Fun and Games with Checkers the Cat! Ch. 61-90
Sheila (Seamands) Lovell is the daughter of Methodist missionaries to India, J. T. and Ruth Seamands. She is a graduate of Asbury College (now University) and the University of Kentucky. She came to Asbury Seminary in to work with David L. McKenna when he became President in 1982. She has been with the Seminary for 38 years, having served five presidents as their Executive Assistant and currently works as a Special Assistant to the President and Grants Administrator in the Advancement Office. In thinking about how to help keep her six grandchildren from getting bored and looking forward to something every day during their time of self-isolation, she began writing this diary from the point of view of her cat, Checkers, who by her own admission is practically purr-fect in every way.
Chapter 61
I haven’t seen Mommy get out in her shiny red car too much lately. She is working from home these days. I used to see her driving to and from work or to the church from my spot on the windowsill that looks over the driveway. I think she misses driving places, though I’m glad to have her here with me. It’s awfully handy for me just to be able to amble over to where she’s sitting at the black boxes with pictures when I need a belly rub or a neck scratch. I just lie down on the carpet and look beseechingly at her and she obliges. If she ever does get to go back to the office, I’m really going to miss that.
She said she gets her love of driving from Mommy Ruth. When Mommy Ruth learned to drive, way back when, all the vehicles were driven with what my mommy said was a stick shift. Nothing was automatic in a car back then. You had to roll down the windows by hand and lock the door with a key and shift the gears with a clutch. When Mommy Ruth went to Belgaum as a young missionary with Daddy Jaytee and two daughters (at that time) they had an old Army jeep to drive around in. It was just after World War II ended and there were lots of surplus vehicles to be found. The jeep wasn’t such an unusual sight – the unusual sight was that a woman (and a white woman at that) was driving it. There weren’t that many women drivers in Belgaum at that time.
Jeeps were not made for comfort, Mommy told me, they were made to get to places over rough terrain. There were times when Daddy Jaytee was gone out into the villages in another jeep and Mommy Ruth had to make an emergency trip to an outlying village for some reason or other. One time it was in the monsoon season and a soaking wet village pastor came to the mission bungalow to ask her to please take to his village the tin roofing sheets that were needed to complete his house that the sahib was building for him or the walls were going to fall down in the rain. So she rounded up some coolies and they loaded the trailer they hitched onto the back of the jeep and off they went. Of course, it was pouring rain the whole time. There were no roads to the village, let alone paved ones, so that’s where the jeep came in handy. It forded rivers and climbed over low stone fences and over fields and got Mommy Ruth to the village safely, where she supervised the completion of the roof.
Mommy and her sisters loved going out to the villages in the jeep. It nearly rattled their little teeth out, my mommy told me, but they enjoyed riding in it. The villagers were so hospitable, even using their last bits of rice and vegetables to cook a meal for the missionaries. Everybody would sit down on the floor cross-legged and eat with their fingers (the right hand only!) off a banana leaf. The South Indian people love their red chilies, and sometimes their curry was so hot the family would eat it with tears streaming down their faces. The lady of the house would be concerned: “You don’t like it, memsahib?” “Oh, no, it’s really delicious,” Mommy Ruth would assure her, sniffing. The floor was just dirt covered over with the villagers’ own version of linoleum. The little girls, mostly, followed the water buffaloes around and picked up the fresh cow dung into baskets on their heads. When mixed with water, the cow dung was smeared onto the dirt floor of their hut (all by hand, of course). Surprisingly, there was no smell when it dried into a hard layer, and it kept the dust down. When that coating began to wear off, the whole process was repeated.
I had to wrinkle up my nose when I heard about that. I think I much prefer the soft carpets on the floor of my house to that village linoleum. The only thing my mommy has to do is run that really noisy machine over it every now and then – the one I run away from every time I hear it. The carpet is really soft and sometimes I just have to roll around on it, especially when I’m playing with my pink-and-yellow mouse toy. And I do know one thing – my mommy loves the automatic transmission in her shiny red car!
