance. It’s okay to achieve only 70% completion.” It’s okay for the grass to take control of the flower beds. I’m thinking, “Damn, that feels good.” Relax, breathe slowly, deeply.

I can’t brush my hands against each other and magically change my circumstances. I can fall short, in my own eyes. I can disappoint and frustrate people because my choices conflict with their choices. Does that rob me of my right to choose? I hope not. Do I have the right to walk away? Sure. To change the rules? That too. Do I owe you something? Only to treat you fairly, if we choose to have some kind of relationship. You owe me fairness as well. How do you define completion? And, by the way, how do you measure it? And most importantly, how do we not use the measuring stick as a means of beating up on each other.

Taking things to Completion
Harold Hollis (Normangee, Texas—July 26, 2007)

Making Art

As I complimented an artful pillow my good friend Joy was repairing during a recent visit at her daughter’s home, I admired the patchwork of color, shape, and pattern. Joy, whose work is diverse, and can range from naïve to sophisticated, commented that she hasn’t made much art lately, that she hasn’t had anything to say. Her words caught my ear, reminding me that all art springs from the need to say something. I guess it doesn’t matter if the audience ends up being only the creator.

And so it is with words. I’ve read interviews with fiction writers who talk about their discipline, blocking out time for writing, maybe beginning early in the day, like going to the office for several hours. I marvel at the wellspring from which a piece of fiction takes life. I’ve read that the story and characters can just take charge, challenging the writer’s fingers to outrun his thoughts. To me it’s a miracle, and a gift I don’t have.

It’s been over a year since I’ve thought seriously about the discipline it takes to write something worthy. Most of us talk all the time about one thing or another, send all kinds of electronic communications, some protracted, others short and disjointed, lazy, incomplete sentences. We talk in our families, with intimate friends, with church friends, people in the grocery store. You name a place, we’re talking there, usually trying to make a point, or win an argument, or assure ourselves that someone else really understands what we mean.

Sometimes art takes form in seemingly simple human interaction. My friend Marlin is doing an internship at a geriatric facility in Miami to complete the requirements for a degree in music therapy. Marlin loves old people, and he’s spent significant time working as an aide in a nursing home and a geriatric hospital. Several months ago on a Sunday after church we took chocolate cake to one of his hospice patients at her nursing home. She was blind, virtually deaf, skin and bones really, a spider pawing the air from under her covers. She really didn’t understand who were, and she didn’t want to be bothered by us. I was touched and a little anxious as Marlin comforted this dying, 92-year-old woman. I watched him tenderly adjust the covers, reassuring “Miss Alma” that someone did care about her, even if only for a moment. It didn’t take long, and it didn’t take many words for him to say what was in his heart. He does this over and over in his work.

On this night, here in the middle of this rural Texas county, the only sounds I hear are the whirring of a ceiling fan, set to run counter-clockwise now that it is winter, an occasional bug cracking against the French doors, Casey the Blue Heeler barking at some distant, threatening sound that only a dog’s ear can sense, and now a neighbor dog answering her concern. There’s a hint of spent oak from last night’s fire in the wood stove, a satisfying smell, one not shared, however. I am with my thoughts, needing to say something, needing to say something a lot lately, and tired of arguing with myself. I practically burned up my keyboard earlier today sending the most important messages, prayers from the Book of Common Prayer; a sermon authored back in the 80s on homosexuality and Christianity, a sermon I visited again today in my continual struggle to understand exclusion, bigotry, and hate; a message to a friend lost who has suddenly become a connection to yet another loss. Oh, how fragile the web we climb on this journey to the heavens.

Today I made another bottle tree, one I’m planning to use in my booth at an antiques market I’m doing this weekend. The other day I harvested an unwanted Red Bud tree from the garden and planted it in an old galvanized bucket filled with mortar mix. I actually had to deal with three separate trunks because that’s how the tree had grown. It was a little tricky, and the mortar mix took much longer to set up than I had expected because I had weakened it with playground sand to make the mix go farther.

In southern Black folklore, the bottle tree was a means of protecting the home by trapping evil spirits within the colorful bottles. Though not so common today, bottle trees have become popular with some southerners who strive to create artful folk gardens. I have several planted around my garden. You never know when you might need to ward off an evil spirit. Bottle trees have been one of my passions of the past few years. They’re a fairly simple way to let loose some of my creative juices. Sometimes the words just aren’t there. Sometimes it’s just easier to juggle three trunks in compromised mortar—holding your mouth just right—toss in a few shards of rock to help keep it together, stand back with your hands poised, maybe mumble a prayer or a harmless curse, and just hope everything comes out all right.

