FRONT-PORCH GOSPEL: THIS LIFE STORY BEGINS IN 1973 (KIND OF) – PART 7
As I stood with shaky knees in front of my newfound “friend” Doocy – his hand with the white-hot webbed fingers having just journeyed uninvited down the side of my face – that would be the first but not last time my life would pass before me that summer. It was a short life and probably needed an encore every time it ran.
At each encore, even now half a century past, we cannot help but look back with that moment standing before Doocy frozen in time.
At the re-telling of this story, we are a month removed from that fifty-year anniversary, being now the first of May 2023. Fifty years ago, I was in the final month of my junior year in high school, and I was finishing up my final few weeks of working at night and Saturdays at the Pic-and-Pay Shoe store at the shopping center where Roses was and just down from Winn Dixie where we had spent hundreds of hours working before taking our employ across the parking lot to sell shoes.
More importantly, by the time the May flowers bloomed, a bigger storm than the one that loomed that Alabama morning was on the horizon.
Mama, Fanny Louise Bowen, was entering the twilight phase of her life. Since her surgery for breast cancer in the Fall of that junior year, she had steadily gone downhill.
In January she had returned to work in the cotton mill, where she had worked a good part of her life. Things looked good then, I mean, in February. We were so proud that she had recovered from her surgery and was able to go back to work. She was happy, but Mama was always happy. That was the way she was. In the past half of a century, we have told her story over and over, always making sure to tell all listeners and readers that if that lovely lady had lived in Bible times the Lord would have pointed her out and said in His calm complimentary voice, “There’s a woman who has faith that can move mountains.”
That was Mama; and, by all accounts, she had a faith that would have been rare indeed, even in Galilee. I would see that faith firsthand as the summer months unfolded. Sometimes as we look back things are as clear as the morning sun, and sometimes it is hard to turn your mind back fifty years and capture just the exact perspective you had then. As a junior in high school – only 16-years-old, but that not keeping you from thinking you were almost a man – I am a little amazed at how well we functioned.
I did not have trouble in any of my classes at LaGrange High School, not that I remember, at least. Mama and I had some good times together that year, too, since it was just the two of us at home.
My older sister had moved to Texas many years before, and my second brother Wayne – four years my senior and the one responsible for giving me a love for basketball – had followed her to go to work out west. Tim, a year older than Wayne, had already joined the Marines but was able to arrange my job there with Pee Wee Light and Doosey and the gang, from his camp in South Carolina.
It was because of Tim, I guess, that I was standing right at that moment between heaven and earth. I was “standing in the gap,” as my grandfather Preacher Miller, Mama’s daddy, would preach from an Old Testament story; and at any moment I am sure I was about to fall into that gap and be swallowed up.
Funny, isn’t it, how a life has to kind of pass before your eyes before taking that fall into that gap. In this case, our witnesses would be the boss-man Red, Pee Wee, and Doocy and the rest of that chain-gang crew that early Alabama morning.
A singular detail that always seems to pop up – invited or not – as this 16-year-old’s life passes before him is that he was the baby of the family. Aw, do not think for a moment that this woman with a faith that could move mountains would ever let even one tiny, little-bitty opportunity pass to make that grand announcement to any and everybody we met while downtown shopping at the square or any other inappropriate place.
“And this is my baby,” she’d say, and she had enough pride in her voice there that she couldn’t have said it happier if she had been saying “This is my brand spanking new, shiny red Corvette fresh off of the showroom floor.” Her saying that would have been more like saying she had a headache compared to how she said “And this is my baby,” with a smile as wide as the Chattahoochee, and with a brush of her hand through my sandy brown hair. Oh, I resisted (Any 12-year-old boy would resist that), and I always pulled away and exclaimed, “Aw, Mama, I’m not a baby.”
But Mamas can just be deaf to such protests, and she would carry on her conversation with ever whom she had just met as if I wasn’t getting red with embarrassment and my lower lip wasn’t poked out like I’d just gotten hit in the mouth by a bully. I knew about that, too, because I had been confronted by a bully once, like that, but I’m here to tell you that he was the one who went away with the lip the size of a tomato and a cheek twice as red.
I was only eleven at the time of that little skirmish, and that might have been the highlight of my eleventh year had it not been for two big traitor brothers who caught wind of it later in the afternoon and carried it straight to Mama as if it had to be told in flying colors or they would burst. And Mama didn’t do anything to improve on that year. Her faith, surprising to me, didn’t keep her from employing a big switch when needed; and a certain part of that 11-year-old boy’s anatomy was redder that night than the bully’s swollen left eye.
But this is another story. We’ll save it for a later chapter, because it will give me some bragging rights when we have to recall that bully-to-be who came out on this bricklaying job looking for trouble. Suffice it to say that that Alabama boy was a mite bigger than the boy down at the Y, but he had the same ill-intentions on his mind. Unfortunately for him, he was on my turf, because this Roanoke bricklaying job would become my domain, even if it didn’t look so promising on that first Monday morning in early June. But that story won’t come until late July, 1973, and we have to survive this encounter with Doocy to get to it.
For now, we need to tell you what happened to Mama in February, four months after her surgery, that turned the world upside down...
Stay tuned for Part 8 next week.