The Movie Star Look
In 1983 I attended summer school at Northeastern State in Tahlequah. I lived with my great-grandmother, worked for my brother-in-law Terry (all three of my brother-in-laws are named Terry), watched the Chicago Cubs on WGN, ate Kentucky Fried Chicken from down the road, and read The Shining, which scared the crap out of me.
My summer school classes were speech and classic literature, interesting summer-like topics I believed. And it would be fun, going to a school where nobody knew me. I’d be anonymous for a few months.
But while going to classes in the morning, I’d get stopped all the time by strangers. “Wade!” they say, while holding out a hand for me to shake. (I’m not sure it was Wade, could’ve been Bill, or Ed, or Herbert, for all I remember. But for purposes of moving on, let’s say it was Wade.)
Or they’d walk by me and wave or give me a shout out. “Wade, man, how’s it going?”
I apparently had a near twin on campus, someone who must’ve looked way-too-much like me. I mean this happened every single day day I went to class, sometimes multiple times. In fact my sister Lori, who lives in Tahlequah, told me she was at a restaurant in town once and saw me with some people she didn’t know. She came over to give me a hug, and it took something like a couple of minutes after she was up close to Wade for her to figure it out.
Creepy.
Apparently this guy was a football player, someone later told me, although that makes the misidentification even stranger, because I weighed about 155 at the time. Too bad I never saw him.
This has been a strange recurring pattern in my life. People have always told me that I look a lot like someone they know. I guess I have one of those generic faces or it’s my curly hair or something else.
Anyway, just after college, people began telling me I looked like that guy from the t.v. show Bosom Buddies and the movie Splash. (Tom Hanks was then just becoming a star.) But I’d seen those shows and noticed only a slight resemblance, so I thought people were exaggerating. But when the movie Big came out, I noticed we did look a lot alike. I know that probably sounds crazy now, but it was something about the hair, the shape of our faces, our skin color and general build then.
This only lasted a few years. Hanks is seven years older than me, so his hairline began receding before mine and he put on a little weight. I started wearing glasses again and cut my hair short. Before long we stopped looking like each other at all. But for a few years, it was cool, looking like a movie star. I mean, Hanks may not make the top ten list of actors one would choose to look like, but he’s no Ernest Borgnine.
During my middle thirties, people would still tell me, from time to time, that I looked a lot like someone they know. Someone from Minnesota, Oregon, Turkey, or Catoosa. A friend would then confirm it. “Yes,” they’d say. “He does look a lot like Chico.”
After I lost my arm at age 40, these types of comments seemed to disappear into thin air. Apparently the absence of a major appendage was preventing people from making facial comparisons. So to distract people from my arm, I decided to change things up. I reduced my shaves to once or twice a week. And I grew my hair out again, so it was dark, curly, and wild, the “mad scientist look,” according to Skye, the girl who cuts my hair.
Since that time my hair has been compared to that of Christopher Walken, Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future, and Kramer from Seinfeld.
However, it’s been quite a while since that brief period in my life when I had the movie-star look. 15 years or so.
But during the last two months, as chemotherapy has caused an alarming amount of hair loss, I’ve been noticing another movie star beginning to emerge in the mirror, staring straight back at me: Woody Allen.
Think about it. The dark glasses. The pasty-white complexion. The once little bald spot on the top of my head has become, uhh, ginormous. I’ve even got some of his quirks. Neurotic. A somewhat shaky demeanor. And the writer’s angst. With a little more weight loss, someone might actually want to take a look at my screenplays.
But alas, as more and more hair falls out, a new look is surely coming. For right now I’m beginning to look like “one of those guys.” You know, someone who seems incapable of accepting that hair loss happens.
Before long, I’m sure I’ll be heading back to Skye and telling her to “just get rid of it.” As an act of solidarity, I’ve already had one friend offer to get shaved along with me. He’s mostly bald already, but I appreciate the gesture.
When I asked Ken Raymond and John Clanton, the Oklahoman team who’ve been following me around, if they might want to accompany me when I get my hair cut off, they both said ”yes” way too fast. I seemed to notice a gleam in their eyes, a slight increase in their breathing, a sliver of a smile, and a smacking of their lips. They’re both follically challenged, so they seemed more than willing to escort me over to their team.
Others, who are in the medical field and are amazed that I have any hair left at all, have urged me not to cut it. But it’s inevitable.
So one of these days when you come to this site, you’ll probably see them put the razor to my head. And then we’ll see who else I start looking like.
Pain in the… Brain
I’m writing from the Cade Cancer Center at OU Physicians in Oklahoma City. I’m starting my umpteenth chemo treatment, so I must write fast, before “chemo brain” sets in.
I awoke early this morning because I had scheduled breakfast with my writer friend Molly Griffis. I try to eat a good breakfast on chemo days, because who knows how long it will be before I feel like eating again.
