I Said "I Will"

By Jerry Wollaston

On May 6, 1970, Susan and I were married in Gainesville, Texas. On that day the justice of the peace asked me, Will you, Jerry, love, honor, and protect Susan for the rest of your life, until death do you part?

I said, I will!

Almost forty years later, as I sat holding her hand, Susan said, I love my grandbabies so much. Jerry, you have to promise me you wont let them forget me. You have to make sure they know who I am. Please promise me youll do that for me.

I squeezed her hand and promisedI said, I will.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456711702

Jerry Wollaston

Jerry’s everyday world for most of his life has dealt in one way or another with oil fields within the Mid-Continent Region of the United States. For thirty-five years Jerry has provided services to oil companies exploring for and producing oil and natural gas in this area. Currently, much of his time is spent in litigation support associated with oil and gas operations and their impact on the environment. For over forty years Jerry’s main concern in life has been for the well-being of his wife and family. Jerry and his wife Susan are the proud parents of three children and the grandparents of two precious granddaughters. For many years, friends have encouraged Jerry to write about his experiences in the oil fields and law offices he frequents. However, it was his love of family that inspired the writing of this book. Contact Jerry by email at: [e-mail]

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© 2011 Jerry Wollaston. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 1/10/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-1171-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-1169-6 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-1170-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010918636

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Every life,

Whether that of the smallest wild thing

Or the greatest man,

Has mountains.

Your only decision – Will you climb?

White Crow - 2008

This Book Is Dedicated To

My wife Susan – who pushed and pulled me up all the mountains.

Dr. James Turrentine

Thank you for your years of caring, and above all – your honesty.

Dr. Joe Hamill, MD

Christy Garrett, R.N.

Melanie Whaley, L.P.N.

Sherri Hightower, CNA

Misty Zevely, BSW - Social Worker

Denise Balmer, Chaplain

Leta Berry, L.P.N.

Brenda Pence, L.P.N.

Kelly Idleman, L.P.N.

Tabathya Taliaferro, R.N.

And

The rest of the employees and volunteers at Cross Timbers Hospice.

Your level of care and assistance should be a goal for all others.

And

Cross Timbers Hospice Grief Counselor, Shelly Murray, who has won the heart of a Down Syndrome child while helping him deal with the loss of his mother. Willie and I are honored to call you a friend!

Contents

Growing Up Jerry

Finding Susan

Finding Me

Together Again

SJ and Me

Just for Fun

Us

Decisions

Just Questions - No Answers

Growing Up Quickly

Moving

A Sacred Life

Cruising

The Speed Bumps of Life

Special Olympics

SJ and Calvin

Our Extended Family

Why and How – The Biggest Words I Know

Going for the Gold

Full Circle

A Princess Arrives

Real Trouble

Dealing with the News

The Fight Begins

The Treatments

The Long Wait

April Fools

The Fight Is Over

Searching for the Truth

The Living Must Go On

To My Granddaughters

Acknowledgments

The writing of this book was at times a lonely and difficult journey. For months I invited no one to make it with me. When I felt the time was right I told my sons Matt and Danny of my undertaking. Without their help and understanding completing this project so quickly would have been impossible.

Danny, your help with all of the farm chores and taking up the slack everywhere else allowed me to spend more time with my writing. The time you’ve spent with Willie has helped him through some real tough times and certainly improved his health. Additionally, it has given me more time to write.

Matt, your help with the mechanics of writing was invaluable. It’s good that one of us learned of such things when we were in school. The many days you spent reading and re-reading the manuscript is greatly appreciated. I am sorry it required you to give up time with Angie, Alli, and Holly. Thanks for all of the suggestions and changes that helped to improve this book. Mostly, I want to thank you for your passion.

I want to thank both of you for accepting my odd hours at the office, for giving me space when I needed it, and for knowing I would ask for help if I wanted any. I don’t know if it was self-preservation or not, but kudos for driving us to jobs so I could get some sleep. Your understanding of the importance of this project to me is appreciated. Something I’ve never said as much as I should have – I love you!

Mark Spencer, your editing combined with the tutoring I required was exceptional. When you agreed to take on the project I suspect you didn’t know you were going to be required to teach English 101 to me at the same time. Your praise was appreciated and your guidance and criticisms were much needed. I promise to surprise you when we do this again.

Shelly Murray – thanks for the suggestion. Your laughter and tears told me I was on the right track.

