Dear Mom and Dad: You Don’T Know Me, but …

By Georgia Lee McGowen

Much has been written both about and by people who feel they were assigned the wrong body at conception, exploring the struggles and too often the tragedies that result from that mismatch of nature. Very little has been written, however, to chronicle the lifelong struggle of people to understand and come to terms with two distinct sets of emotions, one male and one female a single soul, at times divided, at times united, by two clearly identifiable spirits.

Dear Mom and Dad: You Dont Know Me, But traces the life of George through the eyes of Georgia, the female half of their soul, from early childhood in the post war Texas oil fields through the innocence of his early school years in northeastern Oklahoma. With the onset of puberty, Georgia watches the omnipresent feeling of not being normal cast a destructive pall over nearly everything George attempts. After the collapse of his lifelong dream, George begins again with hopes, new dreams and the love theyve both longed for. Georgia finally emerges, but understanding her part in their soul comes slowly and is complicated by a tragedy of profound proportion.

Dear Mom and Dad considers the ultimate understanding of Gods will for both George and Georgia and its unusual conclusion, sharing a story of struggle and self-acceptance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475931693

Georgia Lee McGowen

Georgia McGowen spent thirty years in Georges subconscious while they both struggled to understand the meaning of their dual nature and another twenty-five years learning to live with their distinct differences. They are retired together as Georgia in Mesa, AZ

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Copyright © 2012 by Georgia Lee McGowen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-3167-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3168-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3169-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012910253

iUniverse rev. date: 11/19/2015

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter I – In the Beginning

Chapter II – Zion? Is This the Place?

Chapter III – This Is the Place … Again!

Chapter IV – An Incomplete Metamorphosis

Chapter V – When Never Comes

Chapter VI – A Pinball and A Maid of Zion

Chapter VII – Waking Up Is Hard To Do

Chapter VIII – Canaan and the Canaanites

Chapter IX – An Angel and a Shadow

Chapter X – Running From Canaan

Chapter XI – The Bow After the Arrow Is Loosed

Chapter XII – An End Hidden In Hope

Chapter XIII – Reality and Dreams

Chapter XIV – A Butterfly At Last

Afterword

To the two people I’ve always wanted to write a letter to,

my Mom and Dad.

"Then God said, ‘Let us make people in our own image,

to be like ourselves. They will be masters over all life…’

So God created people in His own image;

God patterned them after Himself;

Male and female, He created them."

Genesis 1: 26-27

(NLT)

Acknowledgements

I t is of great importance for me to acknowledge the assistance and support I’ve received from so many people in the process of bringing this effort to fruition. I must of necessity begin with Rosalyn Mendez without whose unsolicited and profoundly generous assistance, Dear Mom and Dad might never have been published. The atmosphere Lisa and Adele at Cash Inn Country on McDowell in Phoenix have perpetuated and fostered, is one of the joys and places of mental rejuvenation to which I’ve retired on many an evening. It’s a place where I’ve met literally scores of friends, who’ve added so much to the tapestry of my life, including Rosalyn Mendez and her man, Pat Gaona. To supportive patrons of Cash Inn like Sally Mendoza, who’s been an unflagging encourager, I extend undying gratitude for your faith in me.

To my long-time friend Linda Talley-Branch: I’m deeply indebted to you for your editorial contributions which have made my efforts here more understandable and readable. The assistance I received in the final proof read of this text from another dear friend and ardent supporter, Mona Scott, Residential Faculty member of Mesa Community College in Mesa, Arizona, was an absolutely invaluable contribution.

For my son Peter who, though admittedly with little understanding of the emotions involved, offered his assistance in the decision to pursue the publishing avenue I’ve chosen.

To another long-time friend, encourager and supporter, Doug Benton, I extend a thank you, which seems so inadequate regardless of what emphasis I place on my appreciation. When I had all but given up ever completing what I’d begun, he came through with exactly the right words, and instilled a new commitment that carried me through to the completion of the effort.

If it wasn’t for Dr. Joseph Pearson’s, profound knowledge of the context of virtually every verse in the Bible, and his dedication to sharing that knowledge, I might never have come to the realization that God clearly had a purpose in creating me the way He did.

