It Happened at Lake Airhead

My dad was one of seven brothers. By the time Leroy retired from the military and we moved to Austin, my grandmother and four of his brothers were living in the Wichita Falls area.

Wichita Falls isn’t all that far from Austin, so our family would occasionally go up there for the weekend. When we went in the summertime, quite often the whole extended family would get together at the lake on Saturday morning and then we’d have a big fish fry there at suppertime. So much fun!!

A couple or three of the uncles had purchased adjacent lots at the lake, so while there were only two cottages, there was a lot of land to roam, and all the lots were right on the water. I don’t remember whether anyone ever went swimming there, but everyone fished, and there were trails to wander on.

The first time the Lucy family went to the lake, Colene and I were totally baffled because the cousins kept saying we were going to Lake Airhead. Colene and I thought we knew what an “airhead” was, but we could not figure out why anyone would name a lake that. We didn’t want to ask, so we just looked at each other and said nothing. Eventually, all became clear – we saw a sign indicating where to turn for Lake Arrowhead. Colene and I had not gotten the hang of the North Texas Twang, and what the cousins drawled out that sounded something like “arrah-head” we extrapolated to “airhead.” Even after we understood the lake’s correct name, we continued to say, “Lake Airhead” and no one except Lucy#1 ever gave it a thought or gave us a look.

One of the times we were at Lake Airhead, one of Leroy’s brothers who lived in West Texas was also there with his family. There were probably at least 30 family members there, and it was a real treat to see everyone. There was some sort of party or music festival or something happening farther on down the lake shore that afternoon, and it broke up around 9:00, just when it was getting good and dark. The family members, young and old, were gathered outside at one of the cottages finishing up our ice cream (another bonus to spending time at Lake Airhead – there was always homemade ice cream after the fish fry), when out of the darkness came a young man. He startled us because no one saw him coming until he was in our midst – which, by the way, is a good way to put the back up on a Texas man sitting around with his family. So, he was already off to a bad start with my daddy and the uncles, and he did not improve their opinion of him on second look because there was no question but that he was stoned. He wanted to know if we had a phone he could use to call someone to come get him because, as he stated it, he had been “disconnected from [his] party.”

All the cousins old enough to “get” it were giggling because he was so obviously stoned and was rambling on and annoying the uncles more with every passing second. Finally, his words ceased and someone told him where he might find a phone because we didn’t have a phone, and he wandered on off into the night. There was a lot more laughing at this poor, lost, stoned guy after he departed (aunts and uncles as well as the kids), but the best part of all was when the West Texas aunt said, “Well, why did he leave the phone anyway?” Her questions was greeted with curious looks, so she elaborated – “Well, he said he was disconnected from his party. Why didn’t he just call back on the phone he was using when he was disconnected?” Her teenage boys rolled their eyes mightily and cleared up her misunderstanding. (Note to anyone under 40 – this was in the ‘70s and the only phones were land lines.)

Another trip to Lake Airhead gave the extended family their first clue that my quiet personality had some hiccups. One of my uncles was an Assembly of God minister and my grandma was from the Church of Christ, and they were strict teetotalers. The other aunts and uncles (including my parents) were not quite as, shall we say, enthusiastic in their church preferences (we attended Methodist church when we went), and were known to drink a beer or two on occasion. Interestingly, whenever my preacher uncle’s family and/or my grandma were at the lake with the crowd, the other aunts and uncles “hid” their beer by putting it in paper sacks, and then drinking out of the sacks, much like the town drunks in old movies drank their beverages. My parents just went on drinking their beers (if they were drinking beer; Lucy#1 tended more toward iced tea) like normal. The paper sack thing mystified me, and the explanation I was given by an aunt was that they were hiding the beer to show respect for the teetotaler viewpoint. I thought real respect would have been shown by not drinking beer in front of them at all, but hey, I was just a kid.

