Recent Pictures

The pictures in last couple of posts show a person that I didn't really know. Especially the beautiful woman in the portrait pictures. She is a phantom - a dream. Real but not real. Not mine. Below are recent pictures of my wife.





(Shot on our 47th anniversary. Our last trip. We ate at the little place beside the river in Chimney Rock, sitting on the back porch looking out on the boulders in the nearly dry stream bed. We had been here several times before with various family members. Brenda did OK on this trip although the rough-riding Subaru WRX did hurt her back. Note: She carried her portable oxygen tank - along with a lot of other stuff in the big black bag that I got for her at Sharron Luggage a couple of years previous. Finding the right bag was always an issue. I now use the big black bag as my "man" bag - carrying it when I walk to the coffee shop in Mt. Holly and even hiking on Crowder's Mountain.)


(Probably 2007. In Brenda's "office" - one end of Yancie's old bedroom. Brenda liked Solitaire, emails, and doing Google searches. We always got into fights when things screwed up and I tried to explain what was happening or tell her what to do. After she died, I pulled up the old carpet (which she had always wanted me to do), cleared out her stuff and turned this into my bedroom.


(Approx September, 2009 - about three months before she died. She wanted me to take this picture so she could show it to someone the next time she got a haircut, to tell them how to do it. She wasn't entirely happy with this look but figured it was better than some of the other haircuts - she hated the little "twigs" of hair that stuck out from behind her neck and would sometimes get me cut them off. I think she got this last haircut at the Great Clips in Belmont. Afterward we went to the little coffee shop in Belmont. This might have been our last non-doctor related outing.)

Aside - I recently told an older but still pretty woman that someone said she was pretty and she immediately responded in that emphatic way women sometimes have when men fail to see self-evident truths, "That's not important. That changes."

Happy Pictures

Pictures uncovered in most recent attic excavation seem to show happy times. Here are some...


(Toddler pictures, Shelby or Charlotte - early 1940's. In the top picture she is wearing the "didee" that she was reported to have danced off on occasion. Indicating bad habits to come she also is said to have picked up (and eaten) cigarette butts off the sidewalk.)


(Charlotte or Shelby, early 1940's.)


(Finding Easter Eggs - probably Charlotte or Shelby - 1945 - 47.)


(Isabel and Brenda at Lafayette Apts where family lived in mid-late 40's. These were THE apartments in Shelby during that period. I lived on down Lee Street across from Shelby Millwork and thought that apartment life at the Lafayette was exotic. This is where Brenda rode her skates off the porch and got a concussion. About this time Don Gibson was learning to play the guitar across the street. Brenda and I lived in the Lafayette in Fall and Winter of 1961 after getting married in Aug of that year. )


(Shelby 1948 - 1949. Eight and ninth birthdays.)


(Shelby - 1953 - 1954. Brenda is the one with the really short hair. In later years she would not wear anything that revealed her arms.)

Portrait Pictures

Here are proofs from portrait session - probably taken in the late 50's, well into the Fall (when her father's furniture business went bankrupt). I like the proofs better than the picture they finally selected (the one her mother used for our engagement announcement, the one I used for her obituary and in various other places). She was still beautiful in the final picture, but remote, not the way she appears in the smiling picture below. It makes me rethink the period I've been calling the Fall.








(The final selected picture)

Pictures

Again, getting outside the narrative flow of previous posts, I am including some of pictures from current attic foray. And some pictures found earlier.

Click a picture to make it bigger.


(1991, in Phenix City Al at Aunt Margaret's 75th birthday party. Front row L - R Aunt Virginia Parris, Yancie Weathers. Back Row, L - R, Uncle Ken Parris, Uncle Bob Parris, Aunt Margaret Parris Hunt, Tom Weathers, Brenda Weathers. Interesting aside - on this date - March 28, 2010 - only Tom and Yancie remain.)


(1980's. One of our annual trips to Asheboro zoo in early October when we would celebrate Yancie's birthday by meeting my sister (far right), her husband Henry and little Henry - the guy in the red beret. My sister died in 2000.)