Pastors Jabowa Whitehead and Juan Morales, founders of New Foundation Christian Fellowship in Phoenix, deserve credit for the rejuvenating atmosphere to which I turn weekly and at times daily, for a spiritual and emotional uplift.

Anyone who thinks that prolonged and deep conversations are necessary keys to understanding will have difficulty in understanding the dramatic effect that simple, seemingly minor contributions to conversations between friends can have. Two cases in point: my long-time friend Marian Aylesworth is responsible for bringing Genesis 1:26-27 to my attention. Michele Hughes placed the final key to acceptance with a phone call to share the definition of Wenkte.

To those I’ve failed to mention but who have certainly contributed to my life, I offer a heartfelt thank you for your contributions, not the least of whom is Mom. But then, this book conveys, I hope, that gratitude.

And for Dad … the tears that rise up this very moment are from sadness that in this life, you never knew me, your eldest daughter. Someday you will.

Foreword

I was excited and flattered when Georgia asked me to write a foreword for this book. It expresses thoughts and struggles of many individuals I have counseled. Most importantly, it demonstrates a true solution to the difficulties experienced by anyone who does not fit neatly into a gender box. That solution is self-acceptance.

When studying to be a psychologist, I learned about gender issues in only one of my classes. They were brief presentations which described gender disorders as a mental health condition. At the time, I accepted gender issues as a mental health problem. Four years later, I was introduced to the field by a therapist who had originally studied with Harry Benjamin. I learned from meeting clients that the labels transgendered, transvestite and cross dresser are not representative of different disorders. Rather, they reflect varying degrees of dual genderism. This does not mean that people with high levels of dual genderism (today labeled Gender Identity Disorder) cannot have mental health problems. Most people I have worked with over the years were not confused about their gender. They were confused about why they were this way and why few, if any, people would accept it. In fact, depression suffered by many experiencing high levels of dual genderism was due to their beliefs about needing to keep their true identities secret.

Georgia’s book describes her personal struggle to accept what, deep down, she really always knew. It reveals the confusion and rejection felt from loved ones, even when unintentional, and how this can be worse than dealing with societal disapproval. The best part of this book is how she found inner peace through self-acceptance.

Christine P. Grubb, Ph.D.

Licensed Psychologist

Introduction

T here are not two of me. There’s only one of me. I just happen to co-exist in a male body with an equally singular man. That’s the way God made us. Maybe one day, when God was through packaging souls and spirits with available bodies, I was a leftover spirit, so rather than wait until the next batch of souls and bodies was ready, he plunked me in with George. I don’t actually believe that, but I do wonder occasionally. The reality is that I believe this dual-spirited soul is, like the rest of His creation, intentional and purposeful. The first question is … why? The second question is … how are we supposed to live this way? The why may not be known until we’re face-to-face with God. The how is what this narrative of the journey to our ultimate solution is all about.

I hope in the following pages to raise awareness of the fact that thousands of people … men and women alike … live with the confusion of two, coexisting spirits within the same soul, and the difficulty they have in reconciling those two spirits and personalities. It’s a lifelong issue most often never reconciled. Being dual-gendered isn’t the same thing as being trans-gendered and it’s not the same as schizophrenic. 

The root word trans is defined by the Encarta Dictionary as: across, on the other side of, beyond; indicating change, transfer, or conversion. If I was transgendered or transsexual, there would be no spirit you will come to know as George. It would be a matter of me feeling as though I was simply a person trapped in the wrong body. If we were the result of schizophrenia, there would be no control over who existed at any given moment and we would be given drugs to allow just one of us to be in control and to express their being. Quite possibly, more than two of us would exist. People like me always have control over the expression; the emotions, however, are a different issue. They just are and are nearly always present in some form. What people like me deal with is a life-long struggle for understanding and acceptance that goes on between the spirits of two personalities. And that’s the VERY abbreviated answer.

