Back to Kingfisher, back to Irving.

"Going back" is a value that I learned from my parents, who often took us back to where they each came from. These pilgimages taught us kids a great deal about our roots, and about the American story of rural to urban transformation.

KINGFISHER, Oklahoma: Back to the farm.

My father was from a farm near Kingfisher, Oklahoma, the eldest of 6. My grandparents both died not long before he finished high school: his mother first, then his father the next year. The 6 kids owned and operated the farm together til they had all moved away. Then they rented it out for years. That is still true, but now my father's portion has been sold to one of the other siblings.

Day Trips from OKC to Check On the Renters

Anyway, we took frequent trips to the Kingfisher farm throughout my young childhood, because in those days, my father was acting as property manager. I think our trips to Kingfisher usually meant that the renters hadn't paid their rent, and had to be talked to. But he made a lovely day out of it for us kids, and we always thought it was great fun.

We (my two older brothers and I plus my parents) would spend practically an entire Sunday going to the farm and back from Oklahoma City. Since my parents weren't in favor of "skipping church," we probably went to an early church service and then headed straight to the farm with a McDonald's "meal" to tide us over. I don't know for sure, but I just imagine that would be the case.

'57 Chevy

We no doubt made our trips in the '57 Chevy, which had a huge backseat area! Big enough for lots of jumping up and down, and I do remember my #2 brother and I playing "London Bridge is falling down" with one arched over front to back and the other crawling back and forth underneath. At some point in the rhyme, the one arched over would crash down on the other and there would be lots of laughing and perhaps wailing, too.

I would guess that these trips took place from about the time of my birth until I was 10 or so. Not sure about that. Less frequent as the years went by. Maybe the renters got more reliable or something.

Horses in the Country

Driving out to the country from Oklahoma City was like going back in time. I loved seeing the horses most of all, and especially loved palomino ones! I promised myself that sometime in my future I would have a palomino horse -- a dream which I, alas, had to let go with the passage of time.

Daddy Used to Open the Car Window and Sing!

My father was totally in his element -- smiling, singing and very relaxed -- as we got near Kingfisher. He would crank down the car window, lean with his entire left arm hanging out the window, and sing loudly songs like, "O, why oh why'd I ever leave Wyoming?" He would have been in his late 30s. It must have been a huge nostalgic thing for him to return to the farm, and he was always relaxed and happy as I recall.

Recalling Hardships of the Past

Once we got to the farm, we would first schmooze a bit with the nice family living in the old farmhouse where my father was born. It felt like sacred ground to me. I was aware that my grandparents whom I had never met had worked hard to raise kids and eke out a living during the Dust Bowl. I know it was not easy, and they no doubt did their best.

Anyway, after chatting with the family (and they probably fed us something, though I don't recall what), we would look around the farm and interact with as many animals as we could.

Checking Out a Kitty Stud

I was interested in the fact that they had a yellow male cat that looked like my female yellow cat. So . . .when my cat (who was only allowed to be an indoor cat) went into heat, we actually borrowed that male cat from Kingfisher, brought it home to our house on 15th Street, and put the two cats in the garage for an entire week!

Grandkittens

Ha! Imagine! One was always a house cat, and now had to be in the garage. The other was a farm cat, and now had to be shut up! After a week, we took the male back to the farm, and 10 weeks later or however long it takes, Kitty had kittens! Fathered by a Kingfisher cat! In retrospect, it all sounds really funny, but at the time, it made sense to my parents to do it that way!

IRVING, Kansas: back to the ghost town.

My mother, on the other hand, was from a small town in Kansas which was torn down in the late 1950s when Tuttle Creek Dam was built by the Army Corps of Engineers. This little town, Irving, was not only her birthplace but also her father's birthplace. I'm pretty sure that her father's father had been born in Brooklyn, New York, and the family came west during his childhood.

A Has-Been Town That Was Still a Special Place

As I understand it, Irving had a population of just 400 in its hey-day. But it was so isolated that, to those 400 people, it was their whole world. Each generation "went out" (went to the army, went to college) and then either came back or not. By the time of my mother's generation, it seems that most young people had very itchy feet and felt they needed to get out into the world where the action was and make something of themselves, unless they were farm people.

How My Mother Met My Father in Kansas City

Anyway, my mother did just that, and landed her journalism job after college in Kansas City. There, she met my father who was working there for a couple of years, married him in the Irving church, and immediately moved with him to Oklahoma, his home state. (He was 30 by then, and had diligently saved enough money to buy their first house with cash!)

Red Dirt, Black Dirt

For the first 18 years of their marriage, Oklahoma City was home. But my mother was very close to her parents, so multiple trips "back" were built into our annual routines: back to Kansas for Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving, etc. We often sang, "We're from Kansas, good old Kansas, where the great big sunflowers grow!" as we crossed the state line heading north each time. We always noticed the change in scenery, from the red dirt of Oklahoma to the black dirt of Kansas.

