I've been thinking a lot lately about Lubbock. I always say I grew up there, although I spent more time in other places, truth be told. I've heard people say that home is where your happiest memories are, and I think that may be why it is so dear to me.
We didn't have much. Mom and Dad both worked very hard. Dad was also a full-time student. Looking back now, with my own fatherhood clearly in view, I really don't know how they did it. Somehow, despite the difficulties, we were really happy. I remember a lot of laughs there.
We lived in a few different places there, but our house on 25th street was my favorite. Often, in daydreams, I am back there again. There are far too many memories for just one entry, but here are a few of my favorites...
If you grow up on the Plains, you are automatically an amateur meteorologist. You have to be. It helps that in Lubbock, you have an unobstructed view all the way to Alberta, Canada. You have some time to prepare for whatever is coming - most of the time. I grew up there in the early 1970s, after a devastating tornado in 1970 left large parts of the city in ruins. Both my parents were there for that. Their stories about that day still give me chills. You could still see evidence of the destruction in those days. But leave it to the good old pioneer spirit of those people - they just cleaned up and moved on. I distinctly remember the cheesy cartoonish tornado - it looked not unlike a disembodied elephant trunk - they would put on the corner of the TV screen when weather threatened. An outline of a tornado meant a watch. A solid tornado meant get underground. It was nothing like today, with the instantaneous real-time Doppler with "storm circulation" superimposed. It was a more innocent time...
One of the more interesting phenomena on the plains is the fabled dust storm. One in particular stands out. I remember distinctly...I was watching "The Real McCoys" on TV when they broke in to notify us. I ran outside and looked up - the sky was orange-brown and churning. To be honest it doesn't seem like it was that big a deal. I hear people talk about them from time to time, and I don't remember them being a big thing. Of course I was only 6 or 7 years old. The tumbleweeds, on the other hand, were really something. After so many years, it barely seems possible that we used to contend with them, but they were ever-present and eventually almost unnoticed...
A Southerner most of my adolescent and adult life, I have grown accustomed to the damp and cold, but snowless winters. On the Plains it was a different story. From time to time, a Canadian wind would blow what seemed like mountains of snow into the Texas Panhandle. One year, we had a good foot or two with 3 or 4 foot drifts. It was a child's paradise. Snowmen, snowballs...it was enough to satisfy me for a lifetime. My Dad and I built a superb snowman in the front yard, complete with carrot nose and charcoal briquette eyes...
We were typically a one-car family. The first car I remember clearly was a burnt-sienna-colored Chevy Impala. It had a cavernous back seat and my position for most driving excursions was straddling the drive train, head wedged against the vinyl roof, an arm around each parent's headrest. Car seats were unheard of. The lone exception to the one-car rule, as I recall, was a navy blue Volkswagen beetle. I don't remember when we got it. It had a rusted out back floorboard, with a nice piece of plywood to give the illusion of safety. I clearly remember sitting in the tiny back seat watching the rocks in the concrete Lubbock streets dart past. It had an interesting feature - little turn signal sticks that were supposed to stick out to the left and right when you had your turn signal activated. Ours were broken. I always thought those were cool. Eventually we got a white Toyota Corolla station wagon as our primary car. I don't remember what happened to the bug...
My elementary school was only a few blocks from our house. Dupree elementary. Our colors were black and gold, and appropriately, our mascot was a calf. How Lubbock can you get, right? Anyway...in Lubbock, a bicycle was a legitimate form of transportation. The peculiar geography meant that with a little graphite on the axles you could maintain momentum almost indefinitely. Dad still laughs about using his denim jacket as a makeshift sail, utilizing the constant 20mph Lubbock wind to propel him down the straight, unobstructed streets without the need for using his hands to steer. Nevertheless...as a one-car family, somehow, one of my parents had to see me to school in the morning. I don't know if it was the first day of school ever, or if something had changed to make this necessary, but at some point Dad began bicycling me to school. The first attempt was difficult. I rode on the center bar of the bike, and it seemed that I was painfully aware of every single pebble in the road. The second day we were more prepared. Dad had fashioned a makeshift seat by wrapping old towels around the bar and lashing them with duct tape. This worked extremely well. For months, I think, I rode to and from school on this cushion, with my tiny feet perched on the forks of the bicycle. I remember my dad, smiling and waving on his bicycle, in a line of cars in the pick-up lane at school. He was (and is) my hero, and this didn't seem strange at all. I would run to him and he would lift me with strong arms to place me gently on the towels for our daily adventure on the way home. I remember this with more fondness than I can express...
