Saturday, June 19, 2010
The real and present Dry Flat world
Pauline Barker Vincent
(right), visiting here with Jo Shrader, is at age 97 Dry Flat’s senior
former student and senior former teacher.
Up at 5 Friday to turn the oven
on and bake, part of a commitment to the Dry Flat country school
reunion, I got to thinking about thunderstorms four ovenloads later ---
about 7. Sun was streaming through the east kitchen window, but these
are unsettled times weatherwise down here and I wanted a little
reassurance.
NBC’s “Today” show, when I
turned the TV on to check the forecast, was broadcasting live from the
new Wizarding World of Harry Potter amusement park in Orlando --- a
Universal Studios bid to capture tourist dollars by recreating the Harry
Potter movie sets, actualizing a fictional world in which refugees from
the real world can with the swipe of a credit card find diversion,
maybe even fleeting solace, in something that has never been, is not now
and never will be.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have
anything against the Harry Potter books (sorry, but I’ve not read them)
or Wizarding World exactly --- and I have watched a couple of the
movies. They came my way last winter in a temporary DVD swap with
friends.
But aren’t we’re increasingly
overlooking the real magic --- sitting across the room, just outside the
door or a short walk or drive away --- and becoming too reliant for
solace on the illusion of magic in places like Orlando or inside the
boxes that house our computers, televisions and other purveyors of stuff
that looks real and sometimes seems that way, but isn’t? I suppose
that’s better than drugs or strong drink, however ….
+++
I see as much with my mind’s eye
rather than through my glasses these days when driving east out of
Chariton for a couple of miles on U.S. 34, then south on the Transformer
Road across the Chariton River bottoms to the Lucas-Wayne county line:
Places that used to be and people who used to live in places that still
are. I know where at least two of the houses still standing along that
road, built elsewhere to house members of my own family and then moved
over here, came from; and see clear as day the old May place --- a
mansion on the prairie that marched in tandem with one of southern
Iowa’s biggest barns. Both now gone entirely.
Turn left a little beyond the
county line and into the driveway at Dianne (Vincent) and Harold
Mitchell’s place. If you think Sunnyslope Church of Christ when you read
“Dianne and Harold” you’re on the right track.
Their house was built by
Dianne’s father, Howard, for Wayne and Ethyle Cummins and their
daughters, Karen and Sharon. Sharon is the only Cummins left now and it
is real magic when she walks through the door because she looks exactly
like her mother, my first and one of my best teachers --- at Dry Flat.
We’ve all been stumbling while matching names to the faces of the 50 or
so assembled just because we don’t see each other frequently and the
years remold us. But not with Sharon. No confusion there.
Pauline Barker Vincent, at 97
Dry Flat’s senior student and senior former teacher, has not changed a
bit in my eyes or to my ears either, although her son, Jacob, with more
stomach than I'd anticipated and an unfamiliar white beard, confused me
momentarily. He preaches way down in Harlingen, Texas, however ---
about as far south as you can get and still be in Texas --- so I hadn’t
seen him in years.
Pauline still lives where she
grew up and where she raised her children up the road from Dry Flat. I
don’t want to overdo this because I know it will get back to her, but
she is one of the few people I’ve known who embody grace plain and
simple. And I’m not sure she realizes just how much that means to those
of us who are not related to her but remember and/or know her.
She also is one of the few
people left around here with whom I can talk meaningfully about my late
Aunt Mary, her high school friend, and my late mother, who although a
little younger shared room-and-board with Pauline in Chariton back in
the days of the late 1920s and early 1930s when kids from the deep
country quite often boarded in town during the high school week before
the days of fast cars, good roads and school buses capable of covering
lots of miles quickly.
Ron Christiansen prepares to
head out with the second of two hayrack full of Dry Flatters. Harold
Mitchell, driver for the first hayrack, is at left in the background.
Since I didn’t mean to go on and
on here, I’d better pick up speed just as Friday did. After we’d
gathered Friday morning, many of us piled onto two hayracks (ok, some of
us didn’t pile, we carefully ascended portable steps) for the trip
behind vintage John Deere and Allis Chalmers tractors piloted by Harold
Mitchell and Ron Christensen a mile down the road to see the remains of
old Dry Flat, converted to a hay shed after the school closed in 1958
and it and the acre that surrounded it reverted by deed covenant to the
Vincent farm. In deference to my dad, who didn’t think much of green, I
rode behind orange.
