Janice Williams Loves Austin

August 30, 2009

My Cousin Maxine

Filed under: Family — Janice @ 10:42 pm

Everyone complains about it, so I know I’m not telling you something you don’t know when I complain about my day getting off course. You try to do one little thing and suddenly the afternoon is totally out of whack. That happened today and was such a shock to me (not getting off course, just where it ended up).

I had started to do some genealogy because this was the first truly free day I had had in a long time. Quickly I realized that I needed to clean the desk off a little in order to get down to business. The second piece of paper I dealt with was a letter I wrote last weekend and couldn’t find the address. The letter was to my cousin Maxine in Littleton (Boston), Massachusetts. I wrote her a long, newsy letter and asked her to please send my uncle Dick a birthday card for his September 6 birthday. When I wrote the letter, I couldn’t find an address for her anywhere so I just put it aside until I could look some more.

I met Maxine in 1990. I had done genealogy all of my life and some of the information I had had come by way of my grandmother, but it was Maxine that had compiled the information. At some point I think she and I may have exchanged a letter or two. But in my days of business travel, I had a trip scheduled for Boston, Massachusetts and decided to take the opportunity to meet her. I called and we set up dinner. She and her daughter Gina arrived looking so sharp and classy. Here we are, circa 1990. It appears to me that somewhere there is a couch without a slipcover, but we’ll argue my fashion sense at another time.

We had a great visit and I was glad to meet this long lost first cousin of my Dad’s. Her father died in a hunting accident when she and her sisters were young. Daddy grew up around them some, but I had never known them. Maxine had joined the WACs or another branch of the military and met her husband while serving and ended up living near his family in Boston.

So now fast-forward 18 years. I don’t know that I talked to her much over the 18 years. Maybe a card occasionally, but I can’t even remember doing that. But last fall, out of the blue, I get a call from a Yankee on my answering machine. I wish I could imitate her voice and accent in print. If you watch the Simpson’s, she sounded like Marge’s sisters. She said she had a cousin for me and needed me to call her. I called her back and we immediately picked right up where we left off last time. She was easy to talk to. She had discovered that one of her cousins that is unrelated to me, is married to a man who IS related to me on my mother’s side. Convoluted, but one of those small world situations where you never know who you might be related to. Of course, he and his wife are not related to each other, they are just both related to connected people. Maxine and I caught up. Soon after she sent me the picture of her great-grandparents that I posted on my family project page that I had never seen. That was quite a gift.

Today I still have that letter needing to be sent, and needing to be sent fast if she’s going to get a card off to Uncle Dick. I hadn’t found her address, but I did have her phone number stored in the phone. I called and it said it was disconnected. That was odd. I went back to the computer, hoping I could find an address or new number online. What I did find was Maxine’s obituary. She died in March.

I have often thought about all of the elderly people that I deal with infrequently on my genealogy projects and worried about just such a thing. Who is going to know I need to be called if someone dies? And I also know from the other side of it how hard it is to think of everyone that needs to be called . . . or to get up the energy to do it. I called one of Dad’s cousins a year after he died and she hadn’t heard and I felt bad about that. Now I was in the same situation.

Another bit of shock in reading her obituary was that her mother wasn’t mentioned as a survivor. Her mother is quite elderly and I knew she had been living in a nursing home in Abilene, but I was afraid maybe she had died and no one told me that, either. The obituary listed Maxine’s sisters names and I knew one of them lived in Abilene. With an unusual last name, she was easy to find in their “phone book” (online) and I called.

Nancy answered the phone herself and knew quickly who I was. She felt bad that I hadn’t been told about Maxine’s death. We talked on the phone a long time (I never looked at a clock) and it seems like every time we would just about to wrap up, another subject would get us started again. Her mother, fortunately, is 97 and doing fine and is still sharp and healthy.

Nancy told me things about Maxine that I did not know. I will share this one story because it is so amazing. Maxine had a little girl, Brenda, in the mid-1970s that had a brain tumor and died at only 3 years old. While the little girl was sick and going through treatments and losing her hair, she loved cardinals and told her family that when she died, she would come back as a cardinal and let them know she was okay. Maxine was at Mass General with the little girl when she was very sick. Her sister Nancy was at their home and so was Maxine’s husband Chick. Maxine called home and told Nancy to tell Chick to get to the hospital immediately. She did not say that Brenda had died, but she had, so Nancy didn’t know this yet. When she and Chick walked out of the house, a neighbor’s house across the street was covered in cardinals…. She said every inch of roof, tree limb, bush, and yard was absolutely covered with cardinals. And no brown female cardinals, these were all bright red male cardinals, hundreds of them. A few days later on the morning of Brenda’s funeral, their own backyard was covered the same way, hundreds of red cardinals giving an unmistakable message.

