Previous: Before the Beginning
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In my dream, I made my appearance on the beginning of this path at birth. Like all people, I was clueless as to what the reason for my being here was. All I saw was the world around me. Ahead of me was a long path, straight and narrow. In the far distance, a towering mountain. And to my side, a beautiful rushing river. As my dream went on, I realized that my goal was to stay on the path. For what reason, I wasn’t sure – but i began walking.
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1976, Canutillo, Texas, I made my entrance into this world. By the time I was old enough to remember anything, Gramma had worked enough to be able to buy a plot of land and a mobile home in a little subdivision. My parents rented a lot across the street. My sister Lisa was born in 1978, and Leilani came along in 1981.
My dad isn’t a prominent figure in those earliest memories. He just wasn’t around much. He might have been around a little more than my aging memory can pull back, but I just don’t have very many moments I can remember him being present.
Grandfather was sticking around longer between trips to Mexico. Since we lived across the street, we spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house. I spent my youngest years watching Grandfather. Most of my lifelong beliefs were molded by those early observations. Some I had to break up and realign later on down the road, but as imperfect as he was, I can say this: In all the years I am able to remember, I never spent a day of my life without the knowledge that God is God and He is most certainly real. I don’t have any memories of not knowing these things, and it was mostly thanks to Grandfather.
He woke up with the sun and spent the morning alone in prayer and Bible study. It wasn’t at all uncommon to find him on his knees in the living room for hours at a time. He’d make breakfast early and read the newspaper, the Bible and other history/religion related books in his collection. Then he’d work on chores, handiwork, and spending time with the grandkids. He had a large garden in the front yard, where he grew tomatoes, squash, okra, corn, broccoli, radishes, cucumbers, carrots and other stuff. After harvesting them, he’d sometimes spend days canning and pickling. (Stewed prunes were the BEST). In the afternoons he’d read and pray some more. He’d help with dinner and dessert and maybe sit outside in the porch swing for a while or go for a walk. Then he’d go to bed super early. That was the routine I remember most days.
Grandfather was a great teacher. I was learning how to read, write, garden, bake and build bird houses by the time I was 4 years old. He made a little seat that he installed on his bicycle and he’d take me all over the countryside on it, teaching me things as we drove by. Those bicycle rides were the highlight of my life back then. He saved all his product boxes and taped them up so my sisters and I could build our own play store. He made us swings and taught us how to turn a piece of string into all kinds of formations on our hands. He liked to make us think. He’d sit me on his lap, open a magazine and then say, “What do you think?” Those open-ended questions led to some pretty deep conversations…. although, my standard first answer was to try to score some points with him. If it was opened up to a page with a woman on it, I’d invariably answer, ‘I think she has too much makeup on’ and he’d applaud my ‘insight’.
I really enjoyed my time with my grandfather very much.
However….as good, wholesome, pure and well-intentioned as my Grandfather was, he was still trapped in that world of legalism in which almost every thing imaginable was a sin….
Taking aspirin or going to the doctor was not having faith in God.
TV & radio: too worldly. Absolute no-no.
Toys, like dolls: off-limits. (graven images maybe?)
Make-up, haircuts, perms, dyes etc…. FORGET IT. That’s altering & not appreciating the way God made you.
To this day, I don’t wear dresses much bc I spent so many years only being allowed to wear dresses (usually long ones) — because that’s what girls are supposed to wear.
Taking pictures/posing for pictures? Nope. That’s just a tool used to live in the past, which is wrong. We don’t have any pictures of him from that era – & the ones we have of ourselves were taken when he wasn’t around.
The reason I call him Grandfather is because he didn’t believe in short names or nicknames. I don’t think I ever understood the reasoning behind it, but instead of Dad, Mom, and Grandma, it was Father, Mother and Grandmother.(Which is strange because my entire life, I only remember him addressing my grandma as “Sister Jerry”, short for Geraldine.) To this day, I can’t bring myself to call him grandpa or anything shorter.
If we were caught doing something really bad like lying or hitting (or more specifically—at four years old–digging holes in the yard with a can, throwing the can on top of the shed, and then running home and pretending we knew nothing about it–wink, wink), we were summoned to the kitchen table with the entire family and subjected to a very, very, VERY long lecture about how we were making God angry and heaping up destruction for ourselves.
If we started laughing too much, we were reminded that God doesn’t like foolishness. Everything was very serious. Even when we played “Hide The Thimble” in the living room, it had a purpose and had to be done very formally.
Perhaps the most surprising off-limits thing for us, though? Church! He was so rigid that even churches weren’t good enough for his brand of religion. I was invited to Vacation Bible School once and was excited to go – until Grandfather found out and forbade it.
I realize how depressing all of this sounds. Still, I always felt loved by him. I always felt like he cared. He always seemed genuinely interested in us. When he hugged me, I felt safe and protected. He was the male in our lives and for that reason he was very special to me. On a couple of occasions, he decided to go back to Mexico. He had already been deported from there once and was afraid of getting caught again, so we’d drop him off at a place he could sneak over the border late at night. I would always be crying as we drove home, and I’d always be excited when he came back.
