January 28, 2021 – Listening to Kimmie Rhodes “Send Me The Sun.“

My good friend Kimmie Rhodes is a songwriter/singer/playwright/actress/ambassador and the daughter of a carnival worker. When I became a member of the too-young-to-be-old-widow-women club, Kimmie became one of my strongest champions. We have been on adventures, played hours of Spite and Malice, milles of Mexican Train dominoes, and are always making plans for the next big thing.

Kimmie’s story about her battle with rats is more than a tale of extermination. It is a lesson in resilience and bouncing forward and finding resources to help you get through the things you have to get through. And coming out on the other side.

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When Joe Gracey’s cancer returned after more than a decade of remission, he and his wife of nearly three decades, Kimmie Rhodes, faced it head on, with their team of warriors at Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.  They closed their home in Austin’s Briarcliff on Lake Travis, and moved into a long-term hotel in the hospital district for this final tour of duty that would last nearly four years.

Kimmie and I are dear friends. More than that, she has been my #1 widow mentor. Is that a thing? Yes. We have soaked in the pool until nearly sunrise, played cards from morning till night, and driven the backroads of West Texas.

A lot of tears and even more laughter. Is that okay? Yes. There is nothing more frightening to outsiders than widows chortling at the kind of gallows humor that can only be earned when you are left to pick up the pieces. 

Kimmie wins the pitiful widow lesson championship it comes to one-upmanship with her Rat Story. It begins with French cadmium oil paints and ends with an unlikely hero.   

I will try to share the story just as Kimmie told me – well, as I remember her telling it to me. Wine was involved and we both may have embellished it a bit but it is almost completely true.

Kimmie said:

For years, I have collected beautiful oil paints.  I have a house in France and had been traveling and touring there regularly. I love to go to an art store in Paris called Sennelier that has been there since the 1880s. When you go into this store you can just feel the magic, walking in the footsteps of some of the greatest artists in the world: Chagall, Matisse, Picasso, Monet….

This paint is not even the same as paint you can get here. Their Cadmium Red is so much more vivid. Apricots, flesh tones, burgundy all come alive. It’s made with safflower oil and organic stuff.  The colors are so rich, and just make me happy.  Instead of bringing home souvenirs, I would bring home tubes of paint, and had accumulated more than 100 tubes of oils in different stages of use in my upstairs art studio at home in Austin.

Backstory: in the middle of touring, my husband, a thirty-year cancer survivor, came home from the dentist with the news that the cancer had come back. Life got in the way of our dreams.

We went back to M.D. Anderson Medical Center in Houston and embarked on what turned out to be a three and a half year residency in Houston with occasional short treks back to our hill country home. I would come home for a few days and then go back to M.D. Anderson to be with Gracey.

All the while, our home was turning into a haunted house.  The wisteria I had planted near the front porch and faithfully trimmed back every season had grown up and into the eaves. Spiders were taking over with cobwebs everywhere, and everything had a layer of dust on it. And I thought I saw tell-tale signs of a rat. Or maybe two.  But that was not my priority. I’d come home, grab a few things, and go back to Houston.  

During that time, Central Texas was experiencing one of the worst droughts in memory. We live at Lake Travis and the lake dropped about 75 feet.  Then, in the heat of the summer of 2011, some power lines collided and sparked a brush fire that burned more than 6500 acres and destroyed more than 60 homes.

Gracey and I sat on the bed at the Zsa Zsa Hotel, where we were “living” at the time,  and watched The Weather Channel. Only instead of tornadoes or snow flurries, the reports were of the huge fires that we could follow on tv,as they came closer and closer, beating a path to our Briarcliff home.

The last house that burned was only a mile from our house, and then the wind changed and blew the fire back the way it had come. After eleven days of terror, the fire put itself out.

But between the drought and the wildfires, coyotes, raccoons, snakes, and all sorts of animals cut a path to run away from the fire, and what had begun as a small rat problem in the house had become a HUGE rat problem.

The thing about MD Anderson is that once you are there, you feel safe and you don’t want to leave. I’d leave Gracey and come home for a little while and then want to race back to Houston to be with him. On one of those quick trips home, I noticed these curious Easter egg colored pellets all over the house. Beautifully colored rat shit.

It was because – it turns out –rats like fat. And grease. And oil.

And I had a whole lot of really beautiful oil paints in my studio, made with safflower oil. And all these rats had come into the house through the attic vents and the wisteria vines and crimps in the roof and they found the oil paints. Since no one was living in this abandoned house, there was not any other food for them. So they got into my beautiful, vivid oil paints.

And I had zero time to deal with this. I didn’t have time to even buy a trap, let alone set a trap and wait for them to die. It was not a priority.

My husband dying was a problem. Rats were not on my to-do list.

Every time I would come home, there would be more multicolored pellets all over the house. But I did not see the rats. I did not even go upstairs. My brain was not connecting. I did not think about this being a Real Problem. It simply did not sink in. I saw these  brightly colored pellets, and wondered about it for a half second and then left.

My good friend, Beth Nielsen Chapman had lost her husband to cancer a few years before, and she was helping me through this. She flew to Houston to be with me at the hotel for a few days while Gracey was in the hospital, and I needed to go home and get some things. So we drove to Austin to spend the night, planning to drive back to Houston the next day. This was in the early days of The Infestation.  We stayed up talking well into the night, and were standing in the kitchen when I saw a rat tail sticking out from behind a broom in the corner. I moved the broom and there was this little injured rat. One side of its body was wounded so he was scooting sideways across the floor.

Now, I am out of my mind and my husband is dying and I am not paying attention to much of anything, and Beth is jumping and saying “Ew Ew Ew!”