My day eventually got back on course and few things were accomplished after the shock of hearing about this unexpected death. But, as things happen, I learned it at the perfect time where I was able to call her sister and hear stories about the family and let her cry on my shoulder a bit. I wanted to do genealogy today and I got to do the best kind.

August 26, 2009

Writing

Filed under: Writing — Janice @ 12:00 pm

I hope it is evident that I love to write and HAVE to write. I enjoy writing here very much. I love the comments and the feedback. But I also have a sense of invulnerability here because if you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it, you’re not paying for it, it is MINE. I can do whatever I want and if you don’t want to read it, that’s fine, but you really can’t criticize.

I wish I could feel that way in my OTHER writing. I just sent off my Radney Foster article for the September issue of Best in Texas magazine. My heart is racing and my nerves are on edge because of the fear that goes along with being read and critiqued. I am afraid my editors, Katie Key and Ed Shane, are reading it right now going, “Oh, no, this isn’t what we wanted at all! The deadline is Friday and this will just have to be redone by someone that knows how to write. What were thinking when we asked Janice to do this?” I think all of this over and over with every submission. I have written for them now over a year. I’ve written about the Band of Heathens, the Tejas Brothers, Bruce Robison, some new kid I’ve forgotten his name, a few small pieces that they used on their website, and a whole series of little things about the shows at Hill’s Cafe last year. This is the first cover story I’ve done and the longest piece I’ve written for them. They wouldn’t have asked me to write it if they hadn’t liked (and paid for, I’ll add) the dozen other pieces I have written for them. So why do I feel this terror?

I have no idea where this fear comes from. I don’t remember any instance of not having my writing well received, really. Mrs. Shepic, my high school journalism and English teacher, was a hard taskmaster, but I didn’t ask her to be on the paper, she asked me after I took her Sophomore writing class. She liked what I wrote. I was hired at the Canyon News when I was 18 because they liked my writing and I can only recall a few critiques along the way, mostly critiques of reporting, not writing. I have had some submitted articles rejected and a short story get ripped to shreds at a contest, but the fear was there before I submitted those, I know. I wish I could excise it.

The fear is a pretty stifling thing. I felt it at its worst when I took a writing class in Dallas. For the second meeting, we were supposed to write 10 pages of our novel and bring them to class. We didn’t have to read aloud, just bring copies for everyone to read. I did the assignment, but I did not take it with me. I couldn’t bear the thought of letting them read it. After the class, I did go home and mail my writing to the teacher–sort of my proof that I was a good student and I did do assignments. She called and left glowing praise on my machine, the nicest compliments anyone could say. I still have what she said written down somewhere. That made it the tiniest bit easier to start bringing my writing to class and I stayed in her writing groups for a long time.

But what is it going to take to get OVER it? Or is it just one of those things people live with? Maybe I need to be in a writing group again. Or submit writing ALL THE TIME. Or at least keep writing here where people will read it.  Now, by writing this, I am NOT asking that you comment and say nice things. But you certainly can. There’s no doubt I write for the praise, not for the money!

August 22, 2009

My Aunt Dorothy

Filed under: Family, Food — Janice @ 9:58 pm

I am way overdue on writing about my Aunt Dorothy. This is her birthday present, after all. When trying to think of what to give a woman who doesn’t need anything and is probably tired of dusting all that she has, I decided to do what I would want my nephews to do for me… just do something simple. The boys are great about giving us pictures of themselves for Christmas, but I thought that seemed a little self-centered for me to give to Aunt Dorothy so I told her I would write about her.

Mom has three sisters and Daddy had one sister, so I have plenty of aunts and I love them all, but I have always been closest to Aunt Dorothy, both physically and emotionally. When I was a little girl, they moved from California back to Amarillo and so I grew up sharing most family events with the Jacksons. I think Aunt Dorothy would be surprised at how far back my memory goes. I remember when they first moved to Amarillo and lived in a house by the railroad tracks. I was confused at the time because I knew my Uncle Homer worked for the railroad and I wasn’t quite sure if maybe he just stepped outside the back gate and was at work.

