Tag: Floydada

Sunday Afternoon Drives

A recent column by Sean Dietrich inspired this post. In it he talked about the drives he and his family took on the backroads way back when.

My family also enjoyed meandering drives on Sunday afternoons. We’d go to church, then to King’s Restaurant in Floydada, Texas. Afterwards Daddy would aim whichever secondhand car we owned at the time down one back road or another.

Sometimes we’d head in the direction of Turkey, Texas, the home of the grand master of Texas Swing, Bob Wills. Sometimes we’d head to Plainview, where singer and sausage king, Jimmy Dean hailed from. Lubbock, home of Buddy Holly, Mac Davis, and the Maines Brothers, was often our destination.

Other times we’d drive through South Plains, where my great grandparents staked their claim, and Lockney, our main rival in football. Good grief, we couldn’t stand Lockney.

I loved these drives—listening to my parents talk about the places we visited, the people who put these little towns on the map. It used to be a fantasy of mine that one day someone would drive through Floydada and say, “You know, that author, Leslie Noyes, grew up here. Her maiden name was Hall. She was Gerald and Freida’s daughter. Kind of odd as a kid, but maybe most authors are.”

Wouldn’t that be something?

Peace, people.

Looking for Love

I was an ugly duckling in my school days. I’d love to tell you I blossomed into a beautiful swan, but that would be a lie. I guess I ended up as a plain ol’ hen. Just one more duck in the flock.

But for an ugly duckling in a small town dates were few and far between. There were boys I liked a lot, but no one I felt was “the one.” The big L was evasive, and I had no indication that college would be any better. I was plain and more than a little weird. Not a great combination.

Then my family moved to Dumas, Texas, from Floydada, Texas, just as I began my senior year of high school. The high school was bigger. There was a larger dating pool. I went out with a few young men, but they just didn’t cut it. I might’ve been plain, but I still had standards.

Then, Studly Doright and I met. I’d encountered him on the condiments aisle at the Piggly Wiggly grocery store that my daddy managed and where Studly worked. Later, miracle of miracles, I encountered him outside the physical education locker rooms after second hour. We had P.E. class at the same time; although, boys and girls were segregated into different gyms in those days.

After many days of innocent flirtation, he asked me to attend the homecoming football game, and I accepted. During the first sweet goodnight kiss at the end of our very first date I was caught off guard. I’d tell you that I saw fireworks and that bells rang, but I did not. Instead, I just had this feeling of peace come over me, like I’d found a piece of heaven right then and there.

After the kiss I went inside the house. I closed the front door and leaned against it. Mom was sitting there waiting up for me with a questioning look on her face.

“Mom,” I said. “I think I might be in love.”

She didn’t laugh at me, or tell me I was being silly, or that it was just a first date and too early to know. She just hugged me.

I guess I’d been looking for love, but hadn’t really expected to find it. I sure recognized it when it arrived, though.

Peace and love, people.

The Worst Hard Time

Yesterday I shared a poem I wrote called, The Dust https://nananoyz5forme.com/2020/01/14/the-dust/. It was inspired by memories of my childhood in Floydada, Texas, when the wild winds blew stinging dust into every little nook and cranny of my world. I hated the dust and the dry Texas winds. They drove me slightly mad. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

And as a young wife, I grew to hate the wind and dust even more when on two separate occasions the back door of our rental house in Dumas, Texas, blew open while Studly and I were at work. We came home to find inches of dust on our floors, our furnishings, and inside of our cabinets. I cleaned for days and still found dust where dust shouldn’t be. I cursed the dust.

When Studly and I moved away from the Texas panhandle I missed the family and friends we left behind, but never the wind and the dust. I could live there again if I had to, but I pray I’ll never have to.

While living in Illinois I joined an informal book club. We drank a lot of wine and sometimes even discussed the book we’d been assigned to read that month. One that made the biggest impact on me was The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan.

The book chronicles the Dust Bowl era of the 1930’s through interviews with those who lived through that time. I knew every town mentioned in the book. And as awful as my memories of windy, dusty days were, they were nothing compared to the nightmare of the Dust Bowl years.

One lady in the book club complained that the book went on about the dust way too long. I countered with, “I think that was the point.”

If the author had glossed over even a bit of the despair caused by the weather conditions he’d have missed his mark. She also asked if anyone still lived there.

“Well, yes,” I said. “I have family and friends there along with hundreds of thousands of other hardy folks.”