(Brenda working in backyard on Gold St - Shelby. She is decorating a concrete parking stop placed there by previous owner, Elva Gheen. Brenda always made do with what was there. Given the cars I'd guess somewhere between 1987 - 1991. )


(More gardening - not sure where, maybe Gold St. Brenda liked Gold St. Never cared for Mt. Holly.)


(In 1956 on porch at Blanton Street. I love this and following two pictures not only because she is especially beautiful - elegant, but because she seems to have a sense of confidence and poise - maybe happiness, that she does not normally display.)


(Almost laughing.)



(Actually laughing - the only picture I know that shows that. I did not know her in 1956 - just of her - although we did meet in 1952. I was in Florida when this picture was shot and even if I had been in Shelby would not have had the guts to approach her. I wonder, was 1956 a good year for her - maybe the last good year for a long time? Or was this moment a fluke. I don't know who the little girl was.)


(Probably on Blanton St in the early 1980's. Despite having to deal with me, this was a good time for Brenda.)


(Early 1990's, Gold St. Frank Hamrick, Margaret Hamrick, Yancie, Brenda. Frank and Margaret were our best friends. We saw them at the Dairy Queen every night and twice on Sunday's. Frank and I had coffee and ran errands every Saturday morning for about 35 years. When he died in 2002 - a few days before Allie was born it was like losing a brother. Brenda seems a little annoyed here. If so, it could be because she didn't like having her picture made. But maybe she isn't annoyed at all and the camera caught her in mid-expression.)


(Sometime between 1987 - 95, walking back or to the Dairy Queen from Gold St. It was about 1.5 miles. We joked about how I would push Brenda's back to help her get up hills. Probably it was the beginning of emphysema. )


(Brenda at the Dairy Queen. Probably in the late 1980's or early 1990's.)


(Brenda and Yancie in front of Webb Chapel in Shelby where Margaret's mother was getting married and where Yancie would get married some years later. Sometime in the 1980's. Brenda is standing in her model's pose one leg and foot held at an angle. Maybe when she was younger this was a conscious act - maybe not. But it wasn't conscious here because she didn't know I was shooting this picture - many pictures of her candid, unplanned shots. She was never at peace with her beauty and would deny it. Maybe being too pretty too soon got her in trouble with the predators who showed up on Blanton St. )


(Another of her model pose pictures. On Blanton street probably in 1953 - 1954 when she was 13 or 14.)


(In 1946 - when she was six. On Thompson Street in Shelby. Her grandmother Lackey's big house is on the left. This is where Brenda would live until 1950 when her grandmother died and she moved back to Blanton St. The smaller house directly behind might have been constructed by one of Brenda's Lackey uncles. )


(Curtis Moser pictures, items. The picture on the right from 1931 was shot during a visit to a relative in Palm Beach. Brenda used to talk about a place named Rey De Tey. The newspaper clipping and the program card pertain to Debutante week in Raleigh in 1932. Curtis escorted Miss Elizabeth Campbell. They were among "six attractive members of the young social contingent in Shelby").


(Curtis and his mother Dora Richardson - probably from the 1930's. She was from the elegant side of the family with Old South connections. The Moser's - according to Brenda, were black sheep Jews - of whom she was very proud.)


(Curtis and Isabel at Chimney Rock NC - in the late 1930's.)


(Curtis and Isabel - maybe in front of house in Charlotte where they lived during early years of WWII - which Brenda remembered as one of the best times of her life.)


(Curtis and Isabel - on Blanton St in Shelby in the mid-1950's. By this time, the Fall was probably already beginning to happen.)


(Isabel's 1935 class picture from Fassifern, a girl's finishing school near Hendersonville NC. It might be just my perception, but she reeks of sensuality and danger. She and Curtis were a match made somewhere other than in heaven.)


(Brenda looks like Isabel here - July 1962, about the time I went in the Army)



(Curtis - probably 1945 in Okinawa where guarded Japanese POWs.)


(Isabel - 1910's)


(Louisiana 1945 - Before going to the Pacific Curtis was stationed in Ft. Polk Louisiana. Brenda and Isabel rode the train from Shelby to Alexandria to visit him.)


(Isabel and baby Brenda. Probably Shelby, 1940 - 1941.)