So, being a kid, on one of the trips to Lake Airhead when every adult except my parents, my grandma, and the preacher was drinking out of a paper sack, I asked one of my cousins where to get a paper sack and he gave me one. I then put my Co-Cola into the sack, and wandered around doing my usual lakeside activities while drinking my Coke. My parents looked at me; my daddy gave me a wink and Lucy#1 rolled her eyes, but they did not say a word.

I went on about my business, which means eventually the older cousins and I retired to one of the cottages where I yanked a couple decks of cards (also forbidden in front of my grandma) out of my purse and challenged my cousins to a game of Spades. We were merrily playing our game and drinking our Cokes (still in the sacks) when my aunt came in to speak with me. It turned out that the younger cousins (I was the third-oldest) thought drinking out of a paper sack looked like fun, so they all imitated me and got Cokes and paper sacks, too, and by the time my auntie hunted me down, everybody except my parents and the teetotalers was drinking something out of a paper sack.

Aunt Shirley, the sweetest lady in the world, came into her kitchen where we were playing Spades and quite firmly told me this:

I get your point and you are probably right, but now all the little kids are drinking out of sacks, and it has to stop.

Then she gathered up the remaining sacks from the kitchen drawer we had raided, made us give her the sacks we had wrapped around our Cokes at the table, and left without another word. Poor Aunt Shirley! Lucy#1 later told me that Aunt Shirley thought I was hilarious, got a huge chuckle out of the whole affair, and was really sorry she had to chastise me.

On one visit to Lake Airhead, someone had brought a couple mini-bikes. There were plenty of trails to ride on, and it was good entertainment for the tweens and teens. I wasn’t very good with the mini-bike, despite my cousin Kenneth’s best tutoring, but Lucy#1 loved it. She had been riding all over the place and having a great time on the trails when some hill and she had a disagreement and the mini-bike tried to leave her behind. She lost her seat, but not her grip on the handlebar. It took her a minute, but she wrestled the bike to the ground. One of the cousins (who was even more quiet than I, and who had spoken so few words to me that I was uncertain he even knew my name) happened to be watching out the window and said enthusiastically, “Lucy, come look at your mom! She’s wrestling the mini-bike! Wow, she’s strong!” I think her stock went up tremendously with the cousins after that because none of their moms would even consider riding the bikes but Lucy#1 not only rode one, but wrestled it into compliance! 

Colene reminded me of this (in her words): My remembrance is that we had rarely if ever heard that cousin speak, and that day he didn't just speak, he practically shouted "Lucy, Colene, come look at your mom!" I wasn't stunned by Lucy #1's feat - she was always a badass - I was stunned he had spoken AND knew our names.

Those days at Lake Airhead – fun times!

Here's a photo of Lucy#1 on a mini-bike:

Big Ol' Texas Hair

Our family was not one to have formal pictures taken. We were all shutterbugs at one time or another, so there are tons of snapshots of everyone, but posed studio photos? Not so much. We had only one family portrait made, and I am reasonably sure it was taken the summer before I was a senior in high school. At the time, I remember thinking we were all looking p-r-e-t-t-y g-o-o-d, but when Colene and I came across this photo last month, a bit of shrieking laughter occurred. Quite a bit, actually, and not just from the two of us. If my memory serves, pretty much everyone with whom we shared the photo joined the laugh riot, along with a continuous chorus of “oh my gosh!” that was not exactly complimentary in its delivery.

