by Laura Joplin
Reading and ideas defined our family life. No one hesitated to broach any topic during the dinner-table conversation, and our parents expected each child to contribute to discussions. Personal thought on a subject was paramount for Mom and Pop. They asked, “What do you think, Janis?” “How about you, Laura?” Then they listened seriously to our replies. In this way they taught us about personal integrity. If you could state your opinion and back it up, then you should stick to it. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t try to argue you out of things they didn’t like, but they would respect your right to your view.
Janis was well schooled in questions by our father. If he had been a meditating man, his mantra would have been “Who am I?” He always looked beyond the moment. I remember the rains in Port Arthur. It seemed to shower every other day, but Pop never took it for granted. He would call to us, “Hey you kids, come here.” Then we would all step out on the porch and squeeze together on the top step. He would coach us, “Take a deep breath and savor all the new smells the rain has released.” We would stand there absorbing the odors as the rain rolled off the porch roof and splattered on the cement, throwing cool drops high on our legs. It is so easy to get caught in the routine of life. Pop made us stop and realize the preciousness in each moment. We would sometimes ponder where the rain had come from. Had it recently been in Borneo or Chicago? Did families stand in other places wondering about us?
Pop was a mystical spirit who never lost his awe of life itself. It was almost as if God had placed his soul here on earth before he had finished explaining the upcoming experience. Pop said he should have been a monk because he savored contemplation so much. I joked with him a few years before he died, asking, “How could you have been a monk, since you don’t believe in God?” He just laughed that caught-off-guard chuckle, and said, “Yes, that could present a problem.” We decided that monks spend their lives hunting for God, and that surely defined him if anything did.
He looked for the mental wrinkles in everything he saw. He would turn a boring trip to the post office into an exciting adventure. He would tell us to study the faces on the wanted-men posters, then he would drive us around town to hunt for them. Michael loved Pop’s trick to entertain bored children on automobile trips. Pop explained the rules of his game, saying, “Pick a license plate on any car you see and memorize it. As we drive along, I want you to find another one just like it!” It was a Zen koan: If you can see your way beyond the puzzle, then you’ve solved it.
While Pop brought us life’s imponderables to savor, Mother laid out possibilities like a three-course meal. She never talked about limits, only about our goals and how we might reach them. The only boundaries she saw in life were found in the structure of society and its institutions. She felt that a clever person could work around those confines. Everything was merely a matter of planning and seizing the chances that came along.
Our lives were filled with the blossoming of opportunity. Income was up over 200 percent since the end of the war, and people used the extra money to provide for their children the things that they had lacked growing up. We were a generation of indulged young ones.
Mom was quick to follow up on an interest expressed by her children, especially if it was artistic in nature. Janis’s innate drawing talents gave Mother the perfect opportunity to rise to the occasion. She bought beautiful full-color books of the masterpieces of art that hung in all the museums of the world. If we couldn’t get to culture, then she would bring it to us. Mom also arranged private art lessons for Janis with the best teacher in town. Janis drew constantly. Roger Pryor, the handsome and confident boy next door, watched Janis spend hours sketching the horse that his family staked in the neighborhood. Janis told him, “Horses are particularly hard to draw because the distance from the neck to the head is different than from the neck to the tail.” She worked at it until she got it right. Then she was pleased.
Mom believed that it took only a little extra effort to turn something good into something excellent. She explained that wanting to give her kids choices came from her early life. Even in her seventies she complained half-bitterly about being given plain oatmeal for breakfast for eighteen years. She let her kids choose their breakfast, and much of the rest of their lives as well.
Mother was the best teacher I’ve ever known. Her gift was based on that trait all inspiring teachers have—a genuine faith in the ability of those she taught. She thought being human was about learning; therefore, it wasn’t a foreign process—it was as natural as breathing in and out. She believed that people only needed opportunity.
