Nilda Here–My Beginnings

Today I would just like to give you a little background into who I am, and where I come from , so when you read my blog posts you can understand why I look at things the way I do, which as you already know is somewhat different than how I.M. looks at things.

Papa, which was the only name the three of us, myself and my two older brothers, ever called the man who was our dear father, was tall, handsome in a roguish sort of way, and always had a smile on his face. To the day he died, he was the light of ours, as well of mother’s life. Raised in New England, he had gone to college, having always dreamed of being a school teacher, though his parents wanted him to join the family business following in the footsteps of the two preceding generations. I know he wanted to please his parents, yet he also wanted to live his own life, and it was only after he met the girl that would eventually become his wife, and our dear mother, that he decided that you don’t get many opportunities to live your dream and he was going to take a chance on living his.

I’ve heard over the years from my aunts and uncles, that Papa’s parents were somewhat less than enthusiastic about the girl he brought home during the Christmas Holidays of his Junior year. It wasn't because mother was not pretty, for she certainly was, as the old photographs show so well. And it certainly wasn't that her education was lacking, as she was actually a straight A student.  In fact they first met when Papa was having trouble in his French Literature class, and she was assigned as his tutor.

The problem was that she came from the South, and not just anywhere in the South, but was the hills of southern Kentucky, which to my grandparents' way of thinking was a heathen, uncivilized land, if ever there was. As I mentioned before, this all comes second hand, as neither mother nor Papa would ever talk about what caused the rift with his parents. It seems, the next time Papa went home there was a terrible argument between he and his father, the wounds of which never healed, and for which mother always blamed herself.

The result of all this was that when Papa and mother were married the following summer, they never told Papa's parents. And the rift that began at at fateful Christmas continued to widen to the point where neither of Papa’s parents attended his graduation exercise, a year and a half later. However, the new graduates did not lack for well wishers as Papa’s brothers as well as his sister were there, even though all three of them were already working in the family business. But, as Papa’s brother, Uncle Stanley tells it, the entire college fell in love with the Class Valedictorian's family, most of whom had traveled from southern Kentucky just to be a part of something that had never before happened to anyone in their family.

I know I’m probably boring you to death with all this talk about my parents and how they met, but it is because of all this that I am who I am today. Because when those cars headed back to Kentucky, there was another that had joined them, the one carrying Papa and mother, along with all their worldly possessions. You see, Papa had fallen in love with the “hills and the hollers” as he would laughingly refer to them for the rest of his life, the place where mothers' people had lived for generations, when he and mother traveled there to be married the previous summer.

There was never a question of where they were going to live, or what they were going to do, and one of lessons Papa taught the three of us was, there are places where who you are is determined by what your address is, by the car you drive,who you work for, how you dress, or how much money you have. Then there are places like where our family lived, a place where no one judged anyone for any reason, and even if you were not kin, and where you were treated as kin because everyone not only spoke the golden rule church, they lived it each and everyday.

So when Papa got a job teaching second grade at the local school, mother drove down everyday to the University, where she was eventually awarded her Doctor of Philosophy in French Literature, a subject she always said, became her favorite during her junior year in college for a very, very special reason. Once she received her degree she never went back to that University, except for alumni events, nor did she do anything with her degree in the normal sense. She said that Papa loved her so much he let her follow her dream until it came true, and it was then that she realized that the greatest life she could ever live would be if she and Papa followed their own dream together.

I.M. were a thinkin' y'all would reelly appreciate hearin' from my other half. It left out the part bout Nilda's Pa needin' to talk to Nilda's Ma, April first which were the funny part, but some of ya probably notationed that yerownself.