We had a tree in our backyard - a rarity in West Texas. It was a twisted, mangled thing - a crab apple tree to be exact. I climbed it relentlessly. One time my Dad assembled an old Army surplus pup tent under it, then made a head bandage, complete with a red Magic Marker blood spot. For an afternoon, I was a WW2 soldier - wounded but still unbroken, defying my imaginary enemies from my bivouac beneath the very exotic crab apple tree. There is a picture I treasure of me, snaggle-toothed, bandaged, underneath the tree...
My saintly Mother was always teaching, always encouraging me. She would have spent our last penny on an "activity book" for my amusement. I spent so many hours at Texas Tech with her as she worked or studied, they should give me an honorary degree. Mom loved to teach. She really has a gift. She had such a gentle way with me - and still does. I remember how she would come to me as I did my homework or drew on scrap paper and check on my progress. She has always been so kind and complimentary. One day, she sat down gently next to me at the dining room table.
"Matt, do you know how to spell your name?"
"Yes ma'am."
"Show me."
She watched me as I scrawled out the letters. She made sure I could spell all three of my names - first, middle, and last. She was classically celebratory. She was big on staying occupied - a trait that has stayed with me through life. I remember trips to the University Planetarium, Natural History Museum, and just around town. Mom was always so much fun. Somehow, I always had a coloring book and crayons, despite our meager income. I fondly remember lying in my parents bed, learning how to color inside the lines with Mom. She was always so good with crayon. Subsequently, she became very accomplished with stained glass, paint, and more recently with charcoal and pencil. A true artist's soul lives within my mother to this day...
Mom was and is a professional-grade seamstress. She used one of my coloring books as an aid to create a very realistic costume of my childhood superhero, Spiderman. I would protect 25th street on my bike in full regalia...I must have been quite a sight.
Lubbock is a cold, almost unforgiving place in winter. I remember how my mother and I would sit in the mornings, shivering in our tiny car waiting for the heater to start working. If the frost was thick on the windshield, my dad would bring out a container of cold water (not hot lest it crack the glass) and pour it gently to melt the ice. Dad was a handyman genius. He taught me the proper way to wash a car in Lubbock..."wash from the bottom up, then rinse from the top down; don't wash a car and expect not to get wet"..., change a tire..."tighten lug nuts across from each other"...change an oil filter - his curses on Japanese engineering still bring a smile to my face today - and the many varied uses for duct tape and WD40...
In closing, a memory about bicycles. For a time, my mother was a keypunch operator at the computer engineering school at Texas Tech. This will probably seem impossibly difficult to grasp for my own son, but once upon a time, computers were not able to be communicated with via a nice tidy keyboard. In fact, the computer I remember was more like the one on the 1960s starship Enterprise, with lots of nondescript lights and buttons without labels and such. The way a computer engineer would input information was with a series of thin cardboard sheets that had holes punched in them. Imagine "hanging chads" and you've just about got the picture. Someone had to take the program information and type it into a machine that poked holes in these cardboard slips to be fed into the monstrous, roaring computer. From time to time a typo made the card unusable, so in typical pioneer fashion, my mother and the other keypunch girls would take this garbage home. There, it got a second lease on life. Dad would cut several cards, then tape them to the forks of my bike. Magically, my bicycle was transformed into a motorcycle as the spinning spokes caused a sputter as it flicked the card fragments. I was Officer John Baker of TVs "CHiPs" most of the time, when I wasn't Spiderman.
I think of those days often, now that I am a father myself. Most of the feedback I get about Lubbock is negative. It is an acquired taste - loved by those who call it home only. To be sure, it lacks the kind of rolling, lush, green beauty most admire. To me, though, it is the town that saw my birth, and was the setting for my most formative years. The house on 25th street will always live in my memory, filled with laughter and youthful optimism. And my two companions on that journey grow larger in my estimation with each passing year. I hope and pray that I can give my son as magical and wonderful a childhood as my two young parents gave me. By all appearances they had so much less than I, but in so many ways they had so much more. They were brave in the Western way - they never gave up, and never quit. They made me who I am in every way. Someday, I hope that my own son can see me with something approaching the admiration and love I feel for them more every day.