Growing Up Jerry

My dad always said I was in this world by pure accident. I always thought he was joking, but my brother is seven years older than I am, and I have no younger siblings. Despite that evidence, I was always treated like I was wanted – it never mattered whether my dad was kidding or not.

Depending upon where you are from, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas are known as either Tornado Alley, the Heartland of the US, the Bible Belt or as God’s Country. Probably the only true moniker is Tornado Alley. The Heartland of the US seems to me a relatively new description used by the media whenever they’re covering death and destruction in the area. When most people say it’s God’s Country, it’s because they believe no one else would have it. However, I have lived in these three states all of my life and I have no plans to leave anytime soon.

I was born in Kansas but only lived there until I was five years old. The last winter I lived in Kansas I awoke one morning to about eighteen inches of snow. I had never seen snow like that, and I’ve never seen it since. Because of the snow I didn’t have to go to my kindergarten class, and my mom let me go outside and play. After a while she decided I should come in and warm up. She started calling me. When I didn’t respond to her calling, she started looking for me. I don’t imagine she thought too much about my absence at first, but before the search was over the police had been called and a hunt for a lost boy had ensued. What no one knew but me was that I was a couple of blocks away cleaning off driveways. I was never in any danger, but I was getting all kinds of hot chocolate and twenty-five cents for each drive way I cleaned.

I was surprised at all of the excitement that was taking place on my block when I got back home and I couldn’t believe I was the center of attention. Everyone was so glad to see me I didn’t even get into trouble and that was good, because I didn’t think I had done anything wrong. Heck, I had earned seventy-five cents in just a few hours, which was many times my weekly allowance.

Before I turned six I was moved to Oklahoma for the first time. I started first grade in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1955. My name on my birth certificate is Gerald. However, no one ever called me Gerald – I’ve always been called Jerry.

After a week in the first grade my teacher asked, What’s your name?

I’m Jerry.

She looked all up and down her roll book and found no Jerry. After coaxing my last name out of me she said, Well, you must be Gerald. I’ve counted you absent all week because you didn’t answer me when I called your name.

My name was Jerry and I didn’t know who Gerald was, so I had no reason to answer. This made perfectly good sense to me, but the teacher acted like she had never seen a six-year old kid who didn’t know his own name.

I spent first grade in transit. During that one year I was moved from one school to another three times because my dad was transferred from one town to another. After my first-grade year we moved to Enid, Oklahoma, where I attended both the second and third grades. Then we moved to Bowie, Texas, where we stayed long enough for me to finish the fourth grade.

My youngest son and my wife both claim to remember things that happened when they were two or three years old. I don’t know if it was because I was always being uprooted or if I was just not very perceptive, but I can’t remember anything in my life before the time I was about five years old, and even those memories are sporadic. Both my son and wife had more stable lives than I did and lived in the same area until they had time to form memories. I don’t know if that has anything to do with it or not, but that sounds better than admitting I was just dumb.

I remember the snow in winter and catching lightning bugs at night in Kansas when I was five, having rock fights and chasing lizards with the neighborhood kids in Tulsa when I was six, taking polio shots and going house to house to collect money for telethons in Enid when I was seven and eight. When I turned nine and was living in Bowie, Texas, I met the first person, other than my parents, who began training me for life.

He lived just behind our house and across a little alley. His house was about two hundred feet from our house and I thought he was a land baron because he had about three acres for a yard. In comparison, our yard was so small I could traverse it in five or six good jumps. His yard was so big he had room for a big garden, a shed, two mules and numerous chickens. I thought it was almost a real farm.

His name was Bud Conner, and he was at least seventy years old. He didn’t know how old he was for sure and he had no family to ask. At his insistence I called him Bud instead of Mr. Conner as I had been taught. One of my sons and his wife graduated from college with degrees in psychology and they probably would find something wrong with my and Bud’s relationship, but the truth is I was amazed at what Bud knew, what he had witnessed in his lifetime, and what I could learn from him. Things that people nearer my age could never teach me. I think my parents were somewhat apprehensive about our relationship as well, until they got to know Bud a little better – something they made a point to do sooner rather than later. My memories of Bud are as vivid as any I have, recent or distant.

Bud’s house was not a shack, but it was definitely in disrepair. Inside, it was dark and cluttered with a musty smell that I have come to associate with old men living alone, not repulsive, but not what I would consider pleasant. After school and when I wasn’t playing summer baseball or doing chores at home I was at Bud’s house. At the time, I thought listening to Bud was just fun and interesting, but what I was actually doing was learning about life through the eyes of someone who had seen more life than anyone else I knew. Learning about mules, driving wagons, building fires in a wood stove, planting a garden, keeping cool with a pan of water and a fan, making biscuits, living and dying, the list goes on and on. Because Bud was not in good health and he could only walk with the aid of crutches, I think he enjoyed my company as much as I did his. I was never too busy to help him in any way I could, and after my parents got to know Bud they also helped when they were needed.

