I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: The Way Life Was

  • Vagina Dialogues (from Deep in the Heart)

    Vagina Dialogues (from Deep in the Heart)


    Glenn, I don’t know why you brought Sheila with us, Mama said again in her chilly tone. I really don’t think it’s a good idea to take our twelve-year- old daughter on this trip. Mama was sitting in her usual place in the front seat of the car in the middle next to Daddy. She had on one of her nicest summer skirts with a starched white blouse and high heels. She had spent a long time fixing her short hair which was a recently altered shade of brown. She had dressed up for this visit to a new doctor in Houston who she had been referred to by our regular family doctor, Dr. Sanders.

    I told you Selma, Daddy said mildly. She’ll be good company for me while you’re in with the gynecologist. Plus if you feel like it, we can go to a movie afterwards. No harm mixing in a little fun while we’re in Houston, is there? Daddy looked very nice, although he hadn’t put on a tie. He wore a blue sports shirt and brown trousers nice enough to wear to work but no tie which was odd. He always wore a tie when he went to the school even in the summer when he was the only one working.

    I guess not, she said. We do need to make a stop at the Bargain Gusher to look for school clothes, too. Neither one of us has a thing to wear to school this fall, and it starts in a few weeks. (Mama taught music in the elementary grades at the Richards public school where Daddy was the superintendent. I wished they both had different jobs.)

    Oh no Mama, please, I said from the back seat. Not the Bargain Gusher today. I know you won’t feel like walking around in there when you’re so sick. Can’t we just go to the movies like Daddy says? I think it’s a western with Kirk Douglas. Please don’t make us go to that store.

    Oh, for heaven’s sake. It’s not a torture chamber, she said. What in the world is wrong with you? She looked in the mirror to add more red lipstick.

    I hate that store, I said. None of the other kids go there to get their clothes. It looks like an Army Surplus store. I was going into the seventh grade in the fall and was beginning to see the clothes I wore weren’t like those the other kids wore. My grandmother Ma, on my daddy’s side of the family, made most of my school clothes. The only other clothes I owned came from the high fashion department of the Bargain Gusher. Not a flattering selection there for a girl who pictured herself as tall and thin, an almost teenage girl who was in reality short and chunky. Difficult to reconcile sizes in the Bargain Gusher, for example.

    Your friends don’t have school teachers for parents either, Daddy said. Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

    A penny saved is a penny earned, I said. And an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

    Pretty is as pretty does, Mama said and smiled. The tension in the car was over; we were off and running with one of our best road trip games we called reciting sayings.

    Let every tub stand on its own bottom, Daddy said. We all laughed at this one. It was his favorite, and he never failed to mention it when we played the game. The countryside was beautiful as we drove the 90 miles from Richards to Houston to take Mama to the gynecologist. It was a hot, humid summer day in Texas. We kept the windows rolled down to try to keep a breeze blowing through our ‘58 Chevy, but the air blowing in was warm and sticky.

    We had passed the Grimes/Montgomery County line a few miles outside Richards as we entered the Sam Houston National Forest. The pine trees got thicker on the winding two lane road. I recognized the farmhouses where some of my friends lived and thought how lucky they were to live in the country. Not that living in town was all that cosmopolitan. With a population of 440 including dogs and chickens as my granddaddy used to say, and no stoplight or even a stop sign, it wasn’t a bustling urban metropolis. But Daddy had a small ranch off this road, and I hoped someday we would build a house on it, actually move out there. I knew Daddy really wanted to, but Mama said it was bad enough to live in a town with dirt streets without moving to a cow pasture. That was pretty much the end of that.

    He and I went out there a lot, though. Usually my granddaddy Pa went with us because the cows belonged to Pa and me which meant we took care of them. They were fine in the summer when they had good grass and water. Winters were hard. We had to make sure there was plenty of hay to feed them.

    We played the alphabet sign game when we ran out of sayings, looking for letters for the rest of the trip to Houston. There weren’t many signs on these back roads so we’d go a long way between letters. As we got closer to Houston, the signage increased and Daddy called “Z” when he saw the zoo billboard.

    Daddy, you always win, I said. I was still on “W.” Both of you were ahead of me, Mama said. I can’t keep up with y’all. How do I know y’all don’t cheat?

    Selma, we wouldn’t do that. You just have your mind on other things; that’s all. A little while later he added, We should be at the doctor’s office in a few minutes. I think we take a right at the next light.

