Rain Rain Go Away...

photo via

A mushroom cloud has tragic consequences for Jerry's wife Mary and her family...

It was a Spring day in 1945.  Not unlike  the many beautiful days of Spring in New Mexico.Nobody knew it, then, but it would be a day that would change the world forever.

Mary's family was having  a "work-day."  There was a War on, and if you wanted potatoes,
or any other vegetables, well, you'd better be prepared to grow them yourself......Otherwise,
you were into things like rationing........Nobody argued about the need for all this......The
War had to be won....

Mary's mother took care of the inside of the house......There would be housecleaning and
food preparation to tend to.    Her father, Al Kendrick was taking care of the bean crop.
It was only Spring, but the beans were about knee high.  Her brother Dick was being a good
farm boy and was helping his dad.......Mary, for her part,  was   weeding the garden, out about
the radishes and cucumbers.........

Mary's two older sisters  were  not around........Bertha was probably down at the drug store
flirting with boys,  and Jannet was off to school.....She was a college girl.....

None of them suspected a thing when there was a clap of what they thought to be thunder.
Even though the sky was clear,  thunder storms do come up suddenly......Then  came billowing
clouds from the South and a peculiar cloud that was  shaped just like a mushroom.

She'd never seen one like that before, but , oh well,   weather is weather, and you've got to
have one kind of it or another.......

Then came the dust, the clouds, and a rain storm......Even her father wondered where that
peculiar weather had come from.

Where it came from was a site in the South of the state called "Trinity"  by the government.
It was the first Nuclear Explosion in the history of the world.......Even the scientists in their
concrete bunkers acknowledged that the  explosion was at least 3 times as powerful as had
been expected.

Then came the rain. Everyone in the field was soaked to the skin.....and the world would
soon learn a new word "Radioactive"   for that was what the rain was.....and the people of
New Mexico started coming down with Cancer.

Public outcry?    Indignation?   There was none.....The steel hand of government secrecy
descended on the cases......Records were sealed.....on orders from Washington.....Officially?
Well, it didn't exist!

Mary's brother, Dick died first,  then her father........After a  wait, the 5 bouts of Cancer that
would kill Mary  started.........The government, then , said it was all, "Rumors and Irresponsible speculation"
How could anything like Nuclear Bombs contain anything harmful?

Ah, but we are so much wiser today......Why, the government could never get away with such
a thing, now........Or could it?


The truth is, the government is just a bit more sophisticated in dealing with these matters.
Besides, we have so many more  people to blame it all on, now.

A Red MG (reflections on another age)

photo via

Now an MG  is a "Roadster."   In ordinary language, it has two seats....There is an open
space behind the seat for the top to fold down into when you drive with the top down.

With the top up, you can carry paper sacks filled with groceries...About 5 sacks worth cram
it to capacity.........The owner's manual forbade  in very  harsh language the use of the rear
deck for passengers......Children were forbidden to ride there, and this was in underlined
bold  print......

So, did I ever violate this most virulent of  warnings?   Hey, C'mon, guys!   You know  the
answer to that....Of course I did!   The secret of doing it with any degree of comfort lay in
taking apart the cloth top and removing the metal framework....It was an involved process,
but it was done often........Putting it back on was worse than taking the top off.

So, who did I carry back there?   Well, on  more than one trip, Mary drove and I rode back
there........best example?    Well, when we took Grandma Icel  to her very favorite Mexican
food place on her birthday......You couldn't ask a lady in her 80s  to ride back there, and
Mary steadfastly refused to try it.........It wasn't all that bad, but it wasn't all that great either.
I got some bruises  that  were difficult to see without two mirrors.....

Ana Beth rode back there several times.......Did she get bruised?    Hey, if you think I'm
going to ask her, you're crazy!    I mean, there are limits imposed by decency  involved
here.   I'd like to think that the damages to her anatomy were minimum...but, I'd just as
soon not know. Lord knows, I tried to be gentle and avoid the bumps.

I carried Brenda and Dusti a lot of places.......Though the question doesn't apply.
Brenda would never put down her baby anyplace.....She carried her every mile of
the trip.   Why, a couple of times, I had  3 ladies sitting on the rear deck with their feet
on the  ledge......That was during parades in Dulce and the ladies were beauty contestants.

I mean, there was status in being carried in the back of the smallest motor vehicle in
Dulce......This was before ATV's.  Everybody else got to stand up in the bed of a pick-up.

So, we've established that an MG is a nominal 2 seater that can carry up to 5 people in
a pinch.......Providing 3 of the passengers are 16 year old Apache girls.

Mary and I put 186,000 miles on that little car.......Would I own one again?   My heart
says Yes......I fear the rest of my body  would veto the idea.   Why, I could even ride Ana-
Beth up to Cedar Crest and back, and she could even sit in one of the seats this time.
It wouldn't be the same without her mother along; but , I don't know, maybe she would
be  with us.......I'd like to think she  would be.

Fighting the fight, a hank of yarn at a time...

photo source

Anything that bought Mary another day was good...

Going down in a not so great section of El Paso, near the river to buy yarn  caused  some
small problems......The main one was cultural.......In the Hispanic Culture men would not be
caught dead  in a yarn shop buying yarn.   Much less, a man who knows the differences in
lot numbers,   plys of yarn, and  yarn blends.......

Yet,   Mary was fighting for her life, and
anything I had to do to improve  her quality of life, or make the struggle easier I was going
to do.......Okay, so it meant learning a lot of things.    Like?     Well, yarn called "Sports-Yarn"
has some cotton mixed in with the wool,  and there are baby yarns that may be 2 ply or 3
ply and regular yarn is 4 ply.   Oh it is a whole different world!