(Brenda as adolescent and younger. Given that she usually looked older in pictures than she actually was it is hard to say. In a previous move when we were looking at these pictures, she remembered as a little girl hating the curly hair-do in the bottom photo. Her displeasure is apparent in the picture.)

Brenda's Dignity

I was prompted by a conversation with someone to think about Brenda's dignity - so I'll get outside the chronological narrative that I have followed so far and write about that.

Several stories.

Almost every night in Shelby we went to the Dairy Queen to meet friends for coffee. It was our bistro - our neighborhood bar. Yancie grew up there, in the summer playing outside with the owner's children. One night Brenda and I were sitting at the back table waiting for our friends to show up when Dr. Abdul Gangoo walked in the door. I said to Brenda in a voice that was maybe louder than I intended "That's ABDUL GANGOO!". I loved the name. Brenda was afraid that he could hear me (maybe he could) and poked me in the ribs, saying "Shhh - be quiet." Naturally I said it again, this time louder "ABDUL GANGOO - ABDUL GANGOO." He probably did hear me this time. Brenda was enraged. I had violated her sense of proper dignified behavior. (In truth I had probably violated anyone's sense of proper behavior. I am a silly man.)

(This happened more than once.) Brenda and I are in a public place - most likely a restaurant. Brenda sees something interesting over my shoulder. Whispering she tells me about it but warns me not to turn around because I tend to stare, to gawk. She is much more dignified, able to gather everything in a single surreptitious glance. I by implication am a mouth breather and drooler. Later when both of us start to have trouble hearing she passes me notes describing human oddities I am not allowed to stare at.

(This also happened more than once.) It is in the summer in a car with no air conditioning. We are going somewhere where appearance matters. Brenda wants to keep the windows up because the wind will mess up her hair. But I am hot. We compromise by finding a combination of up and down windows that provides a bit of breeze without disrupting the hair she labored over for half an hour and is still not happy with. It is a matter of dignity - although on the way home, she smiles and lets her hair blow free.

Years ago, Brenda said that her dignity would probably kill her and toward the end acknowledged that it probably had. This had to do with the fact that she did not like being seen without her clothes - even or maybe especially by a doctor. She went for years without having a physical exam. A PAP smear was impossible. I think she was ashamed of her body - I don't know why. She was always thin, with an elegant sort of Audrey Hepburn figure. (When she caught me gawking at more endowed women, she would often hiss, "Well why don't you go get yourself some maruska?" - which was her term for larger women.)

When I was a young man and even more ignorant than I am now I tried to change her - imagining if only I could release the wild sprite I knew was inside her - what a treasure I would have - not aware of or accepting what I did have.

Not two months before she died, she acknowledged that she sometimes regarded smiling and laughing as being undignified. I was amazed that there were still secrets and revelations.

From High School To First Jobs

This covers the period from 1958 until February or March 1961 - when she was working at the place where she would spend the rest of her life - and when I came on the scene.

Brenda wanted to go off to school - perhaps to one of the all-girl schools like Peace and maybe study design. She always had a flair for design (so did her father); when she was young she liked to draw dresses. Later in our own houses she made design projects out of various rooms. It was a running joke that she would sacrifice practicality for appearance. Statuary always decorated (and blocked) doorways. (Her modesty regarding her talent was extreme. She claimed to be retarded and liked to tell stories about how her father and other people would criticize her dress designs - calling them impractical.)

With Curtis’ business fully on the skids by now there wasn’t money to send Brenda off to school so she went Howard’s Business College in Shelby to learn how to be a secretary. I don’t know who paid for this - but I think her father managed to scrape up the money.

Howard’s was a small place that did not exist for too long. It was managed (owned?) by Hemon (sp?) Carpenter, the brother of Brenda’s boyfriend Jerry. I think Brenda went there for a year - maybe two. She took various business-related courses, including psychology. She liked the school and got along well with her classmates. It is my impression that she actually enjoyed hanging around the break room with other students drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and listening to bawdy stories told by some of the older women (Randy Logan, a famously wild woman from that era might have been a student at that time.)

Either during or shortly after Howard’s, Brenda worked part-time for her father as a secretary.