    *****************

    Daddy drove up to the office and parked. The three of us got out of the car, went inside and while Mama signed in, Daddy and I sat down in the waiting room. Several other women sat reading the women’s magazines provided on a big coffee table in the middle of the room. Everyone was sitting quietly waiting for their names to be called. No one was talking, so we didn’t either.

    Daddy and I each picked up a different magazine from the coffee table. He started reading The Ladies Home Journal while I selected Reader’s Digest because their stories were shorter. They were both dated a couple of months before but were not too old to be interesting. Mama was filling out paperwork because she was a new patient. When she finished, she took it back to the unsmiling nurse at the front desk. One by one the women were called to go back to see the doctor. As fast as one would go back, another one would sign in. The waiting room was always full, but remained quiet. Finally, they called Mama’s name. Daddy and I were glad because we were running out of magazines.

    Mama had been gone for a few minutes when we heard this loud voice drifting down the hallway into the waiting room. Daddy and I looked at each other as we recognized the voice belonged to Mama. Her regular speaking tone was loud – she didn’t have an inside voice. When she was nervous, the volume was earsplitting. She must have been very nervous today.

    Well doctor, we heard clearly. I’ve been having this problem all summer. It seems like nothing I try helps.There was a lull in the conversation as the doctor murmured some response. The ladies in the waiting room who had looked up and around when they heard Mama speak went back to their magazines.

    Yes, I’ve tried the vinegar douche several times, we heard her say. The ladies around us perked up again. Daddy and I tried to look like we hadn’t heard her this time. Unfazed. Disinterested. That was us. What is a douche, I wondered, as more low undertones came from the exam rooms in the back of the office.

    So you think I have a fungus in my vagina? Mama’s voice rose to the loudest level yet as every woman in the waiting room focused their attention on Daddy and me.

    That’s it, Daddy said and turned to me as he threw his Ladies Home Journal on the coffee table in front of us. Whistle, sing, hum – anything you can do to make a racket in here, he ordered. I had no idea what a vagina was or how sick you had to be to have a fungus in it, but the look of panic on Daddy’s face made me realize this was no time to ask questions. I started whistling as loud as I could. Daddy was humming When the Roll is Called Up Yonder and tapping his feet. He led the music at the Richards Baptist Church, so naturally he would pick a hymn to hum.

    The ladies around us in the room were now staring at us with nothing short of amazement. The unsmiling nurse at the desk was flabbergasted at the commotion in the otherwise sedate atmosphere. All hell had broken loose in the form of nervous laughter at the Houston gynecologist’s usually quiet office when my daddy started humming and I started whistling.

    Well, we need to get a breath of fresh air, Daddy said to me when he finished his song. Let’s go outside to wait for your mother. We both got up and strolled nonchalantly out the door. When we got outside, we could hear the howls of laughter from the women inside in the waiting room.

    Daddy smiled ruefully at me when he heard the merriment we created, told me he wasn’t in much of a mood for the movies after all, but how about we stop at Shipley’s on the way home to get us each a donut? The Bargain Gusher idea was also done for the day, thank goodness.

    ****************

    This story from my first book Deep in the Heart: A Memoir of Love and Longing published in 2007 by Red Letter Press still makes me laugh when I think of that day with my parents who were in their early thirties, the day we made the trip to the gynecologist in the big city of Houston. No one laughed on the ninety-mile trip home that day, but we did each get a donut from Shipley’s.

  • The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 3 The End (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 3 The End (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills – oops, no that wasn’t me; that was Meryl Streep saying the first line from one of my favorite movies Out of Africa.

    I meant to say once upon a time I had a plum tree in the far southwest corner of our back yard on Worsham Street in Montgomery. The first year we were there that plum tree rained plums like pecans off a pecan tree in San Saba, the pecan capital of Texas. For reinforcements to help with the harvest, I first asked my next-door neighbor Jon who brought a ladder to pick the ones higher than I could reach on a tree that was twenty feet tall. He also was the first to suggest we should make plum jelly, an idea I rejected as ludicrous because I didn’t cook anything anymore. Enter my cousin James Paul, my mother’s brother’s son, who lived nearby and volunteered to help make plum jelly because he had my Aunt Mildred’s recipe. Hm. He had a secret family recipe for plum jelly so maybe this was a sign I couldn’t ignore.