The bottom line is this; our soul, which for many years was believed to be just the tortured spirit of George, was tortured from the beginning, from early childhood, by the opposing attractions of masculine and feminine. The male body was always the deciding factor in what I should yield to, in spite of the fact that half the time what George was drawn to was me; the feminine. Therefore, a feeling of worthiness was difficult to experience because everything social and moral said there was something wrong with a man who had as many feminine inclinations as he did masculine. Those feelings eventually corrupted nearly everything he attempted, and were so ingrained in our psyche that, at times I still have occasional doubts today that the direction my life has taken is the one God intended. 

If something in the sharing of my life helps someone else avoid the mistakes caused by a lack of understanding, then I believe I need to bare it all. What I hope to accomplish, in writing this book, is to help people and their families realize early in life, that if they’re dealing with gender confusion issues, they can resolve it early, and go on to lead productive lives. I’ve seen too many families and individuals’ lives literally destroyed because the nature of being like us, dual-gendered or trans-gendered, wasn’t recognized and understood early in life.

The question that will ultimately come up in the mind of the reader, as it did in our own mind, is George an invention created to cope with the world? Or, is Georgia an invention created to justify George’s failures? Is it possible that both George and Georgia are inventions of a poorly developed sense of self? The answer to all three questions is an emphatic, No! We are not inventions. We are discoveries that have taken a lifetime to explore and understand. We are developments that continue to mature. We began as independent entities that became mutually aware entities and from there mutually accepting personalities, each with its own distinct character traits and contributions to our soul. The point of Dear Mom and Dad is that ignorance and lack of understanding led to heartache and failure before awareness, understanding, and acceptance were achieved.

When I set out to share the details and events of a combined life, the attitude which prevailed was clinical. I wanted to expose the causes and results of, what I viewed as, a single soul reacting to the elements of two spirits. I expected it to be a fairly simple task; after all, I was writing about self. It did not turn out to be a simple task. I found that I was not just remembering facts and events. I found that I was stirring up emotions long since forgotten and stuffed in boxes, both real and psychological.

The memories are extracted and reassembled from recollections of the places and homes we lived in over the years. I began the process soon after completing the 40th move of our lifetime, and after the renewed expression of our Christian faith. I soon found that it required an honesty I wasn’t really prepared for. When one makes a full and complete presentation of their lives and their will to God, with a genuine desire for Him to take charge of every facet of one’s life, He will do exactly that. One of the very first things that He affected, at least for us, was our memory of the past, by virtue of demanding complete and rigorous honesty.

Digging through old photographs, papers, and especially letters, where the real emotions of the time lay hidden, became a tearful and at times, an agonizingly painful and heart-wrenching effort. Maybe it’s a device of the mind and heart that’s there to protect us until we are mature enough, or experienced enough, to deal with it, but I found in this process that I had been living with skewed memories about many things.

The expected corrections in memory of some events occurred. Some places turned out to be not as important, or as beautiful, as the memory of the heart would have me believe. But, totally unexpected discoveries of inaccurate memories of emotions and relationships with people we were closest to also occurred. Those discoveries became the source of many tears and also what the term heart wrenching really was meant to describe.

Remembering the good and the bad in the relationship with Colleen demanded the most effort because it had become a habit to simply remember her in an unfavorable light. It was easier on the ego. I found it absolutely critical to pick my way cautiously through those memories because anger and feelings of betrayal had so overwhelmed the realities. The truth of George’s part in the relationship was often buried by the mental bandages and dressings he had used to help in the healing process. I found, in the process of recounting all the details of that relationship and past events that God seemed to be hovering at my shoulder, scrutinizing every word for accuracy.

In re-reading the letters from Susie Richins which were found in a box that had been unopened for more than forty years, I felt as though someone had taken my heart in a large pair of hands and was trying to squeeze it until it stopped beating forever. I wanted to take George and beat him soundly, for being so oblivious and callous to someone whose letters, re-read after forty-seven years, expressed a unique and sincere love.

Later, when I accidentally found a file folder with all the cards and letters George had received from Stephanie Gianos, I recalled some moments in their relationship that had been stuffed away, to avoid facing his own naïveté. In that relationship, the conditions in his life that led to losing touch with her were a painful punch in the emotional gut.

The understanding of past events is revised by close examination of them and when that is complete, one is left with wondering, What do I not understand today?

