In Pursuit of Dreams: A Memoir

By Joan Zumwalt

Love and life can come in many different, wondrous forms, and it is our dreams that help shape the contours of that lifes journey. Yet, while often a life can be defined by mistakes, illness, guilt, and blame--or perhaps just by the slow unfolding of its everyday comings and goings--a life can also be made alive by the triumphs of those vivid, powerful moments where our dreams and our lives come together in beautiful, inspiring stories.

In Pursuit of Dreams is an engaging memoir of a womans life not focused on the mistakes and the lows but on the dreams and on the lifetime of overcoming the challenges that stood in the way. From compelling, sensitive stories about dogs, cats, horses and other animals that have enriched her life to tales from working in a mental hospital, living in Mexico, teaching, building a house, and shooting a bear in self-defense, author Joan Zumwalt provides a window into her journey of life and love in all its intertwining complexity.

A full life can inspire us to share the dreams and the realities of our journey, with the hope and the promise that those close to us and those who come after can learn from them and be inspired to live a life just as fulfilled. A reader may even be inspired to write his or her own memoir, story by story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jun 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781480832220

Joan Zumwalt

Joan Zumwalt has taught in three Arizona colleges, lived in five states and Mexico and traveled to over fifty countries and forty-six states. She lives in quiet seclusion in southern Oregon with her husband and new best friend, Dood.

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© 2016 Joan Zumwalt.

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.

Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

All rights reserved.

Archway Publishing

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

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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.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-3221-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-3223-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-3222-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016908719

Print information available on the last page.

Archway Publishing rev. date: 07/21/2016

Contents

Dedication

Caveat Emptor

I Colorado

Early Memories

Brother

School Days

Animal Stories

Teen Years

The Girl Who Cried Bear

State Hospital

II Mexico

Just Exploring

Night Train to Oaxaca

El Santuario de Atotonilco

The End of an Era

Larga Distancia

Kindness of Strangers

Bell Song

III Arizona

Adventures in Real Estate

Heart

The Highest Bid

More Animal Stories

Dogs I Have Killed

The Words Come

Building a House

Storm

Three Gifts

Advice from the Stoics

East Pocket Lookout

Heart Attack

Our Bed is Flat

Advice from Thoreau

Bad Rep

IV Life Stories

Cleanliness is Next to …Rudeness?

My Writing Life

The Gifter

Bicycle Mishaps

Place with a View

My Hair Piece

Always Horses

Insomniac’s Daydreams

Happily Ever After

My Musical Career

Faking It

Terrible Awful Horrible No-Good Bosses

Frugality

Volunteering

Accidents Happen

Just One of Those Days

More Animals

Full Circle

The following were published, in some form:

Lesson in Love in Good Housekeeping, anthologized by Paulist Newman Press

Clancy, Gweenie The Gifter and One of Those Days in Grants Pass Daily Courier

Larga Distancia and East Pocket Lookout in Rogue’s Gallery

The Words Come in Oregon State Poetry Association’s anthology Verseweavers

Storm in University of Colorado’s Riverrun

Always Horses in Thirteen Poetry Magazine

Dedication

For my daughters Jolie and Janelle who have always motivated me and for Mark whose love and patience sustain me.

There is only way to avoid criticism: Do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Aristotle

Caveat Emptor

You should know what you’re getting into here. First, this isn’t an autobiography starting with the day I was born and continuing until I finish writing or my death, whichever comes first. That reminds me of a saying my grandmother Walters often repeated that has been a solace in tough times. From the day of your birth ‘til you ride in the hearse, there’s nothing so bad but what it might have been worse.

This is also not what I have heard called an illness memoir. I don’t care to elaborate on nor do you need to be dragged through my leg and foot pain since a varicose vein surgery in 1970, a mild stroke, double bypass heart surgery and multiple emergency care treatments for severe asthma attacks. I have also suffered from a herniated lower back disc over the years and tinnitus since 1984, a constant high-pitched screech that makes talking on the telephone even more difficult added to my long-standing dislike of phone conversations. Boring already! Concentrating on problems only magnifies them.

Nor is this a poor me story. Gordon, my first husband, was addicted to prescription drugs after back surgery, with me defending, enabling and rationalizing, then hiding drugs, enduring the broken promises, embarrassment, and OD fears. He held a job less than four years of the fourteen we were together, spent us close to bankruptcy, and had several accidents that required more treatment and medications. Also, I was raped twice within a couple of years when I was a single woman with two young daughters, both incidents possibly averted but for my frantic efforts to protect my girls. There’s nothing so bad but what it might have been worse. Millions of men and women have suffered through those traumas and worse. You won’t read details about those experiences, though I reserve the right to whine a bit.