Learning from Mom was an everyday experience, a manner of interacting as our paths crossed in the house. We sang a lot, as kids do, just aimless tunes thrown into the air for the sheer fun of doing it. Mom often stopped what we were doing for an impromptu lesson. “When you sing, stand up straight and provide support from here”—she would poke my diaphragm. “That’s better, can you hear it?” she would ask. “Enunciate, enunciate. Put the endings on your words. Your audience can’t understand you otherwise.” Sometimes we looked at each other and laughed, waving at the nonexistent audience we were supposed to be entertaining. Then Mom would pick up the laundry and be off about her business.
There was a lot of hard work and practice in our household as well. Mom cajoled, negotiated, stimulated, and oftentimes laid down the law about homework, music practice, or any kind of effort that was instructive in nature.
She bought most of the toys for us and had very clear ideas about what was acceptable. We never got toys that did something on their own; they were always raw materials that stimulated the imagination of the user. We had to provide the spark that made the experience fun. Mom provided ample supplies of blocks, Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, cards, pick-up sticks, dolls, farm animals, books, colors, paints, and paper. She would throw in good board games such as Clue and Monopoly.
Making the commonplace more interesting was a motto both of our parents believed in. Once Pop brought home boxes of old stationery that the plant was throwing out. We promptly set about folding squadrons of airplanes, which we stationed on every inch of floor space in the house. The final erupting battle was a blinding, howling smash of pink, green, yellow, and white bombers and fighters soaring through the house. During the development of the paper-airplane game, Mom was making dinner and supporting our ideas for strategy as they developed. Pop would help find new styles of airplane folding.
Mom monitored our lives constantly, seeing oversight as her primary parental role. She interjected herself in two ways into our development. First, she praised us unceasingly. Mother always found a positive remark to make about whatever our endeavors. Hastily thrown-together projects got the comments they deserved—a selective word about some noteworthy possibility she saw. Otherwise, she would provide her second method of involvement: suggestions. Our childish energies might be scattered among ten compelling projects at once, or the intricacies of our social life as we grew older, but Mom’s statements always called us to focus. “Here, let me show you,” Mother would say. Often she prefaced it with, “When I was your age my grandmother taught me to sew. She wouldn’t let me just put clothes together. She made me learn French sewing, where the edges of the seams are rolled and whipped under. We designed our clothes and made our own patterns. We made dresses as fine as any found in New York. That’s where I learned that hard work pays off.” Then she would turn the story to our task at hand, saying, “You can see that happen for you in your work, if you just slow down and practice until you get it right.” We hated our unknown great-grandmother. The problem was, Mom was right. There was nothing worse than mustering the resentful bravado to defy her gentle teachings, only to see that our way was wrong.
Mom’s love of greatness might have been interpreted as ambitious zeal had her natural aggressiveness not been tempered by maternal forgiveness and support. We might have even thought she was too hard on us if her efforts hadn’t had the full support of our father. In one pout against having
to redo a project, I sought his support. He was relaxed in his evening retreat, reading while sitting in his brown leather armchair in his bedroom. He confided in me that he knew firsthand that follow-through was important—he had almost flunked out of college because of his lack of it. I sucked in my breath. My heroic image of my father had been sullied. In one horrendous moment I saw the embodied statue of George Washington crumble into pieces of worthless marble, leaving only a man.
In this way I realized that inspired hard work was the only way to succeed. It wasn’t that my mother or father demanded so much from me, but that the world expected it. Nothing was ever complete. It could always be made better. At times it was maddening, because no matter how much we did, there was always more to do.
Mother sanctioned her attitude toward learning by aligning it with what she erroneously believed were the words of Abraham Lincoln: “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. . . . You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.” It was always hard to argue with Mom when she brought up things like that.
Janis entered junior high with a trail of schoolwork that was respectable but not spectacular; it appears that school wasn’t challenging enough to inspire her best efforts. She was a quick, intelligent girl whose report cards had always shown she was “making acceptable progress” in most areas. In a few areas she was “Commendable.” By the fourth grade a few areas had been checked as “Needs improvement.” She didn’t always practice good sportsmanship, or keep her work or the room clean.