Anyway, as I was getting ready to leave, I started feeling nauseous. This is not uncommon, of course, for someone doing chemo, but nausea usually only lasts two or three days after chemo and I was two weeks out.
I proceeded to do two or three dry heaves. If I’d wanted, I could’ve puked right then. My stomach was churning like an Amish girl making butter.
But here’s the rub. The nausea was all in my head.
They call it anticipatory nausea or anticipatory symptoms. Like the phantom pain I sometimes feel from my missing right arm, my brain was anticipating the chemo I was about to receive that day. And as if punishing me for some past misdeed–perhaps a college frat party gone amok or those John Grisham books I read in my thirties–it was telling my body to be nauseous even though there was no real reason for it yet.
Fortunately, even though the nausea was just a bad joke my brain was playing on me, I could take an actual nausea pill and make it go away. That’s right, real medicine works for fake symptoms. Wish that worked for phantom pain in my missing right arm, but it doesn’t.
For me, anticipatory nausea always begins in the 24 hour period before chemo. Our brains are that scheduled, that capable of looking forward to what’s coming our way. It’s pretty amazing, really.
The trouble is, this week my brain started anticipating the chemo a day early. So I had two days of fake nausea, rather than one. It wasn’t fair.
I guess my brain was lodging some other grievance. Perhaps it was that year I watched Survivor or American Idol. Maybe it my brief stint as a deacon. Or maybe it was when I took my daughter to see Barney, the Musical.
I’m not sure. Perhaps my brain just thinks it’s funny.
Road Construction-Are You Kidding Me?
So I’m driving home from work a couple of weeks ago, when a friend calls me on my cell phone. (Don’t worry, I have one of those bluetooth gizmos for my phone, so I’m actually able to take a call and drive with one arm.) He asks me what I’m doing, and I say driving home.
“Has the I-35 road construction started?” he asks.
“What I-35 road construction?” I reply.
He starts talking about roadblocks and closed off lanes and reduced speeds and long delays between Norman and Oklahoma City. But I cut him off.
“Didn’t they work on I-35 for something like ten years and then finally open it up about two years ago?” (I know the answer to this question. It’s YES!)
My friend proceeds to laugh.
“I guess I’ll just let you find out for yourself,” he says.
A few days later I’m sitting in a long line of traffic. My normal twenty to twenty-five minute drive home has turned into a thirty to forty minute drive, while the drive to work takes at least five minutes more than it did.
Consequently, someone has robbed me of approximately twenty minutes a day and more than an hour and a half per week!
Relax, they tell you in the newspapers and on t.v. It will all be completed in June of 2010.
Wait a minute, I think. I’m terminal. That essentially means for the rest of my life.
Helloooooooo.
I had a similar reaction at the end of 2007. It was just after I’d learned about cancer spreading to my liver when the City of Norman began advertising the beginning of a little road project around 36th Street and Main, by the mall. I happen to live a few streets away.
Shortly thereafter, you could hardly get out of our neighborhood, and the intersection at the mall was an absolute nightmare. Sometimes you weren’t allowed to turn left. Sometimes you weren’t allowed to turn right. Sometimes the traffic was backed up for a half mile. And all the time people were grumpy.
You mean I’m going to have to deal with this for the rest of my life? I thought a week or two into it. It didn’t seem fair. They hadn’t even asked.
The project was supposed to take a year, I believe, but that “goal” is already long gone. Meanwhile, I almost got creamed by a car yesterday while trying to turn out of my neighborhood. No matter how many ditches they dig or lanes they shut down or orange cones they put up, some people still refuse to believe there’s cause to slow down.
It’s a continuing nuisance, living on a different time table than the rest of the world. I feel like my voice isn’t being heard, that I’m in some minority with no political pull whatsoever, like the legislator who opposes legislative pay raises.
This messed-up time table happens to me all the time. I opened the mail a couple of weeks ago and found a $300 bill from the Oklahoma Bar Association. My yearly bar dues (I know what you’re thinking, but these are yearly “fees,” a/k/a taxes, that I must pay to keep my attorney’s license current) were supposed to be paid by mid February or I would be fined.
And I’m thinking, I wonder if these could be prorated, so I could pay them month-to-month?
The Week in Review
It’s been a tough week.
Not just for me, but for a lot of people I know.
As last week began, I had just completed a series of tributes to some special people in my life who had died. I loved writing the tributes, because I loved the people about whom I was writing.
But I won’t kid you. It was grueling work, mostly because of the raw emotions involved. I cried at some point while writing each tribute–relax, it’s what I do–and I heard from many people who cried too, after the tributes were published. Old memories had been stirred up, along with the pain attached thereto.
I’d decided it was high time for some levity. I mean, I’ve heard from plenty of people who’ve said my blog is ”difficult” for them because “it’s too sad.” So I try to stay balanced, to the extent that I can.
