Our Year of Gambling

I sat in the old wooden porch chair, pulled up close to the computer screen, immobile, paralyzed with memories. The You-Tube screen flashed “Play Again”, but I ignored it. I was being transported by something more substantial than the technologies of today – the revived remembrances of three decades ago. Thirty years. Sunday would have been my 30th wedding anniversary had I stayed on that particular winding path, yet I hadn’t. But it wasn’t lament or sorrow that had me transfixed. The hubby and I had chosen wisely to diverge and when I did think of him, it was with a wry fondness. Life was one adventure after another back in those days, and it was Our Year of Gambling, as I called it, which had me slunk down in my chair, chuckling, shaking my head, recollecting the smells of horses, beer, tobacco smoke and the noise of a crowd as the thoroughbreds came around the last curve, some lost soul shouting above the din, “You’ve got to win – that was the milk money.” I usually put down my book, a mystery, by that point and stood in respect to watch the powerful animals in the grand game of their particular existence.

My husband hated any idea of gambling. We were mathematicians, statisticians, historians, a hard-working team using a handicapping system. “The Daily Racing Form” became our textbook and we learned it well. There was no place for socialization or emotion in our track life – precision led to survival in the gambling world. He had stumbled upon a man and his mountain farm in the hills of West Virginia, bought with race money, and this wise old soul had taught him the secret and he believed.

I grew up in a home where ‘playing cards’ were thrown in the trash. School fundraising ticket books were promptly sent back to the teacher with a donation and a note, “we don’t believe in gambling.” We played Friday night games of Rook and of Lindy, the cards bent from the age of the Lindbergh era and mother’s youth. We laughed and ate root beer floats – but we did not gamble. Two things happened that knocked me right off that narrow path: I became a percussionist in the school band and, at the age of 17, I hopped on a plane to Australia. Drummers play cards and they’re not immune to throwing a penny ante in the pot. And Australians love their horse racing and this was no exception with the veterinarian and his wife, my dear friends who took me off to Gloucester Thoroughbred Park for an evening of wining and dining in the club house. The vet turned to me after we had finished our meal and laughingly said, “I’m going to put a few dollars on a horse for you and speed up your pulse a bit.” Battling between my upbringing and politeness, I quickly scanned the racing program and saw a horse called “Angel of Mercy.” Surely this was God giving me a way out of a sticky situation – a horse with a religious name! No matter the odds were high and he wasn’t expected to win. But, of course he did win, as did the next one, “Heaven’s Gate.” That made a believer out of me. Even in the unemotional professionalism of Our Year of Gambling, I would sometimes sneak a two dollar bill under the ticket window and whisper, “Two to win on “Road to Mecca” – I was quite ecumenical in my choices.

As we traveled from track to track in our old VW van with the wooden bumpers (named ‘Simplicity’), I learned not to approach people with my West Virginia exuberance, but rather to accept the slightly nodded head of fellow professional gamblers whom we would frequently see all along the eastern seaboard. Crossing the border of the Mountain State and settling down for a week of handicapping at Charles Town brought deep gulps of air, as if I had been holding my breath in the grandstands of New Jersey, Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania. I smiled, people smiled back. I talked, folks chatted. So it wasn’t all that surprising one day when a woman saved me from a $200 disaster. The husband and I had carefully calculated a certain horse and were confident of his win – everything lined up. We were well aware that not every horse is in the race to win, many are there for exercise and practice and for a number of other reasons, but we had factored in that possibility. Before placing the bet, I wandered down to the paddock area to take a look at this animal who would add much to our dwindling coffers. Standing next to a sweet looking elderly woman, I said “Beautiful. What a lovely name and intelligent eyes. I think I’ll put a little something on this horse.” - knowing full well I had two hundreds in my pocket ready to ride on him. “Sweetheart,” she answered. “That horse is named for my granddaughter, Mary Elizabeth. Come back in a few days and put your money on him then.” She winked, smiled, and walked away.

I got back to the stands just as the horses were rounding the first curve and our horse, “Son of Mary”, was in a substantial lead. My husband stood there silently watching, but with a small turn of satisfaction at the corners of his mouth. “Well,” I said. “I didn’t buy the ticket. I met his grandmother.” He simply turned to look at me as I inwardly grinned and watched the rest of the race.

Now it is the 21st century and I watch races on my computer. On the day of what would have been our anniversary, at a track called Monmouth, two horses ran neck to neck at the finish line. The second place horse was called “The Wife Doesn’t Know.” The winner was “My Wife Knows Everything.” I hit the “Share” button and put in the hubby’s email address. And laughed – knowing he, too, would chuckle.