    Okay, what’s next, I repeated to James who stood beside me in the kitchen but appeared lost in a trance for what seemed to me to be an inordinate amount of time. His eyes were closed so long I began to wonder if he’d drifted off to sleep. James, what’s next, I said louder with more than a bit of impatience.

    Well Cuz, I think we need to put a bunch of these plums in some water and boil them for a while. That’s what we maybe need to do first, he finally said.

    What? I asked. You think we maybe need to start by boiling some plums in water for a while? What kind of recipe is that?

    Yeah, I seem to be having a little problem remembering the exact order Mother did things in, he replied. It’s been more than fifty years ago since I was a kid watching her, you know. I figured it would all come back to me, and I think it probably will. Besides, I thought you’d be more help. He stared at me – I stared back.

    Then the lunacy of what we were doing hit us both, and we started laughing together. We were having a good time. It was fun to try to re-create a simpler period in our lives when our people made some of the food we ate in our home kitchens, to reconnect to the lost sense of that family we’d had in those earlier days since we basically were apart our entire adult lives except for an occasional Christmas when our paths crossed in random moments under one roof. We shared the same family roots that gave us joy in our early childhood days, the family that gave us our hopes and dreams for the future. For James and me on a Sunday afternoon in my Worsham Street kitchen in the third act of our lives making plum jelly was an act of faith.

    But what we needed at the moment was a recipe.

    James Paul called his older sister Charlotte who matter-of-factly reminded him their mother always used the recipe enclosed in the SureJell box. So much for secret family recipes, I thought. I could feel the wheels coming off my Colonel Sanders vision for a plum jelly empire. We opened one of the dozen SureJell boxes I bought the night before at the Brookshire Brothers grocery store and followed the directions that were indeed included with purchase. Charlotte was always the practical one and had a better memory than her brother and her cousin put together when it came to her mother’s cooking.

    *************

    Four hours later, eleven pints of plum jelly jars formed a line like red soldiers on the white kitchen counter. Each lid popped as it sealed to salute us for a job well done. James held a single jar to the light from the window over the kitchen sink and declared it to have the perfect clear plum color. We were happy cousins that afternoon and talked about how good the jelly would be on toast at breakfast. I wanted to taste the final product as soon as we finished, of course, but James told me it should set for a couple of days first. Naturally, he would remember that. We promised to call each other as soon as we took the first bite.

    The taste of the jelly James and I made from plums on a tree in my own yard in 2010 defied description. I called him two days later after the jelly had time to set and asked him what he thought. Cuz, that jelly is about the best I ever had in my life, he said. I’ve eaten it on two pieces of toast this morning. It’s sweet, but still has a little perfect tart taste to it, too. And what did I tell you about the color? Prettiest reddish pink color I ever saw on jelly. I can’t believe we really did make it, can you? I had the most fun I’ve had in a long time. We’ve got a fig tree over here at our house in Navasota that’ll be producing before long. We ought to try making fig preserves, don’t you think?

    Yes, that sounds good. I’ll have to bring your mother’s pots and pans back to you. Fig preserves should be a cinch for us now that we’re experts in the jelly business. I don’t know about you, but I think it’ll be tough for me to buy Smucker’s or Welch’s jelly again with any enthusiasm. Couldn’t agree more, he said. We just have to make what we have last through the winter. That could be a problem, I told him, and we both laughed. 

    I’m not sure if the taste improved with the intensity of the labor or the love James and I shared that Sunday afternoon in our hot Texas kitchen, but I know I ate peanut butter and plum jelly sandwiches for the rest of the summer. My neighbor Jon and I also had a great time together when we made his version of plum jelly from a cyberspace recipe he Googled which was much quicker to make than the SureJell one, or maybe I was just getting the hang of it… or maybe Jon did all the work.

    The End

  • The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 2 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 2 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    My cousin James Paul texted me the ingredients we needed for our Sunday afternoon plum jelly project, and I was not surprised to discover the only item for the jelly I had in our Worsham Street kitchen was the plums piled high on the counters which meant the Saturday night before we planned to make the plum jelly I made a trip to the regional Brookshire Brothers grocery store that anchored a small shopping center five minutes from our home. I worried I might not be able to find what we needed at the store but was surprised to come upon an entire section of an aisle at Brookshire Brothers that was devoted to canning and preserving. I had forgotten I lived in rural Texas where the homemade goodies sold in downtown Montgomery on the first Saturday of every month regularly included jellies, jams and preserves. Brookshire Brothers knew their market.