Along that line, I had several “lighter” entries planned, stuff designed to keep readers from doing the Monty Python thing. (You know, “run away!”)
I was just about to publish an entry I’d completed a bit earlier, a sort of bio entry about my life. The bio was to run in conjunction with Ken Raymond’s “chapter two” newspaper story. Thereafter, I would start work on the lighter topics.
I was about to post the bio on my blog last Monday when tragedy struck. A 44 year old mother and friend of my family had a sudden heart attack, possibly the result of a blood clot. She was fighting for her life.
It felt silly and insensitive to start work on the lighter material while my friend and her family were in limbo. Besides, I wasn’t exactly in a funny mood, to put it mildly. So I decided to hold off.
She died on Monday night.
So the next day, after posting the bio entry, which itself seemed wholly unimportant, I ditched my plans to work on the lighter entries. Instead, I spent the rest of the week writing and thinking about our friend who had died. I tried to keep it tasteful and brief, knowing her family had not asked to be thrust into a spotlight.
Although the tragedy was ”not about me,” it had so many haunting parallels. A person dies in her middle forties. Kids left behind, still in high school. Grieving parents. Siblings trying their best to find their way.
For me, attending the funeral was something akin to Huckleberry Finn hiding in the back and watching his. I mean I saw many of my own friends there. I watched people I love struggling through their grief. And I felt the awful permanence of it all.
Like I said, it was a tough week.
But a new week dawns, and I will now turn to some of my lighter entries. Not because I’ve moved on, mind you.
No, it’s because we could probably all use a little humor right now.
The Search for Closure
In the aftermath of Sherri Little’s funeral last Thursday, I continue thinking of the Littles, the Tiedemans (Sherri’s twin sister is Kerri Tiedeman), the Dickeys (Sherri’s younger sister is Tracee Dickey) and the rest of their family.
I’m reminded of what it was like after my sister died. A week or so after the funeral, somebody came up to me all bright and cheery and asked, “Hey, how are you?” Not in the sense of how was I doing through all the tragedy, but in the “hi, how are you” way people great each other. This person obviously hadn’t been to the funeral and had forgotten all about my sister’s death.
That hurt.
After a month or so, others who had been to the funeral began doing the same thing. “Hey man, how’s it going?” they’d say, all rosy and chipper.
They’d moved on, you see. They weren’t as close to Karyn as I was. She wasn’t an everyday part of their life.
As time went on, only a handful of us, those who known Karyn for years and were still hurting, remained. I learned this while talking to LeAnn one day, perhaps three or four months after the funeral.
“Is there ever a time when she’s not right there, right there on your mind?” I asked.
“Honestly Jim,” she said. “I don’t think about her that much anymore.”
LeAnn hadn’t grown up with Karyn. She’d never lived with her or gone on vacation with her. She only saw Karyn a couple of times a year, during the holidays.
This is the way it is with death. The initial shock may impact thousands. The aftershocks may affect a hundred or so. But for a dozen, maybe only a handful, an entire way of life has crumbled and has to be slowly rebuilt.
Sometimes, during a funeral or on TV after some tragedy has occurred, someone will speak of “finding closure,” “healing,” or “moving on.” I’m always bothered when this occurs in the immediate aftermath of tragedy, when families are still in shock over the events.
We all want to heal, of course. But for those closest to the person who has died, the thought of “closure” or “moving on” can seem offensive, nonsensical, or ridiculous. We might even feel guilty about it. We wonder what it would say about our loved one if we were “over it” in a week.
And guilt has another side too. Some might actually pretend to be over it, because they think they should be or that’s what those close to them expect. Meanwhile, they’re still hurting deeply inside.
Closure, or more appropriately acceptance, will take differing amounts of time for different people. For some it may take more than a year before anything close to acceptance comes our way.
For those of you who know someone affected by a sudden tragic death, here are two things you can ask. First, what can I do for this person today? And, second, what can I do for them in a few weeks, after the rest of the world has inevitably moved on?
Yesterday’s Funeral
It was one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen.
John Little, a senior at Norman North High School, had lost his mother Sherri only three days earlier. Sherri died unexpectedly last Monday, a victim, I’m told, of what appears to be a blood clot that found its way to her heart.
The grieving family had to make the necessary arrangements, including plans for the funeral. Difficult decisions had to be made. Who will lead? Who will sing? Who will pray? Who will speak?
While discussing possible eulogies, someone asked Sherri’s husband Brad whether anyone in the family would speak. “No,” Brad said, thinking perhaps that the task would be beyond difficult.
But John said he wanted to speak. He had some things he wanted to say, needed to say. Like most teenagers, he’d never expected his mom would be here one day, gone the next. Like most teenagers, especially teenage males, he probably kept a lot of things inside.
