The Curious Autobiography of Elaine Jakes

By H.R. Jakes

Witty, warm and wackya spiritual journey of self-discovery

The Curious Autobiography of Elaine Jakes offers us slices of classic Americana lovingly transformed by the spirit of Welsh storytelling. It is the spiritual odyssey of a woman finding her way back to faith. Her journey is touching, amusing, and at times hilarious.

Rev. Timothy Vaverek, S.T.D., Christian Writer

Witty, wacky, zanythis is a postmodern romp which astonishes with moments of spiritual wisdom and provocative piety.

David Lyle Jeffrey, Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities, Baylor University, Author, Houses of the Interpreter and People of the Book

In The Curious Autobiography of Elaine Jakes, author H.R. Jakes offers a fictionalized account of Elaines life, telling a variety of stories that involve a romantic ride in an old-fashioned car, a frightening cheese plate, a magic sword, and a cross-dressing monkey. Her story is not one, but many as she humorously reveals time and again how connected her own narrative is to that of her Welsh forebears. During the journey, Elaine, a school teacher in the vivacious and eccentric community of New Hope, Pennsylvania, gains not only an appreciation of the world but also of her heritage, herself, and God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Mar 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480814752

H.R. Jakes

H.R. Jakes, has been writing all his life and is working on additional books for this series. He and his wife Diana have seven children and one grandchild. They live in Texas.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 H.R. Jakes.

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 publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Archway Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

1 [phone]

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.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1473-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1474-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1475-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015904365

Archway Publishing rev. date: 3/30/2015

Contents

1. Bear Mountain

2. Joie de Vivre

3. A Picnic in the Garden

4. The Good Dr. Davies

5. Marco Polo

6. Monkey

7. Leni

8. Tea with the Professor

9. The Gracious Dr. Davies

10. The Way of Reconciliation

11. The Scent of Redemption

12. Jemima

13. Thanksgiving

Editor’s Afterword

To my parents

1

Bear Mountain

I will live in the past, the present, and the future.

The spirits of all three shall strive within me.

—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

T hough it was an overcast day, my father, Harry, packed a picnic lunch basket and put it in the back of his depressingly imbued (i.e., brown) 1937 Ford truck. He then helped me climb in the passenger side, firmly closing the door. Taking his seat behind the wheel, he adjusted the oval rearview mirror, cranked up the engine, and took me for a drive on Bear Creek Boulevard (Route 115) up what the locals called Bear Mountain. He thought that the best time for me to learn how to drive would be after we had enjoyed a nice picnic lunch together. He would then, so he reasoned with logic typical of the male species, put me in the driver’s seat and guide me as I drove along the boulevard down Bear Mountain, the only road that ran from Blakeslee to Wilkes-Barre.

Bear Mountain is best described merely by the components of its name, for there is often truth in names. (For example, Harry means the prince of the house, and I have never known a man so princely as my father. I say this as a kind of disclaimer so that you will forgive him for what he did to me in this tale I am about to tell.) The Bear part of Bear Mountain was so called because the mountain was overrun by black bears. Now the bears of Pennsylvania rarely killed or maimed. They could be, however, terrible nuisances. They had been known not infrequently to plunder campsites, having no interest in harming anyone but rather having great interest in acquiring a juicy snack or two by the clumsy thievery for which bears are known. If you encounter one of these bears, you should definitely not try to prevent it from eating its purloined snack. Bears interrupted during snacking are wont to be grumpy, and a grumpy bear is not an animal that one should wish to encounter, for the outcome may be quite disconcerting.

The Mountain part of Bear Mountain, however, would seem, at first blush, to be more germane to my driving lesson, for Daddy took me straight to the top of the mountain in his truck. There we shared a delightful but too ample picnic lunch, which included Daddy’s favorite cheese, an aromatic (some would say malodorous) Welsh variety known as Hên Sîr, which he himself had packed. Having stashed away the leftovers, of which there were quite a few, as I had not been able to finish even half of the rather robust sandwich, Daddy offered me the place of honor, the driver’s seat. He encouraged me to drive down the mountain while he would instruct me on the finer points of operating the vehicle. I can say from firsthand experience that this is most definitely not the best way to teach anyone to drive.

Within moments, the truck seemed to take on a life of its own, as the extreme slope of the mountain caused it to accelerate. I screamed, Jesus! calling, I suppose, for divine aid as I began swerving down the winding mountain road. Ignoring my outburst, Harry bellowed urgently, "Use the brake, brake, brake! Lainie! Lainie! Downshift, Lainie! Push the clutch down! Shift down, now, now!"