HE FELL OUT OF BED AND CHANGED OUR LIVES

It was late autumn and the frost was thick the night the phone call came that would change my life. And as these matters of fate so often unravel, I had yet to be born. Not many people back in the 1950s had two telephones in their house, but the extra one was in the master bedroom, situated on the lower shelf of the built-in bookshelves, several steps from the bed, so the doctor would have to stand and truly wake up when he said his sleep-graveled hello. It was a rare night when there wasn’t a call in the middle of the night.
“Doc, could you please come to Hemlock right away? My husband’s fallen out of bed and I’m afraid he’s broken his hip. He’s just in awful pain and can’t hardly move. I’m going to put my neighbor on the telephone and she’ll tell you how to get to the house – I need to get back home to him.”
The doctor closed his eyes and listened carefully as the neighbor gave directions, only interrupting once, “She’s in her 80s and she walked over a mile through the wilderness to get to your house, with only a lantern to light her way?” He hung up and gently whispered to his wife that he probably wouldn’t be back until daybreak, he and Brier were headed to Hemlock, 22 miles away, the last half on roads barely wide enough for a school bus. He grabbed his black bag from the kitchen table where he had been rubbing it with saddle soap the evening before, checked inside it for morphine and a syringe, and headed out into the Milky Way clear darkness. The collie dog was ready and waiting by the door.
“Ah, Brier, Hemlock, West Virginia – the site of one of the seven wonders of Upshur County, Upshur Mountain, the highest point in the county, over 3,000 feet. We’re going to be riding up a few ridges tonight, might even see some snow.” The dog and the man rode in companionable silence as they headed through Tallmansville, past the turn off to Ten Mile and Sago, over the bridges at Lower and then Upper Queens, and began the steep ascent up the narrow passage on Taylor Hill to Hemlock Ridge. The road became dirt, the houses fewer, and the quarter moon as silvery as the foxes curled up in their nearby dens. At the fork in the road, the left turn heading to the one-room schoolhouse and the Methodist church, the doctor took the hairpin curve to the right, leading to the combination country store and post office, keeping his eye out for a “lane you might miss, Doc, and if you get to the wooden bridge, turn around and go back a piece and you’ll see it.”
The old man and woman didn’t have a car and the road was a path, the doctor’s old Army jeep bouncing through mud holes, scraping on branches, and running perilously close to the steep bank of the creek, a tributary to the Middle Fork River. As he came around the last curve and up the rise to the meadow, the doctor stopped as the cabin came into view - wide logs, a tall chimney of huge rocks, two towering Hemlock trees alongside, planted, no doubt, on the day the couple was married and moved into their home.
Though writhing in pain, the old gentleman did not have a fracture and after the doctor lifted him into bed with his strong arms and administered a shot of morphine, the man smiled and fell asleep. “Doc, I want to show you something,” the old woman said. She took up the lantern by the door and led him across the field to a trail running alongside the river. They wove in and out of the trees, through thick moss, under rhododendron and mountain laurel branches, stepped over an old corduroy logging road, and came out onto a huge rock in the river where the waterfalls filled the quiet of the frosty pre-dawn. He turned to the woman and said, “Ma’am, you live in Paradise.”
The doctor and dog were quiet on the ride back home. His wife was making a pot of coffee and he went over and gave her a kiss. “Lois, I’ve never coveted anything before, but I am in awe right now. I’ve seen the place of my dreams and I hope we can have it someday. It would be the greatest gift we could ever give the children.”
It was a number of years after that nighttime house call, after the deaths of the old man and woman – and the passing of the doctor’s own father, leaving him a simple inheritance, the exact amount needed to buy that hundred acres of heaven – that my father’s prophetic wisdom came true. It was the greatest gift to his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. No matter where we roam over this vast planet, and we do seem to be wanderers, each of us knows there is a spot in the mountains of West Virginia that calls out to us, cradles our spirits, and holds precious memories of first loves, camping trips, digging ramps, driving lessons, horseshoe games, tree houses, dam building, fire circles, hiking, wildflowers, soothing tears – and giggles over how our Tom Sawyer parents invented the ‘wish being granted on the third rock thrown into the big mud hole’, which hole, of course, no longer exists. (I swear to this day that third rock wish is how I got my first husband). And the waterfalls has become the Mecca one conjures up while in the dentist chair or caught by stopped traffic in the city – the mere image brings a smile, a sigh, and memories of holes worn in the seats of our pants as we mentally slide down the falls into the cold, clear mountain stream.

The Whole World Sings Below

The Whole World Sings Below

This evening, the dog and I hiked the ridge. It could have been the moors in a 19th century novel - an evening when it might be thundering, but is simply grey with racing clouds. The cows let us pick daisies, red clover - Dad's favorite and I think of him. A kind soul who took loving care of the Japanese during the Occupation - a mere blink of an eye of time from when his brother, a fighter pilot, an architect, a father, was lost in the South Pacific.

I got to be with my dad when he took his last breath in the room he had shared with my mother as long as I had known him. I stood there with my knee on his bed, touching his back, merging with Greenbrier, K, Araceli, and Thom as we attempted to sing our father into heaven with the only thing we could muster in our numbness: “Oh, the West Virginia Hills, how majestic and how grand, with their summits bathed in glory…..”.

The last words my father spoke, just hours before he died as he struggled from the bath room were: “Beth, Beth, help me, dear.” How many times in his life did he hear similar words uttered to him as he made his rounds at the hospital, visited the sick and dying in their homes - or echoing in his head as he thought of his younger brother in the fighter plane, being shot down and drowned in the South Pacific? That generation didn’t talk about hauntings in their heads.