They soon moved to the house that Aunt Dorothy still lives in – 45 years later. I love that house. It is about the homiest house of any house I know. It is a house where you are guaranteed the best meal of your life–even if it is only a tuna salad sandwich. When my Aunt Dorothy invites you to a meal, you better say yes.

There are many reasons to love Aunt Dorothy, but let me focus on that food for just a minute. She makes the best hot rolls in the world. Period. She makes a whipped butter than melts, well, like butter, but better, on her hot rolls. She used to make a fabulous steak sauce. She may still do it, but I haven’t had steaks at her house in a long time, but that sauce was memorable. She makes casseroles and side dishes that perfectly compliment the meal and she has never poured a can into a pan or heated up a frozen bag of vegetables and called that good enough. Everything is a recipe, a creation. She roasts ham and turkey or cooks a brisket or a fried chicken and never considers that one meat is enough. And when you think about desserts…   Aunt Dorothy doesn’t make a pie or a cake. She makes PIES and CAKES and fruity creamy SALADS and Jello creations and real whipped cream and puddings and chocolates and candies and cookies, too. You would think a woman that can cook like this and does cook like this would be ample and wide and have lots of evidence of the calories, but Aunt Dorothy is petite and thin and fit and agile. I guess she’s always too busy jumping up from the table to get something for her guests to eat a bite and put on any weight.

I have spent the last hour looking for my favorite photo of Aunt Dorothy in her kitchen. But it is hiding from me tonight so I will move on without it. I’m sure it will appear as soon as I post this.

Aunt Dorothy has always had a wonderful garden in her backyard – as neat and clean as she keeps her house. Her cherry tree was the source of the cherries for my favorite pies and jelly. And the vegetables she canned and froze always made for better meals year round. And her pickles. Oh my. I got to bring home a jar of her sweet pickles a few years ago and I enjoyed them more than any pickle I’ve ever had. That is a lost art, I’m afraid, and not one I’m going to carry on.

Aunt Dorothy used to sit on the floor with us and play Wahoo, a board game. She made Barbie doll clothes for us. She taught Sunday School at the First Baptist Church of Amarillo for little kids for years and years so I often got to do the same craft that her kids got to do. I remember getting to paint the Japanese symbols for “God is love” in white and red paint on black construction paper. Every party at Aunt Dorothy’s involved a quiz or a treasure hunt or a game of some kind and prizes for everyone. At the family reunion at her house in 1979 I received the award for “Most Unusual Job” and still have the certificate (homemade by Aunt Dorothy) in my keepsakes.

Since we lived so close, we spent a lot of time at Aunt Dorothy’s house. One of my earlier memories was before I was 5 years old. Daddy was a surveyor and spent a lot of time out of town working. We were home one time when Amarillo was inundated with rain. Uncle Homer came over to get us and to take us to their house (just a few miles away). I remember his car floating and water rushing in the doors as we kept our feet up on the hump in the floorboard of the back seat. I don’t remember if we spent the night or if he brought us home later, but there was always a safe refuge at the Jackson’s.

Over the years, we always celebrated joint birthdays with their family. Somewhere in February or usually March there would be a big celebration meal for me, Mom, Dad, and Uncle Homer with our February and March birthdays. In June or usually July 4, we would celebrate Donna’s and Aunt Dorothy’s and Mackie’s and soon, Donna’s husband Ken’s, June and July birthdays. Judy’s birthday in December usually got lumped in Christmas, I’m afraid, and we didn’t usually have the same birthday celebration with the family for her. July 4 was always a big family event. We usually had it at our house out in the country so we could shoot fireworks. But I remember one very special July 4 when was in my 20s and lived in Amarillo and Mom and Dad were out of town for the holiday. I spent the evening at the Jacksons with all of their family. It was maybe the first time I had ever been there without my immediate family, too. I felt a little bit odd to be there “alone,” but still so glad to have their house to go to.