    Everything including the two cartons of twelve each one pint sparkling clear new Mason jars (now called Ball jars) was conveniently located in one place. It was as if the grocery store stockers knew my Aunt Mildred’s recipe verbatim, or did everyone make jelly with the same three ingredients…hm…I wondered how I had managed to live sixty-four years without attempting to make any kind of jelly. Just not my jam, I smiled to myself.

    The one exception the Brookshire Brothers aisle lacked was cheese cloth. Apparently no one knew cheese cloth was a necessity except my Aunt Mildred. After searching the entire store twice I resorted to asking the Customer Service woman behind the lottery tickets who not only recognized what cheese cloth was but also left her booth to show me where it was, and I was done. Since time was money and money was money, I made a mental note at checkout to keep a tally of the cost for our homemade plum jelly in case I decided to sell a homemade goody at the July first Saturday event. I had leapfrogged in my mind from making twenty-four jars of jelly to becoming a jelly entrepreneur. Keep cranking out the fruit, O Ye Plum Tree of Plenty.

    True to his word James brought several of his mother’s ancient gigantic aluminum pots and pans to my house the next day. A large wooden mortar and pestle paired with a tall cylindrical-shaped strainer added a dose of authenticity to our cooking implements the following Sunday afternoon. We laid everything out on my kitchen counter next to the mounds of plums in the baskets. James and I stared at the counters and then looked at each other.

    James Paul, as I knew him when we were children, was a handsome man in his mid-fifties. He wasn’t tall—less than six feet—and weighed maybe 135 pounds if he weighed after breakfast. He was a GQ male model size and an equally GQ sexy looking man. His salt-and-pepper short hair was more salt than pepper those days and matched the color of his thick mustache and small goatee. He cut the signature hair he wore during fifteen years of playing bass guitar and singing professionally with bands in honky-tonks, bars, juke joints and community halls around central Texas, he said, because the longer length got to be too much trouble. According to him the only time long hair was worth the effort was when he walked into a bar to make a statement, when he needed the “look.” Now he needed to make a different statement.

    Okay, I said. What’s next? He smiled that slow smile of his and struck a thoughtful pose. He stood quietly, looked around the kitchen, folded his arms, shifted his weight, and finally closed his eyes while I waited and wondered what in the world was going on with him. I assumed he needed a moment to collect his thoughts, but this was getting to be ridiculous. He slowly shook his head. I had a nagging suspicion my plum jelly enterprise was collapsing before it got off the kitchen floor.

    ***********************

    Please stay tuned for Part 3, the final episode of The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree.

  • The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 1 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 1 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    Once upon a time there was a plum tree in the far southwest corner of our backyard in Texas that produced as many plums as a small orchard. When I left our newly acquired house on Worsham Street the first week in May, 2010 to return to South Carolina, the light green plums on the tree were the size of large olives. I picked one and tasted it because I believed they might be gone before I returned for my next visit. It was bitter as gall, hard as the pit of one of those large olives it resembled. I quickly spit it out and sighed. I longed for the sweet, soft, purple plums of my childhood from our tree in Richards. How could the eighteen miles from Richards where I grew up to our home in Montgomery sixty-four years later make such a difference in plums from a random plum tree in the yard? Maybe it was more than time or distance.

    When I returned to our Worsham Street house in Texas from South Carolina a month later, I couldn’t wait to check on my plum tree. To my astonishment, the plums had matured and changed. The first thing I noticed was the fallen ones collected in a heap around the trunk of the tree. I peered closer to see they were a deep red color the way I remembered they should be, but they were the size of golf balls which wasn’t exactly what I recalled. They were in varying stages of decomposition, obviously food for worms and birds that shared our back yard. Then I looked up.

    The tree appeared to be at least twenty feet tall with limbs growing awkwardly in all directions. Several branches were entwined in a wire dangling from a utility pole across the fence in a neighbor’s yard. The tree occupied a corner where four yards in our neighborhood met, and its branches hung down with reckless abandon, no regard for boundaries. The branches were thick with kelly green leaves that tried to hide the fruit, but that was a lost cause. Hundreds of plums filled the tree. Seeing those plums in changing stages of ripeness froze me in my tracks. I stared at my “crop” and stepped back into a time, to a place where a little girl ran through her yard and tasted plums from a tree for the first time. Her delight was the same as mine was today. I pulled a limb closer and smelled a scent more powerful than candles of the same name. I picked one of the larger red ones, took a bite that was as sweet as its aroma. The skin broke easily to release a gush of juice that was decidedly the nectar of the gods; it must’ve been, since I was in plum paradise.