At this time, we had been at M.D. Anderson for a year or so, and I had seen so much worse than this. I had seen so much suffering. So I was pretty hardened to pain.  Beth said, “I know! Get a shovel and we will scoop it up and take it outside, and some hawk will have a good breakfast!”

I got a shovel and looked at that rat and said, “You know, Beth, here’s what we are going to do.” And in one fell swoop, I just bludgeoned that little crippled rat – and put it out of his misery. I said we are NOT going to take this rat outside and let him suffer. I killed him instantly and scooped him up and put him outside.

Beth was horrified. She said, “Oh My God! I saw that look in your eye! I cannot believe you had that in you!”

And I said, “I just cannot stand to see anything else suffer.”

Long story. And then, my husband died.

After three and a half years, I came home to this haunted house. The lawn is dead. The garden is grown over. The house is full of rats. The wisteria vines are like Jack and the Beanstalk, and  have grown into the eaves and destroyed the porch, and what had been tearing the house down was now holding it up.

I was not in any place to rebuild. My heart was broken. I was having nightmares and trauma. Gracey died on November 17, and I came home to live with the rats. I was not thinking clearly, and I did not even know where to start.

Things just go over your head when you’re grieving like that, and the rats kind of seemed appropriate.

I remember waking up one night to get a drink of water. I walked into the kitchen and they were grazing. A rat came out from behind the stove. He was just looking at me. I looked at him and he didn’t even run. He was studying me from about five feet away. We looked each other in the eye and I said, “I WILL get you, but I just can’t right now.”

That really said where I was. I did not have the strength to deal with it.  But I was going to play on the Delbert McClinton Cruise in January and then Emmy Lou Harris had invited me to take part in her 25^th anniversary celebration at the Grand Ol Opry. I planned to be gone for five weeks.

So I hired a guy to come in and plug up the holes and fix the vents, and get rid of the rats, clean up the mess, and paint the walls.  Everything was going to be clean and fresh and taken care of when I got home. He finished the job and locked up the house and reported that it was all good, and I wasn’t due home for ten days.

Right before I came home from Nashville, my son Gabe called and said, “There are rats all over the house! And they have torn it completely apart! They’ve wrecked the pantry and chewed through the lids of your liqueur bottles and eaten all the electrical cords!”

What people don’t know is that if you don’t know what you are doing, you can trap rats INSIDE the house – and that is not good. I had just paid $4000 to get rid of the rats and plug up the holes and the rats were trapped inside the house and had gone insane.

What I didn’t know then was that rats are smarter than dogs. It was like if you had twenty German Shepherds trapped inside the house trying to get out.

So I took a breath and said, “Okay, Gabe. I will pay you $25 for every rat you kill. We have to start all over on the house because it is ruined.”

He called me back the next day and said, that one of the rats had fallen in the commode and drowned. I said, “Okay, I will give you $50  for every rat that drowns.”

 He would call me every day with the rat report.

Meanwhile, I decided that this was war. I am going to get them.”

I went online and found the name of a rodent control guy with Five Stars. The best.  I booked him to come to the house on the day I got home. I flew in and drove straight from the airport to the house and met him. It was a real eye-opener.

His name was Rio Tenango.

Rio Tenango calls himself an urban wildlife remover. He has a brown beard, a round shaved head, strong teeth, and round brown eyes. He arrived with his wife. They are a couple who are passionate about rat killing.

Rio Tenango is very clever – and thinks like a rat. It turns out you have to be very clever to get rid of rats.

He immediately recognized the problem and explained that we had trapped our rats INSIDE the house. He put on gloves and those little slippers over his shoes and started scrambling all over the house. He scurried upstairs and into the attic. He pulled out the dryer and looked behind the stove.

I just sat in the living room like I was waiting for the test results at a doctor’s office. He finally came back into the living room and gave me the news.

He had discovered two populations of rats in my house, and they were probably not even aware of each other. They were co-existing without knowledge of the other colony. He said I probably had 17 rats. I don’t know how he came up with that number, but he was confident.

Then he went around the house and told me all the mistakes we had made. He was a rat expert and I paid him a lot of money.  After all, he had Five Stars. I was not going to get some three star rat man. 

Jeff, the guy who had been working on my house, had plugged the holes all right, but he plugged them at the wrong time of day. And if rats cannot get in, they cannot get out!

Rio Tenango explained that you have to plug the holes at a certain time, when the rats are out.  He said we’d need to unplug the holes and let the rats out. Then he walked me all around the house and showed me all the places rats could get in through my corrugated tin roof. It there was a crimp that I could put my finger in, the rats could squeeze themselves flat and long and wriggle into the house that way. So, after we got rid of these rats, we would have to put steel wool and caulk in every nook and cranny.

But for now, we had a rat jail.

I think I just had bad rat karma. Or good rat karma. I am not sure which.

Back to Rio Tenango. He vacuumed all the rat shit from the attic and put rat poison up there and left a place for them to escape.  After rats eat poison, they want to go outside to get a drink of water and then they die. So they needed an exit.

As he was explaining all of this to me, it occurred that he was starting to look positively ratlike. He could do great rat impersonations.  as he explained that rats are smart – and strong. He said most people don’t know how intellegent rats are. They are smarter than any other animals. He knows the way rats think. Most people don’t get that. That’s why they use rats in laboratories for scientific tests. They’re gonna hit the cocaine button every time. They’re smarter than rock stars.

And then he told me what I needed to do to get rid of the ones that were still in the house. I had pets and grandkids in the house so I didn’t want to have poison downstairs where they might get into it. 

Rio Tenango said, “Now look. I can charge your $400 to do this or you can do it yourself.”

