hurling words

Rebby Lee is a creative nonfiction piece. We lived in Mason City, Iowa at the time.

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My record collection was meager and consisted mostly of 45′s. I had one Monkees album that I played over and over again, so when I was in Rebby Lee’s bedroom for the first time and saw all of her records, at least twenty, I was impressed.

Rebby Lee’s house was in my neighborhood, down at the end of the block. We lived in a rented house next to a lady with four cats. I shared a bedroom with my sister, but Rebby Lee had her own room. Her own room and a record collection. She also had her own record player. And a guitar. 

 What should we listen to?” she asked, and she seemed comfortable in the role of hostess, though I knew later that she could not have been.

“I don’t know.” I picked up a record by a guy named Hank Williams.

“Who is Hank Williams?” I asked.

Rebby Lee was a tall girl, probably about 5’7″ and somewhat plump, a word that even grandmothers in 1967 thought harmless. But she was. She was a big girl for seventh grade. She had long blond hair that she always wore in thick braids. Her calf length skirts were calico and her blouses were white percale or blue chambray. She always dressed this way, in soft blue hues, which contrasted with her ruddy, pimply complexion. And thicker than her braids were the lenses of her glasses, glasses that were a bit too large for her, big as she was. Even my glasses were too manly, as if no one thought young girls deserved to feel pretty. And my glasses were thick, too. I understood her need to squint to see the tiny print as she looked over the album I had selected.

“Hank Williams?” she said incredulously. “You don’t know who Hank Williams is?”

I will admit that I sometimes felt superior to Rebby Lee. She was a classmate, but I think I was her only friend, and mostly we were just neighbors. She was large, nearly blind, pimply, and, as I was soon to discover, a country music fan. No one listened to country music. No one who was cool anyway. And now I felt somewhat stupid, as I had never heard of Hank Williams.

She rocked back and forth on her crossed legs, something I could not really do even though I was much thinner than she. She shook her braids slightly from side to side and smiled a smile that said both that she was glad to be able to inform me and glad to know something I did not.

“He’s only the greatest country singer ever.”

“Oh,” I said, not knowing why I should be impressed. I liked Rock and Roll, not Country Western, as we called it then.

“Oh? Well, he’s so great. You wanna listen? You gotta listen.” She put the record on and we listened.

If I had not been 12 years old, if I had been older and understood that Hank Williams was indeed an influential artist whose Blues style crossed over into Rock and Roll, I would have been really impressed that another 12 year old had not one, but several Hank Williams’ albums. But I was not any of those things. He sounded old fashioned and odd to me.

“I can play this one,” she said after the song ended. “I could teach you.”

Now Rebby Lee was not my first choice for a friend, but I knew she knew how to play the guitar and I wanted to learn and I thought–even at 12 years old we can be devious like this–that maybe if I were friends with her, maybe she would teach me. It was how I got invited to her house in the first place. At school we had to give a little speech about our hobbies and she told our class that she played guitar. I got it in my head that maybe I would start walking with her sometimes to or home from school and then as we walked maybe I would ask her.

In our house next to the lady with the four cats where I shared a room with my sister, we had no money for guitars or for more than one record and my mom was having a new baby in a few months and my step dad was in a new job and there was no money for a guitar, but all the cool boys liked guitars. Rock and Roll was about guitars.

“It’s easy,” she assured me. She handed me her guitar, and showed me how to hold it, which felt overwhelming. My moment of emergence was at hand. It was easier for her to sit behind me and guide my hands and fingers. Her warmth radiated into me, her body closer to me than anyone not in my family had ever been, and yet, it felt right, like she wanted only for me to know what gave her joy. She was my teacher.

At night when I lie awake on my side of the room I shared with my sister, I would even hum in my head some of Rebby’s songs instead of the Beatles, instead of the Byrds. But I never told my sister about my new friend. I never talked about Rebby Lee at all.

There were many such afternoons together and Saturday mornings. We’d listen to Hank or Patsy Cline or Loretta Lynn. I learned to play a few chords, but I was a poor student after all. My strumming produced nothing that could ever be considered a song, and we both knew it was useless to go on. Plus, I decided it was more pleasurable to listen to Rebby Lee plunk out her own heartfelt 12 year old versions of her idols’ songs. We would sing “Your Cheatin Heart” really loud and then laugh. She had a true and honest soul. I did not.