Good or bad, right or wrong, what Bud did for me was to remove some of the childish innocence that shrouds a nine-year-old from the real world. At nine years old I realized the world was not the utopia it appears to a child and could, in fact, be a cruel place. I understood right and wrong choices were not as clear cut as my parents pretended they were. I understood that in the future more was going to be expected from me. I realized that there would be times I would have no one other than myself to depend upon, and that I needed to be prepared for that day.

After living in Bowie for about fifteen months we once again moved, this time to Ardmore, Oklahoma. Bud and I had a tearful farewell the day before my family left. Bud could read some but couldn’t write, so I had no way to communicate with him once we moved. After a trip back to Bowie over a year later my dad reported to me that he had seen Bud and that he hadn’t changed much. After his next trip my dad told me Bud had passed on.

I remembered riding in a wagon pulled by two mules, an old man spitting tobacco juice and wiping his mouth on a shirt sleeve, and that he called me his friend. I was inwardly sad and privately shed a tear, but as Bud told me every time one of his old friends left this world, the living must go on.

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Finding Susan

During the second week of September 1959 I was again at a new school. I was now ten years old and in the fifth grade. This was the seventh time I was meeting new kids across three states. Little did I know that what I had finally found in this school were the kids that I would grow up with, laugh with, cry with, fight with, and fall in love with. From mourning classmates lost to untimely deaths, to the joy of graduation and the hope of all the good that was to come, I found it at this new place.

Most important I found this little blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl there. Her name was Susan Jane Blalock. She would let you know immediately that she didn’t like the Jane part, so like everyone else, for many years, I just called her Susan. I don’t know what stood out about her so much in my mind but something did. It seemed that when school was out for the day and all of the neighbor kids and I could get together to do the things that kids do, we somehow migrated to Susan’s neighborhood or to mine. I didn’t know about anyone else, but I found that I liked it best when we went to Susan’s place because I knew she would be there. Her house was just a short bike ride away and my parents didn’t mind me going over there as long as I was home at the time I was told to be. Since I knew this privilege could be revoked just as easily as it was granted, I was always home on time. Because of her family situation, Susan was not able to come to my neighborhood as easily or often as I could go to hers – so that’s what I did.

The thing about being ten years old is that you aren’t supposed to act like you like someone too much, even if you do. I remember a time when my next-door neighbor Fred and I had rode our bikes over to Susan’s house and we played with all of the kids around there until Fred managed to push Susan down into a bunch of grass burrs. Fifty years later I don’t know why I thought that was so funny, but Susan didn’t. When she got up with grass burrs all over her and saw me laughing, she clobbered me right in the mouth.

Now I didn’t find this so funny. Why did you hit me? I didn’t push you down, Fred did.

Yeah, but you were the one laughing.

So there I stood with a tooth in my hand, which had been loose for some time but just needed a little encouragement to come on out, and Susan had provided it. This story has been told to everyone in my family throughout the years but not by me, and every time it was told, Susan was the one laughing.

At school it was the usual Peyton Place scene. Did you know Patsy likes Jimmy but she’s pretending to like Mike because he is Jimmy’s friend and she is going to dump him for Jimmy after she gets Jimmy to like her? I believe what amazed me the most was the seriousness of it all. Susan and I rarely got caught up in such nonsense but I must admit we had our moments.

One day when we were just kids Susan told me, I think you were forty years old when you were born.

In some sense I guess this might have been true, but the stresses she had endured during her young life had left her more mature than most her age too. A fleeting childhood and growing up quickly is not always a good recipe for being a happy child, and in Susan’s case her beautiful smile was hiding something that I would only know many years later.

Somehow, through the years at our elementary school and beyond, Susan and I found comfort and understanding in each other. We weren’t always close on a daily basis but when the parties calmed and excitement was down to a low boil we were almost always together. I believe it was this shared maturity that always brought us to that point. When we graduated from high school in 1967, Susan kindly remembered our elementary school years and noted those days in my yearbook. Over the years she and I discussed this time in our lives and we both agreed that we knew at the age of ten, we would somehow be important in each other’s life.