Making Art
Harold Hollis (Normangee Texas – January 9, 2007)

Friends Don't Give Up on Friends

The phone rang this past Friday, and the voice said my real name, not something on my social security card. Suspecting a telemarketer with a sly, friendly approach, I asked who was calling. She replied, “This is Patrician Wheaton Harrison.” “The Patty Wheaton who lived in my apartment house in the 80s and moved to Utah to become a Mormon,” I asked. Laughing, she clarified, “I was always a Mormon.”

It didn’t take long for us to pick up the conversation that was interrupted some twenty-three years ago. When I knew her in Houston, Patty became a mother, giving birth with no husband in sight. I didn’t remember that she worked for Children’s Protective Services, but I did remember that she was a kind, loving soul who also impressed me with her bravery. She remembered my kindness to her and her baby. That fall, I invited Patty and her baby to Thanksgiving with my family, who lived in a suburb of Houston. My own daddy, then on the brink of a heart attack that for some reason took us by surprise, was so taken with the mother and child that he wanted to adopt them. My oldest sister lent Patty a rocker, which Patty remembered on this Friday as being upholstered in orange fabric. “My sister still has that rocker. She had it reupholstered recently.” That baby is grown with a child of her own.

I had heard that Patty was in Utah, but I didn’t know that she had remarried—“a dermatologist,” she explained, but not before she had asked me all about my own family. “Mother is still living, 88 and hanging on to life by an unraveling thread,” I answered. She, my oldest sister, and I live on the same 200 acres my parents bought 30 plus years ago as a retirement place.” Daddy had a heart attack in December of that Thanksgiving year and died on the first day of spring, 1981.To my question about other children, she replied, “we have a sixteen and a half year old son,” who is among other things an accomplished musician.

We talked for most of an hour while she was driving up the mountain to her home near Salt Lake, recounting that short time in the early 80s when we were neighbors, her partying mother who came to stay after the baby was born, our apartment manager Paul, Bobby Weeks her upstairs neighbor. “He’s burned himself out, I’m sure,” Patty said. “No, I can’t picture Becky,” I answered, who apparently was my upstairs neighbor for a short time before I moved to a different apartment. Patty tells me that Becky is married with children and lives in a town near me, something she discovered on the Internet, along with finding me. “Do you remember Kevin, the guy off the streets that Paul brought home?” she asked. I didn’t. He ended up living with Becky and sharing her bed, as well as Paul’s. “Paul was not a good person,” she added, and then asked if I knew of his whereabouts. “The last time I saw him years ago, he was in the wasting stages of AIDS,” I replied.

Before we interrupted our conversation for the time being, she invited me to Utah to visit her family, and we both were urged to say it seemed like only yesterday that we were neighbors in Houston. I needed that call on that day. It amazed me, opened the well of hope, inspired me to call my old friend David, now living in New York, Columbus Ohio, New York, commuting to Chicago. He rode the subway to his office near the Twin Towers, but was late getting to work on September 11, 2001. Thank God for some habits. David was Patty’s neighbor as well. He was 24 then. He’s celebrated his half-century mark. The news of Patty’s call brought a smile to my mother’s face and led her to reflect on my history of friendship. Friends don’t give up on friends.

Easter Mae Cossey

Easter Mae Cossey. Saying the name evokes a strong image, something perhaps out of a coffee table book of photographs taken in the historical South, maybe a fine collection of photographs by someone who made his or her name documenting images of Blacks in the rural south, specifically Texas, in the first half of the twentieth century. Easter Mae Cossey, wife of Bub Cossey, living in Kohrville, an old Black community in northwest Harris County. A Google search reveals the following from the Handbook of Texas about what was a depleted, worn-down, rural community during my growing up years in the 1950s.