Now it is true that my father had explained to me thoroughly before this misadventure began how the different pedals of the car operated, and he had admonished me not to panic. But all of his fatherly advice was lost as the normally gorgeous scenery of Bear Mountain went flashing by. Often, in fact, quite often, if one were to look carefully through the trees, one might have seen a bear or two, sometimes a mother with a cub, just here or there in the verdant woods that were off the right side of the car as one descended the large hill that Route 115 bestrode. On a normal day, there was, too, a delightful view of the valley out of the driver’s side of the car. On that day, however, all the beauty was lost, and I was simply steering for my life as I had no longer any reasonable hope of remembering how to use the pedals, though they were easily within reach of my feet.

It did not take my father long to move his left foot toward the truck’s pedals and try to depress the brake, but his foot slipped off each time he did this, like the slipping knife of Agamemnon, the king of Argos, who sought to offer his daughter, raising the blade but, ultimately, finding himself unable (in some accounts of the story) to take her life until, just in time, the goddess Artemis presented a stag as a substitute to rescue her; or like Abraham, who brought Isaac to the point of death but was saved by a ram that was readily available in a thicket. Now I was going to my death, and my father, my own beloved father, was the one who had brought me there, and neither ram nor stag would rescue me from Bear Mountain. Yet another animal would fill that role.

Normally, Harry Jakes would not be inclined to quit just when a situation turned dire. But this situation was especially dire, and it was becoming increasingly so as the speedometer rose to its maximum position, the fevered pitch of seventy miles per hour. In vain, Harry hoofed at the brake to halt the hauler, which was hurriedly hastening headlong, leaving him with but one choice: the truck runaway ramp, an embarrassing alternative for a mere pickup truck. There were several truck runaways on Bear Mountain; these were simply short roads that ran up the side of the hill, characterized by a series of gravel speed bumps interspersed at intervals of about twenty feet, sometimes called silent policemen, meant to reduce rapidly the rush of a runaway truck. I had never actually seen one of them used, though I had seen many a big rig on Bear Mountain simply going too fast. These runaway ramps were intended, of course, for tractor-trailers—not just any car—which was why their silent policemen had unusually fat bellies.

Though I was driving a much smaller vehicle than was intended for these ramps, Daddy grabbed the wheel firmly with his left hand and managed to steer the truck onto the third of seven truck runaways. I can still remember hitting my head on the ceiling of the truck as it bounced violently on the first of seven bulging silent policemen, pounding its way up the truck runaway. Owing to his half-a-foot taller frame, my father was driven into the truck cab’s ceiling seven times, in each case more violently than I was. My head banged against the ceiling only thrice.

When the truck came to a stop at the top of the runaway, I was stunned. After what seemed like just a moment or two, I shook off my grogginess and was just beginning to sob when I looked at my father. He was slumped over toward the window, with blood running down the side of his face from a small head wound, which at the time I assumed to be larger. The power with which we had struck the speed bumps had knocked my father unconscious and put a tiny gash at the hairline on the left side of his forehead. I pushed him back into the seat and tried to revive him, but he was out cold. I had no time to panic. I realized that now I had to figure out how to drive, and quickly. Within a few minutes of getting my bearings and restudying the truck’s mechanisms, I slowly turned the truck around, for at the top of this particular runaway was a gravel circle—meant for tow trucks to hitch up their prey—on the edge of a thick wood where one could easily turn a small truck. Skillfully, I guided the truck down the runaway, bump by bump, seven silent policemen later getting back on Route 115 to head the rest of the way down the mountain. Daddy kept sleeping, and I was scared, thinking now that I should take him to the hospital.

Yet this was my first time driving. I was thus still figuring out how to work the clutch and brake as my father remained slumped over, sleeping away, wedged uncomfortably in the corner of the passenger door and the edge of the single front seat. His feet—which were generally angled toward the central gearbox and tall, spindly stick shift—were each in an unusual pose, with toes pointing outward, the right under the glove box and the left nearly protruding into the virgin territory of the operating pedals, especially the gas pedal. Fortunately, there was just enough distance between his foot and my own that he did not accidentally obstruct my use of the accelerator and thus put me off my newfound and ever-waxing confidence in operating the motor vehicle.