Jacob Vincent acted as tour guide on our hayrack as we headed toward Dry Flat. Note the beard. When did that white happen?
The sky was the amazing part of
that trip as clouds gathered in the west and northwest. There were those
who thought we wouldn’t make it without getting very wet and others who
made insensitive jokes about the headlines we would generate if
accurately-aimed bolts of lightning picked us off, but we made it.
Headed back, the wind shifted abruptly and a hot morning turned almost
chilly as we watched the clouds circle away leaving us dry and safe and
windblown, awed by the spectacle out there under that big sky.
Dry Flat, converted to a hay
shed, doesn't look like much now, but those of us who attended school
there see it from an entirely different perspective.
After that an
old-fashioned potluck lunch (official because both Jello and
olive-and-pimento loaf were among the offerings), more visiting and a
program before we scattered at 2 p.m.
Jake gives the Cox brothers,
who had to head back into Corydon, a preview of the slide show that
will be a part of the afternoon program as Dale Cottrell looks on.
At an event like this, tears can
be a sign of success --- and there were some of those. Sharon generated
a few just by looking so much like her mother and being so gracious
about whose daughter she was. Memories of absent friends did, too. My
goodness. My classmate Marilyn (Nickell) Gibbs should and would have
been here had death not intervened; so would Linda Mae Allard, neighbor
and friend. And many others.
But the thing about it was that
it all was real, happening in the here and now in a real place in the
real world. And I’ll bet there are those who would have paid the price
of a Wizarding World ride to cruise down gravel with us on a hayrack
behind a vintage tractor chased by that gathering storm.
The memories may have been just
memories, but they were of real people and real places and real events
that helped shape real lives in what sometimes seems almost another
world, although it was real, too. When in less hurried and troubled
times innocence lasted longer and children could, if circumstances were
right, be shielded lovingly from many of the world’s woes until they had
gained the strength needed to go out into it. It was real magic. I’m
amazed at how fortunate we were to live it.
Just visiting was a major part of Friday’s Dry Flat country school reunion.
+++
Later in the day with clouds
gathering in the west and north again we opened the imaginary gates at 6
for the historical society’s arts and crafts fair on our hilltop in
west Chariton --- nothing magical about the event either really, but
unfolding magic none-the-less for those of us involved in organizing it
and watching now.
The exhibitors were
enthusiastic, the crowd steady, the food good and the music outstanding.
I’d never expected to see fully-grown adults dance down the driveway
toward the patio, but there it was live and in living color to music by
Adam Barr on trumpet with his small ensemble of Nancy Courter on
keyboard and Steve Scott on drums. The barbershop quartet Boys Night Out
was just as good.
The nature of the crowd was the
exceptional thing because historical societies have troubles attracting
younger people. But here were whole families just roaming around
enjoying themselves --- even a few bands of kids on their own just like
in the good old less dangerous days. I got a kick out of hearing the
ringleader of one of these groups, all of 8, reminding her four or five
younger charges as they made their way down the path toward the log
cabin laden with hot dogs, chips and lemonade --- “now remember we can’t
go in there with food.” Our chief distributor of programs, age 7
perhaps and the grandson of the board secretary and one of the
exhibitors, did his job far more effectively than any of us several
times his age would have done.
We closed at 7:30 and just after
the last guests had reached their cars parked for blocks in all
directions and all but a couple of the exhibitors had packed up and
driven away, the skies opened and then the fireworks started as we stood
high up just inside the front doors of the Lewis Building and watched
--- incredible bolts of lightning, tremendous claps of thunder, giant
punctuation marks to remarkable day.
Now you’ll think I’m funning you
when I say that I knew at the start, while baking those muffins, that
the day was going to turn out this way, but I did. Wasn’t really worried
at all (although I did check computer radar a couple of times just to
make sure). I attribute it all to grace, which has the capacity just to
roll over and enfold us --- sometimes when we expect it, other times
when we just allow it and now and then flat out of the blue. I call it
real magic. But you can call it whatever you want --- even wizardry.