I lived close by to Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Homer for a few years after college. I wish I had known then what I know now (don’t we all?) and had visited them more often and spent more time there. Being an aunt now, I know how much it would have meant to them. I did know, even then, that they were folks I could lean on. I remember one time when the water in my apartment was completely shut off and I had to get ready for a wedding shower or something where I absolutely had to clean up. I called Aunt Dorothy and asked if I could use their bathtub and they, of course, welcomed me and were happy to let me rush in, take a quick bath, and rush right out again.

Since I’ve moved away from Amarillo I have seen the Jacksons less and less, especially after Mom and Dad moved away from Amarillo. But even when the visits are the simplest, they mean so much. Mark and I stopped by on our way to or from Colorado one year and had a wonderful lunch of tuna salad sandwiches. That may have been when I got to play my accordion for Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Homer and, according to them, I was as good as Lawrence Welk. No, better.

Aunt Dorothy began using the Internet and email a few years ago and I’m so glad. She writes wonderful “real” letters and I still appreciate them, but our correspondence is much more prolific now that it is spontaneous and almost instant. She has always been more than willing to tell me stories about her childhood and fill me in on the family details I need for my genealogy. And she has never hesitated to send me pictures to use in my projects and family books. That means a lot to me.

She has a streak of stubbornness and fearlessness that I have read about in the women of my family many generations before me. I know I inherited the stubbornness, as well, but I don’t quite know if I got as much of the fearlessness. Maybe it needs to develop and there will be more of it when I am older. Aunt Dorothy took her first plane trip after she was 80 years old when she flew to California to see a friend who had invited her out. There was lots of fuss and efforts to stop her from making the trip and worry over how she would do it, but she was fearless and did it and decided that flying was the way to go! Actually, I think she may have flown once in the 1940s in a small plane and that was why she had never flown since. So the age may have a bit to do with that fearlessness. She grew into it and I hope I do, too.
Uncle Homer died in the summer of 2004. They had been married for over 50 years and were a great couple. I know she misses him, we all do, but she is always cheerful and active and energetic. And always smiling and welcoming. And loving. That’s a good word to sum up my Aunt Dorothy.

Here is Uncle Homer and Aunt Dorothy in 1946 in California.

Homer and Dorth 1946
And I think this was about the summer of 2003 at their sweet  home in Amarillo:

Dorothy and Homer

August 17, 2009

Cooper’s Barbecue

Filed under: Food — Janice @ 1:11 am

I’m so behind on writing about everything that happens in my life, I should just put one small event down, right? Something until I get the big things written about.

Last weekend I ate at Cooper’s Barbecue in Llano for the very first time. Mark has been there a couple of times before, but it always seems we hit Llano at the wrong time and we’ve either just eaten or the crowd is too massive. As we came home from my big family reunion last weekend, we came by way of Llano and the timing was perfect.

I have to say I am not the conoussier that some people are when it comes to barbecue. I really LIKE to have silverware and sauce and side dishes and some of the things people look down their noses at. So I liked that Cooper’s provided all of those things… though they still give you the meat on a piece of butcher paper. Mark had “the big chop,” which I guess is their specialty. I had some sausage and brisket.

Mark’s chop was absolutely delicious and huge. I think he brought home enough for 2 more meals after we both had our fill in Llano. My sausage was great, too. The brisket had a wonderful taste to it, but was pretty gristly. That would be my only complaint. They had great potato salad, which I usually don’t find at barbecue joints where side dishes are an afterthought. Their potato salad had just enough big hunks of potato and crunchy celery or pickles or peppers to make me happy. I hate when the potato salad is as smooth as mashed potatoes.

My favorite thing at Cooper’s was their beans! Free beans! Can you just go in and eat the beans? I would even pay for that privilege. Those were the best beans I have maybe ever had. I snagged an extra bowlful to bring home and they were good even cold later, and that’s saying something. Usually beans get a kind of “dirt” taste to them later I don’t like.

So, big thumbs up to Cooper’s Barbecue in Llano and I hope to go back soon… hopefully going or coming from Comanche County again.

