Reflections on Faith &
Life for the Years of Winter…
Our granddaughter is home
this summer in Marshalltown, Iowa, between graduating from MSU and starting her
graduate work at U of Chicago. She is working part-time as a receptionist for a
social service agency. At least she was until the tornado hit.
The agency she works for
is responsible for helping people make claims for loans and such to rebuild
after the tornado. So now she is a social worker, working 50 hours per week,
with lines in front of her counter sometimes twenty people deep. In Spanish,
because Marshalltown has a lot of settled-out Mexican folks.
That’s not quite as tough
as it sounds. She had Spanish in high school. She minored in it at university.
But it’s definitely not her native tongue. There is a lot of pressure in trying
to help people understand convoluted government forms and regulations in a
language that is not your first.
But when you have to use a
language every day, regularly, for real stuff, you learn in a different way.
I’m not exactly sure how it came up, but yesterday she learned to say “bellbottoms”
in Spanish. I can only assume that someone lost some 1970s clothes in the
tornado and is making a claim for their replacement.
Of course, bellbottoms did
not originate in the 70s. They started in the navy. When my older sister, Mary
V, was dating the man who became her husband, her favorite song was one that I
think doesn’t even exist anymore, so to speak… Bellbottom trousers, coat of navy blue, I love a sailor, and he loves
me, too…
When she was dating Dick
she lived in a rooming house for girls, most of whom were telephone operators,
who went on strike. Mother didn’t want Mary V walking the picket line by
herself, especially at night, because she remembered the quite real violence
that was perpetrated upon her father and other coal miners when they struck, so
she made me go to Evansville to walk the line with Mary V.
Mary V was slightly
embarrassed, to have her little brother walking with her, as some sort of
bodyguard, but she was remarkably good-natured about it, as she has always been
about everything. If anything happened, it would have been more likely that she
would be defending me. I was young, like 15, and looked it, and many people figured
there was reason to strike if the telephone company had to hire kids like me.
But I felt important, especially when the newspaper photogs took pix of us.
After I walked Mary V home
at the end of her picket shift, I’d go to the Y and spend the night.
We didn’t have a car, so I
rode the bus down to Evansville. You could stand along the highway and wave the
bus down and the driver would figure up some discount for the fare since we
didn’t ride all the way from Oakland City to Evansville. That’s how Mary V got
back and forth to visit once in a while, on the weekend, on the bus. I’d walk
over to the highway to meet her bus on Friday night and then walk her back on
Sunday afternoon. Dick was stationed at Fort Campbell in KY and didn’t get free
every weekend to come up to Evansville to see her, so those were weekends she
would come home.
Can’t remember exactly how
the strike ended, but I’m pretty sure the telephone company didn’t hire goons
to beat up the strikers, the way the coal mine owners did. Or maybe they hit me
on the head and that’s why I can’t remember…
It was my first experience
with learning that if someone has his boot on your neck, he thinks he has a
good reason for having it there, and that arrangement is working out nicely for
him, even if it’s mighty uncomfortable for you, so he’s not going to take that
boot off your neck just because you ask him politely. You’re going to have to
bow your neck.
JRMcF
Hooray! Katie Kennedy’s What Goes Up is out in paper back.
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