Chapter 62
Mommy was reminiscing about India again today. She told me that the first time Daddy Jim ever laid eyes on her she was wearing an orange sari. She was visiting his church to speak about India. He was sitting in the choir loft at that moment, though he couldn’t sing a note. (Turns out his Sunday school class was meeting there.) Mommy was friends with the pastor’s wife, who was teaching at the same junior college where my mommy was an instructor in English. When the pastor found out her background, he asked her to speak both Sunday morning and evening.
That morning, since Mommy herself is not a preacher, she gave one of her Daddy Jaytee’s sermons. He was a really good preacher, she said. She had dressed in that sari to give the people a taste of India. That evening, she put on a fashion show for the congregation, using a suitcase full of Indian clothes borrowed from Mommy Ruth and Daddy Jaytee. She demonstrated on people from the congregation, showing how a woman puts on a sari on and how a man ties his dhoti and turban. A sari is usually six or more yards in length and is tied and pleated in a very intricate way. Mommy told me it has been said that a sari is one of the most alluring items of clothing a woman can wear. I bet that’s why Daddy Jim couldn’t take his eyes off her!
Instead of wearing trousers, an Indian villager wears a dhoti. This is a very long piece of cotton cloth, usually white, and measuring around 15 feet. It is tied in a knot around the waist, then both sides of the left-over cloth are pleated and tucked into the waist. If a villager wants to be better dressed, he leaves his dhoti hanging long down to his feet. But if he has serious work to do, he pulls the pleats up between his legs and tucks them into his waist at the back, making in effect a pair of shorts that don’t get in his way. A turban is his hat, yet another piece of cloth about 5 yards long, wound round and round his head. The congregation always enjoyed seeing their members dressed up.
Then Mommy would talk about how in a lot of ways rural India is the exact opposite of America. For instance, in America it’s always ladies first, but in India it’s always men first, with the wife and children trailing behind. In America it’s usually the women who wear the fancy hats and hairdos, while in India the men do that. Americans drive on the righthand side of the road; in India it’s on the left. In an American church, when a man comes in, he takes his hat off and leaves his shoes on; in India, it’s just the opposite. In America, a woman wears a wedding ring on her finger; in India she wears a wedding necklace. When an American goes to bed he covers his feet and leaves his head sticking out; a villager covers up his head and ears with his blanket and leaves his feet sticking out. That way if the rats come to nibble on him they can only find his hard-soled feet, not his tender ears and head. In America, we shake our heads to say “no” while in India a particular head-shake means “yes.” At an American dinner, the sweet dish is offered last, as dessert, while in India the sweet is given first, so the guests will fill up on it and not eat so much of the main dish. In America, we put our farm animals in the barn, but in an Indian village, they share the house with the family. In America, belching at the table is very rude, but in India a hearty belch at mealtime shows that you enjoyed the meal and is a compliment to the cook. And finally, in America it’s usually love first and then marriage, but in India, where people are often married off to each other as children, the marriage comes first!
Mommy still has that suitcase full on Indian costumes. They are in there right alongside the huge, long skin of the python that Thatha killed at the jungle camp meeting that time. And with it is a long cobra skin, though Mommy wasn’t sure it was the same one that Thatha caught by the tail in Belgaum. She has led a pretty interesting life, I guess, but me? I’d rather just curl up in my rampart perch and watch the birds. Too much excitement just wears me out.
Chapter 63
Mommy was rummaging around last night in the big tall box she calls a file cabinet. She found some stuff she had written years ago about being an MK (missionary kid) in India. She was glad to find those papers because that gave her more stories to tell me about growing up there.
Daddy Jaytee’s parents, whom my mommy called Ajji and Thatha, first took him India when he was 3 years old. So he grew up there and actually graduated from Kodai School. Daddy Jaytee used to joke about the fact that when he graduated, he took all the prizes and made all the speeches. Of course, that was because he was the only graduating senior that year!
Mommy Ruth used to say that when she and Daddy Jaytee went back to India as missionaries, he was quite at home, because he was more Indian than he was American. When they first arrived they had to go to language school in Bangalore, learning to read, write, and speak Kannada before going to their own mission station. Mommy Ruth had taken shorthand classes in high school and used it in taking notes about Kannada grammar and vocabulary. I didn’t know what shorthand is, and my mommy said that It is used for taking dictation (something else nobody does any more) and is a language all its own, in which sounds and words and phrases are written down as loops and lines. A good shorthand taker can write down what somebody is saying even if they speak very fast. Of course, people now can just talk to their computers or phones and their speech becomes written words.
