Howard

There was never a time in my earliest years that his life was not a part of mine. Just a month or two younger than me, Howard was my cousin, my best friend, my brother. During those earliest years of my life, it was as if our lives melded together to form one. I loved him as much as one little person could love another, as much as I loved even myself.

His mother and my father were brother and sister. They had come from a dysfunctional family, dysfunctional at best, and, other than their elderly mother, each one was all the other had of that family. There were some relatives, but they had little contact with them. They were each married and they each had four children, all of comparable ages. They each had three boys and a girl. Our families lived near each other in Western Oklahoma during the post-war years of the late 1940s. The brother and sister were both born and raised in Beckham County and they were raising their respective families essentially as they had been raised since that was all they knew.

My parents were farmers, a hardscrabble life then and there, barely a decade removed from the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. Howard’s parents had already given up on farming and they worked for the small dependent school called Hext. It was a very small country school which had only eight grades when Howard and I started the first grade there in 1950. His dad worked as custodian and drove a school bus; his mom was one of two cooks who prepared our lunches.

Most of my preschool memories involve and include Howard. We shared time in each other’s homes. We picnicked together, went to school functions together and had sleep overs. They lived in a small house across the road from the school. It was furnished by the school as part of the compensation package for their services to the school. There were times when we would spend the night at each other’s homes. Three boys in each family, when we spent the night together we usually managed to sleep in one bed, three sleeping at the head of the bed and three at the foot.

A very early memory is documented by an old black and white picture. It is of a picnic in the summer of 1946 or 1947 at the Sayre public park. The old photograph shows Howard and me, together with his older brother, Charles, playing in the wading pool. It shows Howard being his same goofy self and me trying my best to mimic him. It was usually that way. I thought he was the neatest kid I had ever known. What he said was always funny. What he did was always important. Whether we were getting into some mischief or simply walking down the sandy, country road, it was always a joy to be with him. I had two older brothers with whom I was very close, but Howard was special.

We started in the first grade together in 1950 at Hext, that small country school which went to the eighth grade. We were in the first grade in a classroom that housed both the first and second grades, taught by Mr. Berry. She was an adequate teacher for the day, but the memories I have are not of what she taught. They are, instead, memories of recess when Howard and I would play together. We would see how high we could get on the swing set and how hard we could hit the ground on the see-saw, now called teeter-totters. How fast could we run and how much could we tease the girls?

Hext wasn’t just a school, it was a community. There was some organized boxing in the county, so Hext decided to host a boxing tournament. The building had been built around a gymnasium. Built by the WPA, it had two classrooms on either end of the gym, bleachers on one side and stage and restrooms on the other. A boxing ring was set up on the basketball court and there were fights far into the night. Howard and I, both pre-school age, were encouraged to get into the ring and fight. Howard didn’t want to and neither did I. We both adamantly refused to fight for other people’s amusement. The more I think about that, the more outrageous it is that these people wanted us, a couple of four or five year olds, to fight each other.

That first year in school was a glorious year as far as I was concerned. I got to see Howard every day. We sat next to each other in class, went to lunch together, played together during recesses and generally did everything as a single person. I loved him with all my heart.

During our first years of school, Howard’s parents made a major and life-changing decision. They decided to move 150 miles away to Oklahoma City. His father and mine are a study in contrasts in some ways. They were very close. As far as my father was concerned, he never had a brother so this, his brother-in-law, became his brother. They were brothers in every sense of the word. Now, with similar families and children close in age and identical in number, they made different choices for those families. Uncle Glen made a decision that his family would be better off if he moved them to the large city and raised them there. My father made a decision that his family would be better off if he kept them on the farm and associated with a small town environment. Sixty years later, who’s to say which one was right and which one was wrong. Or, was either of them wrong? They both provided for their families in their chosen way and it appears both families flourished.

Howard’s leaving had a heart-breaking effect on me. I moped around the house. Gone were the days when we would run over to the Bowen’s for an evening visit. There was no getting together to make home-made ice cream. No picnics. When school started again, I went into the second grade and Howard’s absence was not lost on me. I was disinterested in school. I wasn’t causing any trouble, I was just there, oblivious of most things around me. Mrs. Berry complained to my mother and was told that I was just having a difficult time adjusting to Howard’s leaving for Oklahoma City. Mrs. Berry had a solution; she yanked me up from my desk and spanked me. I don’t think it had any lasting effect, either positive or negative.

