morethanenoughtruth

Born 1910 – Died 1998

 

It’s a fashionable thing nowadays to have a crazy uncle.  I can claim only a crazy aunt, but the uniqueness of her radiant life is more than enough to claim her place in my heart.  She, as I, was required to live in the shadow of Kelsey Martin.  She had four years, from 1910 to 1914, to be the star.  Then her brother took center stage.  Of course, he was the boy, the son, the apple of his father’s eye.

 

She was a cutie, but was only a girl.  She made good grades but not the straight A’s to match her storied brother’s.  They lived two miles, as the crow flies, from the town of Azle, where they attended public school.  The established roadway measured nearer to three, and convenience dictated a creative solution.  When Kelsey lost his two front teeth at six and started to school, they began cutting through trees, bushes, brambles and prickly pears to the Jacksboro highway and a straight shot to the schoolhouse.  They carried knives and a machete for opening the path that years later became, and still is, a dedicated county road.

 

Margaret was odd.  There’s no denying that.  Her unique physiognomy was a one-off.  She looked for-all-the-world like an upside-down pear.  Like all the Martin clan she had no butt, the result of sitting and reading rather than running, climbing, fighting, and jumping the schoolyard rope.  She did have a sumptuous bosom which completed the visual of a top with no bottom.  Did her behavior echo the imbalance of her physique?  Pretty likely.

 

Grandpa tells of times when, in a fit of pique at schoolmates, Margaret threw herself on the ground and beat the sod with her rage.  She needed to express her considerable feelings and did it with a flourish.  She had never learned how to verbally declare emotion, so she proceeded to act it out to dramatic effect.  I personally saw her chase a carpenter off her land with a hatchet because he installed a roof over the back door to her house that she did not request.

 

Once when a business partner of my Dad was up to creative skulduggery, Margaret splashed white shoe polish all over his car.  She, with her considerable intuition, sensed his evil intent and set about encouraging him to leave.  It turns out, she was right.  Later the scumbag took out a contract on my father’s life and absconded with the entire company cash account.

 

Later, when a live-in sweetie was rolling in my Dad’s deep credit accounts while sneaking off to trysts with a waiter from the Green Oaks Inn, Margaret knew what was what.  Just knew.  She tapped the white shoe polish yet again, this time up and down the hallways of my Dad’s house.  When sweetie-pie took off with the waiter to South Carolina, stopping along the way to max out credit cards, my Dad’s history with the Parker County Sheriff came through.  She was nabbed in the act of unauthorized purchase.  The card was cut in half before her eyes and all accounts were frozen.  “All’s well that ends well” sounds good, but don’t believe it.  Loss of pride and self-confidence ensued from this fiasco.  It was Margaret, not my dad, who had understood and dared to act.

 

In her defense, she was always careful to choose safe props for her playacting.  The shoe polish was the washable variety used for summer whites.  Nail polish could have done terrible things to an auto’s finish or interior woodwork.  Hers was always the kinder choice.  She waved the hatchet but was careful not to strike.  In all my life I never knew her to actually hurt anyone or anything.  When she beat the ground with her rage, did she get any points for not beating her brother?

 

Margaret did have a big heart.  She loved me with a fierceness that was part of the undercarriage of my little life.  Unlike most grownups, she played with me.  We competed at cards, read books, and went for long walks, until I tired and begged for rest.  She told me stories of the pioneers who settled the land and held it to honor that sacred homestead contract, protecting their children’s lives and my future against the “trepidations of the savages.”  She showed me the sandstone steps cut from the banks of the spring that was rumored never to go dry.  The steps were still there, hidden under moss and cat-tail stalks, waiting to share their story.  We sat under the old bridge that crossed the creek in front of the house, listening to the frogs while she regaled me with tales of courage and derring-do.  Thanks to Margaret, I knew we were special, a delight I was to learn that I shared with every person I would ever encounter on God’s earth.  Margaret breathed that world and its people into scintillating life.

 

Thanks to Margaret, I learned to crochet.  It was her quiet patience that guided me through the intricacies of single crochet, double crochet, and shell.  We made lace doilies, a lovely decoration to what was a spare existence on the farm just west of Azle, the town that held for her so many remembered frustrations.

