12 July 1996, Corsicana, Texas
My uncle Thomas came for lunch today. I hadn’t seen him since my mother, his sister’s funeral. Thomas is her baby brother, the youngest of three children, my mother being the middle child. Her sister Francys, being the oldest, is also gone, having preceded my mother by some years. Thomas lives alone now with his cocker spaniel. Hugging him again brings back so many memories of my mother and so many times spent with her family the Toones. It was always a special occasion when we got together. My mother cooked for days and prepared the home to perfection. She was a perfect hostess, making sure everyone had whatever they needed. What we all needed most she gave in abundance. We needed family, to make family memories.
When Thomas came today, my father, who lived with us, and I took him to the local barbecue place for a plate lunch. We sat and talked about the past. I need the past. It’s the past that cements the present and prepares the future. I can’t help missing the past though. There are very few people besides the three of us in that booth that would remember or even be interested in our pieces of memory. They have their own. Our family has been dwindling, separated by space and time, memories suspended until another with the same memories comes.
There are so many missing from the table now, but I’m grateful for the few hours spent with Thomas. He is the last of that Toone generation. Thomas talked about his youth, spent with his father Taze and his grandparents in Waxahachie. His father Taze and his mother Gertrude were divorced in a time when divorce was taboo. Gertrude moved away with Thomas’s sisters, leaving him with father’s family. In their small house there was no running water and little heat. There was only a faucet outside on the back porch and one tiny gas heater. He bathed in a number 3 wash tub in water heated on the stove. One particularly cold winter, Papa Toone went out in desperation and cut down their back yard shade tree to burn in the fireplace for warmth. They burned old tires, too, making a particularly hot fire.
It was the “Great Depression.” They had no money for anything extra nor for even essentials. Thomas said he had one date in high school and walked to the girl’s house then walked together to the ten cent movie. Then home to her house and finally to his, a round trip of about four to five miles. He had no money for more such dates, so that was his only one. He said he always wore a tie to high school, his thinking being that the tie would make his shabby clothes and him look less poor. Mama had only two homemade dresses when she was in Waxahachie High, washing the one she wasn’t wearing and ironing it in between. It made it really hard if Francys borrowed one of the two. But then, life was very hard at the Toone house, as it was for many people. Papa shot black birds in the yard to feed them. Mama Toone spent her days caring for her mentally disabled grandson and the rest of the family. Papa Toone had been a city marshal of Waxahachie, proudly wearing a badge and gun. All that went by the bye when he lost one of his legs, I never knew how. Taze, their son, had owned a successful jewelry store on the square until the Depression. No one was buying jewelry instead of food. Papa and Mama Toone took the five of them in. Taze’s ego didn’t survive the loss of his business, so he turned to alcohol, as many others did. He never gave it up, which was the primary cause of his divorce.
I asked Mama many times to write about her childhood. She always said it was too hard a life to want to call up. I remember her saying you can never get away from your childhood. Although I believe she’s right, I’m not sure I would ever want to get away from mine. It was filled with people now gone but remembered with a great tightness in my throat, sharp with loss. As Thomas and my dad talked, I heard the echoes. Thomas’ stories of Daddy’s great generosity to Mama’s family, his own life with his mother and his loneliness since retirement. It all felt somehow like an arm thrown around my shoulders. I sat in the booth and looked at two old men, mirrors of my past, and regretted only that the clock couldn’t be turned back and have that booth shared with Mama, Francys, all the cousins, Nene and even Taze, who I never knew well. The Toones didn’t have much long ago, but they left a huge legacy of loving memories.