Mommy Ruth’s Kannada teacher was a very proper Indian gentleman who worked with her several hours every day. One time he saw her busily taking notes and asked to see what she had written. He screwed up his face while looking at her notebook and said, “Mrs. Seamands, I can’t read what you have written here in Kannada.” She took her notebook back and said sweetly, “That’s because it isn’t Kannada. It’s American shorthand!” Kannada, too, uses loops and lines to represent words and the poor man was horrified that his pupil was doing so badly in writing his beloved language.
Mommy Ruth told my mommy about other young American missionaries who were also studying Kannada at the time. One of them was a sweet Southern belle (my mommy says that means she was from the southern part of the United States) who, try as she might, could not keep her Southern accent out of her pronunciation of Kannada words. The Indian teacher just used to clutch his head in despair. Upon hearing this story, my mommy said it was a good thing they were all going to South India to serve!
Unlike Mommy Ruth, who learned to speak tolerable Kannada, Daddy Jaytee had a real gift for languages and raced through his Kannada studies. He did in one year what would take the ordinary student two or more years to achieve, and even passed the most difficult advanced Kannada exam. He could read and write Kannada, preach and pray in it, and even wrote Kannada praise songs and choruses that are still used in South Indian Methodist churches today. Daddy Jaytee also learned to read and write Hindi, which, my mommy said, is India’s declared national language. Even in his retirement and up into his 80s, Daddy Jaytee would read a half-hour each day out of his Kannada Bible and his Hindi Bible so that he wouldn’t forget those languages.
My mommy still speaks some Kannada. She and the family used it to keep secrets from other people and there are still times she’ll use a Kannada word. I never knew there were so many languages in the world. I’m glad that I only have to know a few English words (the important ones like “breakfast” and “supper” and “time to get up.” I have enough trouble training mommy to understand me without having to translate what I’m trying to tell her into something else besides Cat.
Chapter 64
Mommy told me yesterday about Mommy Ruth and Daddy Jaytee’s adventures in language school when they first got to India. My mommy grew up bilingual, speaking both Kannada and English. Her parents took her to India when she was nine months old, so it was easy for her pick up multiple languages; Mommy said little kids’ brains have no trouble doing that. Actually, she grew up trilingual, since Belgaum sits close to the border of another Indian state that speaks another language, Marathi. Mommy told me that one cook, Joseph, and his wife, who was her ayah, spoke Kannada and the other cook, Kallapa, spoke Marathi. Mommy Ruth told my mommy that when she (my mommy) was three or four years old, she could translate for Mommy Ruth when a stranger came to the door wanting something. My mommy was too little to remember that, but she’s still pretty good with languages, too. I guess she got that from Daddy Jaytee. My mommy says she still dreams in Kannada occasionally. (She’s getting pretty good at Cat, too.)
When Daddy Jaytee and Mommy Ruth finished their formal language studies, they moved to Belgaum and he began his work as a village evangelist. This involved his taking long tours out into the villages and being gone from the mission compound for two to three weeks at a time. He would hook up the trailer to the jeep and load it with clothes, cooking supplies, and some basic medical supplies, too. He would take one of the cooks with him to prepare his food and make sure his drinking water was boiled. He would also take one other very important piece of equipment with him – a musical instrument, usually his trombone.
When he reached a village he hadn’t visited before, he would go first to the home of the headman and ask permission to hold evangelistic services in the village. Usually the headman would be astounded to be greeted by this tall white man with the ruddy complexion and red hair, of all things, and speaking perfect Kannada. Permission would be granted. The Indian people are fascinated by religion, and are always interested to know what someone else has learned about God. If the headman refused permission, however, Daddy Jaytee would simply move on to the next village and hope to be welcomed back at this one later on.
One time when Daddy Jaytee was preaching in a Hindu village, some of the villagers threw cow dung at him to get him to stop. When he complained about it in a letter to his dad, Thatha, the response came back, “Well, son, that’s just fertilizer for the gospel!”