August 1, 2009

On the Down Low

Filed under: At home — Janice @ 1:14 am

No, nothing in my life needing to be kept on the down low, but you’d think so, considering how I’m not sayin’ nothin’, right? I need to write, to catch up, to get started, to be motivated.
I’m busy. That’s a very good thing. I am loving this new job. I feel very guilty after a full day where Mark has been slaving in a warehouse that may be shaded, but it is just as hot as the outside temperatures. He’s exhausted and has worked so hard. I have been sitting in air conditioning, listening to my favorite songs from my childhood or the newest rock and country or anything at all I want to, and I’m getting paid to do it. I’m not saying there isn’t some frustration from time to time. I spent this week fine-tuning a couple of formats and, when my boss couldn’t make it do what she needed it to do, she re-loaded the old information so she could move forward with what she needed to do. Yes, she had to in order to do what she needed to do, but I start over back at square one. Is that such a bad thing? Not really. I’ll listen to great songs from my childhood again while I fix all the little rules again.

I’d like to write about some wacky family members, but I never know which ones might read this now or in the future, so we’ll keep that to a minimum. One person that I know won’t be reading is a distant cousin that I found through the internet as I was doing research. I emailed and she was kind enough to email back with a little bit of the information I asked for, though she didn’t seem very interested in family history at all. I immediately started getting a lot of forwards from her, but I noticed that she signed her name “Angle Mom.” The forwards are mostly the religious, “God loves you and so do I,” and heavenly chain letter type. So I really think she means to sign “Angel Mom,” but she’s a bad speller. After a few months of her forwards (that I even had automatically diverted to another folder so I didn’t even see them), they finally dropped off. Recently, though, Angle Mom is at it again and I’m getting more prayers and blessings. This week, though, I got one of those “fun activity” forwards. I just don’t get why people send those on… no idea at all. It reminds me of when the study hall teacher passed out busy work. Yes, it made sense there, I have no need for busy work on the internet now. But Angle Mom has time on her hands and sent out a forward where you had to take the first letter of your last name and think of words that start with that letter to fit the categories it asked for. [Side note, this is one of the executive functioning tests my psychologist bosses use to test mental flexibility and ability to multitask.]  Her letter was “S” so the answers all started with S.  The surprise was that she, the Angle Mom, used the word “sh*t” as an answer on one of the categories. But the LAUGH was her word for “Four letter word” was . . . . . .  SHOUT. Bad speller. Bad counter.

I still owe my Aunt Dorothy a post about HER and HER alone! That is/was to be her birthday present. We were there for her birthday on July 4 in Amarillo and I thought about gifts I could give her. Growing up, my family always said a picture of us would be the BEST gift. Now that I AM an aunt I realize how true that is. I love when the boys give me pictures of themselves for Christmas. That’s all I need. So I thought about Aunt Dorothy and I knew that anything she really could use, her kids and grandkids would get for her. Anything that I could think of to give her just sounded like something else she’d have to dust or take care of somehow. So I decided I would write about her on my blog. That’s a good gift, right? I think it is, for a sweet aunt. Trouble is, I haven’t done it yet. A month after her birthday and, though I’ve thought about it a lot, I haven’t written a word.

I think it was Ann Richards who said she didn’t want her headstone to read, “She kept a clean house.” She wanted to get out and DO something in this world and she did. You know, I really wouldn’t mind at all if my headstone said, “She kept a clean house.” I would hope it would be true, though. So far, not so good. Last weekend I finally got busy and cleaned my home office a LOT. I got a bunch of boxes from my friends Denise and Jessica’s office (they use lots of stuff and always have boxes). I filled a box with garage sale stuff (possibly), a box of books I don’t need, a box of books about music I do need, but maybe not in the same place as they’ve been, and another box of books that need to be sorted through. Now the office is clean… or at least cleaner. But there are five big boxes of STUFF in the hall, by the hearth, and in the guest room. My usual method of cleaning house is to move stuff from one room to another so each room appears clean for a short period of time.

And Mark and I need some new computers, it looks like. Last week I sold my Macbook. I never could “love” the Apple computer like everyone said I would. I wasn’t using it, so I sold it. Within a week, Mark’s computer took a nosedive and was not functioning. We couldn’t have planned it any more ironically. My good computer friend Dave got his back up and running again, but it is obviously old and may have issues again. While Dave was at the house, he did some work to this PC that was built when Clinton was in office, I think. He highly recommended I get a new one in here. And I want a new netbook to use out and about. Three computers in our future? Yes. Anytime soon? No way. But we will be backing up data regularly, believe me.

Bloggity blog…. let’s say this is a blog entry and move on.

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