This is also not a tell all narrative detailing my many mistakes, airing all my dirty laundry and spreading blame. Although I understand that some people find solace in reliving difficult situations, illness, conflicts or mistakes of judgement and others enjoy reading about ultimate triumph over difficulties, that’s a minor part of my story.

I’m not including much about my grandparents or my parents, who pursued their own dreams. They deserve volumes and I did help Mother and Dad write brief memoirs before they died. My daughters Jolie and Janelle have played a huge role in my life decisions, but I mostly exclude them and grandchildren from these pages. They deserve not to be embarrassed in any way by me and may someday choose to write their own stories. I have changed names to protect any person who might be offended or harmed by what I have written.

So if this isn’t primarily about family or illness or revenge or confession or poor me, what have I to offer? First, many stories about dogs, cats, horses, and other animals that have enriched my life. It’s about working in a mental hospital with difficult challenges, about living in Mexico, teaching, shooting a bear in self- defense and building a house. There are speeches I have given, and implied advice (free, for what it’s worth). It’s about overcoming lack of money and education to achieve beyond expectations. It’s also about love in all its complexities.

You may think these pieces seem to have been written by different people. You’re right. They were written by a stressed debt-ridden young mother and by a financially secure retiree. They were written over a period of fifty years, some polished for possible publication, others dashed off for the entertainment of relatives and friends. Some pieces may look like poems, but please don’t let that deter you from reading them.

My hope is that someday a great grandchild may want to explore his or her ancestry and will treasure this as I have enjoyed learning about my forbears and reading my grandmother’s poetry.

Like anyone writing about the past, I must give two warnings: first that dialogue is necessarily reconstructed in the spirit of what was said and second, these are my memories. I have staged an incident in communication skills classes where someone barges into the classroom, we exchange a few heated works and the intruder rushes out. Ten students will have ten different versions of exactly what happened, appearance of the intruder, and other details. As to distant events, have you ever compared memories with someone else who was there? Barbara Kingsolver in Animal Dreams writes, Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

I

COLORADO

Early Memories

jpeg1.jpg

My parents Robert and Marilyn Walters, 1937

My most vivid early memory is too painful to start with, so let me begin where I began. I was born on Christmas Day and my parents considered naming me something reflective of the day like Merry Carol or Christine Noel. Thankfully they chose a more ordinary name: Ruth Joan. Just a little problem—they intended me to be called Jo Ann.

When they brought me home from the hospital in Denver Mother said she kept me in the little hospital-issue box on the oven door of the wood-burning cook stove to keep me warm. We lived in eastern Colorado on my grandfather Walters’ homestead until I was five.

Dad often said, You remember that, don’t you? even though I would have been practically a toddler. He claimed to remember things from earliest childhood and perhaps he did, since he had a remarkable memory for people and could still recite hundreds of lines of poetry when he was nearly ninety.

Not me. I have exactly two memories of those years on the inhospitable plains. One was of a toy rubber elephant, a flat reddish creature apparently made by cutting and stitching an old hot water bottle into the shape of an elephant and stuffing it. The other was of a hot summer day, me barefoot, wearing a thin dress, bouncing on the warm metal seat of a piece of machinery not far from the house. Mounted on a heavy spring, the seat was rounded to fit a large behind with holes the size of quarters to help ventilate it. I was bouncing up and down, up and down, when I heard a buzzing and looked down. There beneath me was a coiled rattlesnake shaking its rattles in warning.

Years later I asked Mother about those memories and she didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. Other early memories I know we shared. When we moved to the ranch on Garfield Creek in western Colorado the previous owners kept some things stored in an upstairs locked room for a time. At the top of the stairs was Mother’s sewing room with the treadle machine set up below the south windows. Two large bedrooms with oversize closets took up most of that floor, with another narrow room, sloping from eight feet ceiling to child height, the locked store room.

I had never encountered a locked room and every day I peered through the large keyhole. Mostly I could glimpse a jumble of boxes, some stacked on a low chest or a table, an occasional dash of color and was that a doll? A very large doll perched on a box? A curve of ivory cheek, a speck of blue, maybe a little foot sticking out. Over and over I turned the big brass knob, pulled and rattled, and one day I took Mother’s good sewing scissors, stuck a blade in the keyhole and twisted hard. You can guess what happened. About an inch of the tip broke off. I hid the scissors deep in one of the little sewing machine drawers.

When the previous owners came to clear out their things, I was on their heels, no doubt in their way the whole time. And wonder of wonders – they gave me three things: a red heart-shaped box with a fake rose on the top, a small black plastic (celluloid?) box and….the big beautiful doll! Her face and hands and feet were pinkish, china-like, her body was stuffed cloth and she had real hair. She wore pantaloons, a white dress, a blue velvet cape with gold satin lining and soft moccasins with beading. She was big enough to wear some of my baby clothes Mother had saved. I felt so lucky.