It’s hard for most of us to grasp how tenuous life is. But for teenagers, living in the day to day craziness that is high school, it’s practically impossible. But John knew it now. He felt it. And he wanted to speak.
So on Thursday afternoon, February 19, 2009, before hundreds at his mother’s funeral, John Little, accompanied by his father Brad and his sisters Courtney and Katie, took the stage. And he delivered a beautiful eulogy, telling the heartsick crowd what an outstanding person his mother was and how much he’d loved her.
I can’t lie to you. It was one of the most painful things I’ve ever watched. But it was also one of the bravest and most memorable moments I can recall.
I don’t know John all that well. But I knew his mom. And I know she loved him and was proud of him. Just like we all were yesterday afternoon.
Time
It is a beautiful February day. The sun is out. The winds are ”breezy,” as they say in Oklahoma, but lighter than what they often are. There’s hardly a cloud in the sky. Spring is almost here, it seems, with all the promises of new life that come with it.
And yet I’m feeling melancholic and blue.
Why? Because Sherri Little, a friend of our family and practically everyone who lives in Norman, has died. And as a result, people I love are hurting.
We’ll all be attending her funeral today.
Whenever someone special like Sherri passes so suddenly, so out of the blue, we can’t help but wish we would have told them all the things they deserved to hear. We regret missed opportunities, and we long for a little more time.
For Sherri, here are some of the comments I think she would have heard. We admired you. We thought you showed great humility. We were touched by your kindness. You’ve raised a great family.
Anyway, as I think about Sherri Little today, I’m reminded of a poem I wrote a few years back. It captures my mood.
Time
If you could only grab it and hang on,
buy a carton of the stuff,
or slip some into your front pocket.
If you could only reclaim that moment,
revisit that stupid mistake,
or swallow that unfortunate word.
If you could only see him again,
or tell her goodbye,
or reach out and hold her hand.
Violins are quietly tuning up.
The sun takes its usual spot.
Opportunities skip right on by.
If you could only smuggle a smidgeon,
pinch off the left hand corner,
or sample a sweet slice of once more.
Some People Just Die
I’ve been thinking a lot about a recent conversation I had with my good friend Charlotte Lankard. We were discussing this series and what an opportunity it is to speak about death, taboo subject that it is.
As we were talking though, I began thinking about all the people that don’t have time to say goodbye before they die. I mean I may not be ”Mr. Lucky,” but I do at least have the opportunity to see death approaching. This gives me some time to plan, some time to spend moments with those I love, some time to say goodbye.
“Not everyone has that chance,” I said to Charlotte. “Some people just die.”
One moment they’re here, and the next moment they’re gone.
This led to two tributes I wrote on behalf of people who fall into that category. First, my sister Karyn. And second, my friend Donya Hicks Dunn.
The tributes apparently hit home, for in the aftermath of publishing them on this site I’ve received note after note about Karyn and Donya. Why the response? Well, first and foremost, these were great people. But secondly, I’m not sure we’ve reached the point of closure yet. I mean, yes, we went to their funerals, but we never really had the chance to spend time with them and say goodbye.
Death can be long and drawn out. Shoot, we’re all dying when you get right down to it. But for many people, and I fall into this category, death can take more than a year, perhaps several.
But death can also strike like lightning. So quick that we never have time to think about it or see it coming. So quick that we never get that chance to say goodbye.
Some people just die.
That’s a fact. And a shocking one at that.
Many of my friends in Norman experienced this painful reality yesterday when our friend Sherri Little died. I don’t know many details, so I won’t get into exactly how, except to say it appears to have been a heart attack.
Sherri Little was 44. Her husband Brad works with me. They have three children. The oldest is in college, while the younger ones are in high school.
Sherri was a twin. Her sister Kerri is one of our dearest friends. I can’t stop thinking about her loss.
I would like to write a tribute to Sherri Little… someday. But not today. Today, her death is still too raw, too strange, too surreal. This week is for their family. This week is for her funeral.
But I would like to say this: Sherri Little was one of the good guys. And I mean that from the very fiber of my soul. She was good. And she will be missed.
Regarding Me
Due to my lousy health, my life as a writer, and this “Life is Real” series, I’ve been fortunate to hear from many people I knew long ago. Within the last month, I’ve probably exchanged messages with at least thirty ”blasts from the past,” people I hadn’t heard from for way-too-many years (and likely wouldn’t have heard from again if it weren’t for my situation). They found out about my story somehow and wanted to reconnect.
I love this part of my life, talking to old friends. It’s so interesting to hear how their lives turned out and how they’ve diverged from mine. And it’s surprising to see what they’re up to now, how many kids they have, where they work, what they’re reading, what their religious and political points of view are, etc.
But in doing all of this reconnecting, it occurred to me that many who are following this series (or beginning to follow it) do not know me at all.