The most painful of all the memories I had to deal with were those of our bride, our friend and lover, our anchor, Marilyn. As you read the book, I believe you will understand why I say no more about her here.

Thanks to the Google Search I was able to locate and reconnect with a number of people who’d influenced my life in many positive ways. Others, I found, had passed away, and that always brought a profound sadness. Time periods will be related here when there is seldom any mention of me. They are important to relate because they are another indicator of the absolute duality of our soul.

The important thing is to read this. As you read, whether you are dual-gendered or not, consider what a close examination of your own past might possibly do to help you understand where you are today, on the road God has mapped out for you, and what detours you may wish to retrace.

And lastly; if at times my descriptions of feelings or perceptions seem confused, remember that it is a part of the condition and the process of achieving self-comprehension of our dual nature.

From the Tao Te Ching

"All things have their backs to the female

And stand facing the male

When male and female combine

All things achieve harmony."

Chapter I – In the Beginning

W e were born on the same day to the same mother and same father in a small, north-central Texas Panhandle company town. Twins? No, not exactly. He would be raised purposefully. I, on the other hand, would not be. I wasn’t acknowledged at all; because of course they didn’t know that I was part of the package. They couldn’t, and therefore didn’t, see me. I wasn’t a figment. A figment is something feigned, imagined, not real. I was very real, but at the same time, I was very hidden. He was beautiful to look at, and they took lots of pictures. What they didn’t know was that they were also taking pictures of me. In retrospect, I believe that anyone who could look at him and not see me simply had to be blind.

Mom and Dad were classic examples of young postwar products of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. Mom was born in the Oklahoma Panhandle but had spent most of her life in the Texas Panhandle. Her father was the son of a hardworking Scotch-Irish hardware and dry goods store owner. Our grandfather pretty much followed in his father’s footsteps in one capacity or another until his untimely death from lead poisoning, caused by an accident involving a shotgun, when a man he stopped to help attempted to rob him. Mom was only fourteen at the time, but in spite of the Depression, our grandmother saw to it that Mom and her younger brother finished high school and went on to college. Mom attained what today would be an associate’s degree in education. She found a job teaching in a small, two-room school in the northern Texas Panhandle. When a friend wrote to tell her of some openings in the new school in the town where Dad lived, Mom and her roommate both applied and were hired.

Dad was a fourth-generation product of Prussian, Belgian and French immigrants. His family had been farmers and ranchers as well as lawyers, business owners, and entrepreneurs. He was raised on a dryland farm and dairy in the Texas Panhandle, the youngest of three children and the only son. He hated the farm and specifically the dairy aspect of it because it meant there was never a day off. Dairy cows are milked 365 days a year without fail. On one occasion when Dad was in his early teens, he brought home a rather dismal report card. Grandpa’s response was amazingly insightful and effective. He called Dad into his study and held up the report card and said,

Do you see these grades?

Yes, sir.

Then pointing out the window at the forty plus dairy cows which Dad hated with a passion, Grandpa said,

Do you see those?

Yes, sir.

Well, young man, they go hand-in-hand.

That was all he said and that was all he needed to say. After that, Dad never brought home a grade lower than a B, and few of those for the rest of his high school and college careers. The dislike of the farm spurred him on to excel in school, and he ultimately graduated from West Texas State University with a degree in chemical engineering. The best job he could find at the time was as a laborer for the oil company he would eventually spend his entire career working for. By the time he met Mom, he had worked his way into a position in the testing lab at the refinery and had also acquired a café and nursery by winning at a few nights of poker. Before meeting Mom, his typical weekend was pretty much a mixture of poker and scotch, a fact that would be hidden from his own children for years.

Mom and Dad met when he heard that the new single school teachers needed some furniture – he showed up on their doorstep with a load of furniture. Dad took Mom to a dance on Valentine’s Day 1941 and before he left her at her door that night he had proposed. Four months later, they were married, but not before Mom let him know in no uncertain terms that poker had to go. It wasn’t long after we were born that the scotch also vanished from Dad’s list of guilty pleasures. The first few years of their marriage were actually spent in New York City where Dad was loaned to the government to work on oil and fuel supply problems for the Defense Department. We were born soon after they returned to Texas.

