Why do I feel I can almost remember the day I was born?

Because my mother and my grandmother told me the story of that day. 

Myrtle Lillian Rogers Paul was thirty six years old and already the mother of four children. On that sunny day in May the two oldest, ten year old Glenn, and eight-year-old Nellie had walked up to the square brick school house on the hill. The two little boys, five year old Clayton, and three year old David, played in the backyard while she sat listlessly on the concrete step of the well top and watched them.

            That’s where her mother, Mattie Rogers, found her.  “I brought you some  material”, she said, “There’s not much, but maybe you can make something for one of the boys.”  Myrtie brightened up a little when she saw the fabric, but her mother still didn’t like the way she looked.

            “When are you going to have that baby?”

            “I don’t know,” Myrtie sighed, “It was supposed to have been here two or three weeks ago.”

            As soon as her mother left, Myrtie called the little boys into the house and began measuring the fabric against their narrow shoulders. There was enough for each of them to have a new shirt, if she cut carefully.

            She had the two shirts cut out and was ready to sit down at the treadle sewing machine when Mattie came back with Dr. Nichols. The two of them had already decided it was essential to Myrties health to get the baby out as quickly as possible. When Dr. Nichols gave her the injection to start her labor, Myrtie asked if she could go ahead and sew up the two little shirts while they were waiting for the shot to take effect. But the Doctor said, “No, there won’t be any waiting. You just go ahead and get to bed.”

            He was right. By the time Glenn and Nellie got home from school, she had a five pound baby girl in the bed beside her. Eight-year-old Nellie was shocked, she hadn’t known a baby was expected. Myrtie wanted to name the baby “Joy” because this was the first baby she had delivered outside of wartime or depression. Myrties younger sister, Mildred, came by after she got off work at the shoe factory. She suggested another name, “Carolyn” to go with “Joy.”

            Carolyn Joy Paul was the fifth and last child of James Gillham Paul and Myrtle Lillian Rogers. The family lived in a four room white clapboard covered house on the corner of River Street and in Mokane, Missouri.

            There was no “wrong side of the tracks” as a social dividing line in Mokane. The dividing line was “the hill”. Those who could afford it lived on the hill. Poor people lived in the river bottom at the mercy of the Missouri River.

            Although it was known as a “river town” and the low-lying streets on the south end of town flooded regularly, the river could not actually be seen from the town. The MKT railroad passed through the southern tip of the town. State Highway 94 ran parallel with the railroad, a ribbon of asphalt closely following the curve of the rails. On the other side of the two lane blacktop a wide stretch of cropland hid the river from view. Usually.

             Sometimes a wet spring or fall, or even a series of mid-summer storms, would crowd the Big Muddy out of it’s banks. Backwater would push up the little creeks and tributaries that feed into the rivers causing each tiny rivilut to become a river out of control and overflowing it’s banks.

            It was a wet year. By the time Carolyn Joy was one week old, water had begun to creep up River Street. At first it was just a glimmer on the west end of the street. Myrtie sat on her front porch with the new baby in her arms and watched the water advance until the street was a wide canal, and the porches on either side were like docks overlooking the deepening water.

 Myrtie put on borrowed hip boots to carry the baby out of the flood.  

Why are memories of early childhood the clearest and easiest to recall?

My clearest childhood memories are of Mokane, Missouri. I’ve always considered Mokane to be my home town. After all, I was born there. But the fact is the Mokane that exists today isn’t the same Mokane of my memories. That Mokane is gone, if it ever existed at all. Childhood memories are sharp, bright, clear, and totally unreliable. I know that. But I still like to cling to the picture of River Street and Smoky Road that comes back so easily when I close my eyes.

We left Mokane when I was ten years old. How that came about is a whole other story that I must write down sometime. I lived there for ten years and for some of those years I was too young to be accumulating any memories at all. But still there are many memories.

I was born in a house on the corner of River Street. I think they named it that because when the Missouri River flooded, it came into Mokane by flowing right up River Street. We lived in a wood frame house with white clapboard siding just like almost every other house in the neighborhood. There was a front porch and a front room that you stepped right into from the porch. It was called the “front room” – not the living room. There was a couch and a chair for company, but Mama and Daddy’s bed was there, too. It was an iron frame bedstead with bare springs and a cotton mattress. The bed was always carefully made up with a bedspread or a nice quilt on it.

The kids bedroom opened off the front room and then the kitchen opened off of it. There was a front porch with a swing. The tiny back porch had a well with a pitcher pump just a few steps from the back door.

 That house seems small for a family with five children when I think of it now. But when I was little I didn’t feel crowded at all.

What will the Republicans say about Obama in the General Election?

It's scares me, thinking of all the possibilities. I like Obama. I voted for him in our Missouri primary. But the closer he gets to sewing up the nomination the more nervous I get. I'm afraid the mud slinging will be so uncontrolled everybody will get dirty.

I heard one of the conservative radio hosts today refer to him as Barrack HUSSEIN Obama. The emphasis was pronounced, intentional, and unmistakable.

Why am I so danged fat? Can I ever lose this weight?

Let's just start this off with complete honesty. It's hard to say out loud, hard to write, still, despite the evidence of my own mirror and countless frightening photographs, hard for me to admit: I am fat. At five-foot 2 inches and 229 pounds there is no denying it. I am fat, obese, morbidly obese. Not just overweight, as I have been telling myself all these many years.