Another, most vivid memory, is one I’ve tried to erase my whole life.

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Robert and me, age 3 and 5

Brother

I.

In memory it remains a tall gaunt house

paint-peeled and skeletal in Colorado dusk,

the house of my aunt and uncle whose ranch adjoined

ours over what we called The Burma Road.

When we went to visit that summer evening

my cousins and I crept up their shadowy stairs

as usual leaving the adults to their talk

of crops and prices, politics and religion.

I felt the small pinprick of fear in the storeroom

piled with castoffs and clothes, the jumbled delight

of children playing grownup in kerosene light

flickering and flaring shapes into unspeakable monsters.

Dick plucked the cowboy suit, toy gun and holster.

I hesitated one breath before I grabbed

the blue satin blouse, scrambling with Betty

for our favorite gypsy costume.

My small fear was forgotten in the ritual

of pirate and cowboy and princess

while downstairs the voices droned slower

with the lethargy following a hard day’s work.

Then eager for new identities we dug deeper

into boxes and bags flinging things helter-skelter

and at my feet fell something soft and stiff

a small red snow suit

    blood-stained

    a darker red-on-red

II.

I could make up what happened next –

I screamed, my mother came running

to comfort me

The fact is that I remember only

something like a chill wind, the scent of

musty walls falling away into abyss

Years later when I tried to tell my mother

she said it couldn’t be true

her eyes filled with such disbelief and sudden

tears that I changed the subject

shaken in my own memory.

III.

This I know.

A tombstone in a high windy

cemetery above new Castle

confirms the truth of it.

I would be six on Christmas day.

my grandmother, my teacher, lay ill in our house

when my mother and my brother Robert

and I set out in the old dump truck

over The Burma Road to haul potatoes

my father was helping my uncle to dig.

I was sitting in the middle.

Robert, soon-to-be-four, bouncing

beside me in his red snowsuit.

And he was gone, the big truck door

swinging open in the bitter winter wind.

Before I could leap from the open door

Mother was out and held him in her arms

bleeding

the tread of the truck across his chest

bleeding

scarlet on the new-fallen snow.

Tell Grandmother she said before she sped

up The Burma Road to my father and the hospital

leaving me in the snow

with the sky falling

on my shoulders.

I ran from the blood toward the wide

white porch past the Christmas tree already

laden with gifts for the two of us

upstairs to my grandmother’s room where

I told her something.

IV.

I was young.

I soon forgot my brother

as we must all forget our dead

to go on living.

Except when we opened Christmas gifts –

mine in red tissue paper, his in blue

and Mother packed his, still wrapped,

in the box with his clothes and toys.

And when Mother finally opened his gifts –

blue fuzzy slippers identical to my pink ones

now worn and dirty. Blue mittens

just like my red one –the mate was lost.

And other Christmases when my gifts

were a John Deere tractor with a disc

and plow, a little train with a figure

eight track and later a basketball.

And often when I crept into the dim closet

under the eaves and saw the lavender-foil box

crammed with cards embossed with crosses

and black-inked messages I couldn’t bear to read.

And other Christmases when silence fell

brittle in the midst of laughter

and at my uncle’s house that summer night,

the last time my cousins and I played dress up.

I don’t remember where Robert and I slept before. In fact I remember nothing about him before the accident. My memory was wiped clean. But oh how I missed him! The narrow former store room became my bedroom with my bed filling the end by the window. The room didn’t have carbide lights like the rest of the house, so I had a small kerosene lamp that hung on the wall. That little light was dim and flickery and I hated to go into the room at night.

At the other end of the room was a three feet tall door leading to storage under the whole length of the eaves. There were boxes of my old Wee Wisdom magazines and later American Girl Magazine. Robert’s clothes were there for a time, and a silvery-lavender stationary box crammed with letters of condolence. In the daytime with a flashlight I could barely see the end of that dark closet, but then it turned left and went on and on and who knew where it ever ended.

I would turn off the little lamp and lie down facing that horrid brown door expecting something to burst out of it at any minute. Almost asleep, I would jerk awake, sure I heard something. Sometimes it was Mother and Dad reading to each other in the living room and I could sit on a top step, around the bend out of sight and listen.

Better yet, in winter heavy drapes were pulled across the steps about three quarters of the way down, and I could sit behind them and hear very well and peek out at Mother and Dad besides. Sometimes they read from books I didn’t understand and sometimes from the Saturday Evening Post, maybe a Horatio Hornblower story I understood a few words of. When I learned to read, I spent hours with a flashlight under the covers, devouring the words, avoiding sleep.