    Every day the plums multiplied. I picked them in the morning before the hot summer Texas heat made the outdoors unbearable. I picked the ones from the lower branches that I could reach without a ladder. One morning Jon, my next-door neighbor, came over and climbed a ladder to drop the ones from the upper limbs to me while I stayed safely on the ground. I gave him some as a thank you gesture. I filled a plastic grocery bag to give it to the neighbors living on the other side of us. I took plums to the women who lived in two houses across the street. I took plums to my mother’s caregivers in Houston. I gave plums to the men who came to work on our air conditioner. I gave plums to the cable guy who adjusted kinks in our cable connections. When my cousin Frances and her husband Lee came for a visit, I sent plums home with them. I considered giving them to strangers walking their dogs past my house. I had to get larger baskets to hold the plums I picked because I couldn’t give them away fast enough. That plum tree was a fruit-producing fool.

    Jon and I discussed the need for a new plan for the prolific plums. With the help of his computer, he researched the possibilities in cyberspace and determined we should make plum jelly. I scoffed at the idea, reminding him I hate to cook. That was the first problem. Secondly, I had visions of my grandmother in her kitchen making plum jelly fifty years ago. The images were fuzzy, but I remembered her sweating over a hot stove in a steaming kitchen for a long time. I didn’t like that picture, and I tried to discourage Jon from the project. He was convinced we should give it a try. I was wavering when I made the mistake of telling my first cousin James Paul who lived less than an hour from me in Navasota about the idea. He immediately jumped on the jelly bandwagon and told me he remembered my Aunt Mildred’s recipe. Not only remembered it, but he had the very pots and pans his mother used when she made her jelly. It couldn’t be that hard, he went on to say. I was outnumbered, and the plums kept piling higher on my kitchen counter.

    ********************

    Please stay tuned for Part 2 of the Plum Adventures.

               

  • Texas Highway 105 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    Texas Highway 105 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    Texas State Highway 105 starts five miles inside the Louisiana border between Orange and Vidor. It’s one of the countless farm and state roads that make up the highway system of a state that stretches almost a thousand miles from east to west. If you’re headed to El Paso from Beaumont, pack a lunch or better yet a couple of lunches; but whatever you do, don’t miss SH 105.

                This well-traveled road claims fewer than two hundred miles but passes through seven counties: Orange, Jefferson, Hardin, Liberty, Montgomery, Grimes, and Washington. Many of the miles consist of winding four lanes, and the rest are very good, crooked two-lane routes. I lived 18 miles north of Highway 105 in rural Richards when I was growing up in the loblolly piney woods of Grimes County. Now on a good day I could walk to that road from my home in the little town of Montgomery. SH 105 ran through the middle of town and was a favorite commuter connection from Houston to wherever people drove to escape the interstates that were frequently at a standstill. Long lines of school buses and parents picking up children from the nearby elementary and middle schools created Montgomery’s version of traffic jams in the middle of the afternoons during the week. Two stoplights moved everybody along in an orderly manner, but I avoided that stress whenever possible. On Friday afternoons the traffic got heavy earlier because the weekend wannabe Hell’s Angels bikers left their day jobs and immediately headed west on SH 105 from the cities and suburbs. I thought they must carry their bandanas and jeans with them to work so they wouldn’t have to go home to change clothes before they hit the road. My parents and grandparents made many trips on SH 105. My grandfather referred to it as “one hundred five” when he talked about how to get from his home in Richards to Beaumont to visit his daughter Lucille and her family. “Just take one hundred five all the way,” he’d say whenever anyone asked him how he drove the distance. My dad motored the twenty-five miles from Navasota to Brenham on 105 where the road ended on his visits to Austin every summer. He took me with him whenever he could. At Brenham we picked up the major highway SH 290 from Houston to Austin.

    I didn’t process the names of the roads we drove in my elementary school days from Richards – my perception of distances beyond Navasota to the west, Crabbs Prairie to the north, and Conroe to the east was that other lands were far, far away. I was certain Brenham must’ve been a magical kingdom because it was home to the Blue Bell Creameries, and everyone knew they made the best ice cream in the state. Founded in 1907, the company was named for the native wildflowers that grew with heedless abandon in the surrounding countryside, although I learned that bit of history much later in life.