KOHRVILLE, TEXAS. Kohrville, also known as Korville and Pilotville, was a small black community near the intersection of Farm Road 149 and the Spring-Cypress Road twenty miles northwest of Houston in northwestern Harris County. Freed slaves from Alabama, who made up the community's population in the 1870s, bought land or cut timber for the nearby Louetta sawmill. The town was named before 1880 for Paul Kohrmann, a German immigrant who ran the post office when mail was first delivered in 1881. In the early 1900s the community had a general store run by Agnes Tautenhahn Kohrmann, a cotton gin, and a sawmill, and reported a population of fifty. In 1906 the local school had thirty-one pupils and one teacher. The post office was discontinued in 1911, and mail was delivered from Hufsmith. In 1940 the town reported one business, a school converted into a community recreation building, two churches, two cemeteries, a ballpark, and a population of thirty. The 1980 county highway map showed a school, a church, Solomon Temple, and a cemetery at the townsite.

A Google search of Kohrville turns up mostly real estate advertisements for another rural neighborhood in way northwest Harris County lost to development, bulldozers, concrete, strip malls, tract homes—another name for production homes, mass produced homes. These days this can mean homes well in excess of $100,000—certainly not something that Easter Mae and Bub Cossey could have ever owned, not unless they had owned acreage they could have sold to turn the profits into a big, fine home. Likely, they wouldn’t have even wanted one anyway. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Kohrville wasn’t just another bedroom community for Houston back then. Not so when I was growing up in the 50s, living on West Montgomery Road, aka Tomball Highway, aka SH 149, just south of Cypress Creek. We all lived in the country.

Easter Mae. I can see her coming up the back sidewalk, head wrapped in a faded cotton rag—I see all of this in monochrome—very black skin covering her prominent cheekbones and the little bit of leg and feet left uncovered, worn down shoes, dress and apron like the head rag washed to what must have been heavenly softness, and carrying her big satchel, stuffed to overflowing with who knows what. In later years my mother and sisters have referred to their totes as Easter Mae bags. Those prominent cheekbones suggested some Indian heritage, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Black Seminole. According to an Internet source, the historical relationship between Native Americans and African-Americans has been called, "one of the longest unwritten chapters in the history of the United States." No doubt, Easter Mae is part of that unwritten history.

Easter Mae was our ironing lady, not maid. She did cook sometimes, I’m remembering a cobbler here and there, but mostly, she ironed. Back then everything was cotton, mostly khakis and white short-sleeved shirts for Daddy, jeans and shirts for me, dresses, skirts and blouses for my mother and sisters. Easter Mae dipped snuff and Mother used to complain about the snuff specks on Daddy’s white shirts.

Another thing I remember about Easter Mae is lunch time—just the two of us, a selfish perhaps rewritten memory—and how I had to insist that she sit at the round oak table in our kitchen with me, rather than at a TV tray. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I do remember conversation. And I do remember one time her husband Bub helping me clean our large yard, filled with fall leaves from the many hardwoods and thick mats of wasted pine needles. He told my parents that I was “a working ass.” I smile at this early recollection of my time in the yard, and I’m proud that Bub found me a hard worker. I’m still digging in the dirt 45 years later.

Easter Mae’s time with us spanned several years, including the leap frog of our house from one side of Tomball Highway to the other when the State bought right-of-way to widen the road. Our family’s response was to buy six acres on the other side of the road and move the house. This happened in my senior year of high school—1961—and it was so noticeable that Dr. Bleyl, the school superintendent, had this to say when he announced that I had made the All-State High School Band in Dallas. Harold’s family is so proud that they moved their house to the other side of the road. Not so much a logical cause and effect relationship, but a fond memory nonetheless. House resettled, Easter Mae continued her work for us—ironing, pulling garments from the plastic, zip-up bag stored in the refrigerator where Mother had placed them after completing the task that had to be performed before ironing. Clothes went from the washer, to the starch pan, to the clothesline for drying—khakis and jeans on metal stretchers—to the kitchen table where they were sprinkled (we still have that sprinkle bottle), then rolled and stored in the plastic bag in the refrigerator, awaiting ironing day. Easter Mae day, maybe a peach cobbler as lagniappe.

I don’t remember when Easter Mae wasn’t around any longer. I guess I’ve probably asked Mother somewhere along the way. I remember Easter Mae as already old when she ironed for us, although my mother says she probably wasn’t as old as we thought. Anyway, what do children know about age? She like everyone else had to sit down eventually and embrace the inevitable. I have no doubt that Easter Mae knew her God and probably shouted Hallelujah many a Sunday morning in her Kohrville church, although I don’t even know if she was religious. In my experience, most country Black folks are. It is their God and faith that have lifted them up through the hard times they’ve known. “All my trials, Lord, soon be over” go the lyrics to a beautiful American folk song. "All my trials lord, soon be over….If religion were a thing that money could buy, the rich would live and the poor would die. All my trials lord, soon be over."