As I started down the hill, I noticed that the old oval rearview mirror, which hung from the front of the truck ceiling near the windshield, was made crooked from the pounding caused by the bumps of the truck runaway. When I adjusted the center mirror, I could see nothing in it, even when I set the mirror straight. It was an odd experience because I was appropriately devoting the vast majority of my attention to the road that lay ahead of me. Still, it was hard not to notice that there appeared in the freshly adjusted mirror a dense, stubbly forest of small, dark-cortexed trees, one and all defoliated and swaying briskly in the wind. On closer inspection I realized that these were not small trees but bristles budding from the bulging belly of a big black bear, who, standing up in the back of the truck, pressed its ample pectoral parts upon the pickup’s rear window, all the while snacking on the remains of the sandwich that I had not been able to finish. Looking straight into the belly of the beast, I felt the part of a cowering, timorous mouse.

Unsure about what I should do next, I was precociously brave—non sine dis animosus infans, as they say—and the bear provided all the context I could ever need for that dictum’s validity. My first instinct was to take Father to the hospital, but I suppressed that idea because I questioned the appropriateness of bringing a bear in the flatbed of a truck to the newly remodeled Wilkes-Barre General. To give myself time to think, I suppose, as if running away from my unexpected but not entirely unruly cargo, I just kept driving. When I came to a red light, the jolt from the brake caused the bear, which had been standing up with its elbows poised on top of the cab so it could eat its sandwich, to take a seat, the tips of its sharp claws making a strange sound like nails on a chalkboard as they scratched against the glass of the window on the bear’s way to a seated position.

That animal, which had now finished off the rest of the lunch, just sat there looking quite contented, its tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth, as might a very large dog. Its bear paws were folded in its lap, almost like a monk who, fresh from his noonday meal in the monastery, has now entered the chapel to offer a prayer. The bear looked straight into the mirror at me, not with the threatening eyes of a wild animal, but with the appearance of a domesticated canine that is delighted to be in the backseat of a car and, instead of expressing its appreciation and excitement with a wagging tail, simply enjoys the wind in its face.

I had not yet resolved what I should do with the monk-like, doglike bear in my mirror. Fortunately, the bleeding from Daddy’s wound had begun to clot, and, though he was not yet conscious, he did not seem to be in imminent danger; at any rate, the bear was a greater concern now than the likelihood of my father’s concussion. Various traffic lights prevented me from staying focused on the dilemma long enough to come to a decision about what plan of action I should take, for the looks and concomitant murmurings of the drivers or passengers within those cars kept distracting me. Look, Clarence, I could hear one woman say. She has a bear in the bed of her truck.

No, Betty, her husband responded curtly, that’s just a big dog. It’s one of those Danish dogs, Great Danes, a fat one.

In defense of Clarence’s mammalian misidentification, the bear was acting much more like a dog than a bear, as I have already stated. You might not know it, and I certainly did not know it before that day, but bears really are precisely like dogs in two ways. They like to be walked in the morning—or, rather, they like to take a walk in the morning, since few bears actually are domesticated and are taken on walks in the morning, though I have heard of some bears being university mascots that live on campus and are walked by students called bear trainers; but perhaps that’s just a story. In any case, bears are like dogs, I found out that day firsthand, insofar as they clearly love to ride in cars. As long as I kept moving, the bear was happy, swiveling its head, now here, now there, its tongue waving in the breeze. Sometimes, it would stand up with its paws on the cab’s roof; other times, it would take a seat in the monkish position described above.

Oddly enough, the further I drove and the more I engaged the not-too-thick traffic of Wilkes-Barre with this bear in tow, the better and more confident a driver I became. From the base of Bear Mountain, I drove through the city, incurring further glances and disapproving mutterings from further Clarences and Bettys. One person tried to warn me, You have a bear in your truck, you know, to which I had no ready response except, Yes, I know; thank you.

Having driven all the way through Wilkes-Barre and Kingston, I had in mind to head for a less inhabited zone to allow the bear to jump out, so I drove to Forty Fort, where, I thought, the bear might find an interest in the levee with its park along the Susquehanna River. As I was approaching the park, however, I thought to myself, What if there is a child in the park? What if the child were to be eaten by the bear? No, I could not go to the park. I needed woods, and I needed woods before the bear decided, as dogs sometimes do, that it was bored with the ride and thus might jump out of the truck at a red light. But where could I find woods on short notice?

Since I was now running low on gasoline, going back to Bear Mountain, which presented itself as the obvious solution, was not a viable choice. I could not pull into a service station with a bear in the back of the truck and expect the service station attendant to fuel up the truck. Not only would that be embarrassing, but it could also be harmful to the service attendant, as it could have been to the children in the park. I did know one attendant, however, Bernie Schupp, who, since he worked weekends as a grease monkey, would probably help me if I could make my way to the Sinclair Station on Middle Road in Nanticoke; but that would be a long drive, too, and I wasn’t sure that Bernie was working that day.

