This is Home, Part 44 - Daddy stands by a friend, Uncle Doc

This is part 44 of my mother's book about her life, written in 2004.



Daddy stands by a friend

Daddy was a Mason at one time. Mom told me about it.

Albert Hooper was nominated for membership and was rejected. Daddy quit because he was being loyal to Albert. He said something like if Albert wasn't good enough to be a Mason, then the Masons weren't good enough for him. I think Mom said that some of them tried to change his mind.

Uncle Doc

Uncle Doc belonged to the Masons. He received his 50 year pin when he was older. I read somewhere that he belonged to the Shriners, but I don't know anything about the truth of that.

He had a more active social life than Daddy. Of course, he was single.

He used to go up to Maudie and Irvin Williams' house at night sometimes and play cards with them and talk.

Every now and then, he would also stay a few days with Albert Hooper and Zack and talk. I had the impression that Albert's farm was pretty isolated.

I think he also went to see Roscoe and Dora Mae. Mom told me that one time Roscoe was about to lose his farm and everything. It must have been around the Depression. Anyway, he asked Uncle Doc for help. Roscoe must have given someone a note, because if his things had been mortgaged, it wouldn't have helped. Everything was transferred to Uncle Doc's name. Knowing Uncle Doc, he had a lawyer do it. He always wanted everything legal.

After Roscoe paid back his debt, Uncle Doc transferred everything back to him.

I used to have different men telling me that they had gone to school to Uncle Doc. They all laughed and said he made the same speech each year at the start of school. It was something on the order of this: "I'm going to be your teacher this year. We have a great deal of work ahead of us. I'm going to help you all I can. We are going to get along just fine and you are going to do what I tell you. If you don't, I'm going to whip you."

I asked him one time if he really said that and why.

He said that he did say it. He said in those days, parents kept their children home to help with the farming. He said there were 16-year-old boys still in grade school and they were much taller and heavier than he was. He wanted them to respect him and, I think, be a little afraid of him. He said after the speech he never had any trouble with them.

I think Roscoe was one of his pupils. I seem to remember that he talked about Uncle Doc's speech.

Uncle Doc had a more serious and quiet personality than Daddy did.

I don't know how I would have gotten through grade school without him. He helped me with my lessons. I really had trouble with my arithmetic, especially with questions like this: Jack left home at 9 a.m. and drove 50 miles at 35 miles per hour, stayed three hours, then drove back home at 45 miles per hour. What time was it when Jack got home?

I hated that kind of question.

Uncle Doc helped me memorize things I had to memorize, like poetry. He listened to my spelling. Night after night, he sat at the kitchen table and helped me.

One time he was in the hospital for a week or two. Each night Daddy put his reading glasses on and sat down in his rocking chair in the living room by the lamp on the sideboard that Sharon has and helped me.

When Uncle Doc finally got out of someone's car out front, thanked the man for bringing him and started walking towards the house, Daddy breathed a very audible sigh of relief. Then he closed the book and we all went to meet Uncle Doc when he came in.

There was snow on the ground and Uncle Doc had on his heavy overcoat.

Uncle Doc was still helping me in high school. One year -- senior year maybe -- I took bookkeeping. They had us adding long columns of figures in our heads. I couldn't get the same answer twice, so Uncle Doc added them in his head. He didn't have any trouble.

Dream - Trying to fix tardies at school, and other confusion

On Monday, Memorial Day, May 31, 2010, around 10:00 AM-12:50 PM, I dreamed I was at school, near the end of the term, maybe the end of the whole thing. I had had several tardies, along with some other students. They had gotten very strict about it, to the point where if you weren't there when the bell rang you had to go to the office and get it taken care of. The teacher gave you a tiny thing to take with you, some little paper. Now they even had something where the office gave you tiny little colored things, maybe about an inch and a quarter, mostly gray blue, that had a phone number on it that you had to call to get it settled before you could go back to the class.

It was near the end of the school day. After a class a teacher told me he had fixed some of my tardies. I had had four, but he showed me on the little card, about the size of a vertical business card, that he had taken off three, X'ed them out and fixed it so that they were canceled. I still had to go to the office for the other one. He had done it to some other people, too.

I went to the office. A girl was ahead of me, and the person was explaining to them about the phone number. It was an odd number, given in letters for the last four digits. It didn't seem long enough for a phone number, but I was probably expecting an area code, though I didn't think of that back then. The calling-a-number requirement was something that had been initiated by the corporate people in charge, and apparently covered all the schools owned by that company.

It was getting late and I had to get back to class, but there turned out to be confusion about the class. The two that I had to go to were being held at the same time. Some of the students were in one room and some in the other. The students realized what had happened and a lot of them were joking about it, though some seemed subdued and worried, more in one of the rooms than the other.

I didn't know what to do. I went back and forth from one room to the other, trying to find a teacher I think. When one finally showed up, he started immediately running the class. I tried to talk to him about it, but he wasn't interested and just looked mad, like I had bothered him for something that wasn't his problem. Meanwhile the bell had rung and I was late for two classes being held at the same time. I saw the students in the one I was in bending over their tests, hard at work.