I trust that Easter Mae is with her Lord, Bub as well, along with my Mother, Daddy, Grandma, Mamaw, and all the uncles and aunts I have loved—all these saints who for a time God shared with the world.

Harold Hollis (December 9, 2005 – Normangee Texas)

Daddy, My Uncles, and Jake Goodson

A few years back our neighbor and friend Jake was helping me hang a sign at the entrance to the drive of our family land in Leon County Texas. In truth, I was helping him because he had the knowledge to do the job right. This knowledge comes only through experience that we normally consider a guy thing, although I know women who can sling a hammer, wire a room and hang a ceiling fan with the best of them. The sign is cut out of sheet metal that has been rendered art by Don Austin, a sign maker friend the next county over. At the center is our family name—HOLLIS—and surrounding the name are representations of all the things I love—old stoneware jugs and pots, cactus, even an owl perched on a branch set inside the letter O. The design is totally Don’s creativity at work after visiting my house and seeing what I’m about—at least as far as the objects that own my living spaces.

Like Jake, Don is a guy’s guy, and his story is an interesting one as well. But this tale is about Jake, who has been friend and helper to this family since before our Daddy got down in 1980. That year a heart attack on December 15 ultimately led to Daddy’s death on the first day of spring 1981. For many years after, no one lived on these 200 acres. After Daddy’s health began to fail he wanted to have a home nearer Houston and other members of the family so that Mother wouldn’t be alone. We had cattle on the property, so Jake took care of them, produced hay from the hayfield, took care of the fences, mowed the big lawn that surrounds the house, cut firewood from fallen Post Oak trees, made sure the guard lights kept burning, wrapped pipes and then cut off the water when the temperatures fell below 27 degrees for sustained periods. When the family did spend time in the country, Jake dealt with a cranky albeit new septic system when the infrequent rains persisted at times. Frankly, I guess I don’t really know all the things that Jake kept up with, but I do know that he treated this place as if it were his own. In his nephew’s words, if there are saints on earth, Jake is as close as it gets.

On the day that Jake was hanging the sign from the back of his flatbed truck, with me holding and fetching and cocking my head just right, I realized that Jake, although he is only 14 years older, was playing father—or at least big brother, the one I don’t have—to me, and that he reminded me so much of my Daddy and a couple of uncles who could do just about anything. And like all of them, he has the patience required to see something through, in spite of challenges, complications, and setbacks. Jake grew up in the country, the product of Texas German stock, a good, conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran, who doesn’t question the teachings about God and church that he was brought up with. After serving time in the military, he became a lineman for the telephone company, and because he just knows things that lots of guys know—especially ones who grow up in the country—he can “do just about anything”. He cooks as well, at least beans and cornbread.

On that day as I watched Jake, reminded of Daddy and my uncles, I also realized that Jake wouldn’t always be able to do the things he was doing. He was then 72. I recorded my feelings about Jake, and as the fates would have, lost them when I got a new laptop in April of 2004.

When the floodgate of illness opens up, the torrent can seem unstoppable. At 76, that has begun for Jake. He was already plagued by macular degeneration, and in spite of severely compromised vision, still driving the roads, including trips into the nearby town. Usually trips between his house and ours, separated only by the county road and a short leg to our west, he usually makes on his four-wheeler. In spite of vision problems, Jake is an avid reader, sharing with me a passion for Texas history and stories and biographies of the West. These days his eyesight has deteriorated to the point that he doesn’t drive to town anymore, and he can’t read like he did. All the other onslaught of health problems began with gall bladder surgery a few months back, followed by severe stomach pain, skin allergies that led him to take his back to the door jam for frequent scratching, general lack of energy and shortness of breath, and now to a heart catheterization this very day.

In the record I lost of that day four years ago, I remembered that watching Jake made me think about my daddy and two uncles, who were married to Daddy’s sisters. Like men are supposed to be—at least where I grew up—these guys were problem solvers. Daddy truly whistled while he worked—his way of expressing pleasure at the task he was doing, as well as his unconscious artful expression. My middle sister and I picked up the same habit, but unfortunately for me, I didn’t get Daddy’s genes that enable one to fix things and make things. Like Daddy, Uncle Bud and Uncle Frog were products of pre-World War II America, exposed to farming and the Depression, and because of things they learned early, instinctively strong in work ethic.