We didn't have much. Mom and Dad both worked very hard. Dad was also a full-time student. Looking back now, with my own fatherhood clearly in view, I really don't know how they did it. Somehow, despite the difficulties, we were really happy. I remember a lot of laughs there.
We lived in a few different places there, but our house on 25th street was my favorite. Often, in daydreams, I am back there again. There are far too many memories for just one entry, but here are a few of my favorites...
If you grow up on the Plains, you are automatically an amateur meteorologist. You have to be. It helps that in Lubbock, you have an unobstructed view all the way to Alberta, Canada. You have some time to prepare for whatever is coming - most of the time. I grew up there in the early 1970s, after a devastating tornado in 1970 left large parts of the city in ruins. Both my parents were there for that. Their stories about that day still give me chills. You could still see evidence of the destruction in those days. But leave it to the good old pioneer spirit of those people - they just cleaned up and moved on. I distinctly remember the cheesy cartoonish tornado - it looked not unlike a disembodied elephant trunk - they would put on the corner of the TV screen when weather threatened. An outline of a tornado meant a watch. A solid tornado meant get underground. It was nothing like today, with the instantaneous real-time Doppler with "storm circulation" superimposed. It was a more innocent time...
One of the more interesting phenomena on the plains is the fabled dust storm. One in particular stands out. I remember distinctly...I was watching "The Real McCoys" on TV when they broke in to notify us. I ran outside and looked up - the sky was orange-brown and churning. To be honest it doesn't seem like it was that big a deal. I hear people talk about them from time to time, and I don't remember them being a big thing. Of course I was only 6 or 7 years old. The tumbleweeds, on the other hand, were really something. After so many years, it barely seems possible that we used to contend with them, but they were ever-present and eventually almost unnoticed...
A Southerner most of my adolescent and adult life, I have grown accustomed to the damp and cold, but snowless winters. On the Plains it was a different story. From time to time, a Canadian wind would blow what seemed like mountains of snow into the Texas Panhandle. One year, we had a good foot or two with 3 or 4 foot drifts. It was a child's paradise. Snowmen, snowballs...it was enough to satisfy me for a lifetime. My Dad and I built a superb snowman in the front yard, complete with carrot nose and charcoal briquette eyes...
We were typically a one-car family. The first car I remember clearly was a burnt-sienna-colored Chevy Impala. It had a cavernous back seat and my position for most driving excursions was straddling the drive train, head wedged against the vinyl roof, an arm around each parent's headrest. Car seats were unheard of. The lone exception to the one-car rule, as I recall, was a navy blue Volkswagen beetle. I don't remember when we got it. It had a rusted out back floorboard, with a nice piece of plywood to give the illusion of safety. I clearly remember sitting in the tiny back seat watching the rocks in the concrete Lubbock streets dart past. It had an interesting feature - little turn signal sticks that were supposed to stick out to the left and right when you had your turn signal activated. Ours were broken. I always thought those were cool. Eventually we got a white Toyota Corolla station wagon as our primary car. I don't remember what happened to the bug...
My elementary school was only a few blocks from our house. Dupree elementary. Our colors were black and gold, and appropriately, our mascot was a calf. How Lubbock can you get, right? Anyway...in Lubbock, a bicycle was a legitimate form of transportation. The peculiar geography meant that with a little graphite on the axles you could maintain momentum almost indefinitely. Dad still laughs about using his denim jacket as a makeshift sail, utilizing the constant 20mph Lubbock wind to propel him down the straight, unobstructed streets without the need for using his hands to steer. Nevertheless...as a one-car family, somehow, one of my parents had to see me to school in the morning. I don't know if it was the first day of school ever, or if something had changed to make this necessary, but at some point Dad began bicycling me to school. The first attempt was difficult. I rode on the center bar of the bike, and it seemed that I was painfully aware of every single pebble in the road. The second day we were more prepared. Dad had fashioned a makeshift seat by wrapping old towels around the bar and lashing them with duct tape. This worked extremely well. For months, I think, I rode to and from school on this cushion, with my tiny feet perched on the forks of the bicycle. I remember my dad, smiling and waving on his bicycle, in a line of cars in the pick-up lane at school. He was (and is) my hero, and this didn't seem strange at all. I would run to him and he would lift me with strong arms to place me gently on the towels for our daily adventure on the way home. I remember this with more fondness than I can express...