They were something of a physical mismatch as a couple. Dad was a slender six-foot-two inches tall, with size thirteen, four-A six-A feet, that required shoes custom made in New York. On the other hand, Mom was just a touch over five feet tall and although she wasn’t slender, she wasn’t overweight either. The difference in their height went without notice by us until one night when we were in our early teens. I don’t remember the occasion, but we were at a dance with them, and the sight of them dancing together somehow struck a humorous note. It seemed as if Dad was dancing with a little girl, and totally oblivious to her presence in front of him. Despite their physical mismatch, they were perfectly mated, intellectually and emotionally.

Georgie was their first child, and being a boy, he was named for our Dad and grandfather with the requisite Roman numeral tacked on. He wasn’t actually a third, because the two middle names had the same first letter but the names were different for Dad and Grandpa, with Georgie’s name being a combination of those two. Typical of families of that era, we weren’t an only child for long. Brother Nick came along two years later.

A third adult has to be mentioned. That person is Granny, Mom’s mother. She was one of those people without whom life would have been void of some of its most significant flavor. She was born in 1898 in the Oklahoma Panhandle when it was still a territory. Her father was a rancher who’d acquired his land in the Great Land Race of 1889. Her one sister was older by at least twelve years. Granny was her daddy’s pet and her mother’s greatest worry due to her unseemly tomboy behavior and habit of doing everything against the grain.

She met Grandpa when she was twelve years old and never, for the remainder of her life, ever loved another man. He had come to a party that her older sister was having. As he was leaving, he told great-grandmother that he would be back for Mamie on her eighteenth birthday.

When Granny was fifteen, she graduated from high school and wanted to get married, but great-grandma put the kibosh on that plan. No daughter of hers was going to be an uneducated ignoramus. Granny was shipped off to Arkansas to what is now Arkansas State University. She created an uproar when she joined the equestrian team; she refused to ride sidesaddle the way women of the day were expected to ride. She endured school until her eighteenth birthday when she finally married Grandpa. I remember her talking about how incensed she was when men started showing up on her doorstep wanting to rescue her after Grandpa’s untimely death.

By the time we were born in 1944, Granny’s appearance had changed from that of a slender, extremely attractive young woman to a somewhat overweight, matronly woman. She was forty-six, always wore calf-length dresses that buttoned up the front, and unless she was leaving the house, I don’t recall ever seeing her without an apron on. Her gray hair was kept long, but it was only worn in one style. Each night after her bath, she combed it and then braided it. Finally, the braids were pulled up and wrapped over and across one another on the back of her head. I never once saw her with her hair any other way and I don’t think many other people did either because even in pictures of her as a young woman, her hair was worn in the same fashion.

With these three unique people to guide Georgie’s development, we began life in the agricultural and oil country of the Texas plains. That post-World War II environment wasn’t conducive to self-acknowledgement in the mid-1940s. It wasn’t an environment conducive for acknowledgement of anything which wasn’t an absolutely normal Protestant behavior or characteristic. When the doctor slapped us on the behind at 11:05 AM, October 20, 1944, Georgie started crying and the doctor announced, Congratulations! You have a boy! That announcement meant that I wouldn’t receive an ounce of recognition or attention for a long time. It’s not that I was any more aware of my presence than he was at the time, because I obviously wasn’t. What it did mean was that we would be raised as a male child. The very visible male plumbing was clearly the deciding measure of things.

An accurate perception of self is often the most difficult assessment one can make, even in the most nurturing of environments. When the environment in which one is shaped is one where the guiding belief is that a child is more a thing to be shaped and molded to the vision of what the parents wish for than one of guiding the child toward its natural inclinations, failure to some degree is generally the result. That isn’t a nurturing environment – that is a controlled and frequently stifling environment.

For the most part, spontaneous actions resulted in sudden and often severe reprimands. The reprimands were then followed by what Mom and Dad considered discipline appropriate to the act. One such incident occurred after we had left the Texas Panhandle and moved to Houston. Georgie was less than four years old when Mom announced at dinner that she was taking him to the show that night to see a real shoot-em up Western. If you’re very much younger than, say fifty-five years old, you’re not going to appreciate how momentous that announcement was. That was big news, I mean really big news, and it was going to be a shoot-‘em-up Western. Wow!