I said, “I want to pay you to do it, but tell me anyway.”

And he wanted to tell me. He is all about rats. Have I mentioned his Five Star rating?

Rio Tenango said, “Here’s how you catch a rat.”

He said to get the old fashioned wooden traps – the seventy-nine cent kind. Not the box they climb into that is sticky or the new plastic traps. Get a dozen of big wooden rat traps, at least. And remember that rats want fat. That’s why they got into all that oil paint.

He said to use the rat traps as feeding stations. And remember that if a rat sees another rat get killed in a trap, you will never catch that rat in a trap. So you have to  train them, and catch them all by surprise.

For a week, you use the rat traps as feeding stations.  Yes. Feeding stations.

Set them up all the way around the room next to the walls. Never in the middle of the room because rats don’t walk into the middle of a room.

Every day for a week, at the same time, you feed the rats a piece of cheese in the UNSET trap – feeding stations. Then, on Day 8, you put a piece of cheese with a thin piece of fishing line tied to the trap and SET the trap. They will all go to the feeding station at the same time, because rats are easy to train and are creatures of habit. On Day 8 they will all go to the feeding station at the same time and this time, they will ALL get caught in the traps.

I left Rio Tenango the keys to my house and went far away. And they went to work.

Once the attic rats were poisoned and had left the building, and the downstairs rats were trapped in the feeding station/traps and disposed of, Rio Tenango had his people put steel wool into every corrugation, and sealed it with a special NP1 caulk that rats don’t like.

Rio Tenango knew exactly what to do.

He proved his Five Star rating.

And he gave me a four-year guarantee.

I am not a big TV watcher, generally watch news channels or those true murder programs where the the Little League coach kills his wife so he can marry the teenaged babysitter, and is caught because he went to Walmart and bought a tarp and a shovel and some rope and a gasoline can, and left the receipt in the car the day before the murder.  (Note: Always toss the receipt).
In this time of COVID, I have not done any holiday decorating, and was having trouble mustering up some “cheer,” but I discovered that if I tune the TV to the Hallmark Channel and leave it on all day, in my peripheral vision, one part of the room “looks” like Christmas. Every scene of every Hallmark movie includes a Christmas tree, or snow, or holiday sweaters, or gingerbread and hot chocolate.
In case you are a movie aficionado and have not explored the depth of these movies, you really should watch one. They are mindless and simple, filled with flirtation and decorations, and if you get off track and don’t see the end of one, just catch the next one because the stories sort of morph together and it seems that they have a troupe of actors who switch roles for the different movies. In general, they have no plot, and even the non-white people look like they are darker shades of white. Everyone is beautiful in a homogenized Barbie and Ken way. And all of their clothes come from the same racks at The Mall. Or maybe the Burlington Coat Factory.
The storylines do not really build or have conflict or a climax or a resolution because, as I said, everyone is happy, dressed warmly in turtlenecks and overcoats and scarves. Lots of scarves. And they love Christmas.
So, last night, a Hallmark movie was just the ticket for holiday cheer. I don’t remember the name of the flick, but it could have been any of the titles listed above, so I will give you the overview of AnyHallmarkMovieEver.
You need to understand that no one in any of these movies works at any kind of job, because they all have spend the month of December getting the town ready for Christmas. I take that back: the Black couple owns the  “tinker” shop, and the Very Handsome Grandson lives with his grandmother, and they “own” the library, which is the first floor of their house. They host story-time every morning with the children of the town – who don’t evidently go to actual school. 
And all of these stories are in places where no one has heard of COVID, so that is an added pleasant nostalgic bonus.
The working-aged people all spend their time decorating trees on the Main Street or practicing Christmas carols for the nightly events where six to ten people walk into other people’s nicely decorated homes. The homeowners are evidently are not real Evergreen Vermont residents because the real townspeople  are all doing the singing- so I am not sure who these people are but suppose the Evergreeners might carpool to the neighboring town that lacks in its own Christmas cheer. Of course, the Very Handsome Grandson plays one chord on the guitar while everyone sings joyfully and then they drink hot chocolate at every house. 
The next morning it begins again in a Groundhog Day way, at the coffee shop where everyone eats pancakes and Christmas cookies… and plans the day’s holiday events. 
This goes on for a long time – maybe three weeks – leading up to Christmas.  
So okay, there is a little plot. 
A stranger, a pretty, young woman, comes to town to get away from The City, (but it takes a while to remember which one she is because all the young women look alike and dress alike).  BUT,  come to find out, she is a journalist ,and decides to write a story about The Town That Loves Christmas. Of course everyone is suspicious of her, because she might be just there to write a hit piece on The Town That Loves Christmas and ruin it all. (Because that is what a liberal journalist from The City would do.) 
And just when she starts to fall in love with the Very Handsome Grandson in the home-owned library, he finds a page of her story on the community printer in his living room. This paragraph of her draft article questions the validity of the Evergreen community holiday spirit. And the town turns against her, but within two minutes they have all come to love her again, because it appears that she really does have the Christmas spirit, so much so, that she gets to turn on the Christmas tree lights on the town square. The romantic tension heats up when the Very Handsome Grandson has to brush a snowflake from the nose of the Journalist.
Alas, she has to go back to The City to live her life, and I suppose, file her story. The Very Handsome Grandson comes to The City the day before Christmas to tell her that Evergreen misses her, and takes her back to Vermont on a train that is red with gold trim and no grafitti or dirt; and they all stand around the lighted tree on the town square on Christmas Eve night, wearing colorful wool coats and scarves and turtleneck sweaters, and hold hands and sing.
Throughout the entire movie, no one drinks anything but hot chocolate on the street, and fancy coffee drinks in the cafe.  
If you are not familiar with this genre, you might be thinking, “But surely, they have a mass shooting at the Christmas tree lighting” and “Do you think the Christmas train will crash on its way back from The City?” but no one is ever murdered and even the grandmother in the home-owned library doesn’t die of a natural cause. 
By the end of the movie, you may be wondering what sort of people watch these movies. You might be tempted to rewrite the movie to have at least a dead body show up at the end, or find out that the very Very Handsome Grandson is really a child predator, or that everyone in the town is in the Witness Protection Program.
And, what if the liberal journalist really did write a “hit piece” on The Town That Loved Christmas? How would that ruin it? 
I was kind of hoping for a shaggy folksinger and a hooker. But they never showed up. And no one even almost shot his eye out with a Christmas BB gun.
It  is Christmas in Hallmarkville, and everyone is perfect.  And, I do like the scarves and warm coats.
Maybe these really are scary movies, after all if your greatest fears are of a place where everyone is healthy and happy, and community spirit abounds and no one has to work, and everyone kind of becomes the same color in kind of an equal way, and they all  hold hands and sing and make  snowmen and of course, snowwomen in the town square, and no one is poor – or rich, or sick or worried.   And these movies are sort of addicting. So what if they won’t ever win an Oscar. Sometimes, it is nice to just breathe, and escape to Evergreen.
After a few glasses of Very Good Wine and one Hallmark movie (so far),  I am in the holiday spirit for 2020. 
If you need me, I’ll be drinking hot chocolate, and watching another movie. And wishing everyone a Very Merry Holiday Season.