    ************

    The day before my sixty-fourth birthday on April 21, 2010 was a magnificent Texas day. The temperature was perfect, the blue skies were clear, my dogs Red and Annie were in high spirits. I decided to drive west from Montgomery on Highway 105 to Navasota, the place where I was born. I loaded the dogs in the back seat of my 2004 Dodge Dakota pickup, backed out of our driveway onto Worsham Street, and turned left at one of the two stoplights in town as we left the neighborhood.

    I didn’t have to drive more than a mile to find the scenery I loved. As soon as I passed Old Plantersville Road, I began to see the patches of bluebonnets that made Hwy 105 spectacular in April. At first they were scattered in with the reddish-orange blanket flowers and the pale pink buttercups; they only appeared on the sides of the road. Then the patches grew thick with the deep blue that was the mature color of the Texas state flower. A few minutes more, and I saw a ranch with a sea of bluebonnets in its pastures that reminded me of the dazzling Caribbean ocean without waves. I knew it was a good day to be on the road.

    Five miles to the west of Montgomery, I made my first stop in Dobbin, which had no traffic lights but did have a cowboy roadhouse called Holder’s which was owned by a proprietor of the same name. Bobby Holder didn’t look like a cowboy, though. He wore faded blue overalls and a dark T-shirt inside the overalls. He resembled an Appalachian mountain man with hair the color of charcoal mixed with some white ash tightly pulled down his back in a long ponytail. His thick mustache was the same shade of black and white. A plain, unfashionable baseball cap completed his look. The first time I saw him, I labeled him in my mind as a hillbilly hippie, right-wing extremist, and all round Bad Guy. That was a few visits ago.

    The restaurant was as interesting as its owner. The building was ancient and consisted of three distinct areas visible from the small, gravel parking lot. The weathered wood building had a steep rusted tin roof that promised a larger space than was visible from the parking area. A little log section to the right was clearly the barbecue pit. Smoke rose from the flue and drifted occasionally into the middle porch space which was open-air and the place where four stained wooden tables with benches accommodated the “eat-in” customers. (Feel free to carve your initials on a table. Everyone else did.) To the left, a window for ordering was highlighted by the handwritten menu on a chalkboard tacked to the wall. The tiny kitchen was behind the ordering window, and the smells of cooking barbecue mixed deliciously with the aroma of burgers frying on the grill while you waited patiently for service. A sign under the window warned: If you’re in a hurry, go to Houston. Imagine every Texas roadhouse you ever saw in western movies, put that in high-definition, surround-sound, Blue Ray, 3-D with the appropriate eyewear or whatever, and you could begin to picture Holder’s.

    Bobby was quick to mention to anyone who was a newcomer that Hollywood discovered his place last year, and he had a framed newspaper article to prove it. When a film was shot on location in the Houston area, the crew made a stop at Holder’s and a local reporter penned the story that immortalized the restaurant. The picture hung on a wall left of the ordering window and occupied a place of prominence among the vast array of wall art that vied for attention. I could have easily missed it in the midst of an extensive collection of frightening heads of longhorn cattle with varying horn sizes from small to huge, an “audition” sign for waitresses for Hooter’s that consisted of two very large holes for women’s breasts, all the brightly colored Texas license plates ever hammered by inmates of its legendary correctional institutions plus other states’ license plates, high school football schedules for the Montgomery Bears for the past few years and assorted photos of satisfied customers. The sound of country music legends blared from speakers in a large, mostly vacant room behind the front porch eating section.

    My first trip to Holder’s was with my wife Teresa last month during the week we moved to Montgomery. We were driving home from Navasota on SH 105, noticed the place from the road, thought it looked intriguing; so we stopped. After we ordered our cheeseburger baskets from a friendly woman who was also the cook, we asked her if we could sit inside the huge room at a small wooden table instead of the benches on the porch. We were late afternoon customers and had the entire place to ourselves, so that wasn’t a problem. The interior room looked like a large barn with a loft full of tools and materials that indicated the room was a work in progress. The back end of an old, but newly painted, black Thunderbird Convertible was mounted on a wall near our table. Teresa and I were startled and amused to see this was the focal point of décor in the barn-like setting. The space was large enough for a dance floor, and with the country music blaring, I imagined it was the perfect spot for weekend Texas two-stepping until I saw the hours of operation posted: M – TH 10:00 – 5:00. FR – SAT 10:00 – 7:00. SUN CLOSED. Unless you danced early, you weren’t dancing at Holder’s.