We had a tree in our backyard - a rarity in West Texas. It was a twisted, mangled thing - a crab apple tree to be exact. I climbed it relentlessly. One time my Dad assembled an old Army surplus pup tent under it, then made a head bandage, complete with a red Magic Marker blood spot. For an afternoon, I was a WW2 soldier - wounded but still unbroken, defying my imaginary enemies from my bivouac beneath the very exotic crab apple tree. There is a picture I treasure of me, snaggle-toothed, bandaged, underneath the tree...
My saintly Mother was always teaching, always encouraging me. She would have spent our last penny on an "activity book" for my amusement. I spent so many hours at Texas Tech with her as she worked or studied, they should give me an honorary degree. Mom loved to teach. She really has a gift. She had such a gentle way with me - and still does. I remember how she would come to me as I did my homework or drew on scrap paper and check on my progress. She has always been so kind and complimentary. One day, she sat down gently next to me at the dining room table.
"Matt, do you know how to spell your name?"
"Yes ma'am."
"Show me."
She watched me as I scrawled out the letters. She made sure I could spell all three of my names - first, middle, and last. She was classically celebratory. She was big on staying occupied - a trait that has stayed with me through life. I remember trips to the University Planetarium, Natural History Museum, and just around town. Mom was always so much fun. Somehow, I always had a coloring book and crayons, despite our meager income. I fondly remember lying in my parents bed, learning how to color inside the lines with Mom. She was always so good with crayon. Subsequently, she became very accomplished with stained glass, paint, and more recently with charcoal and pencil. A true artist's soul lives within my mother to this day...
Mom was and is a professional-grade seamstress. She used one of my coloring books as an aid to create a very realistic costume of my childhood superhero, Spiderman. I would protect 25th street on my bike in full regalia...I must have been quite a sight.
Lubbock is a cold, almost unforgiving place in winter. I remember how my mother and I would sit in the mornings, shivering in our tiny car waiting for the heater to start working. If the frost was thick on the windshield, my dad would bring out a container of cold water (not hot lest it crack the glass) and pour it gently to melt the ice. Dad was a handyman genius. He taught me the proper way to wash a car in Lubbock..."wash from the bottom up, then rinse from the top down; don't wash a car and expect not to get wet"..., change a tire..."tighten lug nuts across from each other"...change an oil filter - his curses on Japanese engineering still bring a smile to my face today - and the many varied uses for duct tape and WD40...
In closing, a memory about bicycles. For a time, my mother was a keypunch operator at the computer engineering school at Texas Tech. This will probably seem impossibly difficult to grasp for my own son, but once upon a time, computers were not able to be communicated with via a nice tidy keyboard. In fact, the computer I remember was more like the one on the 1960s starship Enterprise, with lots of nondescript lights and buttons without labels and such. The way a computer engineer would input information was with a series of thin cardboard sheets that had holes punched in them. Imagine "hanging chads" and you've just about got the picture. Someone had to take the program information and type it into a machine that poked holes in these cardboard slips to be fed into the monstrous, roaring computer. From time to time a typo made the card unusable, so in typical pioneer fashion, my mother and the other keypunch girls would take this garbage home. There, it got a second lease on life. Dad would cut several cards, then tape them to the forks of my bike. Magically, my bicycle was transformed into a motorcycle as the spinning spokes caused a sputter as it flicked the card fragments. I was Officer John Baker of TVs "CHiPs" most of the time, when I wasn't Spiderman.
I think of those days often, now that I am a father myself. Most of the feedback I get about Lubbock is negative. It is an acquired taste - loved by those who call it home only. To be sure, it lacks the kind of rolling, lush, green beauty most admire. To me, though, it is the town that saw my birth, and was the setting for my most formative years. The house on 25th street will always live in my memory, filled with laughter and youthful optimism. And my two companions on that journey grow larger in my estimation with each passing year. I hope and pray that I can give my son as magical and wonderful a childhood as my two young parents gave me. By all appearances they had so much less than I, but in so many ways they had so much more. They were brave in the Western way - they never gave up, and never quit. They made me who I am in every way. Someday, I hope that my own son can see me with something approaching the admiration and love I feel for them more every day.
