The Time of My Life

A
NY NEWSPAPER WRITER
who seeks to preserve part of his work between the covers of a book has to have a lot of nerve. Newspaper stories and columns are by their nature ephemeral. They're written in a hurry to be read in a hurry and then discarded. Our work is meant to be timely, not timeless.

Yet while the cast of actors and the stage settings of the human drama are always changing, the play itself doesn't. From generation to generation, people keep on experiencing the same hopes, joys, dreams, triumphs, fears, troubles, miseries, and losses that their ancestors knew and that their descendants shall know. We all remember our family milestones of deaths and birthdays, the places where we grew up, the warmth of Christmases, special moments spent with children and animals and nature, small problems that play havoc with a routine day, public events of high tragedy or low comedy. The sum of such events and memories equals a life. And despite such exterior differences among us as wealth, station, race, religion, and region, the lives of all of us are remarkably similar.

At least that's the impression I've been given by readers who over the years have written or phoned me in response to pieces that I had considered entirely personal when I wrote them. “I know just what you mean,” they say. “The same thing happened to me.” Or, “You know, I've had that same feeling. I just never put it into words.” It's for such responses that a writer lives. The knowledge that he has communicated with another life, another mind, makes his own life and craft worthwhile.

This book is, as the title suggests, a personal record. Between 1976 and 1983 I wrote some six hundred columns, personal essays, whatever you want to call them, for the
Dallas Times Herald
. Some of them appeared on the editorial page, some on the op-ed page, some in the metropolitan news section, some in the features section, and some in
Westward
, the Sunday magazine. Many were merely timely, and seem as out-of-date now as, well, yesterday's newspaper. But these few, I think, have held up pretty well under the test of time. Without exception, they're the ones that readers wrote and phoned about. Some still are brought up in conversation sometimes by someone who read them years ago and still remembers them. Some readers have even been so kind as to suggest that they ought to be in a book. So now they are.

I thank the
Dallas Times Herald
for giving me permission to reprint them here.

Dallas, January 13, 1984
BRYAN
WOOLLEY

The Time of My Life

The Time of Her Life

S
HE
WAS
BORN
in 1892 in a Texas community that has disappeared, except for the cemetery where her mother and father and little brother are buried. When the great storm destroyed Galveston in 1900, she lived at Brazoria, not far inland, and remembers being a refugee in the old courthouse while the water went down. Some of her friends, who went to school on the island, were swept away. While she was still a girl, her fatherâa school teacher and a storekeeperâwas bedridden with a terminal disease and died young. When she was seventeen, she and her older sister, Voleta, became schoolteachers, too, to help support their mother and five surviving younger brothers and sisters. She lived in boarding houses in communities with such names as Sunshine and Honey Grove and rode a pony to her one-room schools, where some of her pupils were older than and twice as big as she was. She kept discipline and taught many country youngsters all they would ever know of book learning. She married Audie Lee Gibson, a farmer, and bore a daughter, Beatrice, and taught in a small town called Carlton. Her husband accepted a job as deputy sheriff and was shot to death by robbers in 1932, a few nights before Christmas. When her daughter's marriage ended in 1945, she trekked beyond the Pecos in a 1939 Chevrolet with Beatrice and five grandchildren to help create a new life in Fort Davis, a small, isolated mountain town. She taught for twenty years there. Among her pupils were all five of her grandchildren. “An education is the most important thing you can have,” she told us, “because no body can take it away from you,” and the grand children would get eight college degrees among them.

She remembers veterans of the Lost Cause parading in their gray uniforms, Teddy Roosevelt and the Spanish-American War, the first automobile that came through and scared all the horses, the Wright brothers' first flight, the Mexican Revolution, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the A-bomb, the Korean Police Action, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the death of President Kennedy, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, Vietnam, Watergate, and the births of thirteen great-grandchildren. Through it all, she has been sustained by her faith in God, in country, in her unshakeable belief that there's some good in all of us. “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” she has said to the generations. “All things work for good for those who love the Lord.” “It's always darkest just before the dawn.” “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.” “There's more than one way to skin a cat.” “Be sure you're right, then go ahead.” Her mottos and slogans are engraved as deeply in my mind as the Beatitudes and the Bill of Rights. Whether they're lived up to or not, they're still true for me, and for hundreds of others whose lives she has touched and helped shape.

When I was very small, I, her first grandchild, gave her a nameâMommy. For forty-five years the name has remained right for her. Everyone in the family calls her that. “Children have been my life,” she says, “and nobody's ever made a better investment.”