“Who is this guy?” you’re probably thinking. “And why is The Oklahoman following him?
I guess it’s Ken Raymond’s job to tackle those questions in his newspaper articles. But I thought I should probably help him out a bit. I mean, it couldn’t hurt to give you a bio, at least a fairly brief sketch. Besides, I need to start practicing on my obituary.
I was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma on December 9, 1963 to Jim and Sharon Chastain. I was their second child, the only boy out of four children. My sisters are, in order of their births, Lori, Cindy, and Karyn, who died tragically in a car accident at age twenty-one.
My family moved to Bartlesville when I was one, and we stayed there throughout my childhood. In fact my parents still live in “B-ville” to this day, in the same house we lived in since I was in fourth grade. I attended Will Rogers Elementary (about fifty steps from our back door), Madison Junior High, and Sooner High School. I graduated from Sooner High in 1982, the last year of its existence.
While I was growing up, my father worked for Phillips Petroleum Company in the computing division. Phillips employed about half the town it seems, and prospered as a result of having one of America’s great corporations located there. However, during my high school years, we went through those same job-related concerns so many people are having today, as Phillips seemed to have a new round of layoffs every Christmas.
My mother was, for the most part, a housewife, although she had a side job selling Luzier (a lesser-known brand of cosmetics). She also volunteered a lot at Highland Park Baptist Church where we attended services. But beyond that, she chased four kids around the house, took care of Dad, and did the sort of hard work moms do. I know for a fact that she made a heck of a lot of French toast for me over eighteen years.
Bartlesville was a pretty wealthy town, but my family lived in modest homes and drove unspectacular cars. My dad was what you might politely call ‘thrifty.” We were your typical middle income family, I suppose. We weren’t particularly churchy, but we did attend church regularly. Like most kids, I tried my best to avoid it.
I was a sweet kid, they tell me, with a kind heart. I got along well with people for the most part, and I made friends easily. I believed strongly in fairness, so it bothered me when somebody was wronged. I had a soft spot for the underdog, still do, and I loved animals (the movie Bambi nearly killed me). I especially loved dogs, and therefore we always had a dog at the house.
Sweet or not, I was also a stinker. That’s true of lots of boys I guess, but I seemed to consider stinkering a fine art. I loved pestering my sisters. I got spanked a lot at home and in elementary school, and, even though we don’t do that anymore, I usually deserved it. In junior high, I was too busy trying to keep my butt from getting whipped to get into too much trouble, but in high school I returned to my prankster ways. Whenever anything happened or went wrong, I was one of the “usual suspects” who was called to the principal’s office for questioning. Some of my high school exploits became rather notorious, I’m afraid to say.
I was a competitive kid when it came to games, grades, and sports. As most kids growing up in a fairly small town, I played sports throughout my youth. What else was there to do? I was pretty good during the early years, but less so during high school when it really counted. I was fast, but I didn’t particularly care for running. At Sooner High, I lettered in baseball, basketball, and football, but I only played football as a senior, choosing instead to work (first at Braums, then at Barlow Interiors) and put gas in my car.
I was a reader from the beginning and spent a lot of time at the Bartlesville Public Library. I was one of those kids who was always reading a new book. One of my earliest memories was having my picture in the local newspaper for being a first grade “bookworm,” meaning I’d read something like one hundred books. Some of my favorites were My Side of the Mountain, Mr. Pudgins, the Henry Huggins series, the Hardy Boys mysteries, The Last of the Mohicans, Tom Sawyer, The Chronicles of Narnia, and anything by Shel Silverstein or Dr. Seuss, who continue to be two of my heroes to this day.
I also loved the movies. In fact from a very young age, I used to pretend my life was a movie. (Perhaps this explains all the troublemaking–I was searching for conflict to move the film along.) I remember walking down the street to the local theater regularly for Saturday matinees. I loved eating a giant green apple Jolly Rancher while watching a film.
I’ve always been a social person and a firm believer that friendships are key to happiness. Fortunately, I was blessed with a great group of friends in junior high and high school. I hung around with about twenty guys and several girls from my class, along with some notables from the cool class ahead of me. On most weekends you’d find me with Greg, Kevin, Ghent, Terry, Gary, Sheldon, Polly, or whoever else happened to be tagging along with us. Meanwhile, I joined as many clubs as would have me. I went to every party I could find. I dated as much as the next guy, but I only had a few “girlfriends.”
After high school I went to Oklahoma State University. I spent my freshman year in the dorms with several high school buddies. I made straight A’s that year, but met almost nobody and spent way too much time at Eskimo Joes. By the end of the year, I was so frustrated that I packed bags and went to live with my grandmother in Tahlequah. I attended summer school at Northeastern State, watched the Chicago Cubs on TV and contemplated staying in Tahlequah for good. But I decided instead to return to OSU for my sophomore year.