Here’s the portrait:

Um, yeah. That’s probably one of the most unflattering family portraits Olan Mills™ ever produced, but I don’t think much of the blame can be laid at OM’s door. Really, the ‘70s are to blame. Lucy#1 is wearing a bulletproof polyester pantsuit that was actually in style and her glasses are not even hopelessly outdated (just a little outdated). Colene’s big wire-rim glasses are the height of fashion! I’m definitely stylin’, what with that awesome sweater-vest thingy, and I’m here to tell you that pink shirt was very fashionable, very shiny, and very polyester-silky, so much so that I wore it for years. (I actually wore it until the day this happened: I was in college and was wearing this same shirt, which I still loved and still received compliments on even though the buttonholes were beginning to stretch out a wee-tiny bit. I went out to lunch with my (female) coworker and as I climbed out of her low-slung car in the office parking lot afterwards, a (male) professor stuck his head out the second floor window to say something to us . . . . just as my front-closure brassiere flew open and caused my shirt to unbutton. Yeah, right there in front of God and Karen and Dr. McKee and a whole wall of windows at Oak Street Hall. You can bet I whipped around in a flash, and Karen and McKee both swore they never even knew anything had happened, much less saw anything except my back as I faced the parking lot with my hand to my chest, but that was the end of that shirt for me.)

The most awesome thing about this family photo, however, is the hair! Oh my goodness! Leroy looks just like the retired military guy he was, and Colene’s hair really isn’t that bad, just not cut well for her naturally curly hair. Colene really couldn’t help what her hair was doing, what with being in elementary school and being at Lucy#1's mercy on hairstyles and hair stylists.

But no one will ever be able to say what we Two Lucys were thinking. Lucy#1 hated getting her hair cut (obviously, no styling occurred at all), so she went to the most convenient, least expensive place she could find and got in and out as quickly as possible. As for me, I actually liked my hair, despite the fact that it looked like a helmet. (I didn’t actually see the helmet thing at the time, but I should have, I really should have. Earlier in the very summer this photo was taken, a boy I met in Florida told me that he had first seen me walking from my grandma’s house to my aunt’s house and wondered why I was wearing a helmet. But then, he said, the breeze had picked up a piece of my hair and he had realized that was my actual hair and not a helmet at all. True story.)

This photo being the product of a family-portrait session, it’s no wonder we didn’t have additional group photos made. At one point when I was in my mid-20s, Lucy#1 made Colene and me each have a portrait made during an Olan Mills™ special event. Colene’s came out fine, but thank goodness I don’t have those photos at hand because I’d have to include them and that would just show that I did not do any better with my hair after I hit 20 – in the portrait, I was growing my hair out from a crazy Rocky Horror Picture Show Magenta kind of perm, and after straightening it – since it was straight on top and frizzy at the ends – it was flat at the top and thick and wide at the bottom, very triangular, and I appeared to be wearing a wedge of cheese on my head.

Finally, FINALLY!!, in the mid-80s, after many pleas by Leroy and Lucy#1 for us to have our picture taken professionally again, Colene and I took a photo in which we were gorgeous! Yes, 100% fabulously, stunningly, gorgeous. No horrible hairstyles. No braces. No bizzarro clothing. We had finally grown up and we were lookin’ GOOD, baby! Behold the beauty, y’all:

Yowza! Really, there are not enough superlatives to describe how great we (thought we) looked here. Colene and I loved this photo! Woo hoo! A good likeness at last. We had this lovely photo framed and gave it to Leroy and Lucy#1 as a combined Mother’s/Father’s Day gift. They loved it! They hung it on the wall in their living room because they were so proud of their incredibly beautiful girls.

The photo stayed on the wall until long after Leroy had died, when Lucy#1 sold the house and moved to another town. She didn’t hang the photo on her living room wall in the new house because 20 years had gone by and she had better photos – of her grandchild! –  that she wanted to hang instead. The photo of the Big Ol’ Texas Hair Girls was stored in a closet.

Then, ten or so years later, Lucy#1 had to leave her house and move in with me. When Colene and I were helping her pack up her house, Colene’s son found the photo in the closet. He did not recognize us. (Can you believe that?) We all three laughed long and hard over the photo, and over how slam-dunk perfect we had thought we were. We propped the photo up on a dresser in the guest room where it could not be missed and went on packing boxes.

Later in the day, Lucy#1 came into the guest room and saw the picture standing at attention in front of her. She asked, “Where did you get that?” We explained that D had found it in the closet.