I didn’t know what to do with Daddy—who remained unconscious and was by now snoring, a further distraction—or for that matter what to do with the bear, but I knew who would know: my sister. I drove straight to the home of Lee Ann and her husband, Ed. Their house was located in Dallas, only a few miles down Pioneer Avenue. Of course, I got quite a few odd looks on Pioneer, a parkway with passing passengers in motoring motorcars who were still debating whether the animal in the back was a large dog or the bear that it was. Lee Ann’s house was the last one on the left of Midland Drive, right next to Fern Knoll Cemetery, itself next to a thick wood that ran behind Ed and Lee Ann’s house into a small vale contiguous with the lower bit of the Misericordia University (then Misericordia College) campus.

I hurriedly pulled into Lee Ann’s driveway and tried to honk the horn of the old truck. But, as not a few other things on this truck, it did not work. So I did what I felt was the only thing to do. I jumped out of the truck cab and ran for the front door of Lee Ann’s house. The door was unlocked, as I knew it would be, and I darted inside, fell prostrate on the floor, and began to howl inconsolably, babbling like an apostle speaking in tongues. With sisterly affection, Lee Ann swooped down on me as she enfolded me in her healing wings and spoke a blessing, if a secular one, over me, Ymdawelu, anwyl (Calm, dear, sister’s here).

Bear Mountain … truck … Daddy … bear … runaway … hit head … blood … hospital … like … big dog, was all I could say; I simply could not form a coherent thought. Then Ed looked out of the front window from their living room, between Lee Ann’s lovely rocker—which to its right had a small but strong coffee table—and the brand new TV, more of a status symbol at that time than an actual entertainment box.

My God, Lee Ann! Ed exclaimed. Harry’s truck is on the lawn. He is getting out of the truck, and he has blood on his head. He’s staggering toward the house.

Don’t just stand there looking out the window! Lee Ann barked, magically metamorphosed from staff medic to sergeant major in the instantly incarnate war zone that lay between living room and front yard. Go help him!

No, I shrieked, donning my role of shell-shocked soldier. You can’t go out there!

Now, now, dear, it will be fine, said Lee Ann, transformed back to a medic. I tried to wiggle out of her grip to stop Ed from going outside, but it was too late. He ran toward Harry and, putting his arm around him, propped him up as he staggered toward the house, as if Ed were a valiant hero rescuing a wounded soldier.

I never knew exactly what happened to the bear, and, despite what I insisted were clear traces of scratch marks on the top of the cab, only Daddy ever really believed that there had been a bear riding in the truck bed. Still, Daddy did not like it said that the bear had taught me to drive; after all, he had packed the picnic and picked the place, for better or worse, to teach me how to drive that old truck.

The credence of my story seemed to grow a year or so later when, at the UGI power plant, my father met and befriended a newly hired worker by the name of Clarence, who was married to a certain Betty. During one of the night shifts that Daddy worked at the plant, Clarence told the story of having once seen a very large dog in a truck riding across Wilkes-Barre that his wife swore was a bear. Further, it was a well-known fact that the Misericordia campus was often visited by black bears (or at least one black bear), and for years after this event Lee Ann found bear tracks in the winter snow of her backyard. It seems fitting that I should here tardily request for myself the indulgent mercy of the Mother Superior of Misericordia, as I was the likely cause of the ruin of many student picnics that over the years were overrun by the bear that taught me how to drive.

2.jpg

This belated appeal to the Mother Superior notwithstanding, it should be clear by now that I have chosen to begin this work as I began life, not like Augustine with some lofty panegyric full of quotes from the Psalms, Great art Thou, Lord, and greatly to be praised, but with an affirmation of the roots of autobiography, not simply to please my pedantic son, Homer, whose penchant for tracing a word’s roots always irritated me not a little, but rather to assert my own view of autonomy, another word whose etymology is telling.

Yet this is not simply my autobiography. Rather, this is the story of a teapot, tea leaves that float around the top of a teacup like chips of a rugged old tree, and a cheese plate, the lustrous face of which looks something like a rabbi, and a frightful one at that. These objects were transported from Wales to Pennsylvania in 1869 in a trunk that served as the family’s covenantal ark from the old country. These are the objects of this story but not the object of this story, which is the journey itself, a journey that began nearly 150 years ago, when life was vastly different, simpler, and purer than today. Purer, except for a war, the second such war in a span of a mere quarter century.