I really am going to put away the rest of the Christmas decorations today – but I have been busy. Reading a yearbook. From a private boy’s school in Dallas. No. I guess you would say I don’t have any connection there – beyond my first journalism teacher. But when I look back at my career of writing, I remember the cinderblock walls of his classroom in the “new” English building that has since been torn down. And I know that group of St. Mark’s journalism students and I have a lot in common. Ray Westbrook’s classroom: It’s “Where I’m From.” 

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Ray Westbrook came to San Marcos High School right out of Southwest Texas State University as our first “real” journalism teacher. Before he stepped into the role, journalism teachers had generally been English teachers who were saddled with the newspaper and yearbook staff, or coaches who had to also teach something else during their off periods.

The year before he came to us, Ray had edited The SWT Pedagog, an innovative and journalistic yearbook. In high school we looked at that as the definitive yearbook. I managed to wrangle a copy a few years ago.  It read like a time capsule. In recent years,  that yearbook has set on my desk at the office, raising my iMac two inches to the perfect height. And yes, occasionally, I  pick it up and look through  it. More than group pictures and class favorites, that college yearbook chronicled our world at that time. Folk singers and war veterans, streakers and sorority girls, and current events and trends –   a new movie theatre opens – a Hollywood movie being filmed in San Marcos with Big Stars – protests continue as America’s youth finds its voice.  At the time it was published, I was still in high school and this was a college yearbook, but it spoke with eloquence of the times of our lives, and the weight of the world our generation was soon to inherit.

When Mr. Westbrook came to SMHS, he was not much older than we were. At the time, I don’t think we realized that. There was a line between Teachers and Students and when one crossed that line, they aged quickly, and began to wear sweater vests and ties. But he was different. Behind the sweater vests and ties, he understood us. And he knew, better than we, what we could be. He brought that new way of thinking to The Rattler yearbook. We were allowed to sit ON the desks and hang out in the journalism room when we had free time. We began to tell our stories – and we learned elements of design and life lessons along the way.

It wasn’t until several decades later, when the magic of Facebook brought us all back together in our 50s, that we realized that Mr. Westbrook was Our Age. In that way that the years blur as we get further away from seventeen.

So what is Ray — yes, now we call him Ray — doing now? He has The Dream Job. He teaches journalism and publications at the famed St Mark’s School of Texas in Dallas. He went from teaching at SMHS to working for Taylor Publishing Company (a major player in yearbook publishing) for nearly two decades.  Along the way, he served as director of academics for the University Interscholastic League and the Texas Association of Secondary School Principals – and in 2001, landed in The Dream Job.

For the last 14 years, he has taught at St. Mark’s Of Texas, a private boys school on Preston Road in Dallas, with about 850 students between first and 12th grades. In 2011, he earned –  and continues to hold –  the Gene and Alice Oltrogge Master Teaching Chair. He explained, “In private schools, some teachers are honored with a Master Teaching Chair. The Oltrogge Chair is funded by H Ross Perot Jr.  When it was founded, I was honored to be given this chair. It is basically an “elevation” in rank for good work – and it came with a $20,000 pay raise – no small potatoes!”  He teaches journalism and design, and is the advisor for the student newspaper, The ReMarker, and The Marksmen yearbook.

Student newspaper? Hardly the stuff we would expect. The quality is outstanding.  http://www.smtexas.org/podium/default.aspx?t=146661 Check it out.

As we swapped text messages during the holidays, Ray told me he was going to send me their latest yearbooks. I looked forward to receiving them and seeing what my old friend and mentor was doing these days. And, it’s been more than a decade since I have looked through a current high school yearbook. I wondered what they look like now.

Wow! This is a dream job. His multitalented student staff handles all phases of the publication, from theme to content, to layout and design, and operations.  The 2013 yearbook theme is “Where I’m From,” and after I poured over the pages and read every word, and wrote back and raved about this coffee table book, he casually mentioned that it did happen to sweep the three most prestigious national and state awards for yearbooks last year.