Well, the Mexican ladies down in this emporium of wool often sold 35 pound hunks of
yarn  for $10.   If I had been forced to buy the stuff at a regular shop.....Like Hancock
Fabrics, my customers couldn't afford it.....Then they wouldn't sit around and chat with
Mary, and she would start to brood about the horrors of the Chemotherapy.....In short,
if I had to let those clerks in the yarn shop think think I was a humpbacked whale, well
and good........Anything that would buy my ailing wife a little time and a little hope would be
done.

She had lost both breasts and 29 lymph nodes to the cancer, and the Chemo had taken
her hair, or maybe it was the Radiation Therapy, at this point, whichever one was the culprit
is irrelevent.....I've heard it argued both ways.

So, if these little Mexican ladies thought I was gay,

so be it!  I got tired of trying to tell
them  "Mary No es mi madre, es mi esposa."    It got to the point where I didn't care if
they thought the moon was made of green cheese!    I only saw them twice a month.

Why, I even developed a set of mannerisms especially for yarn buying....Laying two
fingers alongside my cheek  and pursing my lips while inspecting the yarn....Patting my
foot,  and waving my hand and telling them that their new Alpacca yarn was simply
scrumptious.

Acting?   Yea, You betcha!    There ain't nothing wrong with my  biological drives,
but, if nothing you say can change their minds,  why not enjoy making fools of them.

Okay, so maybe it was a little cruel,  Know what?    I'd do it again.......Anything that
bought Mary another day was good.......In the long run, it's not vastly different than
the Used Car Salesman's  spiel when he's trying to sell you a "clunker".........

Now Mary had some objections.....Not to my acting, but from the fact that the ladies
thought she was my mother......She was having some problems with her "self-image"
right then......and  her feminity was  taking a beating in her own mind.

In the end,  we lost the fight.......but we won the first 4 rounds with Cancer, and I bought
her 15 years using every strategy  I could think of.......On the whole of it, that statement
sounds concieted as all get out.........She won the fight....It was her victory, not mine.
All I did was to help, and sometimes "Helping" meant just having a shoulder for her
to cry on.........

In life, dear readers, you fight the fight, every moment, every hour, and every day.
There is time to wonder how in the world you managed everything ,when the fight is over.

A memory to last a lifetime

photo via

It is a week that I will remember all my life.......It was the one time that we lied to Ana Beth....

Mary had  seen the doctor.....There was a lump on her breast, and the likelihood of it being
malignant  was about   98%.    We decided to have Ana-Beth and the kids come to Dell City.
I don't remember who arranged the details, but there was one thing that I had to swear to.
Ana Beth must not know that her mother was sick.......Now, both of us were emotional wrecks,
but as far as  our Princess was concerned, it must be a normal family visit......Was it right
or wrong to do things this way?   I don't know, but it was not my decision to make....It was
what Mary wanted........

Ana Beth has a beautiful laugh, and  we both needed to hear her laugh again.  For Mary,
it might be her last time to hear her daughter laugh.  So,  I drove to the far west side of El Paso
and escorted Ana Beth's car out to Dell City........

As far as anybody was concerned, it was a lark, a happy time.....A chance to see the grandkids.
The deep somber undercurrents had to be painted over......They didn't exist......


That  was the time I really bonded with Sara.....She became the apple of my eye....A place
she has held  every day of her life since then.   Did we fool Ana Beth?    One of the things
about her is her uncanny ability to read  situations through some psychic link that seemed
to exist between her and her mother.......She knew there was something wrong, but she wasn't
certain just what.........

I held Mary close and we cried  when Ana-Beth, Sara, Jesse, and Brian left.  Everything
in us wanted to hold on to them, but the children were so small, and a Hospital is no place
for children 4, 3, and 2, years of age......

The day of Mary's surgery came, and I cursed myself for being  too protective of Ana-Beth,
and letting  Mary talk me into  keeping her un-informed.......Yet,  Ana-Beth was also the fragile
one.......If things went badly, as they quite likely would, there would be time for tears. Buckets
of tears, Oceans of tears......Why give her a few extra days of worry?

Then the surgery was done.  She had lost  both breasts and 29  lymph nodes...Beyond
that, the doctor had given her 3 months to live at the outside........I had been in the recovery
room with my wife.....I was there when the nurses couldn't get enough blood pressure to
register on their machine.

I knew then,  that Ana Beth should have known.   For her sake? No, for my sake.   I desperately
needed someone to cling to.

We found another Doctor, and the  M.D. Anderson trained Oncologist stretched the three
months into 15 years.  We fought Cancer about every other year for a long time.....In the end,
we lost the fight, but we fought every minute of the fight together.

So, why is the old fool burrowing into  the  sad years of the past?  Is there impending doom?
No, quite the opposite....Ana Beth and Sara are flying into Albany for my birthday.....I have
not seen them in so many years.    They are my ladies, and they will be here with me.
How can I explain how I feel........Somehow, I feel that, just maybe, Mary will be here too.
Be happy for us, dear friends.

They'll be here the evening of July 9, and they will leave on the 13th......My fearless 4 year
old grand daughter is a lady,   and Ana-Beth?   my 5 foot 11.5"  blue eyed blonde bombshell?
Oh she'll wrap me around her little finger as she has for many years, and I'll enjoy every
minute of it.--June 17, 2010