“Unbelievable,” she said.

There is a lot of beauty in that part of the country–days so perfect, sunsets so gorgeous, you could almost cry. But I always remember the dust.

Peace, people.

Whirlwind Girl

That staple of concerts, the ubiquitous t-shirt: Fountain of youth or reminder that our glory days are long gone?

The young man behind the merchandise table smiled kindly as I told him I thought I could fit just fine into that size XL Sister Hazel t-shirt.

“Um, they um….”

“Run a little small?” I asked.

“Yes ma’am,” he nodded, obviously relieved that he wouldn’t have to tell me what I’d just deduced.

“I’ll take the next larger size then. And thank you.”

“For what, ma’am?”

“Your diplomacy.”

He blushed. It was all I could do not to pinch his cute little cheeks.

I like my new Sister Hazel t-shirt. It makes me feel 17 again. A much larger version of my 17-year-old self, but a more grounded one, as well. (Have to be grounded; jumping is completely out of the question these days.)

I couldn’t resist this one because my high school mascot was a Whirlwind. How cool is that?

If you look closely at the Floydada high school 1974 yearbook cover, below, you can see my 17-year-old self on the left side of the white space in the D, slightly behind the band mate in plaid pants. My forehead seems to be touching the dot in the exclamation mark.

Kind of like “Where’s Waldo” without all of the stripes.

Bottom line, I was meant to have the t-shirt with “Whirlwind Girl” blazoned across the front, even if it might be a bit snug across the chest.

Here’s the tune, Whirlwind Girl. It’s a fun song.

https://youtu.be/tkUNXOzGE2k

Peace, people!

Parade (Throwback)

Still one of my favorite blog posts. I wrote it my first year as a blogger, and I love it because it paints me as I wish I’d been in high school–the cool chick who did her own thing during the big parade. Instead, I was a band geek afraid to rebel. Oh, to have a few do overs.

https://nananoyz5forme.com/2015/07/26/parade/

Finding Love at the Piggly Wiggly (reblog)

Who’d have thought a lifelong adventure in love and laughter could have begun at a Piggly Wiggly store? I guess Studly Doright and I had a pig as a matchmaker.

https://nananoyz5forme.com/2014/07/30/finding-love-at-the-piggly-wiggly/

I first posted this piece in 2014 and had forgotten about it until a long time friend tagged me on a facebook post that mentioned Piggly Wiggly. I commented on the Facebook post and the author “friended” me. It looks like the pig is still bringing folks together.

The Offering Plate

In my little blogging world one random idea often leads to another, and soon a theme emerges. After I posted “Choosing My Religion” on Monday, a piece prompted by a sun beam shining through clouds on a stormy day, the feedback I received here and on Facebook dredged up some long buried church-related memories.

As I recounted in “Choosing My Religion” I grew up attending three varieties of Protestant churches: Pentecostal, Primitive Baptist, and Southern Baptist. While the three were quite different in terms of worship volume and decorum, ranging from the jubilant, yet often apocalyptic tone of the Pentecostals to the solemn certainty of the Primitive Baptists, they all three shared one thing in common–the offering plate.

At some point in every service the preacher would intone an offertory prayer and the choir and/or the congregation would commence singing an offertory hymn while the deacons passed the plates. There was a rhythm to the plate passing and an order to it that made this one of my favorite parts of the service.

A person sitting on the end of an aisle would take the plate from the deacon in one hand, deposit money with his or her free hand and then pass the plate on to the next person and so on until the plate was handed to another deacon at the end of the pew. It was a beautiful thing to behold.

No matter which church I happened to be attending on any given Sunday I always had a bit of money to contribute, either from my own allowance or from one of the adults in my life. Usually I had a quarter, sometimes only a nickel, but occasionally I was able to give a whole dollar. Those were proud days indeed, although, we were taught that excessive pride was a sin, so I squelched the chest puffing and smile that went with placing a buck in the bucket.

One Sunday when I was five or so I was with my Grandma and Grandpa Hall at their little Pentecostal Church in Floydada, Texas. Just before the service started my bladder told me urgently that I needed to potty. My no-nonsense Grandma took me firmly by the hand and marched me back to the ladies’ room, accompanying me inside so as to hurry me up. I might have had a reputation for lollygagging, and she was having none of that on her watch.