The first time I really thought about being fat, I was 19 years old. Somebody bought a new bathroom scale and several of us tested it out. My father-in-law, Ed, weighed 119 pounds. My sister-in-law, Ruby, got on the scale next. She weighed 119 pounds. Then I got on the scales, and was surprised to see I also weighed 119 pounds. My husband got on and weighed 165 pounds, so we knew the scale wasn't broken.

At about six feet tall, Ed was much too thin. At five-foot-seven, Ruby looked good. At 119 pounds she was stacked. But the same weight on my small boned five inch shorter frame left me looking pot-bellied and soft. I vowed to lose weight that very moment. An hour later when my mother-in-law served up the pot roast, mashed potatoes, gravy, and apple pie, I forgot all about it.

Over the years I have made the same vow with nearly the same results so many times I can't count them all. Sometimes I stayed with it long enough to lose a little, even as much as 20 or 30 pounds. But every time I gained it all back and then some.

Just think about it. I was overweight at 119. Now I weigh 229. That's a whole extra person I'm carrying around.

This week I joined Weight Watchers. The meetings are on Thursday evenings. Every Friday morning I will post my weight here.

I've alway known what I want to be - so why did I become so many other things instead?

I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was ten years old. I don't remember ever thinking it over - I just knew. So why is it that I have studied and worked and practiced to be so many other things instead?

Despite a deep love for all books, I never really wanted to be a librarian. Yet I've spent the last 25 years sitting behind a desk in a public library.

Although I love history and have alway enjoyed family stories, I never had any intention of becoming even an amateur genealogist. And yet, I'm on the board of the Missouri Genealogical Association and I spend quite a bit of time doing genealogy research. I never intended to be a genealogy speaker. But I've given genealogy presentations in four different counties.

I certainly never expected to design web sites. But almost as soon as web sites appeared I was deep into learning all about it. Why did I do that?

I want to write. I want to BE a writer. Always have wanted that with all my heart. But I spend my days being a librarian and way too many of my evenings being a genealogist and a web
master.

Can we really 'do it all'? Why did we think we wanted to?

During the sixties I was a typical Missouri country girl. I married in late 1963 and spent the rest of the decade barefoot and pregnant. I raised a garden, sewed clothes for my kids, and even attended extension classes to learn proper canning methods. I didn't work, or even drive.Then the seventies came along. I was a charter subscriber to Ms magazine in 1972. I started thinking about my life in a way I never had before. I was no longer happy being "just" a good wife and mother. I wanted more. I wanted a career. I wanted to be a great writer. I wanted to "find myself". I wanted perfect sex. I wanted to decide which channel we would watch on TV. I wanted to go braless.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying Ms Magazine put all those ideas into my head. The women's movement was everywhere in those days. It was in the newspapers and magazines, on TV, and it was something we all talked about wherever women gathered. We began to think we had a right to want more than we had.What we wnted most was the right to make decisions about our own life. It was a fact that women did not have that right. Everyone knew it. We would say things like "my husband won't let me cut my hair" or "her husband let her get a job".

My own husband felt there were only two reasons why any woman would want to go to work: either her husband was not able to make enough to take care of the family, or she wanted to earn her own living so she could leave him. This was a deeply felt belief for him, just as it was for many men. He couldn't articulate it, and for many years I couldn't understand why he was so dead set against letting me have a job of my own. We had bitter arguments about it, especially after all the children were in school and I was at home alone on the farm all day. It was 1979 before he gave in to the idea. He let me get a job. So, you can see right there that I never have really managed to become a liberated woman.

Over the years I've picked some rights I really wanted and let others slide. I've worked since 1979. I have my own car and my own bank account. I wear my hair short even though I know he likes it long. But I don't think I'll ever get to decide which channel to watch. The women's movement opened up a whole world of possibilities for my daughters and my granddaughters. I am happy for them. But I'm also a little sorry that they will never know the world we gave away. Years ago I wote a poem about it.

Paths

I followed down the narrow path
carefully placing my feet
just where he stepped,
pausing
where he paused,
indian-fashion
single file.
Sometimes he looked back,
grinned,
and called me
squaw.
I didn't mind.
Not at all.
Summertime,
he took his pocket knife,
cut wild roses growing
cross the way
to save my arms
from scratches.
In winter,
he made his steps shorter,
trod down all the snow
to make the going easier
for me.
When my breath still came hard and fast,
he stopped,
watched a hawk fly 'cross the sky,
waited quietly 'til I said
"let's go,
I'm okay."
One Fall,
when the stream was running full,
he found a log to carefully balance on
while the water rushed beneath our feet.
I grasped his hand
to clamber up the bank,
and waited, later, while he checked some
swampy ground, to see if we should cross
or go around.
When he said
"come on"
I did.
Stepping carefully
where he stepped,
pausing
where he paused,
Indian-fashion,
squaw.
I didn't mind. Not at all.

Why do I let myself make so many promises?

I have too many hats to wear - or I have my finger in too many pies - or some other well worn cliche that means I have too much I'm SUPPOSED to do and not enough time to do any of it right.

Tonight I'm wearing my "librarian" hat because I'm at work. But I'm slipping into my "writer" hat for few minutes while I'm on break so I can get some blogging/venting done. At 9 pm when I get off I need to find my "grandma" hat and go watch my granddaughter play ball for an hour or two. Afterward, driving home and collapsing into bed with my ever-lovin' old man, I have to see if I can find my "good wife" hat. But if I can't find it and can only come up with my witch hat, I know he'll hang in there just like he has for the last 43 years.

If I get up extra early tomorrow, maybe I can sneak a half hour in my State genealogy "board member" hat and try to work on that slide show for the conference next week.