We would see the Bowen family during the year, particularly in the summer. They would come to Erick to see my grandmother from time to time. And, we would go to Oklahoma City to visit them. In those days, it was not an easy thing to make that 150 mile trip. We planned weeks in advance. It was a long drive on those two lane roads and you didn’t run up there just to turn around and come home the same or even the next day. It was always painful to see them leave or for us to do the leaving at the end of one of these visits.

Occasionally, but not often, I would be allowed to spend a week or so with them in Oklahoma City. More often, Howard and his brother, Charles, would be allowed to spend a significant part of the summer with us on the farm. And when they were there they did what we did. If we were chopping cotton, feeding the hogs or milking the cows, they were there. If we went to Vacation Bible School, they were there. And, if we stopped to pick blackberries at my grandparents after VBS, they were there. It wasn’t all work. There was a lot of play. We rode our old horse, Lady, everywhere. We would go to the river and play in the water. We ran all over that farm.

Once when we were visiting them in Oklahoma City, Howard and I were riding a bicycle on a busy street where we probably should not have been. We heard a roar and then saw a plane pass over our head and crash into the back yard of the house next to us. We went back there and saw the plane and the body parts scattered all over the yard. It had hit nose first, coming nearly straight down into the ground so that the wreckage was contained in that single back yard. I remember seeing a torso lying there. Various limbs, also. There was one head that we could see. Two people had been in the plane and it was a gruesome sight for a couple of ten year old kids to see.

It seemed Howard and Charles spent significant amounts of the summer with us each year. They fit in and did whatever we did. We lived on the farm, in a small farm house. Each summer we would move our beds outside. We didn’t have air conditioning and it was cooler outside. Besides, the house was so small the addition of other children pretty well filled it up. But, they seemed to love being there as much as we loved having them. Charles was the first to get a little older and too busy with his own life to continue making these summer visits.

One summer, Uncle Glen and Aunt Laura came to Erick to see her mother who was getting along in years and was in failing health. She would live only a few more years. Howard was with them. By this time, he was their only child young enough to still be going with them places. They spent the weekend there and the day they were going to leave we were working on plans for him to stay a little longer. We had a camping trip planned to go to Colorado. We loved camping in the Rocky Mountains and would spend quite a bit of time on these trips. They were work on Mom and Dad, especially her, but it was something she enjoyed. The change in scenery from the flat lands of Western Oklahoma to the grandeur of the Rockies was always awe inspiring. It was a big deal to get to go to Colorado and spend two or three weeks.

We floated the idea with my parents of Howard’s going with us to Colorado. They didn’t mind at all. We asked his mother and her first reaction was to say no. We continued to try to wear her down and she finally asked Glen what he thought. He wasn’t really a quiet man, except when Laura was around. She did most of the talking for the both of them. Uncle Glen thought about it briefly and then said, “Well, I’ll tell you what I think. If I had a chance to go to Colorado and my mother didn’t let me, I’d probably hate her the rest of my life.” Howard went with us. It turned out to be one of the most enjoyable trips I ever had. I walked familiar trails, explored familiar sights. I did all the things I did every year, but this time it was special. This time Howard was with me.

As we got older, the high school years saw a distance growing between the two of us. Our grandmother died in 1961 and they came back to Erick less often after that. And we were busy so we went to Oklahoma City less often. Howard’s life, like mine, was getting more involved and he didn’t come with them so often. And after we grew up and had our own families, we went years without seeing each other. We finally reached the reality of most families which have allowed distance to grow between them; we saw each other at funerals.

My father was the first to die and Howard and his family, including Aunt Laura and Uncle Glen and all their children, were there to share our grief. Uncle Glen died and it broke our hearts. And then, in 2007, my mother died. Once again, Howard and his family were there. Recently, Aunt Laura’s second husband, Dutch, died. My sister and I went to his funeral. We really didn’t know him, but we did know Aunt Laura. She is the only one left in the family of that generation, the only child of the Depression who remains in the family of William Waldren and Della Poarch. William and Della had two children, Aunt Laura and my dad. She is the only one left. We went to the funeral because that’s what families do, because that’s what my mother would have done had she still been alive.

When I was very young, I had a small picture of Howard who was about six years of age when it was taken. It showed a little boy in blue jeans and a striped T-shirt looking up at the camera. That was a heart-warming picture, just a precious image of a precious little boy. I loved that picture and would have even if I had not loved the little boy. I carried that picture with me far into my adult years. And, then, somewhere in the confusion of my life, it was gone.

I saw Howard at Dutch’s funeral. He was carrying his new little granddaughter, proudly showing her off to me and everyone else. It was a poignant moment filled with pleasure and pride. And in that moment I saw a generational shift in the family. But, I also saw that little boy in the picture, the cousin of my youth. And I was reminded of how I loved him.