On a whim I joined Delta Tau Delta fraternity, and after that my college experience improved dramatically. I began meeting people, including… girls! I became president of my pledge class and later of the entire fraternity. I met some of the greatest guys in the world, several of whom are still my best friends to this day. I still hung around at Eskimo Joes too much and for a time tried setting a world record for having the most fun. But overall I remained fairly balanced in my approach to school and life beyond college. I always took my grades seriously. And I worked at a video store during the last two years at school, which was no surprise to anyone, as one of my nicknames was Mr. Movie.
As far as my post-college plans were concerned, I decided I wanted to be one of three things: a film critic; a writer; or a lawyer. (I’m reminded of the SCTV episode where Martin Short plays a college freshman who wants to be a “hockey player or a circuit court judge.”) As I knew no writers and film critic is not really a career path in Oklahoma, I began steering toward the law.
During my junior year, I met LeAnn when we were both participating in Varsity Review, a singing and dancing show. She was a member of Chi Omega sorority, and I knew several girls there. LeAnn was dating someone at the time, and I was dating someone else. But I noticed her. Later, after we’d both had breakups, we began dating. And as my senior year rolled around we became inseparable.
I was somehow accepted into OU law school and moved to Norman in 1986. LeAnn was still a senior and in the midst of completing her studies to become a teacher, so she remained in Stillwater for a semester. After that, she obtained a student teaching position at Norman High and joined me in Norman, where she lived with two of our dear friends. We married in the summer after my first year in law school and moved into our first apartment, along with Winston, our beloved cocker spaniel.
While I was busy at law school, LeAnn decided to pursue a Masters Degree at the University of Oklahoma in Mathematics. Meanwhile, we also got involved with a local church and made many new friends, as most of our college friends had moved. After obtaining our degrees, we decided to make Norman our home. We had our first child, Madison, in 1991, followed by a son, Ford, in 1994.
I began my legal career working at a small, upstart law firm that relied entirely on one client. My job was to write title opinions and to do most of the research and writing, as well as help out with litigation now and then. But that job ended when we lost our main client and my boss closed up shop, before killing himself, accidentally or not.
During this period of time, LeAnn decided to forego a full time job to focus on raising our kids. She did, however, teach math classes at night at various colleges in the Oklahoma City metro. Being a people person, she was always ready to go, go, go when I got home, while I was ready to relax.
I moved on to a medium-sized law firm in downtown Oklahoma City. It was a good job for the most part, and I made some lifelong friends. We had twenty lawyers at one point, but the firm relied a lot on the oil and gas industry and eventually ran into hard times. I was working downtown at this firm when the Murrah bombing occurred, just a few blocks away. Not long after that, my boss and good friend Doyle Bunch died in a scuba diving accident. The firm began splitting up soon afterward and was never quite the same.
As the kids began getting older and were attending school, LeAnn increased her work load. She continued teaching college math classes, but she eventually took a job at our church, where she helped with adult education and organized various small group studies. I also became involved at church, teaching adult classes and serving in several key positions, including, if you can believe it, deacon! (”What in the world was the staff thinking?” I’m sure you’re asking.)
I took a tumultuous job at the Oklahoma Insurance Department in 1996. A year and a half later, I moved on, accepting a position in 1997 as a Judicial Assistant to Judge Gary Lumpkin at the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, the same job I have today. There I help determine whether or not criminal defendants have received a fair trial in the state district court system.
While holding down a full time job, I began working on my writing career. I’d been writing poetry for a long time, but became more earnest about it after my sister died in 1992. I wrote more, read more, and began submitting poems here and there. I also became interested in screenplays. I took several classes and read all the right books. My second attempt at a screenplay finished in the top ten percent at the Austin Film Festival one year.
I began writing film reviews for The Norman Transcript in 1996 and have continued to do so ever since, although I’ve slowed down quite a bit recently. My reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and at one point I was writing close to one hundred reviews a year. I’ve also been a freelance contributor to the Oklahoma Gazette, Oklahoma Today, and numerous magazines.
In 2001, at the age of thirty-seven, I found a tiny little lump in the triceps muscle of my right arm. That lump turned out to be a very aggressive and rare type of cancer, and it eventually cost me my right arm in 2004. I chronicled my crazy battle with cancer in a memoir entitled, I Survived Cancer, but Never Won the Tour de France, which was published in 2006. That same year my first book of poems, Like Some First Human Being, was published.
In September of 2007, cancer, which had been out of my life for three years, came roaring back. I was diagnosed with colon cancer that had spread to my, gulp, liver. The outlook was not good. After many rounds of chemo we have been unable to shrink the tumors enough to give me a shot at a possibly life-saving surgery. Cancer has now spread to my lungs, and I’ve been told that my life expectancy is “months” rather than years.