The three national awards are the Gold Crown from Columbia Scholastic Press Association (NY), the Pacemaker Award, given by the Natl. Scholastic Press Assn., and the Gold Star, given by the Interscholastic League Press Conference (the state journalism group housed at UT Austin).

Where I’m From offers well written feature stories, such as “20 Years of Arnie,” a story about the longest serving headmaster of the school preparing for retirement; a definitive “Class Tree” that lists a year by year roster of the Class of 2013 graduating students beginning with their first grade year — (second grade out – second grade in… third grade out – third grade in, etc.);class pictures of each group from first graders to seniors; a feature about a physics teacher who plays a little blues music on his guitar and harmonica when there is time at the end of class; and  each senior gets his own page – including a personal essay about his experience at St. Mark’s, and includes his activities in school, a favorite quote and other details.

Yes, I guess it seems odd for a 50-something woman to spend a couple of nights curled up by the fireplace reading, cover to cover,  a high school yearbook from a boys school in Dallas. I only know one soul in the book, and he is a greying master teacher now.  But I do feel the spirit of the place.

When I read the notes from the editor, I see, “Ray, I can’t thank you any more articulately than past editors, but suffice it to say I am the man that I am because of you. Even when we disagree, there’s no one I respect more. Thank you.”

And the last words on the last page: “It’s where I became who I am – and where I will come back to for the rest of my life. 10600 Preston Road. It’s where I’m from.”

Where I’m From speaks volumes. Not just for these Dallas prep school seniors, or former students with old yearbooks and faded memories.  It is the one thing that we all have in common. We wear that like a class ring or a letter jacket wherever we go in life.  It is the tie that binds.

And it’s heartwarming on this freezing January Saturday,  as I look into the faces of these bright young strangers, and wonder about all  they will see in the next 40 years.

I think of my earliest friends, Kate and Gregg and Shelly and Lloydean and Debbie and am grateful. They are a part of who I am today.

And Mr. Westbrook. And his classroom.

It’s Where I’m From.

Listening to: “You’re Always Seventeen In Your Hometown”  – Cross Canadian Ragweed  

I love old photos –and once in a while one will float to the top of my
consciousness – or desktop, as was the case here.  (Actually, I found it
on my baby  brother’s facebook page!) This is surely one of my favorites
though I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what was up with Sammy.

From left to right, I (Diana Leigh) stood with my  little brothers,  Guy Allen (whom we called Sammy) and Ronald Gene (whom we called Chuckie).

If these nicknames make no sense,  you are obviously not familiar with the old Southern tradition of nicknames. I can attempt to explain. Unlike “Mike” for Michael or “Susie” for Susan, Southern nicknames rarely make sense. I think somewhere along the line, our  forefathers got “nickname”
confused with “codename,” hence the nonsequitur.

That tradition has faded. I think it was one of those Title III or XXXVII kind of federal government rules handed down by the high court of the land somewhere along the way – that said people ought to be called by some semblance of their given name. So Sammy and Chuckie fell by the wayside and we have long since begun  to call them Guy and – well- ok, family still
call Chuck “Chuck,” though the rest of the world calls him  Ron.

And I  answered to  a variety of code names ranging from “Tee-tah,” (a baby brother’s bastardization of “Sister” that caught on in the entire family)  to the more common “DianaLeigh,” a more common and rational moniker that is still used by old family friends to this day.

This snapshot was taken sometime around 1965,  because I was at the first of several awkward ages  – about eight and a half –  when one’s nose grows faster than the rest of one’s body,  and arms and legs are at that spaghetti gangly stage… (Ah, to be gangly once more, I dream!)

In this old picture, I have a hair style that could only have been achieved by sleeping in those bristle-y old grey  brush rollers affixed to the scalp with pink plastic spears, something I only got to do on Saturday nights when Mama wasn’t using the hair net.

I was still wearing lacy nylon socks with my good shoes.  We were obviously getting ready to go to church because Chuckie is wearing his clip-on tie and Sunday School attendance pin. I HAD a Sunday School attendance pin, too, but it was probably in my Barbie shoe box.

But for the life of me,  I am not sure what’s up with Guy in that picture. Obviously he was not going to Sunday School that day, standing barefoot up against the car, nursing what might have been a red ant bite on his arm .

Truth be told, that grimace may have been  our fault. We tortured Sammy.

Not physically.

We  were much more conniving than that.

Much worse.

We would  “look” at him until he would squeal.

Then someone would call out “What are y’all doin’ to Sammy?”  And we’d say, “Nothin’, Mama.”

Somewhere along the line, someone said, “That little Sammy has a rubber tail and he squeaks when anyone steps on it.”

From then on, we could answer, “Nothin, Aunt Robbie. The devil musta stepped on his rubber tail.”

While we were all born the old fashioned way to our Mama and Daddy, Guy grew to an age of insecurity, believing everything his older siblings would tell him.  Chuck and I  would whisper that he was not really ours.

And so we’d torment him – weaving tales of buying him  from gypsies at a carnival. In our story, he never had slept on a real mattress until we got him. When he was a baby, he  had to sleep in the back of  a greasy truck on a bed made from stuffed animals filled with sawdust.

This store bore some truth in his mind and ours, because our Grandma never let us vie for those prized plush toys at the  carnival that set up each year at the  Confederate Soldiers Reunion  out at Camp Ben McCullough because  she said, “Those teddy bears are filthy and filled with bugs. You know those carnival gypsies   – they make beds from those toys for their children to sleep on.”

Since Guy was the third of three children, photos of him as an infant are rare. At that point, our mother was working full time and raising us and keeping food on the table,  so photographs were a luxury reserved for Christmas, Easter, funerals and a rare vacation, if at all.