Clora Laura DeVolin Gibson is ninety now. Months before her birthday, my mother, her daughter, started making plans and calling the members of the scattered clan. “Everybody's got to come,” she said. “Anybody missing will ruin it.” She rented nearly all of the historic Limpia Hotel on the Fort Davis town square and ordered birthday cakes, cookies, gallons of “Baptist punch,” flowers. She published notices in the
Alpine Avalanche
and the
Big Bend Sentinel
, inviting all Mommy's friends to come celebrate. She hired a photographer. “Who knows when we'll all get together again?” she said. Some of the great grandchildren are in college now, and soon will go their own ways.

All day Friday and Saturday morning, relatives, in laws, step-relatives, and in-laws-to-be arrivedâIsabel and me from Dallas; Ted and Pat from Saint Louis; Chris from New York; Linda, Jim, David, Scott, Terry, and Laura from Marfa; Dick, Sandra, Audie, Michael, Janice, and Allyson from Cisco; Mike, Linda Kay, Alden, and Lori from Lubbock; Sherry, Lee, Mark, Susan, and Tara from Midland, Aunt Helen, Mommy's baby sister and the only other surviving DeVolin of their generation, arrived from Las Cruces, and cousin Joanne and husband Jim from El Paso. Cousin Emmett and wife Dorothy and daughter Linda came from Marfa. Cars seemed to be breeding and multiplying in the town square and up the street from the courthouse in front of the rambling old adobe house where a generation of us had grown up. “We can always tell when the Woolleys are in town,” a merchant said. “The population of Fort Davis doubles.” In the side yard the male cousins of the youngest generation played a nonstop touch football game. Inside, the youngest females, aglow with adolescent vanity, showered and curled and blow-dried and primped and perfumed. The old house groaned under their energy.

Down at the Limpia, Mommy's grandchildren, now in middle age or getting there, traded old jokes and memories over coffee and wineâthe first vintage from Fort Davis's own vineyard, a small and appropriate new industry for the old town, which has never seen the smoke of a factory or even a railroad train.

It was toward the middle of Friday afternoon, before things got really hectic, that I took my bourbon out to the second-floor porch of the Limpia and sat on a bench in the sun and looked down on the town square. I had never seen Fort Davis from that perspective, perched like God above the ground and buildings where I had spent my boyhood. To my left was the stone Union Mercantile, established in 1879 and in business ever since, its steel-barred windows still misleading tourists into thinking it's the jail. How many nails and boards had I bought from Tyrone Kelly there over the years? How many ropes and pocket knives? No telling. The Union was where we bought nearly everything that wasn't to eat or drink in those days. Across the square was El Cerro Books and the office of the newly arrived doctor, the first physician Fort Davis has had in years. Their building had been the Harry Jarratt Motorport in my youth, and, later, Mrs. Tarvin's beauty shop. Next to it, in a red stone two-story building, the twin of the hotel, were the Fort Davis State Bank, where I had worked for a year once, hating every minute, and the post office, where I had waited desperately for love letters from high school sweethearts in Alpine and Marfa. And to my right was the Jeff Davis County court house, where my mother had been county and district clerk for more than thirty years, and its town clock that now, as thirty years ago, tolls each hour five minutes early, and its lawn and trees and side walks, where I learned to roller skate and played capture-the-flag on soft summer nights. Below me, on the first floor of the Limpia, the drugstore had been in the old days and Bill Fryar gave me my first job, sweeping up, jerking sodas, washing windows, to pay off an Ansco box camera that I had to have but couldn't afford. When I was in high school I once fell through the floor where I now stood. The Limpia had caught fire, and the Fort Davis Volunteer Fire Department had tried to save it. The floor collapsed under me and I fell to the sidewalk below, not hurt at all and feeling very much the hero. And around the rim of the town stood the mountainsâSleeping Lion, Old Blue, Doloresâthe rugged, changeless hills where I had wandered with my friends and alone, shooting rabbits, camping, just standing and looking at the vast world in which I felt so small and unique. The names and faces of dozens of good people passed through my memoryâold relics of the pioneer days who were still alive and lively then, the mothers and fathers of my friends, and my old buddies and girl friendsânearly all of them gone, either dead or moved to God-knows-where. One of them, Barry Scobee, who had loved that town with a rare passion, had told me once: “After Fort Davis, heaven is all that's left.” And I knew that, given the choice, he would rather stay in Fort Davis and leave heaven to others. Sitting there in the sun with my bourbon, I also knew that I'm a privileged person, having grown up in that place and having known its people.

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