Time of Day-Evening
Beautiful evening skies in northern Texas earlier this month for the CFFC Time of Day https://nofacilities.com/2025/08/18/time-of-day-evening-cffc/
Tag: August
101 Years Ago Today
August is the birthday month for my two sisters and both my parents, and this, the last one, celebrates my Dad’s birth date, August 20, 1917.
Business was the main course at our dinner table, humor the dessert, and both were served generously at meal times.
Dad was the purveyor of the laughter, helped along by my older sister. The rest of us were the audience and the targets of the quick-witted jokesters.
The serious discussions about running a small-town newspaper were interspersed with merriment, both areas sharing the spotlight.
My father was complex and simple. Funny with a frightening temper. Loved and loathed. Embraced and rejected. Indiscriminately sexual but private with secrets.
He was a mixed bag of positives and negatives, weighted one-way or the other by the describer.
His first wife scorned him, his second adored him.
One daughter shunned him, two accepted his flaws, and one didn’t know him as her father.
Corny humor was his product, laughter his calling card, drinking his solace, sex his enjoyment, sales his trade. He worked hard and played harder. And he did both with gusto.
Sam Lewis Williams was a Oklahoma native, coming from common stock, a late life surprise and adored child. He grew up in poverty, but like many children, was not damaged by the sparseness provided by his parents. His mother labored diligently, his father not so much.
But the family, through hardships, could laugh, finding humor in the darkest times.
Because the family moved regularly, Dad’s brother quipped that on the first day of each month, when the rent was due, the chickens would lie down, and cross their legs preparing themselves to be transported to a new location.
This favored boy selected newspaper typesetting as a career path in high school, and for most of his life he earned a living in that arena, working as a pressman, a linotype operator, a salesman, and a newspaper owner.
He was quick to laugh, and just as fast to anger. I remember watching him punch an opposing coach at a high school football game when the guy called one of the players an ugly name. It was over quickly, they shook hands, and the game was uninterrupted. Once his explosive temper evaporated, it was ended for him, forgotten and forgiven. The two men might share a beer later that night.
Men and women alike sought Dad’s company. His quick and often naughty wit added flavor to any gathering, whether in the back shop of the newspaper office, or at a church choir rehearsal.
This man of many talents was not gifted with handling money. He could bring dollars in, he just couldn’t keep them. Instant gratification was his compass more than plotting the future, and he left the headache of financial management to my mother.
They were a good team, as seen through his eyes. He worked and played. Mother worked and planned. Thanks to both of their efforts, their three daughters graduated from college, one a doctor, one a lawyer, and one a newspaper publisher.
I am grateful for the ringing laughter my father brought to our home. He was business foolish, but his fun-loving optimism is embedded in my DNA.
Thank you, Dad, and Happy 101 Birthday.
My ‘Little’ Sister’s Birthday
Having my sister, Paula around creates new mental excursions for me.
She challenges the status quo of ideas and norms, thus shoving me into territories I’ve neither explored nor fancied.
Her mind ranges far, her beliefs ring strangely. I’ve not ventured along paths she wanders until those tracks become superhighways traversed by the masses. By then, she is charting new territory, once again investigating terrains of the future or revisiting ideas lost by the ages.
She was a feminist, perhaps from birth or before. I took that mantle after it became mainstream.
She saw her girl child as shy. I saw her as bold but quiet. She questioned, I accepted. Together we played, fought, disagreed, created, and grew. We experimented and moved along on our own, each spreading our wings in diverse ways, returning to a common arena of give and take, respecting the gifts each offer.
This is not her obituary, although it may sound like it. Rather, it is acknowledging my awareness of how she opens doors within my mind.
Today is her birthday, 17 months my junior. We have been mistaken for twins, often being dressed alike. Mother found it easier to buy 2 of everything since we were the same size until she outgrew me.
I was the outgoing sister. She was the thinker. She explored ideas, I bathed in relationships. In our teens, Mother failed to understand Paula’s mental capabilities so opted to have us tested. Paula soared to the top of IQ scores while I meandered in the 130 range. She was bright, just different.
Coming from a family of ‘doers’, Paula started college at 16, earned a doctorate, became an attorney, led women’s rights projects, was a mother, wife, activist, friend, and is now ‘dissolving’, as she describes it.
She is letting go of all the shrouds used to identify, define, and protect us, the artificial titles and actions we embrace making our way through life.
Dissolving. An interesting and accurate description of where many of us find ourselves as we reach our 70s. Who we were, what we achieved, the talents we adopted in order to succeed, are left scattered and abandoned as we free ourselves of old patterns.
As she suggests, in the process of dissolving horizons change, desires transform, and the authentic ‘me’ surfaces.
Thank goodness for my ‘little’ sister. She continues to offer clarity to what I find confusing, and insight into what I find mystifying.
Happy Birthday, Paula…and many more, please.
Happy Birthday Betty Belle
August is the birthday month for my two sisters and both my parents, so I’m going to write about each one on the day they entered this lifetime.
My mother would be 98 today if she hadn’t died 14 years ago.
She is, this is my guess, glad she didn’t live any longer since many of the things she had enjoyed no longer held her attention.
Her love of clothes, flirting unabashedly, investing in the stock market, making money, traveling, her grandchildren, and did I mention her love of clothes?
She was a force, not a maternal one, but an energy impacting those around her.