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The care-free days of elementary school for me gave way to the desire to have a job and earn money. It wasn’t that I needed it as much as it was that I wanted it. So at the ripe old age of thirteen I began working outside of my normal chores for people who were willing to pay me for my services. These services amounted to cleaning out chicken houses and cleaning up after a bunch of winos at a salvage yard. Not very glorious positions but I was paid in real American money.

At the age of fifteen I landed a job at a state lodge, thanks to a friend from school. I now had a job that other people wouldn’t mind having. The pay wasn’t any better but the atmosphere was certainly a step up. It was during this time that Susan and I probably drifted as far apart as at any time in our lives. She was looking for ways to overcome the problems at home, and I was looking to make a buck. Our paths didn’t cross often. When they did we still knew there was a depth to our relationship and a respect for each other that was somehow different from how we felt about our other friends.

During our junior-high and high-school years Susan and I continued to live parallel lives but on different planes. She was in the school band and became a twirler and majorette. I still have her fire baton that she and the other twirlers used at half times to the awe and amazement of the crowded bleachers. Six girls twirling, tossing and catching sticks of fire in the middle of a football field with all of the lights out amazed everyone. The thought of it still amazes me today.

I believe during these performances Susan was in the better place that she had hoped for and struggled for all of her life. In a place and time where her worth and talents were recognized. For the short duration of these performances, she was in a place where she was judged by what she could accomplish and the effort that she put forth. Not by the fact that she was somehow an unwanted burden and just another mouth to feed.

During these years, Susan at times walked a path best described as careless and reckless. She was drawn to an older crowd. I believe it was because they could go out more and stay out later. This kept her out of her real world longer, an escape she was so desperately seeking. She was searching for someone who cared for her. Not someone who cared because she was a cute blonde that could twirl a fire baton – for someone who cared about how she felt and why. As she put it to me, For someone I can talk to and who will give me the time to listen, at times without questions. She was searching for someone who cared – for no other reason than she was Susan.

Unlike Susan, I wasn’t searching for anyone or anything. I continued to work and earned money that I mostly put into savings accounts. I was happy in my situation and mostly dwelled in my own little world, with thoughts too deep and answers too few. However, because of this I was a good listener, asked few questions, and somehow knew Susan was special to me.

When reminiscing, Susan and I found it abundantly clear that her school work was not what it could have been. The lack of effort and caring she displayed in her studies was unchallenged by her parents. She was neither encouraged nor discouraged. The fact that her accomplishments were not relevant to her family was made clear in May of 1967 when we graduated from high school, with neither of her parents in attendance. As for me, you couldn’t have kept my parents away with a gun.

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Finding Me

Susan and I continued to have classes together throughout high school, but only classes that I was forced to take. This is because Susan never took any math or science classes, and that was probably best. They didn’t interest her and she wasn’t about to apply herself enough to get through them. Almost the identical problems I had with English and history. I believe Susan also thought being popular and social would get her away from her problems at home faster than an education would.

I had only a few classes during those years that held any interest to me and my grades and attitude showed it. The only thing I wanted out of school was me. I mostly made B’s in my classes with an occasional A or C and I attribute that to my dad. It was my dad who forced me to at least partially apply myself to my studies. I wasn’t interested in any subjects other than math and science and those only mildly. Most of the lack of interest was my fault, but the blame should also be shared by my teachers. When I had a teacher that made the subject interesting and stirred the urge to learn in me, I generally received good grades in the class. If not, we both suffered through the year, with me ready to be out of the class and the teacher ready for me to go.

For as long as I can remember I believed respect was earned, not required, but disrespect was not allowed. During my time in grade school, junior high, and high school I met Mr. Edgar Wallace, Mr. Charles Dabbert, Mr. Wayne Byrd, Mr. Leroy Ritchey, and Mr. Ralph Benham. All of these gentlemen were real teachers who took their jobs seriously and who truly wanted young people to learn. I still remember and use the things they taught me many decades ago, and they will always have my respect.

Even when I was just eight or nine years old I believed teachers should be special and held to a higher standard. The fallacy of this belief was pointed out to me in the harshest light when I was in the sixth grade. The principal of our elementary school taught me a lesson I never forgot.

After I had corrected a mistake he had made on a math problem at the chalk board, he told me, I may not have been right, but I am never wrong and don’t you forget it. That to me epitomized what was wrong at school and, in many ways, in the community. From this little statement came my deep and undying dislike for people who think they are above or better than others. Not necessarily a popular opinion to express when you’re a teenager. My only saving grace was that my dad shared that opinion with me, and was there every time I needed backup with my school administration.