The Man I Only Thought I Knew

1 Samuel 2:7 (New International Version)
7 The LORD sends poverty and wealth; he humbles and he exalts.
This is a concept I did NOT understand as a Youth. At All.

When I was young, my father was a high school history teacher in our small town of Bridge City, Texas. But he wasn’t just an educator. He was also a mentor to many of the troubled teens who were shipped over from Port Arthur. When expulsion from Port Arthur ISD was their only prospect, they were packed off to Bridge City for men like my father to mold into human beings. He enjoyed teaching. He enjoyed young people. He even enjoyed driving the noisy school bus.

However, in 1966 he decided to leave his position as teacher and went to work for Firestone, which would give him the money to invest in his education for his Master’s degree in Elementary Education. He paid for most of his educational expenses up front so he wouldn’t have to worry about it through the ensuing year or the next. For all his intelligence, my dad was not a smart guy about some things. He also decided this would be a good year to tear off one end of the house to do an addition to ease our squalid little hovel-like living conditions….those were my only words to describe how we lived.

Within less than a year, I heard the word “strike” being discussed at the dinner table. Clueless as to what it meant, I was baffled by the conflict it seemed to present. Then it happened. There was no money. As months of this strike dragged on and dad continued to drive to Lake Charles to McNeese College, I noticed dad didn’t come home until late into the night. I was unaware that he was selling Lustre Craft pots door to door after college each night for us to survive.

Suddenly, the next disaster hit.

In the Fall of 1967, my mother fell ill and her local doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong. A few months later, she collapsed and nearly died. It was discovered that she was a severe diabetic and it had gone undetected and untreated for far too long. After her collapse and near death, mom’s return home left her with the inability to lift anything heavier than the clothes she put on. This put me, the oldest, in the position to oversee a brother two years younger and a sister seven years younger. Mother could no longer drive to pick me up from school after junior high marching band practice. While my friends rode in air conditioned cars, I was forced to walk home. I carried a French horn that, with the ancient wooden case, weighed more than my 67 whopping pounds. Once home, I did whatever chores needed to be done in a blazing hot, miserable, un-air conditioned house. There was no time to watch television - no problem there because WE DIDN’T HAVE ONE.

I was totally conscious of the fact that we were virtually poverty stricken. We weren’t just low income, we were flat broke due to the comedy of errors…my words again….that transpired before mother got sick. And all this was my FATHER’S FAULT.

We virtually did without Christmas that year. I wanted to ask out loud, “Why couldn’t dad go back to work anywhere else?” The strike lasted for 19 months. It was freezing cold that winter, and all we had was a wall of plastic on the north end of the house flapping in the wind from dad’s inept attempt at home remodeling. Why couldn’t he have nailed up some sort of wood? Oh, yeah, wood cost money and dad had already spent it on his education.

Easter 1969 rolled around. I eyed a cute pair of white pumps at the local dry goods store. (Sigh, I have shown my age. Note to self to put a footnote to explain what a dry goods store is to this generation.) All the girls bought their shoes at Nobles, and I yearned to be just like all the rest. The price tag of $16.00 was beyond our income. My mother tried to explain this to me. I didn’t like the answer I got, but took it as I heard mother silently weeping at the kitchen sink when I walked away. My resentment of my dad deepened. My mother should have never needed to cry over my desire to own a pair of $16 shoes.

Not long after Easter, my father brought home the children of a former student. The young mother could not cope with them, one of whom was still in diapers. She asked dad to take them in until she got a job in another town and got on her feet. He did. Add two more bodies to our tiny house and more work for my mother to do. My mother earned her wings and stars in those years. I don’t know how we survived. Mother had to be much stronger than her illness would allow her to be. The mound of diapers to be washed morphed into baskets of training pants to be dealt with. Two years passed and I was older, but no wiser.

To escape, I lived in the band hall. I stayed in my bedroom pounding on an old upright piano. I rode my bicycle all over town to clean houses and do ironing for my aunt and her ‘wealthier than we were’ neighbors. Anger and resentment seethed in my young, ignorant body. I wedged a space between my mother and myself. I was closer to my friends than I was to my family. I hated what my home life was like and vowed I would make my own way in life and everything would be different. Instead of clothes from the local retailer I was the girl wearing home-made outfits. Sewing was another talent I received from my mother, but failed to realize its wealth at the time. By 8th grade I was making most of my own wardrobe.. and I was the brunt of many jokes in the looks-popularity-fashion world of cruel school-age kids. I was the outsider and that ‘person known as Cheryl Earles’ needed die an unacknowledged death in my own heart. I even erased my image in my school yearbooks. I buried myself in novels with perfect Victorian settings, full of elegance and beauty. (I failed to see that air conditioning was not in that lifestyle, either.) I created a sense of independence and self-reliance that would take me through my adult years. I honed my musical talents and discovered that I could write music and poetry. I perfected a life of order and precision in my mind that would make me the business woman I would come to be in the future. Most of all, I created a hardness in my young, stupid heart and, lastly, my parents seemed oblivious to my miserable plight.

Time rolled on. I became an adult and a mother myself. They say time heals all wounds, but they don’t mention the scars. What happens to them? I now know. They remain pinned to you as badges of courage or cowardice, honor or shame - but they remain part of you nonetheless. The years of anger and resentment faded and I came to know my parents as my friends. I blinded myself to the years of junior high and high school. They were dreadful memories of a homely girl with freckles.