Her focus was singular: not to be old, sick and poor. She could adjust to being old, and even in ill health, but improvised was not an option. She spent her life enjoying the pursuit of money and the safety of security.
Mother worked hard, insisting her three daughters get an education while avoiding being trapped in unwanted marriages, and she fought for her right to soar as a woman.
She married unwillingly at the ripe age of 16, days after her high school graduation, with hopes of going to college. Although young, she was driven to rise above the poverty level of her parents. The fear of meagerness fueled her core.
Her path through almost 84 years did not seem a straight one: college never happened, a fun-loving and philandering husband brought bitterness and lasting anger, and being thrust into a business she didn’t choose were obstacles that hindered her. But she was not deterred from her underlying goal: I will not be destitute.
Betty Belle Poe was the fourth child of five, and the first girl of a union between an ‘old maid’ victim of early childhood polio, and a man-child of post-Civil War reconstruction 20 years her senior.
The family prospered in a small Oklahoma town when, three years after Mother’s birth, the economy turned, ripping away their financial sanctuary. Forced to give up their home, the Poes struggled to survive. The determination of the crippled matriarch kept food on the table, as her now 55-year-old spouse unsuccessfully struggled to recover his fortunes.
The role of her mother may not have been obvious to Betty Belle, but it was the blueprint she followed throughout her own life: a woman pushing and shoving forward in the quest to exist with limited or no support from a man.
Her mother learned this set of skills watching her own mom raise three youngsters when her young husband died.
Mother came from strong feminine stock, and she passed those lessons and abilities on to her progenies.
What my mom lacked in nurturing skills, she replaced with drive, fierceness, and an innate ability and enjoyment for business. Being financially successful boosted her self-esteem, as she sought to compensate for a lack of education and societal limitations placed on women. A feminist long before the label, she lived the role.
Mother died ill, aged, and happily, well off. Her goal achieved.
Happy Birthday Mom. Thanks for the many gifts you instilled in your daughters, if not always appreciated.
A Month of Birthdays
August is the birthday month for my two sisters and both my parents, so I’m going to write about each one of them during the next 20 days.
She’s my older sibling, 4 years my senior, and I don’t know her.
The last time we talked was at our dad’s funeral 13 plus years ago, not that we had ever been close. Maybe it was the age difference that created a gulf between us, or perhaps we never ‘gee-hawed’, as the saying goes. Whatever the reason, we didn’t connect.
Mother often recited, “Just because you are sisters doesn’t mean you have to be best friends.” And we weren’t.
As a kid, I admired her quick humor, her cleverness, and I craved her approval. Was it my insistence she like me that caused her rejection? Often we distance ourselves from the demands made by another person, struggling to be free of entanglements that seem suffocating. One side clinging, the other resisting.
It’s an unexplained mystery.
Like sisters across the planet, we fought, we laughed, and we formed a unique relationship of distance.
I felt inferior to her, my self-esteem dependent on her acceptance. Measuring my weaknesses against her strengths the results were skewed and out of balance.
A shared history seen through a shattered mirror. Her vision recalled from one fractured piece, and mine from another. Coexisting as strangers in a house called family.
I could say I miss her presence. How do you miss something that was never there?
I can regret connections not made, opportunities lost.
Maybe in another lifetime.
Today’s her birthday, 80 years old.
Happy Birthday, Karen, a sister unknown.
Lots of August Lions to Celebrate
August is birthday month in our family. Four of the five of us celebrated the passing of another year in the eighth month of each year.
Being the lone one out, I was very aware at an early age of the clashing forces within the walls of our home. When you have four Leo the Lion activists vying for the top of the hill, my Aries Ram knew to stay down the slope and out of danger.
Now really, does this look like a pack of lions?
(Left to right) Interloper Ram; Papa Lion, Mother Lioness, Cub 1, and Cub 3
Not to say that I avoided attention, rams are known to want the limelight too, just in a different way…from a place of safety. How I ended up in this den of boisterous lions is a puzzlement. Perhaps I had been deserted by my family of rams and this pack of lions had taken me in.
I’ve often thought about how the Lions took turns as the leader; each finding their particular speciality in which to excel and rule.
For instance, Dad roared the loudest and would seem, to an outsider, to be the kingpin of our family. Not so fast. Inside our compact group it was clear Mother carried the big stick, making and enforcing the rules.
My older sister, being the first-born and a Leo, would not be denied her power. As an only child for 4 years, she learned how to wield her influence, marking her territory and demanding a place at the table. No doubt she considered the ‘family’ as only 3, not expecting or wanting any additional clan members.
I came along, disrupting what had been a somewhat closed society, followed 16 months later by another baby cub, my younger sister. As another Leo, she showed her lionish traits with smarts and determination.
We each assumed certain roles, and clung to those positions like a lifeboat saving us from drowning. The roles we played may not have been comfortable, but we knew them and felt secure within that knowing.
If one of us stepped out of character, tried to test another way, the roaring around the family den was quick and loud and fear inducing.
But nothing stays the same, and the pack began to leave the lair, each one starting their own family, and mimicking the rules and positions we learned as children.
Today, we have only 3 left: 2 Leos and one Ram. But we will celebrate throughout the month, remembering the roar of 4 lions: the noise, the challenges, the hierarchy that has defined us for almost 80 years.
August 9–First cub
August 14–Mother Lioness
August 16–Third cub
August 20–Father Lion
Happy birthday, all you Leos.
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