I placed the two quarters I had for the offering plate on the back of the toilet, did my business, and went to flush, accidentally knocking my money into the toilet. Thankfully I hadn’t pressed the handle, so a tsk-tsking Grandma had me pull a handful of toilet paper off the roll to keep my hands dry while I retrieved the coins, all the time trying to get me to hurry.

When I bent to pick up the coins with one hand using the toilet paper as a shield, I leveraged my free hand on the side of the toilet and accidentally pushed the handle, flushing the quarters. I started crying, but Grandma Hall got tickled. This stern woman laughed as she dried my tears. She laughed until tears of her own rolled down her cheeks.

I washed my hands and walked solemnly back to my seat, chagrined at having nothing for the offering plate that week. Seeing my Grandma laugh that hard, though, more than compensated for the lack of funds. It’s still one of my best memories of her.

Peace, people.

Snapshot #207

I took a few photos at Tallahassee Nursery’s “Summer Sips” event on Wednesday evening. Here’s one of my favorites from the night:

I call it “Big Bad Bromeliad.”

That reminded me of my favorite childhood song, “Big Bad John,” the heart wrenching story of a miner who sacrifices himself to save his co-workers during a mine collapse. Yes, that’s the kind of tale that appealed to me as a child.

Jimmy Dean, famous for his sausages, sang “Big Bad John.” He was practically a hometown boy, having grown up in Plainview, Texas, just 30 miles or so from my own home town of Floydada.

I believe that’s a young Jimmy Dean in the photo below, but Pinterest couldn’t differentiate between Jimmy Dean of sausage fame, and actor James Dean.

I know for certain that it’s Jimmy Dean sausage pictured here, though.

As far as I know James Dean didn’t deal in pork products as a sideline, nor did he sing.

He could have, though. He was just that cool.

Without further ado (or a decent segue, for that matter) here’s Jimmy Dean, singing, “Big Bad John.”

https://g.co/kgs/b8nuxi

Peace, people.

Umbrella Geography

As I drove through a pop up thunderstorm on my way into Tallahassee yesterday I glanced over to make sure my umbrella was tucked into its appropriate spot in the catch-all pocket of the passenger seat door. Sure enough, there it was just waiting to provide an invaluable service. And if it hadn’t been there I knew there was another umbrella in the pocket behind my seat.

Studly Doright and I keep two umbrellas in each of our vehicles, plus spares in the house for visitors and one in his shop. We are a proud, multi-umbrella household.

For most of my life I didn’t even own such a device. I thought they were pretty when characters on tv and in movies unfurled their umbrellas to stroll through a gentle rainfall. In theory I knew they could be useful, but I grew up in the dusty Texas panhandle where most days it was too dry to whistle.

Unless one is an umbrella fetishist there is absolutely no use for an umbrella in places that might get rain three times a year. And when it does rain in Floydada, or Claude, Texas, the howling winds generally render an umbrella useless.

When our daughter was small she desperately wanted a colorful raincoat with matching galoshes and umbrella. We were barely living paycheck to paycheck back then, so something the child might get to use once in her life wasn’t high on my list of priorities. But she’d have been adorable in matching rain gear. Damned poverty.

How many umbrellas do you own? Is the number directly related to where you live? I considered making the claim that I could tell where respondents reside by the number of umbrellas they owned, but decided I’d just be guessing. I’m no umbrella soothsayer, after all.

Peace, people.

A Week of Loss

Earlier this week my mother-in-law, Saint Helen, called to let us know that her beloved brother-in-law, our Uncle Junior, had passed away. Junior was one of the best men I ever met. He always had a smile and a story to tell. Every Sunday he’d call Saint Helen and they’d share their week’s adventures. Even in his last years Junior would be out on his large property in Oklahoma tending to chores that would be daunting to much younger men. He was quite a man.

I also lost a friend I met in a Facebook group of political progressives, and while we never met face to face, Thom’s death hit me hard. He was a retired Methodist minister who lived a life of service to others. His heart was huge and his sense of humor kept us all on our toes. He shared his beautifully written prayers with us along with his calming and deep wisdom. Even in his last days he was posting puns on Facebook to cheer us up. The world has lost a great man.

Then just this morning I learned that a friend from my hometown was hit by a car and killed. I hadn’t seen Roy in years, but he was like a big brother to me when I was in high school. He had a big personality and an even bigger heart. I’m so sad for his family and for all who knew him. Another good guy gone.

Life is short. Hug your loved ones, cherish your friends.

Peace, people.

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