Despite her unauthorized marriage to my dad, mom followed Grandfather a lot. For a while there, she spent so much time with him that she started to get almost as legalistic as he was. The rules at our house generally weren’t as severe as at Grandfather’s house, but there was a short time in which we weren’t even allowed to watch Sesame Street because of its worldly origins.
Some things started becoming clear to Mom though. The final straw in a string of very red flags: Grandfather told mom she needed to get rid of the pants we had been running around in and make us some good “godly” dresses. She took us over to their house to model the new Little-House-On-The-Prairie style dresses she had just made us. They hung down about mid-calf. He said that they were cute dresses, but that they were just still toooo short. While he continued to reason with her about the dresses, she said that she could just see the chains of bondage wrapping around him and squeezing him tight. She told him that she no longer wanted to be part of whatever it was they were getting involved in. Gradually, (at our house, that is) things went back to semi-normal…. at least in this area.
My parents relationship wasn’t great–ever–but it got really bad. Leilani was born in 1981 and shortly after that, I vividly remember lying on my bed reading one of my favorite books–”The Shoeshine Girl”. Mom and Daddy called me into the living room, which was very irritating to me. I wanted to finish reading my book. They sat me down and told me that they were going to get divorced and they wanted to know what I thought about that.
I just shrugged. What was that supposed to mean? He hadn’t consistently been around anyway. At that moment in time, I had no idea, no clue as to what the magnitude of what was about to happen would be. It really didn’t seem like things were going to be that different than from how they always had been. And when you’re a kid, you don’t think about what’s best and what’s not best. You don’t question circumstances or worry about the future…you take things as they are. So I just shrugged. I wanted to get back to the fascinating adventures of the Shoeshine Girl. I asked if I could go back to my room, and that was that. And I was right….things weren’t much different after that.
Only a short time passed before my parents decided to try to work things out. We started spending more time together as a family. I remember my dad taking us to K-Mart and buying us stuff and some cherry Icees. My mom was hesitant but she wanted to believe that my dad was as sincere as he acted.
One day, my mom borrowed my gramma’s car & we went for a drive. When we stopped, I looked out the window and saw a nice little house with grass and a sidewalk and a mailbox–nothing threatening. A kid was outside in the yard. My mom asked him if Art was there. The kid disappeared and a few minutes later, my dad emerged in his underwear.
It’s strange. My memory is good for just a few moments about that day. Then it just ends. Surely there was an argument. There must have been some tears … some tense words… maybe some yelling? A long, quiet, lonely ride back home. A sad, lonely night watching my mom be sad. But I don’t remember. I don’t even think I fully understood what just happened. I did know my parents would not be getting back together, though, and that it was my dad’s fault. And even though I didn’t understand everything, this memory would bring tears to my eyes for the rest of my younger life… and I don’t even know why.
To support us after that, my mom got a job as a school bus driver and as the secretary for the Transportation Department. All of the adults I knew in my family worked at the school. My aunt worked in the cafeteria, my uncle worked at the waste water treatment plant and also was a school bus driver, my grandma was the food service director. It really worked for us during the school year. But it meant even more time at my grandparents’ house during the summer.
As I got older, Grandfather became more of a sore spot in my life. I think after I started school he was sure the world was contaminating me. We didn’t spend time doing the things we used to. When we would go over there, we would spend most of our days outside playing by ourselves. If he heard us playing make believe, he’d run out and put an end to it. Once I was swinging on the swing he made us, singing the theme song to Leave It To Beaver. He could hear me from the kitchen, and I could hear his chair scoot back from the table … his boots stomping against the floor, as he came to the door to demand that I stop. He sounded so disappointed that his granddaughter was so knowledgeable of such sewage.
Little offenses started becoming deal-breakers. Once, I came back and drank some orange juice after I had already asked to be excused from the breakfast table. (Asking to be excused from the table was a HUGE rule at his house). He was so enraged by my disobedience that he went outside and took my little seat off of his bicycle. He never put it back on. Another time when we were baking a cake, I held the sugar cup a little higher over the bowl than I should have. Like any kid, I thought watching the sugar flow down like a waterfall was pretty cool. But he took it away from me, saying that because I didn’t take things seriously, we wouldn’t cook together again. He kept his word.
Other little things started to eat at our relationship even further. One day, we had spent the entire day swimming in a little pool at our house. My mom had run over to my grandparents’ house for some reason or another and took a little longer to come back than I had expected. I had put some shorts on over my swimsuit and I knew my Grandfather wouldn’t approve of that attire. I grabbed a towel and threw it around my waist before I went to check on her. When I got there, Grandfather demanded to know if I was wearing shorts under that towel. When he inspected me and found that I was, he told me to go back home and never to come back dressed that way again.
Little by little, we stopped talking. By the time I was 10, I hardly knew him, anymore. I always felt completely unacceptable to him. He used to talk to me with enthusiasm and concern, but gradually, his voice became as monotone and somber as it was when he talked to the grownups. He stopped making eye contact with me, and put his head down and slightly to the side when he’d talk to me. He seemed to have given into the idea that I was just as lost and unreachable as the rest of the family.
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Despite the rough road and all the inaccuracies, I learned the mission from an early age. God is all that matters, and to get to Him at the mountain, I had to stay on the path & follow it faithfully. Stay out of the river! It’s heading the opposite direction & that’s not where you wanna go.
Out of the Box 
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