Ghost Town

The most exciting thing about going "back" to Kansas for me was whenever we would go "back to Irving." Irving, of course, did not exist anymore by that time. But it existed socially in the minds of all who were from there. And it existed physically as a weedpatch full of trees that had once adorned people's yards.

Alumni Banquets After There Was No More School

Socially, there was a time once a year to re-experience Irving at an "alumni banquet" on Memorial Day in Blue Rapids. As most people who ever lived in Irving have died off or are dying off, I wonder if those gatherings still take place??? Last time I knew, the answer was yes! These potluck meals serve as a sort of historical society, since people always bring old artifacts, photos and stories of Irving. Once a year, the town comes alive again.

Irving Stone Marker Still There Today

There is a stone in front of the old Irving townsite that looks like a huge tombstone or sorts, and says simply IRVING. There is a guest book in a little mailbox there, that people sign when they visit. Besides that, it's just weeds and trees and flowers. During hunting season, people are allowed to hunt there. The rest of the year, it's just a nature preserve.

Leaving Irving Was Hard on the Old Folks

Of course, there was a lot of human loss and tragedy associated with losing the town for people who were from there. In Irving, they had been "somebody." With the demise of the town, they were thrown out into other communities where they had to get used to being "nobody."

I understand that a lot of old people died not long after being forced to leave Irving, not surprisingly. They probably lost a lot of the support network that kept them going, besides their own peace of mind and comforts of home.

Memories . . . . . or Figments of the Imagination?

But by the 60s when we kids visited there with my mother who was from there, it was great fun to run through the "town" -- you could still see where streets had been, and some foundations remained. A true ghost town, with no buildings left at all . . . just memories, or figments of the imagination. I had memories of being there at the age of 2 when the town still existed. After that, Irving was gone.

Strangely, I have no memories of the actual moveaway of my grandparents to Dwight. Perhaps it happened during the school year and my parents weren't able to get away to help. Or maybe I did witness it but was just too young to remember anything.

Going Back Is Still Moving After All These Years

In any event, to this day, although I rarely get to do so, I love "going back" to the Irving townsite even though I myself never lived there, no one lives there, there is nothing to see but trees and weeds, and "nothing is going on" other than butterflies flitting about.

My Grandmother's Flowers Still Bloom There

But the most exciting thing to see in the late springtime are the yellow irises and the bluish-purple "sweet rockets" that have spread throughout the old townsite.

Those flowers are exciting to me because my maternal grandmother was an avid flower gardener, and I understand that she had planted and nurtured the predecessors of the flowers that still bloom there today.

Of course, probably other families in the town had flowers. But it is my understanding that my grandmother gardened more than most people did, and that she did, in fact, bring the yellow iris. At least, that's the legend we are familiar with.

I really want to post pictures of Kingfisher and Irving here, but don't know if I have any such pictures of my own. I will have to wait til someday when I can get access to all my father's old slides, get a scanner that can get take slides and digitalize all those images. I'll need a laptop computer, scanner and about a week at least at my mother's place.

Enough for now about "going back." More tales to come when I am so moved.

More childhood memories: my father often traveled to other countries throughout my childhood.

My father traveled abroad fairly often on business. He was a petroleum engineer and later a chemical engineer working with sulfur and other chemicals, not just oil. He designed processing plants for petroleum and other chemicals.

His work sometimes required him to go abroad to be present for the start-up of a plant, or to trouble-shoot with processing plants that he had had a part in designing . . . or maybe that others in his companies had designed? Not sure about that. I should call my uncle and ask if he knows exactly what my father was doing on those trips, although I think I have a vague idea.

Anyway, his trips varied in length from a few days to a few months at a time. His departure was always a big deal when I was very small. We would all go to the airport to see him off in person.

In those days, "going to the airport" meant getting personal with the airplanes! We stood behind chainlink fences not far from the planes. He would walk out with others who were flying away and climb stairs that were wheeled to the side of the plane, just as we can still see on TV when presidents board and deplane "Airforce One."

I guess my mother must have felt a sense of loss whenever he left, but the rest of us thought it was exciting. I don't remember missing him in our daily lives, terrible as that sounds. Maybe it happened regularly enough that I took it for granted that he would be gone for awhile and then return.

As I got a little older, I remember even feeling that we kids had a bit more freedom and less stringent rules when he was gone. Mother would tell us, "I'll tell Daddy about that when he gets back!" if we were misbehaving.

He was the disciplinarian who sometimes spanked us if we needed it. I don't know if that type of spanking goes on in most families today. It was not physically painful but it was humiliating and dreaded -- and no doubt, dissuaded us from misbehaving similarly again. I did not experience it often, but one of my brothers did. My father had also been spanked often by his own father.

Anyway, that was not the main focus of his absences. Mostly, I just thought it was kind of neat and prestigious to say, "My father is in X country." I supposed he got some kind of pay bonus for being abroad.

Several times, the company sent my mother with him to various places. In that case, we would stay with our aunt, or our grandparents would come and stay with us. I only remember once that a woman stayed with us as a live-in childcare giver. We did not get attached to her at all; she served a purpose and that was it. Anyway, usually my father went alone to these different countries.

