My wise and wonderful husband accompanied me to see this excellent movie this evening. I was very impressed with the story and the emotions this movie evoked in me. I cried, laughed, cheered, clapped, and left with a new appreciation for my parents and a realization that they had raised and taught me right.
President JFK was tragically assassinated on November 22nd, 1963 so I was 3 when this novel was to have taken place. We lived in San Angelo, Texas where my father chose to start his practice as a young budding orthopedic surgeon. My mother also had a degree and was a licensed dietitian. She then had 3 children so she chose to stay home and be a domestic engineer. She was truly the perfect mom, wife, and homemaker. She had a bachelor's degree from TWU in Home Economics and then her Masters in Dietetics. She made such wonderful happy memories for us as she kept a spotless house, made a cake from scratch every week, varying between Devil's Food Cake, German Chocolate, and a mouth watering white cake with amazing white icing, all from scratch! She cooked fabulous meals every night and served them always on a lovely table setting and presentation! She polished silver, ironed and starched just about everything, made bread and biscuits from scratch, served in the Junior League and the Doctors Wives Association and taught Sunday School at First Baptist Church! She was truly outstanding and made each of us kids feel loved, nurtured, and that she was proud of us. She was the absolute BEST nurse if you were sick! She'd make you literally go to bed and she'd set up a little bell by your bed to ring if you needed her! She even sanctified a special pan in our house as "the vomit pan" so if you had a stomach bug it went right by your bed so you didn't even have to run to the bathroom to throw up. She was amazing. I was so blessed.
My point in elaborating above is that once Daddy set up his practice he agreed to let Mom hire a lady to help her with her household management duties. Mom was thrilled. She found a wonderful young lady, Hispanic, named Mary who wanted the job. Mom worked right alongside Mary on the days she would come and Mary was a great help to Mom. We all considered her like family. My parents referred to her as someone like their daughter and they saw in her great talent and potential. She was smart and they saw this. They challenged her to go on and get her college degree at ASU and they would help her. She did! She went on to become a teacher and remained a close friend of our family thereafter. I always thought of her as a friend of the family and never, ever as "the help". My parents would not have ever tolerated a label like that or an utterance or thought resembling anything of the sort. I was never taught any ideas or stereotypes of this sort and was quickly corrected or informed by my parents if any idea or suggestion of racism or bigotry was ever presented to me as a child and later a teen. I am SO thankful I grew up in a home with parents who's background reinforced right over wrong and the fact that all people are equal.
My mother grew up with her mom being a Christian single mother, a nurse, who had to work hard to support the two of them. My mother was sent to live with an older Aunt and sometimes her grandmother so my mother's mother could stay as a live in nurse for several elderly people. My mother grew up with humble circumstances and it helped, I'm sure, to mold her into the amazing mother she was to me and my brothers. My mother dropped out of the Junior League when she realized how much time it was taking her away from her family. I always admired her for that.
My dad also grew up in a Christian home and with a hard working father who did civil engineering. He was the 2nd of his siblings to attend college (Baylor) and he went on to Medical School and earned everything he had. He was a very loving, kind, gentle, father who taught me how to swim and loved to play his guitar and sing in the evenings at home. He also bought pretty Living Bibles for our whole family one year and had us sit down once a week and do a family Bible study! I just loved that. I still have that specific Bible he bought for our family times of study. He worked hard and was a deacon at First Baptist Church. He loved to make model airplanes and rockets. He wore a Mickey Mouse Timex watch, even though he later could afford any designer watch he desired. He drove his car until it was SO old it was embarrassing to us! He just loved driving his old Oldsmobile into the doctor's parking lot and parking it beside another doctor's exotic car! He was so funny how he relished not fitting the stereotype of a well to do doctor! He had a great sense of humor and many friends. He spent too much time with each patient and his nurses would get mad at him because his schedule was hard to juggle since he would go over the time they had allotted him for each scheduled patient that day. He was a great Papaw to my kids and my nieces and nephews and he would not tolerate any racism, prejudice or bigotry at all. I am so thankful and realizing just how blessed I am.
I am very grateful to have been raised in a Christian home with parents who took me to church where as a child I learned a very simple song that holds an eternal and relational truth, "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow black and white, they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world!"
Proverbs 17:6
"Children's children are a crown to the aged, and parents are the pride of their children."
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