So it made sense that we didn’t have pictures of Guy as a blue-eyed, tow headed baby. (If it was any consolation, we told him we had to pay the gypsies much more for him  than  for a plain ol’ brown-eyed boy like Chuckie.)

So, in spite of a perfectly legitimate birth certificate and my clear memories of his birth at the Hays County Hospital, this picture does appear to be worth a thousand words. This was the day Mama dressed us up  and we went out to buy a kid from the gypsies.  And, yes,  this was the one we picked out.

Could anything be more devastating to a little boy?

That is a fundamental difference in boys and girls. Girls raised by their birth families (is that how one would frame this concept?)   probably won’t admit that we have all had snippets of daydreaming of the day we find out that this is not our REAL family.

We are really the daughters of wealthy and exotic jetsetters, right? Folks who simply didn’t have time for the tedium of child rearing but as soon as we get to an appointed age, we will go back to our rightful lifestyles. And we will  never again be forced  to wear nylon lace socks that slip on the heel, and our mamas wont have to sit us in the high chair on the porch and  give us home perms and trim our bangs with the kitchen scissors.

We have flashes of that dream well into adulthood as we transform the dream from  waiting for the limo to arrive to take us to our REAL home – and we begin to pray that surely we are not going to wake up one day and be  five baby steps from flat out crazy like most of  the other women of our family. We rationalize that what appears to be the dominant family gene is simply not going to pass on to us because  we are not scientifically genetically related to these crazies.

But we are.

Still that doesn’t keep us from going back and studying old pictures, trying to figure out who we are, and looking closely to see if we can see clues that will lead to  who we are going to be….

When we grow up.

Happy Mother’s Day. Mark and I are moving kind of slow today at my house. This weekend marks the end of a very busy semester. Nine hours of grad school, two gallery shows, three magazine cover stories, and a wonderful community wide election that brought unlikely groups of people together to push forward in a new direction with some greatly needed school improvements. And it’s Mother’s Day.

While we have lots of images  of our blended family with all five of our fabulous kids, this one was on my mind this morning. Sterling, Jenni, and HalleyAnna — the three kids who helped me grow into who I am today.

I have had this picture on my computer desktop and in a frame on my desk for a couple of years. A quick shot taken at a rare moment when everyone was together somewhere, it has always made me think of that final scene in “The Wizard of Oz,” where Dorothy wakes up in her bed on the farm in Kansas and sees everyone around her.

“You were there, and you were there, and you were there,” she says, as she looks at the familiar family members with a different eye…as she remembers a technicolor dream of the adventure of her life.

And I look at this picture, I see my own versions of the  Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion.

The Scarecrow: Sterling is one of the smartest people I have ever known. In the third grade, he carried a well-worn copy of Thoreau’s Walden in his book bag, reading and quoting from it. He liked reading Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and books of lists and world almanacs and Texas maps.  He was a Duke National Scholar with high scores on the SAT while in junior high, and grew to be San Marcos’ first National Coca-Cola scholar and a presidential scholar. And along the way, he stumbled into more questions than answers and  started doubting his own ability – wondering how life would be  “if he only had a brain.” Ah, but he does.

The Tin Man: Jenni has been goal driven and organized since she was a toddler. She grew up overnight when Sterling was born and before she was two, she had stepped into the role of second in command in the mothering department.  A childhood on stage led to a successful career on the business side of music, a challenging, competitive, and sometimes  careless world. She has faced family illness and stopped her world to take care of others. And against common practice, she has put her artists’ needs ahead of hers, and taken on much more than what would normally be required. Through her dedication, her clients have become friends and those friends have become family. Though along the way, when  forced to make difficult decisions, she has confided, “I am sort of heartless, I guess.” I beg to differ.

And HalleyAnna, the Cowardly Lion. She learned to walk before she crawled -and always knew she wanted to keep up with the big kids. She has stepped up and stepped out of her comfort zone and made her own good decisions for a long time. She had heart surgery at the age of 13 to fix an extra electrical pathway, was hit by a car while riding her bike nine years later, and has traveled solo to New York City, Walden Pond, Costa Rica and across the Great Divide in Colorado, and got at tattoo of the state of Texas on her index finger, lest she need to find her way home from somewhere far away. As she prepares to release her second album and is packing her car to head across the southeast to promote the record, she thinks a lot about courage. And wonders what it would look like.

And so today as the dust settles after a whirlwind month,  I look at this picture of those  children who grew into adults while I was looking the other way, while I was busy traveling down that yellow brick road, fighting off flying monkeys and trying to figure out how to get to where we needed to be.  And I think of a million things I would have done differently —  and oh so much better — if I only  had the brain and the heart and the courage …. and time.

And if I had known  then what I know now. And the things I wish I had said while time was  slipping through my fingers.  I wonder if they know how much I love them – and how proud I am of who they are – deep down,  far beneath their own doubts and worries and questions.

Looking back, I think that that if I’d only had a brain… a heart… and courage, I would have passed  it all on to them.

But for now, I will look at this picture and think of that great adventure over the rainbow that was motherhood.

And I will be so very proud of who they are.  And who they have been all along.  Even if they don’t completely know themselves.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Note: This is unlike most of my blogs, but is a big part of my life.

It’s been twelve years since April 20, 1999. An ordinary morning.

That was the morning two teenage boys woke up, got dressed, and went to school to embark on a deadly rampage. They killed 13 people, injured 24 and committed suicide. Columbine became a household word. The bullets fired that day tore a gaping hole through the heart of America, leaving each of us groping for a sense of security that will be forever lost.