That year I learned that I was never going to be a guitar player, and I learned that I could be cruel.

After Algebra class the large, ruddy faced girl with thick blond braids approached me excitedly to tell me that her grandpa had bought her a new Hank Williams album.

“Its a greatest hits,” she almost squealed as she squeezed her books to her chest.

I was with some other girls. They did not wear long skirts or their hair in braids. They did not listen to Hank Williams records. They thought Rebby Lee was odd. Everyone thought Rebby Lee was odd.

“Who’s Hank Williams,” I scoffed, as if I had never known Rebby Lee, as if we were not friends, real friends, not just neighbors, as if she had not trusted me with her heart.

I gave the other girls a knowing look and with them walked down the hall to French class.

June 4, 2008

I have told others of my mother, that in the days when we were poor, she never let us feel poor, and I think that may be the most important thing she ever did for us, her four children. I know it is the most important thing she ever did for me.

She never let us think that we were not special, not smart, not capable of everything we could be. That she made us feel this way in spite of some incredibly rough times after she and my father were divorced is a testament to her strength.

We could have been raggedy kids, but we weren’t. If we were different from other kids in school, I never knew it. We bought our clothes in stores like other kids, or my mother or grandmother sewed for us. We never went without meals, either. Sure, we ate cheaply, but food was fun and made with love. I loved hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes. I even secretly like liver. And who could guess that my favorite meal from those days would become a classic with my son in law: wieners, potatoes, and cheese. I always made that for my own kids. Some things from the need to be frugal simply became part of who I am.

I am not a waster. I am not a frivolous spender. As a teacher, I get angry when I see how kids take for granted all the gadgets and toys their parents buy for them. Not that I always wanted toys. I remember wanting two things growing up: an Easy Bake Oven and a piano. I never got the Easy Bake Oven. Instead, I learned how to use a real one when I was only nine years old. I can still use an oven pretty well on occasion, but the most important thing that I gained from my early experiences with cooking was an enhanced self confidence. I have long felt that I can do anything. I don’t remember my mother ever contradicting that impression. And even this influenced the kind of mother I became. I was not a “mothering” mom, overprotective, having always to do everything for my children. Instead, I expected them to be self reliant.

The hardest thing in those early days for my mother was the long hours she spent working. Her waitress jobs left her physically exhausted. I am sure I never fully appreciated that sacrifice from her. I know she was often tired, and looking back, I cannot fathom how she coped with it all. I wonder if it had been me in her place, would I have been strong enough to keep a nice home for four kids? We lived in no palaces, but our houses were always clean, inside and out.

One house in Fort Wayne I remember especially well. It was the house I learned to cook in. It was the house I learned to garden in, with a little patch of lima beans by the side of the house that nobody but me would eat. I still love lima beans. And it was the house where I learned that playing with a homemade Barbie house might even be better than a real one. My sister and I not only made our own Barbie Dream House, we made an entire Barbie town out of anything we found around. The expanse of it took up half the floor in the basement. We were queens of our realm. We imagined and learned. Those days were mostly joyful, mostly wonderful.

I think there is a certain pride within me that comes from having had little growing up. I wonder how people who had everything their little whims desired can have matured with values at all. For it is true that when we no longer desire anything either from the world or from ourselves, we have stopped living in the truest sense. I like to think that not ever having an Easy Bake Oven was a gift to my character, and I am proud that my mother never gave in to my whining.

Our life could have been otherwise. My mother, if she were not as strong and self reliant as she was, might have sunk into the despair that captured her from time to time. She could have let us plunk ourselves in front of the TV on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons instead of insisting that it was our part to help clean the house and insisting that cleaning the house was not a negotiable concept. If she were not a woman of humor and joy, we might have grown up to be cynical and sour, expecting the world owed us for our pain. If she were not a woman who knew we were always better than our circumstances, we might have given in to the demands of poverty.

It could have been otherwise. But it wasn’t. We owe this to her, to the lessons she taught us with her life.

My mother will be 73 this year, but in many ways she is younger than ever. I cannot give her the expensive gifts she deserves, but I know that she does not expect them either. This essay is my milk carton covered in a crayon design planted with marigolds. It comes as much from my heart.