    When the cook brought us our cheeseburger baskets, I asked her about the restaurant.

    Bobby owns it—he’s the guy in the ponytail. He does the barbecuing himself, and sometimes he handles the grill, too. He takes a lot of pride in his place here.

    It looks like he’s trying to expand and add entertainment in this space, I said.

    Yes, he does all the work himself, so it takes a little while.

    How long has he been working on it? Teresa asked.

    About five years, she replied. Can I get you gals anything else?

    We shook our heads, and she left us to our meal. I suppose it was possible to get a bad cheeseburger in Texas if you went to one of the chain places that were the same in every state. But if you got a burger at Holder’s, you would never think of cheeseburgers in the same way again. The ground lean beef was cooked perfectly with the right amount of seasonings. The lettuce and tomatoes were fresh, and the onions mixed with mustard added a flavorful kick. The melted American cheese oozed to the corners of the toasted old-fashioned buns that were just the right size. The French fries were homemade and piled high. You would go away, but you wouldn’t go away hungry.

    ************

    That first visit was memorable for more than the food, however. The morning after we ate that first time at Holder’s, Teresa and I talked about our projects for the Texas house. We had decided to paint several of the rooms a different color and needed to buy the paint from the local hardware store. Have you seen my billfold? I asked her when it wasn’t in its place next to the kitchen stove.

    No, she said. Did you look in the bedroom? With that, we began an exhaustive search through the house and outside. We looked in the truck. No wallet. I tried not to panic, but I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as I thought of all that was lost. Since we were traveling from South Carolina to Texas and cash was a concern, I had over six hundred dollars in my wallet; that was a whopping amount of money for our budget. All my credit cards, driver’s license, everything that held the clue to my financial identity were in that billfold, and I didn’t have it. What in the world had I done?

    When was the last time you paid for something? Teresa asked. I tried to think. The last time I could remember paying for anything was the food at Holder’s the afternoon before. I told Teresa we needed to drive back to Dobbin to retrace our steps, but neither of us expected to see the money again. I felt physically sick.

    We had barely backed out of our driveway when my cell phone rang. It was Claudia, the realtor who handled the purchase of our home in Montgomery. She told me Bobby Holder had called her that morning to say he found her card in a wallet someone left in his restaurant the previous day. It was the only phone number he could find to try to contact the owner to let her know it was safe. An overpowering feeling of relief poured through me, and I felt like I could breathe again. Teresa and I were ecstatic, giddy at the bullet we’d dodged. We drove the short distance from Montgomery west on 105 to Holder’s.

     When Bobby handed me my wallet, he was almost apologetic for having to go through it to look for a number. I saw that cash, and I saw the South Carolina driver’s license. I knew how I would feel if I was this far from home with no money, cards, or anything else. I worried about it all night.

    I offered him a reward, but he refused with a wave of his hand, and I took a second look at this man whose character I so quickly judged by his appearance less than twenty-four hours ago. I had always been proud of my liberal leanings which ostensibly avoided labels for people, but I realized with shame I had been guilty of prejudice toward this man on superficial characteristics. Bobby and I were different for sure, but I was wrong to assume that made him incapable of good.

    You have a customer for life, I said. Even if you didn’t have fabulous food, I’d be back. I owe you for more than you know.

    I’m glad I stopped at Holder’s today on my birthday eve. The cheeseburger basket was as fabulous as the first one I had a month ago. Bobby wasn’t in the café, but the country legends blared from the speakers in the back room; and somehow the Thunderbird Convertible seemed the perfect décor. I was right. It was a great day to be on the road…Red and Annie were ready to ride after polishing off the last of my fries.

    *****************

    I still see the bluebonnets around Brenham every April – even if in my mind and thankfully in the images I captured the four years we were in Montgomery from 2010 – 2014. As I revisited this piece from my book I’ll Call It Like I See It published in 2012 my mouth watered while I thought of the cheeseburgers at Holder’s once again, could almost smell the aroma of the smoke from his barbecue pit, the lessons about judging people I learned from the owner thirteen years ago. I do feel the political landscape has had a seismic shift since the incident at Holder’s and wonder whether he and I would have the same goodwill toward each other if we met in a similar situation in Dobbin, Texas this afternoon in 2023. I hope so. I know I miss Red and Annie.