By nightfall, April 20, 1999 was recorded as the third deadliest massacre in United States history on a school campus. Since then, Columbine has dropped to  #4. (Virginia Tech, 2007, left 32 dead.) Evidence shows that shooting started at 11:19.  The shooters took their own lives less than an hour after the rampage began.

It’s been twelve years. Ordinary years.

I think of those students and their teacher, and where they would be today if they had not crossed paths with two evil people that day.*

Rachel Scott, the first victim,  would be 29, and she would probably still be making “to-do” lists and doodling in margins and celebrating a love for community service.

Coach Dave Sanders would be 59 today, and no doubt doing the math toward “the rule of 80,” or whatever state-regulated teacher pension plan he was on.

And Steve and Kyle and Cassie and Daniel  and the others would be bursting from colleges and grad schools and into society – building families, traveling, chasing dreams, and joining their friends in probably mostly ordinary lives.

Ordinary lives. Ordinary days.

Rachel Scott, 17
Daniel Rohrbough, 15
Dave Sanders, 47
Kyle Velasquez, 16
Steve Curnow, 14
Cassie Bernall, 17
Isaiah Shoels, 18
Matthew Kechter, 16
Lauren Townsend, 18
John Tomlin, 16
Kelly Fleming, 16
Daniel Mauser, 15
Corey DePooter, 17

I  have had a lot of time to think about Rachel and Coach Sanders and Corey and Cassie and the others who died that day. I think of Columbine High School and Jefferson County, Colorado often.  In an ordinary week, I talk about it at least once or twice. Not as often as I used to, but it does come up in regular conversation in my world.

You see, I have a day job that could land me a spot on the old television program,  “What’s My Line.”

In  real life,  I am the Director of Communications for a national law enforcement training center  based at Texas State University-San Marcos:  The Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center.

Our program teaches first responding police officers how to go into an active shooter situation like Columbine or Virginia Tech or Fort Hood and stop the shooting. In fact, Mark Todd and Kim Munley, who stopped the shooter at Fort Hood in 2009, had just been through our training. The official Department of Defense After Action Report cites ALERRT as the standard in active shooter response training that ended the massacre and saved lives.

The ALERRT program started in San Marcos, Texas in the spring of 2001, in the aftermath of Columbine. Fuzzy black and white video of the shooters in the cafeteria, photos of students running from buildings and clinging to one another were burned into our minds.  The Jefferson County, Colorado after-action reports had been released.  The media had shouted out  questions that regular people were whispering in front of televisions in living rooms across the nation:  How could this happen?  Who can we blame? Where were the cops? Why didn’t they stop it?

The first responding police officers did exactly what they were trained to do. The first shots were fired at Columbine and reported. The first patrol officers arrived on the scene, secured the perimeters and called in the Jefferson County SWAT team. The SWAT team, as is standard in most communities, was comprised of law enforcement officers who volunteer for the SWAT team above and beyond their regular assignments. They answered the call-out, left their regular assignments, assembled, and arrived 49 minutes after the first officers rolled onto the scene. In that time, 13 were killed and 24 injured.

A quick history lesson takes us back to the University of Texas Tower Shooting in 1966. A former Eagle Scout and Marine killed 16 people that day from a sniper’s perch atop the landmark tower. On-duty Austin police officers Houston McCoy and Ray Martinez climbed 29 flights of stairs to the top of the tower and took out the shooter. This effectively stopped the killing.  And was a turning point in law enforcement training and procedure.  Elite, highly trained, special weapons and tactics  (SWAT) teams were created to deal with such violent, high risk operations. The first SWAT team rolled out in 1968 in Los Angeles. A few major cities even created fulltime SWAT teams.

By 1999, even smaller populations had multi-agency teams who would answer the call to action when needed. The  Jefferson County, Colorado SWAT team was one. The Hays County SWAT team based in San Marcos, Texas was another.  And the standard procedure that law enforcement trained to was to do exactly what the cops at Columbine did. Secure the perimeter and call in SWAT.

So ALERRT was born when the Hays County and San Marcos SWAT team members Terry Nichols, David Burns, John Curnutt along with Sheriff Don Montague and Police Chief Steve Griffith started looking at ways to better prepare. A training program that would offer our local first responding officers basic, life saving SWAT tactics and skill sets  to enable them to go into an active shooter situation and stop the killing.

Flash forward from April 20, 1999 to the summer of 2001. The economy was tanking and small newspapers were taking the hit. I had left a career in journalism to take a job as the City of San Marcos grants coordinator.

Terry and David and I created the first grant proposals for ALERRT,  with strong support from Texas State University and the Texas Tactical Police Officers Association, to share this new training program with other law enforcement professionals.  We were awarded a few hundred thousand dollars from the governor’s office  in early 2002 to take this training to other small agencies around Texas – agencies who didn’t have fulltime SWAT teams and could not afford much training.

9-11 happened about two months after we rolled out the program around Texas. ALERRT tactics and training  was not exclusive to school violence.These tactics and principles would work with domestic terrorism and workplace violence. Our program became the first law enforcement operational training delivery approved by the United States Department of Homeland Security  and  today, ALERRT remains the only active shooter response program in their state catalog.

By 2003,  the ALERRT program became a training center in the Texas State University’s Department of Criminal Justice. Five of us came to work fulltime to support this vital program.

Today, in our tenth year, we have trained more than 32,000 officers around the country through more than $23 million in federal and state funds. We have trained in 41 states and have been adopted as the state standard in a dozen states, with more on the request list to ramp up their programs. Beyond the small agencies we targeted from the beginning, large metro areas have adopted ALERRT as their standard training for active shooter response.  (San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, to name a few). And our request list continues to grow.

Our program teaches first responding patrol officers to go into a live fire situation, head toward the sound of gunfire,  and stop the killer. In reality, that generally requires deadly force.