When Daddy died, I was already well into adulthood, finished with a career in teaching and trying to establish myself in the world of private enterprise. I was way past the point of teaching—at least the point of being interested in building a box or a life-sized dove house, or tinkering with the lawnmower. All I ever really learned to do was change the spark plugs in an old truck one time with Daddy’s help, clean the filter and change the spark plug in the lawn mower (and if that didn’t solve the problem I was SOL and done with it!), and help him with minor building projects and fence building. Oddly, Daddy always chose to work on fence in August—in Texas!—and I remember the agony of being out there in the sun on a Sunday afternoon. My biggest outdoor help to the family was yard work, helping with the menagerie of livestock that we had once we moved to the country, and trying to stay ahead of Daddy’s instincts to junk and make clutter. Every once in awhile I would take on the garage, move things out, sweep, and attempt to throw away things that seemed useless to me (Daddy would risk life and limb stopping on the blacktop roads of northwest Harris County to stop and pick up a bolt). Before I could reach my personal objectives, though, everything would come back into the garage at Daddy’s insistence. Ironically, these days I’m lousy at staying on top of the junk I accumulate—much of it valuable because of its age and other merits.

While I recall that Uncle Bud’s outbuildings were always fairly well organized, he certainly had his share of tools and projects in progress. Uncle Frog really had the “bring it home” mindset. Even more than Daddy and Uncle Bud, Uncle Frog could make something out of anything, sometimes giving totally new meaning to an object, other times enhancing while letting the object maintain its intrinsic integrity. All three men shared the same passion for junking, and I clearly inherited that gene, although I have taken it quite a few rungs up the ladder. I call most of my stuff antiques and Texas relics.

Daddy’s vehicle legacy at his death was a truck that had frustrated us all to no end. You could drive it from point A to point B, cut off the engine, and then find upon trying to fire up the SOB that it just wouldn’t turn over. Give it a little time and it mostly likely would start. It had done this from the time it was still in warranty, but the GMC dealer couldn’t correct the problem. Does that surprise me? As things must be, the truck always failed at the worst time—for example, while pulling a loaded trailer down I-10 toward San Antonio, 100 miles from home, in the parking lot while grocery shopping. It met its fate in the Wal-Mart parking lot some 20 years ago. My middle sister had borrowed the truck from Mother to go Christmas shopping. Headlong into the local Wal-Mart, she certainly had no inkling that someone would want an old yellow GMC with an ugly aluminum camper top. Wrong. On that day it did start, and I guess made its journey to a chop shop. Talk about poetic justice!

I didn’t have as much time to observe Uncle Bud as I did Uncle Frog, but one memory of them is etched in my mind. While the evil GMC was still in the family, Uncles Bud and Frog came to my rescue in the hospital parking lot (what’s the deal with parking lots?) of Heights Hospital in Houston on one of the last nights of Mamaw Hollis’s life. She was about to die at age 93, although her goal had been to make it to 100. Ironically, she outlasted all three of her sons. I don’t remember why I was driving the truck that night, only that I had been to visit Mamaw. Uncle Frog and Aunt Mary and Uncle Bud and Aunt Frances were there. Back in the parking lot, I attempted to start the truck, it chose to throw its weight around, and I went back into the hospital hoping that my uncles could rescue me. We all trekked to the parking light. They raised the hood, looked around, shook their heads, scratched, turned on the ignition switch and the engine turned over. They didn’t really do anything. The comfort they provided came from their ability to do what certain guys can do—sometimes just a matter of being there. The important thing is that they were there for me. They were Daddy, my uncles, and they were Jake. That night I realized that like Daddy, someday neither of these uncles would be there to help me out in the parking lot—to think about a problem, scratch their heads, tinker a bit, and make everything all right.

Today I am especially aware that life has once again changed forever. Jake, who has helped me help him so many times—hanging a sign, building a fence around my yard, running water out to an open shed in my garden—Jake with whom I swap books, drink an occasional beer, talk about the forecast for rain, reminisce about his growing up years in Westfield—Jake who counsels me even when he doesn’t know it—Jake can’t ride the tractor like he did anymore, and we’re all the lesser for it.

Harold Hollis (December 6, 2003 – Normangee Texas)