Her first full-time job was with a company called Woodward Warren. It was a commercial refrigeration company located in an old building somewhere downtown, maybe on DeKalb street near the First Baptist Church. Brenda said that the main office was in Charlotte and that owner opened this branch so that he could be near his girlfriend who evidently lived in Shelby. Brenda didn’t have much to do. She fed pork rinds to the rats who eventually became half-tame. She especially liked one black and white rat. Sometimes her mother would stay with her and feed the rats.

Her second job, the one that would last a lifetime was as a secretary with the local Right-of-Way branch of the Highway Department. She started sometime in the Spring of 1960, near her birthday on May 1st - when she became 20 years old. She stayed there until 2004.

I am not sure how she got the job. I think maybe Hilton Eades, the man who would become her first boss, called Howard’s and asked for a recommendation. From the beginning Eades treated her as more than a secretary. He taught her about reading plans - how the process worked. The job became Brenda’s refuge and salvation - in some respects, her life.

I am not sure where Jerry Carpenter - her boyfriend - was in all this. Her got a baseball scholarship to Carolina but was required to work in the school cafeteria to help pay expenses. He could not bear to serve food to the “rich kids” and quit. By the time I came on the scene in February or March of 1961 he was in the Army. At some point he had asked Brenda to marry him and she had refused. She never was exactly clear about their status when I called. But it was my understanding that they were no longer together. I don’t know - never thought to ask - who broke up with whom. Possibly it was he who gave up on her. Brenda tended not to initiate major moves - life happened to her, not the other way around.

Through High School

This covers the period from 1950 - when Brenda moved back to Blanton Street after her grandmother died until 1958, when she graduated from Shelby High School. It was during this period that the Third Fall occurred, when her father’s business failed and the drinking (both his and Isabel’s) got much worse.

I’ll organize this section by school years - grammar, junior high, high school.

Grammar School Years

I think Brenda was happy enough in grammar school, from 1946 until 1952. She had friends; she played with other children. The only story I know is the one when she was going to Graham Elementary school which was located beside the house on Blanton Street. Bessie, the black woman who worked at her house would walk up from their yard to the playground and admonish Brenda about things. Perhaps Brenda would be out playing without a coat and Bessie would waddle up and yell, hands on hips, (in front of all the other children) “Brendlen Moses - you put your coat on!”. (There are other Bessie stories - like the one about the time the family returned home to hear splashing coming from the back of the house. Bessie, who didn’t have a bathroom, was taking a bath.)

I remember more stories now....

Brenda hated green beans and would hide them under her dress - actually sit on them. I think somebody - maybe Bessie - made her eat the green beans she had been sitting on.

The family had a parakeet named Pretty Boy. He either got loose or was allowed to fly free in the house. Once sitting in a chair in the living room, Brenda felt something beneath her. It was Pretty Boy. Smothered. She shrieked and flung the lifeless bird across the room.

Junior High Years

Things went downhill in the Junior High years, from 1952 until 1954. Her father’s business started to go bad. She became physically mature. Her parent’s drinking got worse. Predatory drunks and sexual deviants started to hang around the house. I don’t know what happened but I am pretty sure that something did and that is scarred her. There is a picture of her sunbathing with her friend Janice in the back yard. The girls are about 13 years old. Both are wearing shorts and halter tops. It looks as if Brenda has stuffed something (tissue paper?) in her top to make her breasts look bigger. Sometime later she scratched angry pencil marks over her breasts.

(It was during this time that we first met - maybe 1952. It was a Saturday afternoon Pete Panther and I were on the steps in front of the Junior High School - near downtown. Carol Moser and a slightly younger girl walked by. Carol, Pete and I were classmates; Pete and I halfheartedly vied for her attention. I am pretty sure the younger girl was Brenda, Carol’s first cousin. I expect they had been to a movie and were walking back to Brenda’s house on Blanton Street. I remember that the other girl was pretty and reserved. If the word had been in my vocabulary I would have said that she was exquisite. When asked years later neither Carol nor Brenda remembered the encounter so I could be making the whole thing up. But I don’t think so.)

Janice lived across the street. She and Sarah Blanton who also lived across the street were Brenda’s best friends. Brenda would accompany Jancie and her family on Sunday afternoon drives. Jancie’s father droved slowly and the girls (maybe just Jancie) would make squealing noises when he went around curves. There was no need to make squealing noises with Curtis - he always drove like a bat of hell.