After the villagers had come in from working in the fields and had their evening meal, Daddy Jaytee would station himself in the middle of their huts and start playing his trombone. The Indian people love music, but the trombone was something really new to them. They would stand around talking among themselves: “Look at this fellow. What is he doing swallowing that gold thing and spitting it out again? And he’s playing our music!” Daddy Jaytee would be playing their popular tunes, for which he had written Christian lyrics in Kannada. So the people would hear their own music with different words, and would listen as the Word was preached to them. The message would be a simple one, full of illustrations taken from common events of Indian life. If he was welcomed, Daddy Jaytee might stay a week at a village before moving on to another one. Mommy told me that what he was doing would be called church planting today. Often just a few villagers, or maybe just one family, would accept Christ, but in time he might go back to that same village and find a small congregation waiting to be baptized.
I wish I could have known Daddy Jaytee and Mommy Ruth. My mommy talks about them a lot. I know they were a close family. I think it’s wonderful when the members of a family love each other and enjoy being together. I know I like being around Mommy and being loved on by her. I guess we’re family, too.
Chapter 65
I scared my mommy last night – and myself, too. She was typing on our next chapter at her computer desk and I was messing around at her feet. I scootched over way under the desk and was investigating those interesting wires that hang down. I stood up on my hind legs between the desk and the wall and suddenly I was stuck. I couldn’t move at all! I began to cry loudly. She got down on the floor and tried to pull me down but I couldn’t budge. I kept crying, so she real quick moved the printer table and then also the computer table and I was free! I ran away and hid under my big chair in the living room. She put everything back and then got down on the floor to talk to me. Her voice was full of concern for me, so I tried to show her I wasn’t really hurt and that I was more scared than anything else. I feel really secure in close places, but I don’t like not being to get out of them.
To make me feel better, Mommy started telling me some more stories about life on the farm. She and Daddy Jim and the kids lived in the little community of Betsey, Kentucky. It was just a postal address, not a town at all. She said they had to go to the local country store/post office to get their mail. A couple of years after she had moved there with Daddy Jim, she began writing a weekly column for a local county newspaper and in casting around for a name, she decided to call it “Heavens to Betsey!” It was a humorous column, some of it about things that actually happened and some of it pure fiction.
Mommy was really not a farm girl at all, she told me. She is too much a lover of her comforts, and there weren’t a whole lot of them on the farm. Oh, there was plenty of food, especially that wonderful Angus beef stored in the big freezer out on the back porch, and canned and frozen vegetables from the garden, but she really didn’t like farm work. She had already told me the story of the chicken house and Daddy Jim’s electric fence around it. There were other inconveniences she really detested.
The water to the house came from a well out in the front yard. Most of the time, the pump worked just fine. The water tasted wonderful – clear and pure, with no chlorine. But in the wintertime, the pump would freeze up in its unheated well-house. Daddy Jim always wound insulated heat tapes around the pipes to try to keep them from freezing, but invariably the tapes would fail several times each winter. It was usually discovered at night (“Of course!” said Mommy) when the water would quit running in the kitchen and the bathroom. She and Daddy Jim would have to get all bundled up in coat and hat and gloves and go out there and he would have to unwind the tapes and find out where they were broken. Then he would rewind them around the pipes again. It was Mommy’s job to hold the light and help straighten out the tapes. It seemed to take hours in the cold, and Mommy was frozen herself by the time they got done.
The other thing she really didn’t enjoy was feeding the cows in the wintertime. After getting the kids off to school and Daddy Jim off to work, Mommy said she would have an hour or so before having to get to town to open up the store. It fell to her to bundle up head and ears in her warmest coat, hat, and gloves, pull on her galoshes (those are heavy rubber boots, she told me) over her shoes, and slip and slide through the snow down the hill to the barn. Then she’d have to climb the ladder (really just wooden slats nailed to the wall of the barn) up to the hayloft on the second level and call the cows. They usually came running once they got used to the sound of her voice. Then she’d have to wrestle with several bales of hay, cut the twine, and throw them down to the cows. Fortunately, she said, she never fell out of the hayloft or down the ladder, although she always worried about doing so, as she was carrying a big kitchen knife with her to cut the twine from the hay bales. Farm life just wasn’t her thing, Mommy said.