Through these years, dad had long since received his Masters and had returned to teaching on the elementary school level at E.E. Sims Elementary. Around 1982 my father and I opened a weekend antique shop on the side. We came to be shopping buddies and good friends over the next four years. On Saturday, April 12, 1986 I was working the booth with dad at the flea market. When it was time to close up shop, he was arranging furniture with his back turned to me. I had this impulsive urge to hug him. This took me totally aback because I have never been the huggy-kissy-feely person in the family. As was typical for me, I resisted. But that moment of hesitation I have come to bitterly regret.

Two days later, on the night of April 14, 1986, I received the call that dad had a heart attack and they were taking him to Orange Memorial Hospital. I looked at my husband, and with a calmness I cannot believe I had, I told him not to speed. I knew my dad was gone. My world changed in an instant. Once again, I closed off my heart. I was the strong one who helped mother make funeral arrangements. I even played the piano at the funeral service without shedding a tear, and, from the piano bench, I took a moment to glance at the church. The church could seat over 600 and it was packed. The isles were full. People were gathered outside the doors - all for a man I only thought I knew. The church was full of people who knew him wearing other labels: teacher, mentor, counselor, deacon of the church, bus driver who listened to their stories, the bus driver who could shift a bus so smoothly the cheerleaders could put their make-up on in the bus, and the man on the playground the children with no love at home gravitated to and clung to for affection. My own memories washed over me. They mixed good and bad and clouded over the hazy years of my painful youth. Dad was many things, but one silent group of mourners caught my attention. There was a solemn row of police officers in full dress uniform standing shoulder to shoulder at the very back of the sanctuary. The mystery would not be revealed to me until my class reunion many years later.

We buried my father in Oklahoma. In the twenty-plus years that followed, I didn’t even go back to see the headstone. I closed one of the doors of my life. I shed tears only once when he died. My next set of tears were of remorse and sorrow at the realization that I did not know enough about him to know what a fine man he was.

Years passed. As I was attending my 30-year class reunion, in the midst of all the laughter, the noise and my sheer delight to discover that Cheerleader Bottled Blond Barbie was hit by the Gravity and Twinkie Time Machine, I learned one of my life’s most valuable lessons.

The older brother of a classmate was on duty as security for the evening of that reunion. He recognized me and introduced himself as Officer R.M. [initialed because I have not secured permission to use his name] In our conversation, R.M. was quick to tell me he knew my father and was proud to have been in possession of our city’s best-kept secret. I voiced my curiosity and he went on to unfold a tale that astonished me.

Officer R.M. was one of those kids from Port Arthur everyone wrote off. He met my dad on the wrong end of a paddle one day in high school. After that ‘discussion’ was over, my father offered him the chance to be on a committee for the senior trip to Carlsbad Caverns. R.M. was astounded. He said his life did an about-face that day. R.M. graduated from Bridge City High School in 1963. After college, he went to the police academy and returned to our home town and settled down. On Christmas Eve in 1967, the police received a call that there was a man in the poorest [and I mean the poorest] neighborhood in town who appeared to be sneaking from house to house. This was the type of neighborhood that was no stranger to gunfire. They went on the call, and, sure enough, they saw a figure lurking in the shadows. They hit the lights. The culprit froze in the high beams of the law. R.M. and his partner were stunned at whom they had cornered - their former high school history teacher - my father. Upon questioning him, the officers learned that this man was not going door to door stealing from the poor at Christmas time. He was leaving packages and food at the houses of children he knew had nothing for Christmas. He had been doing this for years prior to being caught that night. When his own children would be getting very little for Christmas, my father spent the rest of his money to ensure that these children would have at least a small token of something as a gift to put under their tree and food for their table. Dad swore the officers to secrecy and, from that year on, these two police officers guarded my father on his mission. R.M. also informed me that this wasn’t a Christmas-only event. My father secretly supplied shoes at the beginning of school when children wouldn’t play on the playground because their big brother’s shoes had blistered their feet raw, school supplies throughout the year, household supplies and toiletries and, most of all, clothing when children showed up at school wearing dirty, ragged clothes too small or too large for them. As duty partners changed, other officers joined in the ranks of the guardians of Mr. Earles’ missions.

At that class reunion in 2008, time rolled back to the memory of a row of polished officers who stood at the back of the church in April of 1986 quietly expressing their grief at the passing of a man they admired and served with pride. Years washed away and my memory of a pair of $16 shoes came rushing back. Even my own mother did not know why we didn’t have the money to buy them. Yet, there were children in our little town who received a pair of socks for the first time or shoes that wouldn’t hurt their feet were found on their doorstep. After a sense of total shame bathed me, I lifted my head with the second flow of tears to fill my eyes since dad’s loss. They were cleansing tears. They were tears of forgiveness for both my father and myself.

I learned a tremendous lesson that day. God truly sends poverty and wealth; and, indeed, he humbles and he exalts. I was humbled. My father was exalted and remains so today at the Maker’s side. He might be singing bass in the choir, or playing the piano somewhere, but rest assured, the children of heaven will be gathered around his gentle soul, just as the children of E.E. Sims Elementary did.

In memory of my father, W. D. Earles