In the midst of these challenges, I’ve continued writing. In the summer of 2008, Antidotes & Home Remedies, my second book of poems, was published. The book is a combination of health related poems and some of my “greatest hits.” I’ve also been working a book of prose, some new poems, and this series.
I’ve spared you some of the gory details, but that’s basically it.
Regarding Poppa
I suppose many of you have grandmothers and grandfather who go by nicknames like nana, papaw, mamaw, poppi.
I did. I had Nana and Poppa, a/k/a Nan and Pop.
Poppa was known to the rest of the world, or at least the world that was Tahlequah, Oklahoma, as Bige Hensley. He was my great-grandfather, and he stands out as one of the larger figures in my life. Indeed, he has become something of a mythical figure to me, for I was a teenager when he died and I had never lost anyone that close. I will rely here on only my strongest memories, the most trustworthy ones, for when I step beyond that point things become fuzzy.
Nan and Pop lived on a farm, sort of, in the small community of Tahlequah, which is in Northeastern, Oklahoma, close to Tenkiller Lake. Tahlequah, the city where I was born, is also the Capital of the Cherokee Nation, so many Native Americans live there. Indeed, most of the people in the community have at least some Indian blood, and that included Poppa, who appeared to have quite a bit. (Nan, however, used to claim that he was “black Dutch,” for reasons I can only guess had to do with trying to raise their status in the community.)
I say they lived on a farm, but it was in reality just a huge unimproved tract of land with their house and a rather large garden, where they grew green beans, corn, radishes, squash and peanuts. Poppa did have a tractor though, which he used in the garden and parked in his big garage.
Their land actually connected to what became one of Tahlequahs main thoroughfares. When they bought the land, I don’t think that was the case. But while I was still young Tahlequah began growing their way, and before long they owned some prime real estate.
Poppa was an entrepreneur, if there ever was one. In addition to his rather large and productive garden, he owned a used car lot (Hensley’s Used Autos) and for a time the Tastee Freeze. Other businesses rented land from him, like a beauty shop and some fast food restaurants.
He spent most of his work day down at the used car lot, selling cars. He was known as an honest man in a business not known for setting the ethical bar high. But I remember walking down from their house on a little dirt road, stopping for something cold at the Tastee Freeze, then heading over to his car lot. I watched him do his business, and it was very clear that people respected and trusted him. There was a lot of bartering involved, as it was a poor town. But the business could not have survived as long as it did without having a reputable name behind it.
Poppa was darkly complected, so much so that he looked like he spent most of his time in the tropics. He was a man of few words, but when he did speak he was either making a wry joke or some dead-on observation. He didn’t have a whole lot of hair, but he had the cutest smile. And he dearly loved his wife. They had moved here from the east, Kentucky perhaps, and I don’t think she ever embraced Oklahoma as much as he did. From time to time, they’d load up the camper and take off on vacation, heading somewhere back to their roots.
Poppa also loved to play cards. When we’d go to visit, which was quite often, we would always play pitch, or spades, or hearts. During a pitch game, he’d partner with Nan, and they would eventually start talking across the table. “Well, these are some awful cards, so now would be a good time to bid, if you can,” he’d say. This is a total no-no in pitch, but you could never cure him of it. It didn’t matter anyway. He was such a risk-taker in the game that he’d overbid his hand. Then they would start griping at each other, and he’d shoot the moon. We would laugh and laugh.
He was also a fisherman. A regular. He would shut down the car lot and head to that quiet spot he loved. I’m not exactly sure where it was. But he did take me there once, when I was ten or eleven. He had never asked me to go before, so it was something like a ceremonial blessing when he did. I had no choice but to say yes, even though I never cared for fishing. But in reality I wanted to go just to hang out with him.
The trip turned out to be memorable, but for all the wrong reasons. We hadn’t been out there long when we heard a scream. Another fisherman across the river rushed out of the trees. He’d been back there digging for worms and had stumbled upon a bee’s nest. The bees were swarming him as he rushed to the water. There seemed to be a black cloud around him. He jumped in the water and the bees flew off, some toward us. Seconds later, Poppa and some other fishermen were helping him out of the water. He’d been stung many times and his face was swelling. He said something about being alergic. Somebody rushed him to his car and they drove away. We were never for sure what had happened to the man, except that Poppa had heard that he wasn’t supposed to make it.
Every Christmas, our entire family gathered at Nan and Pop’s home. The couple had three children, Bob, Faye, and Ruth. (Ruth is my grandmother.) Those three children gave them eleven grandchildren, my mom being the first. And those eleven children gave them more great-children than I can add off the top of my head, but my sisters and me were four of them.
So that was a lot of people in one little white house, perhaps 1500 square feet, not counting the dark and scary basement that I never saw anybody but Nan go down into. But gather we did each and every Christmas of my childhood. Lunch was pot luck of course and began at noon. Presents were opened at 2:00 or 3:00.