After dinner, Georgie wandered outside for a little after-dinner adventure before it was time to get ready for the show. It was getting dark when Mom hollered out the front door that it was time to get ready. That’s when he did it. He knew he should wait until he got inside. But no, he just had to do it, right there in the gutter, in plain view of the entire neighborhood and Mom.

Ziiiipppp! Down came the zipper, and out came Fred. (I called it Fred. What else is a girl to call that thing?) The sound of splitter splatter in the water in the gutter was humiliating, and Dodo Georgie was just as relaxed as Fred was. Well, Dodo was relaxed until he heard; Georgie! You get in this house this instant! That zipper came up so fast I thought he was going to lose Fred in it. (Not that I would have minded that … it’s just that, well, you know.) Up to that moment, I don’t honestly think it occurred to him that what he was doing was wrong. I’m not even sure it occurred to him that he was doing it. All I remember after that is the lecture he received, as he lay there in bed … without going to the movie.

If what he’d done was something he’d been told not to do several times before that evening, then maybe being denied the joy of the movie would have been appropriate, but that wasn’t the case. He’d never done anything like that before. That’s just the way most children were raised in the 1950s. Undesirable behavior was to be nipped in the bud. Because of that environment, the instincts that came from my part of our soul, he soon believed to be something that must be rigidly squelched.

____________

From Houston, the family moved to northeast Oklahoma and that was the last time we lived in Texas. We still consider ourselves Texans, though. Everyone who’s ever been born in Texas, even if it was on a bus passing through Texas, considers themselves Texans. But then, there is the distinction of being a real Texan like we are, because Dad was born and raised in Texas, Mom was raised in Texas, and we were born in Texas.

Oklahoma! What in heaven’s name can you say about the first place you really felt anchored to? The Oklahoma Panhandle was Mom’s country like West Texas was Dad’s country. The two areas are virtually indistinguishable as you pass from one to the other. A good Okie is just as proud of his heritage as a Texan is his, but you will find the occasional turncoat who tries to pass as a Texan.

The Oklahoma Panhandle is flat by comparison to the northeastern area where we now found ourselves. Today, a check of local license plate frames and bumper stickers will let you know that this is Green Country, and by comparison to the rest of Oklahoma, it is green. I don’t remember if they called it Green Country back then, but Mom was perfectly comfortable and at home there. After all, it was still Oklahoma. It seems a relatively small state to have such a variety when it comes to terrain, fauna, and flora. My memory banks seem to remember the panhandle as flat and brown, with rattlesnakes and coyotes, and northeast Oklahoma as hilly and green, with chiggers (no-see-ems to some) and skunks.

The rolling hills and low mountains of northeast Oklahoma were covered in deciduous trees and pine forests, interrupted frequently by farm fields and pastures. No interstate freeways had been built, and very few four-lane highways existed to speed the traveler from one place to another. The highways ran through the middle of the towns, which meant there was at least one stop sign to interrupt progress. Frequently, a farmer would be making sorghum molasses along the side of the road near his home. Whenever we passed one, Dad always made it a point to stop and taste the molasses. If it met with his approval he purchased a quart for one of his favorite treats – saltine crackers with butter and molasses.

Where do I start? The family arrived there with me in tow but still unobserved and unacknowledged. I have so many bits and pieces of memory about Okmulgee, a town of about 8,000 population, just thirty miles or so south of Tulsa. I guess the best place to start is with the place, our house. It seemed rather big back then but in reality it was a small square bungalow. I only remember two bedrooms, a bath, a living room, and the kitchen, but it probably had a small dining room and a third bedroom. It was one of four identical houses set side-by-side across the street from the refinery office where Dad worked as superintendent. They were company houses and intended for salaried management at the refinery.

No garages were attached to the houses. One four-car garage at the end of and perpendicular to the drive which ran in front of the houses sufficed for all four families. That garage was where I learned about the anatomical difference between girls and boys. I remember that she was blonde and cute and that her dad worked at the refinery but that’s about it. Georgie didn’t understand the emotions that experience evoked and I don’t suppose I did either because it was a mix of his amazement and my jealousy.