Brenda said that she hated Junior High School but never elaborated too much - although she did say that she despised gym class - especially the blue shorts and tops they were made to wear (although that might have been in high school). I am sure Brenda did not hate gym because she was incompetent. She had good reflexes and balance and could catch better than I could (although that was not a great feat).

A story from the junior high or early high school period...

A couple times each year Curtis and Isabel would go to big furniture shows in High Point. They left Brenda home with a woman named Mrs. Oleary. During one of these trips Brenda manged to consume nothing but black walnut cookies and a drink called Hemo(?). After a week or so of this she became so constipated that she had to be taken to the hospital (managed then by her Uncle Bob Moser) for an enema. They told her it was like having a baby.

High School Years

Although things were no better at home during the high school years (1954 - 1958), it is my impression that she might have handled the situation better. Then again, maybe not. At least she contrived a style and a way of being that expressed who she was.

I went to Shelby High my freshman and junior years. I remember Brenda from my junior year. She was a weird beautiful girl with short blond hair who always wore black and never looked at anybody. She was at the same time scared, scornful and proud. Once she fell down the concrete stairs at school and bloodied her head. She did not seek help - I don’t know if any was offered. She walked from school downtown to her father’s business. I either saw the incident or imagined that I did - possessed by an image of her blond hair plastered in blood and her face filled with shame and pain. We had no contact at all in that time. Of course everybody knew her or knew of her. I even had some small notoriety due to the James Dean resemblance. Brenda said that she and Janice sometimes walked behind me going home from school and Janice had to be restrained from coming up and saying something to me. (That must have been after my mother died and we living in the duplex that had been created from the old Elk’s club. Sometimes I walked home at lunch to grill a baloney and cheese sandwich.)

Brenda was pursued by various brave guys in school and was eventually captured by one (not me - I was not that brave then). She usually walked home (about 1/3 mile) to Blanton Street, rain or shine and several guys tried to give her a ride when the weather was bad. One of them, David Rose, was at the reception after Brenda died and he told me the story of his encounter with her. Another one was Bob Childers, a dark handsome fellow who drove a James Dean style 1950 Mercury coupe (when I drove at all it was my dad’s 1950 Ford sedan). Brenda grudgingly admitted that she liked his looks - but I am not sure she got into the car with him. David said that she did get in his car bit didn’t say anything. Just sat there. However he did recount that they both were involved in some sort of required/volunteer activity after school and that they did talk then and that she was pleasant.

Although she went out on a couple of dates with Morris Page and Harold Dobbins she was eventually won by Jerry Carpenter. Another darkly handsome fellow, he was a star athlete and a somewhat renown fighter - not a bully but certainly a tough guy. They went together for maybe two years in high school and then for a couple of years afterward. If girls are supposed to marry men that remind them of their fathers then Brenda should have married Jerry. Not only was he dark like Curtis, he was troubled. I am sure that she loved him. She probably continued to love him in the way that we do with people from our past. I don’t know too much about their relationship. He was fully involved in the school and would attempt to drag her along on some of the activities in which he was required to participate. She might have even attended some of them. I believe she actually appeared in a fancy dress as his homecoming attendant. However I don’t think she went the Junior-Senior dance. She told me that they fought a lot, but I got the impression they were good fights. She also said that he looked after her on some of the bad nights on Blanton Street. She went to his house and ate dinner with his family. She said that his mother cooked good little biscuits.

The rest of this time is a collection of odd snippets. She and Jerry double-dated with another football player and Libby Haynes - who was the star beauty of that class. Brenda and her cousin Marlene Moser got drunk and so disgusted Jerry that he left them to their own devices. The beautician who died Brenda’s hair blonde experimented with a new color which left Brenda with lavender hair. Curtis made her walk back across town in this condition to get her hair dyed back to its previous blond color. Brenda said that peroxide was required and that after the procedure her hair was like straw. Brenda, Jerry and some others went to Charlotte to see black rock and roll musicians perform. Brenda told somebody that one of the performers reminded her of Kathleen Crow, the Spanish teacher. Mrs. Crow though it was funny and teased Brenda about it.