Pop played Santa Claus. He’d sit on the floor and sift through present after present, sending them off to grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Due to the sheer size of this clan, each individual family drew a few names, so that all of the kids received a present or two. Nan and Pop received many presents though, from all their kids and from many grandchildren.
Pop liked me. Perhaps it was because I was one of the oldest great-grandchildren, in fact older than some of his grandchildren. Or maybe he just made me feel that way. We all want to believe that we’re special to someone else, but he did take me aside often, call me silly nicknames, ask me to accompany him places.
On one of those occasions, he asked me to go on a walk with him. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time. Curious, because I didn’t know him as a walker, I agreed. We walked up the street toward his daughter Faye’s house, then turned right and wound through some neighborhoods. Poppa revealed to me then his plan. To buy some land up this way and build a new house for Nan.
“Why do you need a new house?” I said, unable to imagine them living anywhere but the same house they had lived in my entire life.
“Well, Nan doesn’t drive much, so I thought I’d get her a house up here by the church, so she could walk to church whenever she wanted.”
“What about you? You can drive her.” I said.
“I’m not going to be around forever.”
Those words stayed with me for some reason. It was perhaps the first time I realized that this man I loved so much would not be with me forever. Still, I thought he was just saying that. I mean, it’s the type of thing you say when you get older.
A few months later, we received a call at our home in Bartlesville. Poppa had fallen and they thought he might have suffered a stroke. He was in the hospital and further tests were being done. Mom left immediately. We were left behind because of school.
The news was bad. Not a stroke, but a brain tumor. An operation was scheduled to attempt to remove it, reduce the pressure, and determine if the tumor was malignant. It was, of course. The doctors were only able to remove part of it, and the tumor would definitely grow back.
We were all shocked, for Poppa was the patriarch of our family. And he was such a good, hard-working guy too.
The next six months were a blur. Mom was traveling back and forth to Tahlequah, trying to help out Nan, Grandma, Faye, and Bob. Sometimes she took us, sometimes she didn’t.
Poppa didn’t seem that different at first. His head was shaved, and he had a bandage over part of his head. But he wore a little hat, so you couldn’t tell. He sat over on a chair, cracking jokes, telling stories. It was reassuring to see him this way.
Later, he began to change. He lost weight. His concentration wasn’t nearly as good. He seemed less jovial than before.
And then, it finally happened, our last moments together. We drove down to Tahlequah as a family, still hoping for a miracle, but knowing that was probably not going to be the end-result. When we got there, Poppa was just a ghost of what he had been. He’d forgotten names (or entire lives) of many people who were close to him, Nan told us.
“Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t know you,” she said.
He was out of it, most of the time. Moving around, groaning, trying to find a comfortable position. I couldn’t bear to watch. When he did awaken, he didn’t seem to know any of us.
As it came time to leave, my Dad and sisters exited and went out to the car. I stayed behind with Mom, both of us needing a little more time. Poppa looked up at her and held out his hand.
“Sherry,” he said, then started sobbing. “Don’t go. Don’t go.”
My eyes filled with tears. He had remembered Mom and was begging her not to leave. But she had to. Dad had to go to work. We had to go to school. Mom had a family to take care of.
Poppa then turned to me and offered his hand.
“Jimbo,” he said, tears streaking from his eyes. ”Jimbo.”
I offered my hand back to him. He grabbed it and squeezed, as though he was transferring all of his love and power and wisdom to me.
It was my saddest one-on-one moment with another human being.
I walked outside with Mom. Both of us were crying. And I continued crying for the remaining two-hour drive home.
Poppa died a couple of weeks later. Mom was there, helping take care of him near the end.
These are my memories, from thirty years or more back. Yes, it was a long time ago, but as far as childhood memories go, these are some of my strongest, most vivid ones.
Passage
In a funny way
he was a Renaissance man
for his day, his time.
Not one to lord it over Grandma,
his not so submissive wife,
he was quietly strong.
He was strangely devout
for one who dealt in land and cars.
Honest, he would never cheat you.
Except at cards, you know,
talking across the table that way.
But oh how we laughed.
He had a wondrous garden
and a dark, oily-smelling garage
and a tree swing-I see them now.
He was, perhaps, my biggest fan.
Something about his playful eyes
and mischievous smile gave him away.
He took me on a summer’s walk once,
revealed secret plans and dreams.
That was his nature, looking forward.
We lost him a few months later though.
Cancer ate away his mind, stole his dignity.
But only briefly, memories remain.
He took my hand and squeezed it,
knowing this would be a cruel goodbye.
His tears, how they pierced me through.
I turned and walked away,
leaving that tree swing of my childhood
still swaying in the autumn breeze.