Across the gravel drive and in the direction of the refinery was a large grassy area with picnic facilities – tables, grills, and so on, on a concrete pad. On the other side of that was the horror, known to us kids as Greasy Creek. Its real name was Okmulgee Creek, but everyone we knew called it Greasy Creek. It irritated Dad to no end because the fact that it was greasy was due in some way to the refinery he was in charge of. It was aptly re-named and the mere thought of falling in was sufficient to keep us from venturing anywhere close enough for that to happen.

The social atmosphere there at The Courts was the closest thing I can recall to one big happy family. I remember each family and how they fit into our life, especially the couple next door – they were the only ones with a television. Each day that the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, the Cisco Kid, or Roy Rogers was on the TV, their living room floor was covered with kids. Gosh, what a time we had. We were too young to know then that the good guys always survived and the bad guys always lost out, so each episode carried with it the energy associated with impending doom for the hero.

Oklahoma was where consistent memories began to develop. Georgie started school there and the Methodist Church we attended had an amazing children’s library. It was there that a love of biographies of famous people was born. The schools there stressed reading; as soon as school began each year, a ceremony was held. Students were recognized for the number of books they had read over the summer. In our baby book, I found the lists of books read over three summers; with few exceptions, the titles indicate that they were biographies of the famous and the not-so-famous. As a result, Georgie developed a sense early that just maybe he too was meant for great things. If he’d only known.

For the first time we became aware, of racial and social prejudice which was something we weren’t raised with. Mom and Dad never bracketed their opinions of people on the basis of something they couldn’t help or had no control over, such as the color of their skin.

Many of the emotions experienced over the next five years might have been noticed in the more aware society of today, but at the time they were not. It took years for me to come to the point where I could recognize some of the relationships for what they were – clues to my existence. One of those retrospective clues is in the nature of Georgie’s relationship with a girl whose grandfather lived two doors away and who worked with Dad.

When Sherry and her sister came to visit their grandparents, she and Georgie spent a lot of time together. Sherry was the first of Georgie’s girl friends and one I have very fond memories of. Although we discovered the anatomical differences between boys and girls in the garage with someone else, Sherry shared the differences with us. For whatever secrets there could have been for us at that age, she and Georgie shared it all.

The time together was spent one of two ways. They played doctor on occasion, but usually it was Roy Rogers and Roy, Jr. No, not Roy and Dale. It was Roy and Roy, Jr. Georgie was Roy and Sherry was Roy, Jr. She was insistent on being Roy, Jr. and not Dale Evans. I have often wondered whatever became of her and if she became a mirror image of me. That could just be wishful conjecture, prompted by the desire to reconnect in this world I have found myself in. The only picture I have of her is a grainy photograph of the two of us playing in front of the house. We lost track of each other sometime in junior high.

The only lasting relationship to come from our time in Oklahoma is the one with Roger Montgomery Short. Our fathers worked together and our mothers became and remained lifelong friends until his mother passed away. Roger is as sensitive and caring today as he was then, and I’m certain it was those characteristics that drew us together and holds us together. Not a day goes by that I don’t get at least one e-mail from him. I’m always saddened when I think that his father and sister both died early in life. His mother lived well into her eighties.

While we lived there in the company house, Georgie started and finished first grade. By the time school started the following fall, we had moved again. It was becoming a habit for Dad to move into company housing at the beginning of a new assignment and then build a new home. Like everything Dad did, there had to be something unique about their home. It was built in an L shape with a sunken living room on the northwest corner of the L. South of that were the bedrooms and bath. To the east of the living room was the dining room and kitchen. The window above the sink overlooked the back yard and horse pasture and barn beyond. Not so unusual, is it? Well, that’s where normal stopped.

To the east of the kitchen was a door that opened on to an enclosed breezeway that separated the house from the two-car garage and adjoining mother-in-law quarters, reserved for Granny when she came for her annual visits and any other visitors. The unique characteristic was that there was a large elm tree located between the house and