If night was my enemy, mornings were just as bad. At 5 A.M. week day or weekend, summer or winter, Dad would call up the stairs, Time to get up. Rise and shine! How I hated that. I was sleeping soundly. I was tired, far from ready to get up. And for what? I never had to do anything but get dressed until after breakfast. That’s not the only thing that made me angry. I discovered quite young that I had a space between my front teeth wide enough to drive a truck through, I thought. I had never seen such a deformity and I kept my mouth closed as much as possible and never smiled in pictures. Then Dad would ask, Why the long face?

How I wanted to retort, I got it from you. I wish I had a nice little round face like Mother, but no, I had to get your long face. I see from photos that he got his long face from his father, and my other grandfather had a long face too. That was no consolation at all. My Uncle Mark used to say that the main requirement to be a Walters was you had to be ugly.

One other early memory happened the summer before I was to start school when the skin and flesh was ripped from ankle bone to sole of my right foot when I stuck it into the spokes of a speeding bicycle. I’ll tell that in a later story.

School Days

When I was five, Grandmother Walters was my first teacher in the upper Garfield one-room school. She was living with us then and we rode horseback together. My cousins Betty and Dick rode over the hill from their ranch on Alkali Creek. I’ve joked that at recess we could play cowboys and Indians on real horses. I remember in winter an older student would pull us little ones from our horses and lead them back to a shelter.

Grandma would have started a fire in the big stove, surrounded by a pressed metal outer shell so we couldn’t get burned on the hot stove. She would soon have a basin of lukewarm water for us to safely warm our frozen fingers. Writing was never required during the first part of the school day in winter.

The next year school was moved to the lower school house. Where school was held depended on where the most students lived on the crick. A rancher near the school had a vacant bunkhouse Grandma rented that year, and she walked along with me riding Queenie. For reasons unknown, Grandma taught in another country school when I was in third grade. I wrote about that experience in an article published in Good Housekeeping and anthologized in a textbook published by Paulist/Newman Press. I called it Lesson in Love. Here is a version of that story.

Among my Christmas decorations is an old snowflake ornament, which never fails to bring tears to my eyes. It always reminds me of a Christmas from my childhood, a memory bittersweet, as Christmas memories sometimes are. I still remember clearly that snowy December night many years ago when I stuck out my tongue at my grandmother and she cried. It was my first hint of the complexities of love.

My grandmother Walters was a strong pioneering woman who had received her teaching certificate from a normal school in Iowa when she was still a teen-ager. She was a kind but firm teacher who expected the best from her students, and I wanted to be a teacher just like her when I grew up. Widowed for many years, she sometimes lived with us, and she was my teacher for first and second grades at the little school on Garfield Creek near our ranch in Colorado. Then the country schools in our area were consolidated, and I would have to ride the bus to New Castle.

One late summer day Grandma told us, with blue eyes twinkling behind her rimless glasses. I have a contract to teach at Dry Hollow this year. I looked hopefully from my father to my mother to my grandmother. Then she said, Would you like to live there with me? I was too happy to answer.

So that winter I lived with my grandmother in a little partitioned-off corner of the school on Elk Creek called Dry Hollow. Our room was just big enough for a bed, a small table and two chairs, a two-burner kerosene stove and the orange crate where we kept our clothes. Dad and Mother usually came to take us home for weekends, but the ranch was over twenty miles of winding mountain road away, and sometimes heavy snow made the trip impossible.

On the Friday before Christmas vacation, the snowflakes began falling early in the afternoon, and the gravel road in front of the school was soon covered with snow. Arthur, the school clown, started one of his hiccupping spells. Grandma’s frown silenced him. I squirmed in my seat. She turned, lips compressed into a disapproving line, and came to inspect the composition I was writing.

A spit wad flew across the room as Grandma returned to her desk. She looked at each of her dozen students ranging from first through eighth grades and smoothed her starched cotton dress. I realize this is the last day of school before Christmas vacation, she said. That’s no excuse for misbehavior. She took off her glasses and wiped them with an embroidered handkerchief plucked from the neck of her dress. She walked to the blackboard, wrote in her meticulous script, Merry Christmas, then turned with a hint of smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. If there are no more disruptions, you may leave ten minutes early."

That’s what we had been waiting to hear. The only sound was the crackling of the fire and the scratching of pencils on paper. I stared at the blackboard. Merry Christmas. I was assaulted by memories and expectations which blocked out the schoolroom and the snow outside.

A tall pine in the living room of our spacious ranch house. Me standing on the ornate iron grill of the furnace floor vent, looking at the fragrant branches sheltering bright mysteries shrouded in red and green. Standing with the warm air puffing my skirt out, smelling roasting turkey and plum pudding, hearing Silent Night on the phonograph.

As the other students bundled up to leave, shouting Christmas greeting on their way out, I stood silently by a window. The big snowflakes were falling faster, hanging heavy on the tree branches, cloaking the fence posts. I could barely keep the tears choked back. We won’t be able to get home tonight, I thought,