 

She had worked as a book-keeper for the REA (Rural Electrification Association), but left to fill a job as chocolate dipper at a Ft. Worth candy factory.  For a while her employee discount made fine chocolate affordable.  Then nothing.  No explanation.  One day an itinerant window-washer blew into town.  Margaret traded her “Martin” for his “Anderson.”  He stayed awhile and then was gone.  One day Margaret got a call that Jim had fallen off a skyscraper.  Suddenly a widow, Margaret began collecting Social Security based on his account.  In the benevolent order of things, life improved.

 

Margaret began attending a local fire and brimstone church.  When registering her irritation with all and sundry relations, Margaret began threatening to leave her considerable landed estate to the church.  She never did, but the threat served her well.

 

My dad, having learned that he could not be trusted with assets, willed his entire estate to Margaret, to safeguard it from “women.”  Grandma willed her own estate to Margaret for the same reason, given her son’s checkered history with the ladies.  Margaret in her turn left everything to me.  I spent the residual after her death on establishing an architectural design business.  In my own turn, I enjoyed the creative commerce until it fell to the cheating lies of a “friend.”  What is it about the acorn and the tree?

 

As Margaret aged, she became even more interesting.  She inherited Grandma’s inner ear problems. Soon, deaf as a stone, she worked at becoming blind as a bat.  Daddy built her a little house on her property.  She wanted only the basics and defended that concept with considerable insistence.  Having sent the carpenter packing when he dared to add the frippery of overhang to her back entrance, she defended any intrusion of “other.”

 

Years passed.  Blind and deaf, she attracted many well-meaning helpers to her door.  Local dignitaries concerned, my dad and I answered their call to assist and flew from our remove in California to her aid.  She wasn’t having any.

 

We couldn’t just leave.  She was wrapped in a dangerous isolation, no way to get food unless somebody thought to bring her some, and morsels dropped on the floor stayed there forever since she couldn’t see to pick them up.  We couldn’t just leave her there.  We loaded her into the car, flailing, kicking, and inveighing against our intervention.  I had no idea Margaret was so strong.  With the child-safe door lock mechanism engaged, we drove to the airport and sat her in a wheelchair.  I had forgotten about her strange vocal signature until we began to push her through DFW to our departure concourse.  Margaret was born with an unusual pneumo-pharyngeal arrangement that resulted in augmented vocalization.  From out of her RBG physiognomy issued a Wagnerian projection.  I inherited only a touch of this which I occasionally experience when I work up a super high resonance cough response to whatever irritant is my current problem.  It turns heads and raises eyebrows.  At DFW it turned heads, raised eyebrows, cranked open eyes, and stilled the room to silence.  As we moved through the giant space, Margaret’s voice filled it.

 

“Help!” she boomed.  “I’m being kidnapped!”

 

There was no recourse.  She couldn’t hear our entreaties to silence.

 

“Help!  These people are taking me from my home and are going to sell it!”

 

It would have been no big deal given garden variety ululation, but the booming diatribe rattled the terminal.  My dad and I cringed, worried that we might at any moment be accosted by airport security.  But nothing happened.  It must have been obvious that this was a well-meaning intervention.  We made it into the plane where Margaret spat on the attendant when assisted with her seat-belt while I pretended to not know her.

 

She settled in, working up a litany of “Help! Help! Help!” until my Dad lost his famous cool and got in her face with a “SIT THERE AND SHUT UP.”  She heard him, not with her ears, but with whatever always came through to her understanding of what’s what.  The remainder of Margaret’s very first flight in an airplane was uneventful.  She was docile until, when arriving at the assisted living facility in Los Angeles, she bit the nurse.

 

Our long friendship came through a rough time, and though I never was able to acquiesce to her demand that I return her to her Texas home, we were friends until many years later she decided to stop eating.  Soon it was all over.  Teaching always by example, she showed me how to stop the world and get off while the gettings good.  Next time around, she may have an easier ride, but she’ll never have a more interesting one.