And it saves lives. I could go into detail about the fact that we also teach terrorism response, team maneuvers and low light tactics, entry breaching, and building approaches, but the ultimate goal is to stop the shooting.

I am honored to be a part of this program. It is anything but ordinary; and a good, if unlikely, profession for me.

I consider among my friends and heroes, John Michael Keyes and his wife Ellen, who lost their daughter, Emily, to an active shooter in Platte Canyon, Colorado.  They turned from a successful software industry to create the “I LOVE U GUYS” Foundation, named for the last text they received from Emily. They developed a Standard Response Protocol, advancing student and school safety,  that is available at no cost to school districts around the nation.

And  I am proud to know A. J. DeAndrea, one of the Jefferson County SWAT team captains who led the charge into Columbine High School, as well as the Platte Canyon High School shooting in 2006.  I’ve visited with Darrell Scott, whose daughter, Rachel, was the first fatality of the Columbine shooters;  and  I regularly talk to boots-on-the-ground heroes from around the country who have been first on the scene of active shooter situations that have made headlines.

But most importantly,  every day I am privileged to work with people whose actions and efforts prevent tragic headlines.  And allow for ordinary days to play out in unremarkable ways.

So that the Rachels and Kyles and Laurens and Coreys in our communities can grow old.

And live ordinary lives.

Really, it’s not too much to ask.

Listening to: Joan Baez – “Forever Young”

(*  Without even thinking, you can probably name the University of Texas tower shooter by name – but do you know the names of any of the victims of any of the active shooter events through the years? It is a sad fact that more people know the names of the shooters in these events than the names of the victims. We ask the media to stop making celebrities of these evil shooters.  Wishful thinking? Maybe so. But we can hope.)

Do you remember the first record you ever owned? Mine was the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” and Santa brought it with my portable record player the Christmas I was six.

We had a stereo console in the living room. It was a big piece of furniture, encased in a maple finished cabinet and had two sliding doors in the top and  gold flecked speaker upholstery. My mother had a good collection of albums: Roger Miller, Nat King Cole, Andy Williams,  The Ray Conniff Singers, Vikki Carr, Perry Como, Ray Price,  and soundtrack albums of every musical Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote.

Almost too sophisticated for 45s, that grand old machine did have one of those adapters the size of a toilet paper roll that you could lock in and load with a stack of records, so they would drop and play automatically. You could stack LPs too, in case you were too lazy  to get up and change records every 18 minutes. And of course, it had the tuner and played AM and FM, but we didn’t discover FM until KRMH (Karma) came along a decade later.

The stereo was in the living room, and the television set in the den, so I could listen anytime I wanted –  as long as I didn’t put my feet on the furniture or make a mess.  My cousins were members of a mail order record club, and owned two records I wished were mine.  One was Gene Pitney’s  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. The other was Leslie Gore’s It’s My Party. Odd that those albums stand out in this random stream of consciousness. My cousin thought Gene Pitney was dreamy. And I liked the revenge of  “Judy’s Turn to Cry.”

My mom bought some good stuff, too.  I liked Nancy Sinatra the best. The coolest record albums we owned when I was a kid were Nancy Sinatra’s Boots and Country My Way.  I wrote down the lyrics and learned every song on both records.  I was about ten the year I got some light blue jeans  and a striped shirt  almost exactly like she wore on the cover of CMW. And I bought my own single of “Something Stupid.”  Good stuff, that.

We had one store in town that sold vinyl. B&O Music also sold cork wax and Black Diamond strings and bongos, and maybe short wave radio equipment.  Before long, I owned the Monkees and Herman’s Hermits, Paul Revere,  and a stack of other pop hits. I got my music advice from Tiger Beat and Sixteen magazines so I didn’t jump right into being cool. I pretty much started at the shallow end of the cool pool.

Summer camps led to my discovery of folk music.  We called them camp songs. Peter Paul & Mary and Pete Seeger,  Woody Guthrie and The Kingston Trio taught us songs that made us feel nostalgic at the ripe old age of twelve.

Junior high dances added to our social consciousness.”Billy, Don’t Be a Hero” and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town” found their ways onto the playlists of our lives.  We wondered aloud what Billy Joe McAllister threw off the Tallahassee Bridge.

As soon as someone was old enough to drive and anyone had a couple of dollars for gas money, we’d pile in and head for the nearest dance hall to shuffle the night away to country classics. We waltzed across Central Texas, and two-stepped through the hill country. My high school summers were a blur of steel guitars and fiddles.  Dance halls with names like Club 21, the Rockin’ M,  Crystal Chandelier, Ramblin’ Rose and Texan Palace featured cover bands like The Velvets, The Moods, and the Country Nu-Notes. Once in a while, Hank Thompson or Ernest Tubb would travel through on a big old, diesel-belching tour bus and play the Watermelon Thump or Camp Ben McCulloch Reunion,  and we’d hear the real thing – the stuff you heard on  jukeboxes.

Then came the summer of ’73. The summer before my junior year in high school. We said “We’re going to a picnic and a dance at a ranch over by Drippin’ Springs.”  And our mothers said, “Okay, be careful.”

Willie Nelson put Hays County on the map with that first 4th of July picnic and set the course of my musical taste forever. It was our own Texas version of Woodstock: Kris and Rita, Waylon, Billy Joe Shaver,  Tom T. Hall… and Willie sitting in and singing with all of them.

Today, almost 40 years later, I can still feel the kick of the bass in my chest in the hot Texas sun.

Those great American poets left a mark on my soul.  And I still remember all the words.

Listening to: Willie Nelson – “Whiskey River”