After that war, life began to return to what everyone else seemed to think of as normal. Even the Welsh, naturally circumspect and pessimistic, felt joy, if not precisely irrepressible, as close to that state as the gloomy and nostalgic Welsh allow themselves to get. By the century’s midpoint, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, had become a thriving town, with Wilkes College as its intellectual and even economic hub, though Boston Store, quite near the Wilkes campus, might have made that claim, too. Regionally, it was still the coal industry that drove the economy, though each year that became less and less true.

My father had already left Shaft 17, the only mineshaft recut to accommodate somewhat larger miners, for work in the local power plant known as UGI. Though better than the toil of the mines, his role as a supervisor in the power plant was not an easy one for him, because he had to work evenings, staying up all night and arriving home at 4:30 in the morning, just after his 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. shift had ended. I do not think he slept very much in the late 1950s or at all during the 1960s; still, my father never complained. He retired in the spring of 1972 and lived a full seven years as a pensioner, thoroughly enjoying the time of his retirement as he had thoroughly enjoyed his working life.

For my older sister (Lee Ann) and me, our parents’ goal was that we should have the opportunity to go to Wilkes to study to become teachers. This transpired for Lee Ann in the years just after the war. She finished college three years before I began, having made preparations to teach Latin and English in a local school district, which she did for many years. When, in the fall of 1954, I embarked on what would be a somewhat lengthy college career, I was less sure that I wanted to be the teacher my parents had envisioned, a vision for them born essentially out of the conveniences that a teaching career potentially might provide.

But I get ahead of myself. I was born on August 19, 1936, to two loving, sometimes even doting, parents. Harry, you have already met, and you know my opinion of him. My mother’s name was Blanche, an appellation (like Harry) quite archaic, I imagine, even in her day. Mother was, I always maintained, a little gwallgof (Welsh for batty). I say batty not because we spoke a good bit of Welsh at home—many people spoke Welsh at home without being gwallgof—but because she sometimes did odd things that suggested that she was gwallgof. For example, she frequently would gaze out of the living room window of our home in Kingston, Pennsylvania, and comment quixotically to an imaginary interlocutor about this person’s hat, that one’s gate, another’s attire, yet another’s corpulence. Some days, especially in the spring when the weather might embolden her, she would sit on the front porch and perform this ritual within earshot of the passing pedestrians, though she rarely drew a comment, let alone ire, from any of them. Still, in this way, Mother was gwallgof. She also occasionally read tea leaves, quite against the stipulation of the good Reverend Griffith, who first introduced English into the services of the Gaylord Avenue Welsh Calvinistic Presbyterian (and therefore tautological) Church of nearby Plymouth, Pennsylvania, the church that we attended as early as I can remember.

I was one of four children. Of the lucky two who survived childhood, I was at least as precocious as my sister, Lee Ann. But what miseries did I, ever unruly, undergo in school when I was told that I had to obey my teachers if I should wish to flourish! I was sent to school to get learning, yet I had no idea why I went to school or what value the education itself bore. Thus, I soon found myself placed in a special kindergarten class for the mentally retarded (for what reason, I cannot recall, but Mother always said it had something to do with an IQ test). Eventually promoted to the normal school, I was nearly held back from the first grade because of my inability to focus on the task before me. Even when I was a toddler, my father, Harry, had had to constrain me, like a dog, with a leash. He maintained throughout his life that he did so for my own protection (i.e., from myself), and I understand now why this would have seemed to him a wise course of action. Still, throughout much of my adult life, I was certain that my father actually must have had another motive, though I could never establish one.

My childhood—at least the aspect of it involving the Second World War, the struggle of which touched virtually all of my early days—was chiefly happy. Indeed, it may be that it was happy because of the war. My life, or at least the part of my life of which I have memory, commenced about when the war began, or near that point in time when America’s involvement in the war did. Accordingly, I remember the war well, and, despite my young age, I innately recognized, with judgment more mature than my years, that this was a critical moment for our country and for the world. Nevertheless, I was not particularly afraid. Rather, I grew up boldly hating Hitler and all he stood for. So savage and inhumane was Hitler’s particularly evil brand of inhumanity that the rest of our fallen race had to rethink questions of what constitutes human dignity and what the human race must learn in order to begin the slow movement beyond bigotry and racism.

Our noble war against the Nazi regime taught me also to respect and value other cultures. This I learned to do so precisely because the Germans did not value human life.