Her junior high report cards were another matter. They showed a girl increasingly at odds with her teachers. She wasn’t satisfied with the routine of education. Janis asked questions like “Why do people have hair on their toes?” She began to get unsatisfactory marks in work habits and citizenship because she talked too much and didn’t get all of her work done on time. Only some teachers found her a problem, and it wasn’t a matter of the teachers not liking Janis. The woman who favored Janis the most also gave her the worst marks in following directions, getting work done, and respecting the rights of others, i.e., talking out of turn.
Janis was taught to try for excellence at home, but she was criticized by teachers who wanted her to be quiet and follow directions at school. She was more inquisitive and energetic than the school program allowed. Janis was given a different female role model than most young Southern girls. Her mother was strong, independent, intelligent, ambitious, and assertive. Janis wasn’t raised to see women as passive or behind-the-scenes. Our mother had lived on a farm where a woman’s work was equal to a man’s, even if it was different. There was little room in a farmer’s marriage for the pedestal that women were placed on in the Eastern cities. Our mother didn’t have to rip off her corset to find her power. It came naturally. It grew from her experience on the farm and was hardened by the problems her parents had.
Mother married a man who liked her for her strength and never tried to own her. It never occurred to them to raise daughters whose primary goals would be female attractiveness or compliance. They focused on what they believed were the important qualities in life—character, intelligence, and talent.
Janis maintained a proper social standing through junior high. She and Mom sewed her first evening dress, a pink net affair to which she received a matching pink evening bag for Christmas. She joined the Junior Reading Circle for Culture, which was her introduction to reading and criticizing good literature outside of the family environs. Her journalism teacher, Miss Robyn, asked Janis to join her Tri Hi Y club, which she did. Janis hosted a gathering at our house, a night of Italian street café life. She covered card tables in red-checked cloths and spent weeks melting candle wax on wine bottles to give the proper atmosphere.
Janis participated in Glee Club throughout junior high. In the ninth grade she sang a solo at the Christmas pageant, her first public singing beyond church. Due to quirks about enrollment dates in kindergarten, Janis was the member of a class in which many kids were up to eighteen months older than she was. In the ninth grade, that was an embarrassing difference because she wasn’t as physically developed as many. She weighed less than one hundred pounds and hadn’t passed through puberty. Many of the other girls were amply endowed and loved to show off their newfound femininity in low-cut dresses and flouncing full skirts. Luckily her best friend, Karleen Bennett, was close to her age and exactly her size. At least she wasn’t alone.
With parental help, Janis began to perfect their primary passion in life: bridge. We had been taught the rudiments of the game as soon as we were able to sit atop two 3-inch-thick Century dictionaries and be at table-top height. Then we learned to deal, count cards, and bid according to the basic rules. Our folks showed unimaginable patience in letting us play a hand, supporting our feeble strategy and including us as equals in the game. By junior high, Janis was taking special bridge lessons, playing with our parents and their friends, and inviting her friends over for a game.
Jack Smith was Janis’s ninth-grade boyfriend, a tall, handsome fellow with a marked intelligence and politeness about him that guided his own passion for knowledge. Jack gave Janis a necklace with her initial on it, a style that was all the rage in junior high. He splurged and got her a five-dollar one, because his feelings went far beyond the normal one-dollar variety. Jack said Janis often called him a big cry, and it was only years later that she explained what that meant. A cry was a sob and a sob was an S.O.B., and she would never say that word back then.
Jack and Janis read Ivanhoe in school. The story inspired her. The gallant, wounded knight Ivanhoe was rescued from his enemies and nursed back to health by a young Jewess and her father. Returning to his true love, Ivanhoe had to leave her to joust for the life of the Jewess. Treacherous nobles accused the Jewess of witchery because of her ability to heal Ivanhoe. Similarly, Janis often looked to Jack to rescue her. Her expectations for men were now clear. She merely sought a knight of the Round Table, a man who belonged in Camelot.