His homecoming was always exciting: he could bring me a doll from whatever country he had visited, and other gifts for the rest of us. Every time. He would also sometimes bring something to eat, such as yummy waffle cookies from Holland. And he would bring several rolls of film waiting to get developed.

Within a few days, he would have slides to show us. We would ceremoniously sit and watch all his slides as he narrated his travels with "show and tell" pictures to match the narrative. I remember few specifics at all . . . just the "drill," so to speak. Some of the photos and narrative would always seem boring to me, but some would be more interesting.

All those slides still exist in metal boxes in closets at my mother's place. I look forward to some time in the future when I can look at a lot of them again. I'm not sure when there will be an opportunity to do so, but surely sometime, somehow. I know my mother would not want to let them leave her house, and I don't anticipate having enough time to go there, so I'm not sure when this will happen or how or when. But sometime it will.

I've seen advertisements for devices that will help transfer slides to digital photo records. That's obviously what I should try to do sometime . . . put tother photo CDs for all of us who would be interested. Of course, there will be mysteries . . but he usually labeled his slides pretty well.

Anyway, back to the fact that he traveled abroad so often. Although the effect on me personally was minimal since we kids did not go along on those trips, our minds were opened nonetheless. As my doll collection grew, so did my conceptualization and curiosity about the big world out there. I have no doubt that this was why I determined from a young age that I would go abroad myself as soon as possible -- and why I later became an ESL teacher.

"Going abroad as soon as I could" first meant going to Mexico beginning the summer I was 17. I went several times over a 4-year period, (1) to a Christian mission in the mountains, (2) for academic purposes and (3) for personal visits to people I became close to on those original visits (Enrique and Ofelia).

I began my career as an ESL teacher at the age of 22 1/2, in January of 1980. Through this career, the "world" has come to me steadily over a nearly 29-year period. When my father was still alive, it made for good conversation with him to talk about my students, their homelands, their English abilities and so on.

When I went to teach English at a Japanese university (1990-93) with my young daughter in tow, my mother came to visit each of the three years I was there. The third year, my father came along.

Since I was teaching a high-level elective course in Tokyo every Saturday, and many of the students were engineers-to-be, I took my father along to class one Saturday while I was there.

Before his visit, he had been sending me articles of interest for my students over several months -- usually articles about Japan-U.S. professional exchanges, related political or economic topics, and other intercultural topics. My students had been reading these articles all fall and giving oral summaries of them. So, when he came to class, we had a round-table discussion of some of those articles with my father taking part.

All of this made for a very rich experience for all of us, both linguistically and interpersonally. As I think back on all that now, I am amazed all over again at how perceptive and participatory my father could be in my life despite his seemingly introverted tendencies.

This was an amazing and special experience overall! I mention it in this blog because after years of his traveling abroad for his work, this time, I was the one who was living abroad and working . . .and he came all the way to visit, and greatly enriched the whole experience for my daughter, myself and my students, not to mention my neighbors and my mother.

New horizons were opened up for us all through this meaningful visit. Since my mother had come alone the previous two years, she was well prepared to "take care of him" as needed while I was at work. She knew how to use all the appliances in my apartment, knew how to go shopping for food and knew people in the apartments.

OK, that was a deviation of the theme of my father's travels abroad. However, we had a couple of very interesting experiences that brought these two phenomena together. In his own travels to Japan for work purposes many years earlier, he had made friends with two different Japanese engineers that he had kept in contact with over the years. Or is it possible that one of them was the one who had traveled to his company in the U.S.?? Not sure about that.

Anyway, during my parents' visit with us in Japan, he reconnected with two of his own professional collagues. One lived north of Tokyo; the other lived south, in Yokohama. The one who lived north came to Tokyo and rendezvoused with us near the emperor's palace in the heart of Tokyo, a prime tourist attraction.

This was in pre-email days and pre-cell phone days, so meeting up with someone like that took careful planning! Anyway, he and I met with that man the same day that I took him with me to class. We took pictures of each other . . . and my father complimented the man on his camera.

The next week, back in my apartment in Chiba, my father received a package . . . a gift from the man of an identical camera for himself! He was quite amazed by the generosity!

Later on that same visit, when my parents, my daughter and I took a long day trip to Kamakura, we visited the other Japanese colleague in Yokohoma.

He and his wife had a young daughter, perhaps 6 or 7 years old. Their family was in a state of mourning because their 8-year-old daughter ahd recently been killed in a pedestrian-car accident. Despite the sad time they were experiencing, they were very gracious and hospitable to us all, serving us a nice meal in their home. I can't for the life of me think what the meal consisted of!

Anyway, all of these experiences whereby my father's earlier world travels and my own teaching abroad dovetailed brought home the fact that my life was greatly impacted by his foreign travels.

(Photo credit: This picture of the Great Buddha at Kamakura is one that I found on the Internet in this person's blog: http://www.mikesblender.com/indexblog75.htm)