Chapter 1 ~ Pigeon Droppings

Part 1

I married Huckleberry Finn.  I know it’s supposed to be the Peter Pan Complex when a man refuses to grow up, but in this case the man not only refused to grow up, he insisted on doing it barefoot and with a fishing pole in his hand!   I once asked Carmon why it was that he was allergic to the wood in a paintbrush handle, but not to the wood in the handle of a fishing pole.  He told me something about lake water seasoning it and . . . I think you get the picture.

I suppose I should begin at the absolute beginning if you are to ever understand how a city girl like me spent a large chunk of her adult life on a mini-farm.  I guess I could blame it on the fact that I am an eyes person.  I know what Rob Reiner told Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, how every woman is interested in two things – pecks and a cute butt.  But to me, it was always his eyes.  I’ll notice eyes before I’ll notice anything else.  Maybe it’s true that the eyes are the windows to the soul.  If that’s true, then I fell in love with Carmon’s soul.

Even with those eyes, it wasn’t love at first sight.  First sight was across my friend Ann’s living room in the summer of 1961.  She was having a going away party for her brother who was going into the Navy. (I can’t even remember his name, probably because he had good pecks, but uninspiring eyes!)  Carmon was in the Air Force at the time and had come to the party with his roommate, who was also in the Air Force and happened to be dating Ann.  For those of you who were born post-Vietnam, don’t think we were all that patriotic.  In those days, if you were male, over 18, and had an arch, you were almost certain to be drafted.  For those guys who didn’t fancy themselves as slogging through the mud in the Army, there was always the option to enlist, with the Navy and Air Force being the odds-on favorites.

At the party I first saw Carmon across a crowded room (sounds like a song lyric, doesn’t it?).  I acted as if I didn’t have a clue as to who he was.  In reality, I sort of knew who he was.  Okay, I’ll admit it: I knew exactly who he was.  After all, Ann had been talking about him to me in home economics class every day for the past three months.  She kept coming back to her idea about what a cute couple she thought we’d make until she had, frankly, piqued my curiosity.  Carmon knew who I was, too, since Ann’s boyfriend had been doing the same kind of talking to him, man-style, during that same time. 

Our eyes met and Carmon walked across the room.  I can’t describe that walk, only to say that when Henry Winkler created the character of Fonzie, he must have had Carmon in mind.  Ann joined us and introduced us to each other.  Then she left and we just stood there.  As I mentioned earlier, it wasn’t love at first sight.  Despite his gorgeous eyes, within two minutes of talking to him, I thought he was the most arrogant, self-absorbed man I had ever met.  He later confessed that he thought I was a conceited snob.  We were married a year later.  So much for the power of first impressions.

We got married for all the right reasons.  I liked his eyes, he liked the way I looked in a sweater, and we both liked tacos.  I guess there are marriages that start with less than that, although I personally don’t know of any.  As soon as he was discharged from the military, he returned to his hometown – Mesa, Arizona – to look for a home for us.  I followed two weeks later after packing up our meager household belongings, my clothing, and two silver platters we received as wedding presents, (neither of which I ever used!)

Our first home was a furnished, one-bedroom, walk-up apartment in the heart of town.  The older part of the town was a good place to live in those days.  Our apartment was one-half block to the west of the Arizona LDS Temple.  In the early mornings it was beautiful to stand on the porch looking east as the sun rose over the palm trees in the temple gardens.  Even today, when I close my eyes and think about our apartment, I can still smell the orange blossoms and hear the cooing of the pigeons.  The pigeons should have been a sign of things to come. 

I have since heard pigeons referred to as “rats with wings.”  In those innocent days, I wouldn’t have described them in that way.  Carmon loved them.  He would work on mimicking their call – sort of a “coo-walk-walk” done deep in his throat.  I should have had a premonition.

~  ~  ~ 

Like many newly married kids in the 60’s, we were broker than the Ten Commandments.  Carmon worked at a feed mill, loading sacks of grain from dawn until dusk for $65.00 a week.  I didn’t work and, quite frankly, it didn’t occur to me to even look for work.  In that time and place, wives generally stayed home.  This meant that we had very little of what young people today would call discretionary income.  In fact, if it weren’t for twice-weekly dinners at my sister-in-law’s home, we might have starved!  Because we could barely feed ourselves, it stood to reason that we didn’t entertain very often. You can imagine my surprise when Carmon informed me that he had invited one of his best friends from high school to our home for dinner.  “What dinner?”  I asked.  “I could fix potatoes and potatoes, but that doesn’t seem suitable fare for Johnny and his wife.”

“Don’t worry,” he told me, “I’ll take care of it.  Just get out that big cookbook you’re using to keep the radio from falling off the shelf and look up a recipe for cooking squab.”

Squab!  That sounded suitably impressive, even for a valued friend.  I spent most of the day before cleaning the apartment until you could see your reflection in the floor tile.  I had the rest of the menu all planned and could hardly wait to get my hands on the squab.  After dinner that night, I asked Carmon when he was going to get them.  “Right now,” he told me as he headed out the door with a flashlight and a brown paper bag.  That worried me, but he assured me that everything was perfectly legal.

He came back less than an hour later.  It was then that I learned that squab are baby pigeons!  My latter-day Daniel Boone had climbed to the top of the grain silos at work and robbed the nests!  I made him clean them on the porch, but I did cook them the next day.  For some reason, his friends never showed up.  They later apologized and said they simply forgot.  Personally, I think Carmon must have told them what was on the menu.

© Gebara Education, 2001.  No portion of this book may be copied by any method without the express written permission of the author