What is it about human nature that in the moments it takes the pen to scratch a President’s name, an Emperor’s signature, a Prime Minister’s scrawl, a soldier goes from battle to reconstruction? Even as the heart screams with grief for the kid brother who shared the attic room with the slanted ceilings in a little New Jersey town, a man is capable of walking into a hospital ward in that prior land called evil, and seeing a woman with pneumonia, a child with a broken leg, a young man with seizures, and he begins to administer care with every fiber of his knowledge and every inch of his soul. And then he writes home letters to his wife, extolling the gentleness of these people. That generation didn’t reveal how they discovered the secret of forgiveness, the ability to be humble and in that humbleness become the strongest generation yet.

As my father’s breaths became softer and slower, I wanted to whisper to him, “Go Daddy – reach on over for Mother’s hand and embrace your brother and all the collies who have gone before you and I know are waiting for you. Indulge in the gardens of your beloved sweetest berries.” Instead I softly began to sing with my siblings, “I want to wake up in the morning where the rhododendrons grow, where the Lord is so near me, when I breathe He can hear me, and the whole world sings below…”

Back in 1907, Miss Anna Jarvis, a woman who was never to become a mother herself, held the first Mother's Day service as a memorial to her mother, in Grafton, West Virginia. Decades later, she announced to the world that she wished she'd never started the tradition. What began as an honoring of mothers became a commerical holiday and this saddened her. But the holiday became popular and continues to be celebrated throughout the world. Frankly, I'm glad. Though it brings a pain to the heart as I reach for a white carnation instead of a red one at the door of our beautiful rock church along the Blue Ridge Parkway, the memory of my own mother is clearly one to celebrate. And there is the recollection of so many women who touched my life in a motherly way as I grew up in a small town in central West Virginia.

My mother, Lois Ruth, was a kind and gentle soul, though strong in so many ways. When I am asked to describe her, I often say three things: A Methodist, a botanist, a 4-H'er. Her creed in life could be summed up in one sentence, if one can actually do that for someone as personal as a mother. I will try. My mother hated alcohol, thought God cried when the mountains were stripped for coal and the trillums and topsoil and bubbling creeks were pushed asunder -- and she was always pushing herself and her children to 'make the best better'.

There were so many strong and resourceful women in that little town. My earliest memories of Saturday night family gatherings bring to mind Ella Berisford, Irma St. Clair, Hazel Beer. Aren't those wonderful names? Ella, Irma, Hazel - names from another era; ladies who loved their children and spread that love to their friends' children, too.

And the neighborhood mothers of Victoria Hill. They kept their eyes on all of us, but in an independent way that encouraged our all day hikes and building of forts and softball games and tree house construction. Knowing when to bring out the watermelons and gather all the gang around first one house and the next week another. I salute them -- Alice Williams, Rose Lockwood, Lena Stansbury, Martha Daniel, Splash Williams, Mona Oldaker, Vivian Shaffer, Sarah Chamberlain, and Martha Shissler. They made childhood sweet.

Those first few years of school, our teachers were often like mothers to us. Helen Reger was an angel on this earth. Martha Jane Phillips gave me a lifelong love of reading. Olive Baxa can still make me smile when I think of her laugh. Katherine Steurer had the prettiest sweaters I had ever seen. Delma Iden read us "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and is the only teacher who ever gave me straight A's - an act of pure love for that A-- in handwriting and even as a nine year old, I knew that. I thank Edith Hall in my mind every time I have to multiply a number. Mary Rinard had the patience of a saint. Betty Hicks taught me respect for myself. And Hope Butterfield was a teacher who let us come to her house on a Saturday and become her friend. But she also made me sing the only solo I have ever sung in my life.

As time went on, my best friends' mothers rose to the occasion and reached out to us at times when we needed someone other than our own mothers. There were the mothers who were actually fun and would take us shopping and join in our card games and show a real interest in our boy worries and other angsts: Peg Clark, Jane Reddecliff, Sue Martin, Susie Miller, Pat Turner. And those who would talk to us with respect, like Bunny Mow and Anna Thompson. And mothers who treated us with politeness and interest and concer - Judy Allman's mom and Susan Hunnicutt's mother. And then there was Maxine Hinkle, who let us take over her house on Saturday afternoons so a gang of us could laugh and dance and make bologna and potato chip sandwiches and just be girls. And I could salute more, but as the decades have passed, the memories and the names become fuzzier, but remain warm.

My last salute is to my Godmother, Beth Darnell. A woman with natural class and grace who lived in what I thought of as the grandest house in town, a columned home on Meade Street. We shared a name and a friendship between a young girl and an older woman. She gave me gifts each year on my birthday and Christmas. It would be her gift I would reach for each Christmas Eve when we returned home from church and mother would let us open one gift before bed. I always knew it would be something I would cherish. To this day, I sometimes reach far into my jewelry box and pull out the sterling silver figure of a young woman, engraved with the name of Beth, and I hold it close and conjur up the times of childhood. A time when there were so many mothers in my life.