I went back to the office, trying to explain what had happened. The woman gave me the two little colored papers and was carefully explaining about calling the number, and then I had to give them a number off the paper apparently, and maybe explain my situation. She didn't give me a solution about the classes being held at the same time, maybe just saying that she would have to look into it.

I left and hurried down the hall. The place was set up something like DeVry, a big square with a hallway that ran around the edge with rooms on each side. I was trying to find a phone. I think I saw a couple, but they were already in use by other students trying to fix their tardies. I finally left to go somewhere else, that I thought would have phones. I think I left one of the little pieces of paper on something on the covered sidewalk around the school.

I went to the other place and was going through it. It seemed like a hospital, and was laid out like DeVry. Going down the hall quite a ways I came across some phones. They were hooked up to some video displays set into the walls. Some of them were being used. I saw a video game was being played on one, and it had something on the screen that might be important, a little rectangular box with numbers in it, and a smiling and frowning creature standing off to the right, who might have been an ogre but who looked something like the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil character. I couldn't get the person to give up the phone to me. A man was letting his son play the game to pass the time so he would have something to do while they were waiting, someone was having an operation evidently. A phone to the right of it had another video game being played, something with a genie I think. It didn't look useful to me.

I went back and forth between them for a while. There was another phone or two to the left of them, but I think one of them was being used by someone to make a call. I wanted to use the video game with the box on the screen that might be useful too, and I didn't know if I could find it on my own. The person playing the video game that had the box finally stopped and left, with his father, but now the screen was dark.

I started looking at the number on the little piece of paper again. It was not the number I remembered seeing on it earlier, the same one that had been given to the others. Now it was a regular number and it had one of those free area codes on it, starting out something like 1-877-... I was puzzled, but assumed I would have to call this one. I couldn't understand why there had been a change. I wondered if I had to give them a number when I called. I had left one of the little papers back at the school, and wasn't sure if it was still there. It would delay me a lot to have to go back and get it. It was getting late and the classes were almost over now, I thought. I wasn't sure what I could do to fix it, but I would try to explain what happened and hope something could be worked out.

I went off to try to find someone who could explain about getting into the program I had seen on the display, the video game. I started trying to go to the upper stories, hoping to find a nurse or someone who could explain it. I went to one of the corners to take the stairs, but I found that they were being worked on. They were roped off with yellow tape, and a young man and a young woman were painting them. They were maybe eight to ten feet apart, doing different sections. The wood had been kind of a dirty dark color, but was being painted yellow. The stairs themselves were much simpler constructions than I had expected, being simple boards nailed together, even the railing just seemed to be 2 x 4's. It was a very wide open area, much more so than I expected, with the stairs going back and forth beside themselves, at shallow angles.

I reached out and tentatively touched and took hold of the yellow tape, preparing to go under it anyway. I paused and asked the young man if it was okay if I used the stairs, I didn't need to touch the railing and I would try to just walk on areas that hadn't been painted or were already dry. He said sure, somewhat jovially, and said to watch out for the paint, some of it was wet.

I started to carefully walk onto the stairs. Some of the steps were partly painted, sometimes with the painted part not covering it completely, not put on heavy enough to get into the surface everywhere, creating a kind of fog effect, with a lot of the old surface showing through, like the brush or roller had been too dry when the paint was applied, and it would have to be painted over again. While most of it immediately ahead of me was dry, the one I had to step on first was wet, one of the partially painted ones. I stepped on it and quickly on to some dry steps, apologizing. I was touching the railings too, but they were either partly dry or hadn't been painted. I was heading up, at least at the moment. The stairs also led down, to lower levels.

I was talking to them about what I was trying to do, and I think one of them mentioned a way to speed it up. I saw a little wooden boat that had drifted up, outside the railing, floating I guess on air, though it seemed almost like a dark ghost water. The boat was simple in construction, like the stairs.

I climbed over the railing to it, talking now like Clint Eastwood, and maybe a little like Humphrey Bogart. I came to look like Clint Eastwood now, and it seemed to have changed to a mystery, and something about some evil people who had gone upstairs and were waiting for me, trying to stop me. They had been sent by someone. I talked some about that and about what I was doing there. I was confident that I could take care of them. There would be others too, sent to stop me when I was trying to leave, and I also had to solve the mystery of the numbers, and get that taken care of, and the answer to that mystery should be somewhere upstairs.


Earlier in the dream I had been driving to school in the gold 1970 Cadillac. There had been some problem with other cars, about them trying to stop me, threatening to crash into me, but the Cadillac, already big and sturdy, got even bigger and taller, and with even thicker sheet metal, and crashed into them, knocking them away, bouncing them way back or to the side and sometimes even sending them tumbling. I had stopped there on the street and talked to someone about it, and about what was happening, and about what the Cadillac could do, before getting in again and doing it some more. I don't remember much about it, though.