Janis arrived at Jack’s door one day wanting to see the movie The Ten Commandments. Neither of them had money, so they resorted to counting out the pennies in Jack’s money jar. They arrived at the box-office window laden with copper coins. Janis stood politely aside as Jack tried to explain his embarrassing predicament to the ticket lady, who recounted the coins. “I lost a bet with a friend,” Jack mumbled. Janis stepped over and jokingly poked him, saying half-seriously, “You shouldn’t lie, especially about a movie about God.”
Janis, Jack, and Karleen Bennett began to get interested in that other compulsion of adolescence: sex. They traded much-read copies of Peyton Place and Splendor in the Grass, with the best parts dog-eared and indexed. “Be sure to read page 89,” they wrote in notes among themselves.
Janis’s ninth-grade birthday party was a neighborhood scavenger hunt. She graduated from her Arthur Murray dance class. Along with the entire family, she watched the Miss America pageant and pondered what it would be like to be Miss Texas. We discussed the styles of dress worn by the contestants and planned a new one for Janis.
Though Janis was developing some problems in school, she also had supportive experiences there as well. Miss Dorothy Robyn taught her ninth-grade journalism class and was the head of the journalism club. Janis excelled in both. She illustrated The Driftwood, the school literary magazine. The art she drew consisted of stylish stick figures and thin-line sketches illustrating the stories and experiences. She had the ability to capture emotion in quick strokes. In her scrapbook, Janis pasted a Journalism Award Certificate given her for the work, writing beside it, “Miss Robyn walks up in the middle of class and casually says, ‘Oh, I thought you might like to see this.’ I nearly fell out of my chair I was so excited.”
Janis wrote a story for The Driftwood titled “The Most Unusual Prayer”:
My family includes one brother, one sister, one father, one m
other and me. We take turns saying the blessing at dinner each night.
My sister Laura says it one night. I say it the next. Michael, my little brother, has been listening to us for two years.
About three months ago Laura said the blessing: “Thank you, God, for the birds and the flowers and the things we play with. Thank you, God, for the lovely nights and the lovely days. Amen.”
After she had finished, we all heard a weird chant from Mike’s end of the table: “Birds, flafers (flowers), ’tatoes, peas, water, bubber (butter), plate.” It was Michael saying the blessing.
Since then Michael has been joining in on all the blessings. The other night when we decided it was Mike’s turn to say the blessing, he proceeded with a short but inclusive “Thank you for ebeything. Good-bye.”
Journalism class was Janis’s favorite, in spite of getting poor citizenship marks from Miss Robyn. She couldn’t corral her enthusiasm sufficiently to accept the structure of the class. She talked, gossiped, and doodled. Her best friends were in the class with her—Karleen, Jack Smith, and others. Janis sometimes led others through the door marked DO NOT ENTER in the journalism room. It went up a narrow staircase to the dome on top of the building. From there you could see the city spread out before you.
While Janis worked on The Driftwood, I began to write a neighborhood newspaper. I always emulated Janis whenever I could. I wrote on such timely topics of interest to an eight-year-old as “Where the Wind Comes From.” I asked anyone who would talk to me, and decided that perhaps the huge fans in the field across the street by the Baptist Church had something to do with it.
Janis liked to manipulate the home scene whenever possible, and my copying her was one of her tools. She would say, “I won’t love you if you don’t do what I say.” So I would. Once she got in a huff and screamed, “I’m going to run away,” and stomped her feet around the house. I yelled, “I’m going with you.” I asked my father what you did when you ran away, and he said you got a bamboo pole, which we had, and tied all your things in an old red bandana and hung it on the end of the pole. So I ran around the house getting ready before Janis said, “Laura, I wasn’t serious.”