Lucy#1 asked, “Where did that come from? Did one of you store it here?”

“No,” we replied. “This is your photo of us. We gave it to you and Leroy when y’all lived in Bryan. It used to hang in the living room.”

And Lucy#1 declared in a firm voice, “I have never seen that picture before in my life.”

That’s the heartbreaker of dementia. We propped our Big-Hair selves up on the dresser so Lucy#1 would get a laugh when she came into the room and saw us, but she didn’t get to enjoy the joke after all. Don’t you just hate that?

Hello, Real World. Hello, 1970s.

You may have been wondering, as did the folks back East in Dancing with Wolves,  “Now, why don’t [s]he write?” In my case, folks, depression. I slept through most of 2014 and when I was awake, I mainly gazed vaguely out the window or read a book until I fell back asleep. I did a little knitting on easy-peasy projects, but I haven’t picked up a piece of my main hobby, cross stitching, since Lucy#1 died, because I have been unable to make my mind focus well enough to follow a pattern. I bottomed out in December 2014, clawed my way out of the dark, and have only been back to pretty much full-time normal function for a month or three. I started a more detailed knitting project, but I still haven’t tried to cross stitch. That may be the acid test, and maybe I can give it a shot next weekend.

At any rate, even while I’ve been one big emotional malfunction, I haven’t wanted to give up this family story – I’ve just been unable to write it. So, here we go, back to the life and times of the Two Lucys and our family.

Lucy#1 left me seven boxes of photographs. Some are great big packing boxes, and I haven’t opened those yet, but I took three smaller boxes to Austin a couple weekends ago so Colene and I could divide them up.

What a hoot!! It happens that many of the photos in the three boxes were scenery from various trips Lucy#1 took over the years, and while we said, “oh, pretty” a lot, those weren’t keepers for us. The photos we examined closely and divided between us were the ones with the people we knew. Those people photos are our gold!

Here’s a keeper:

I’m fairly certain this charming family portrait was taken in the early ‘70s, in our kitchen in Austin. It looks to me that I’m trying not to cry in this photo, which suggests my Uncle Gilbert took it. I’m crying or about to cry in nearly every teenager picture he took of me! I hated having my picture taken, would always try to get out of it, and he would eventually (by shame or by physical force) make me be in the photo. However dorky I was, though, man-oh-man, check out my cute family! Isn’t Colene adorable? (But why is she wearing long sleeves while the rest of us are in summer attire? I wish we had narratives to go along with these gems.) Leroy looks the same as always, handsome with a crew cut. And look at Lucy#1!!!! What a doll! It’s fun to remember her being so young and happy!

I sat at that very table every afternoon to do my homework. (Yes, I was the super-geeky teen who got the homework out of the way before suppertime, so I could have my evenings free. If only I were so good about getting things done now! Ha!) I did my homework at the kitchen table so I could talk Lucy#1’s ears off while I worked on the school stuff and she cooked supper. She was my sounding board, my spell-checker, and my problem-solving assistant all rolled into one. She taught me what turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons for life, while helping me with my algebra and geometry proofs, simply by saying, “Read that problem to me again.” She later confessed she had no idea how to do the proofs, but she knew that if she could keep me focused on the problem by reading it to her over and over, I would figure it out on my own. She was correct, with both the high-school math problems and the approach to life’s problems. I’ve learned a lot of things and solved a lot of problems in my life by reading and/or tackling the thing again and again until – presto! -- success.

I learned a lot and laughed a lot that kitchen table. Lucy#1 listened while I fought my way through algebra and geometry and taught me to figure them out (and grow to love them), especially the proofs. She listened to my tales of teenage woes and joys and taught me how to walk on. She told me tales of the extended family and of the people she worked with, their woes and joys, how they were walking on, and her take on their situations. Lucy#1 knew what I needed to know and hear and learn, and she taught me as well as she was able, all at that kitchen table.