I’m on her side. I love my creature comforts, too – a warm place to sleep and soft carpets to walk on. I’m glad both Mommy and I have them at this stage of our lives.
Chapter 66
Mommy went out to refill the bird feeders this morning. While she was there, she started pulling out some weeds from the flowerbed. They weren’t very big and the ground was soft from all the rain we’ve been having, so it was easy work for her. When she came back in the house, she said that the flowerbed was now nice and clean and ready for some flowers – if she ever gets around to buying some to plant. My mommy isn’t much of a gardener. Daddy Jim was much better at it than she is – or was on the farm.
Of course, Mommy said, Daddy Jim only had to worry about getting himself down to the garden, along with his hoe. But she had to get herself down there as well as the kids, and mind them and the garden at the same time. Jessica and Jaytee were just one year apart (they share the same birthday, even), so when they were little it was a real project to get any serious gardening done.
Mommy told me about one May day on the farm when the kids were about 4 and 3. The garden was on the land below the house that sloped down towards the barnyard. Mommy says she hoisted Jaytee over the electric fence first, telling him firmly not to touch it. Then she turned to do the same for Jessica. Only Jaytee decided he didn’t like it on his side of the fence, especially since his mommy was on the other side, and started coming towards her. She put out one hand to keep him back, bending nearly double over that fence, while keeping Jessica away with the other. Time seemed to freeze just then, she said, until finally Daddy Jim hollered “Hurry up!” from the garden and broke the spell. Jaytee backed off and Mommy swung Jessica and then herself over the fence.
She gave the kids some M & Ms to keep them occupied so she could help Daddy Jim with the hoeing. About one minute after that Jessica announced that she had to go to the bathroom (of course just five minutes before that she declared stoutly she didn’t have to) so Mommy had to quit what she was doing and give her the proper instructions.
Meanwhile, Jaytee was feeling ignored and began to fuss so she had to go over and settle him on a flat rock with his candy. Then she went back to hoeing and didn’t really notice the cows coming up from the pasture field, until she heard a whimper coming from Jaytee’s direction and turned around to see him in front of a solid wall of black Angus cows. They were all standing at the fence, studying intently that little scrap of humanity with chocolate on its face. Everything was fine until one of them gave out with a bellow and he began to shriek. That just about put an end to that night’s hoeing for Mommy.
The next night wasn’t much better. Mommy and Daddy Jim were planting potatoes. Daddy Jim was dropping them into the rows and Mommy was coming along behind him and covering them up. The kids were playing along the grassy edges of the garden. Then it was Jessica’s turn to shriek and Mommy whirled, thinking she had touched the electric fence after all, but luckily she had just gone to a section of cold barbed wire and gotten her hair caught. When Mommy went back to the potatoes, it was to discover that some of the rows were empty. Jaytee had very carefully removed the uncovered seed potatoes from one row and was helpfully placing them gently atop the fresh hills in the adjoining row. So he had to be chased off before the planting could continue.
That night, when Mommy was putting him to bed, Jaytee touched her bare arm with great concern. “Look mommy,” he said. “Sore.” “No, darling,” she said, “those are Mommy’s freckles.” “Oh,” he said, greatly relieved. “Pickles!” So Mommy isn’t much of a gardener, but she seems to have raised a pretty good crop of kids.
Chapter 67
Mommy is excited. Tomorrow she’s going to go over to Jessica and Brian’s and have lunch with them – the first time in well over two months. Usually when Brian was flying, she would go over every Sunday for lunch with Jessica and the kids. Being together means a lot to her, I know. She loves it when she can be with her family.
Mommy has told me about how close she and Mommy Ruth and her sisters were. Now it’s just the sisters, but they remain very involved in each other’s lives. As their parents got older, the four sad bisters, as they called themselves (taken from the story of Rindicella and the Pransome Hince) made it a point to come home together at least once a year to be with them. There would be big dinners, Mommy said, and lot of laughter, and lots and lots of stories. Did I mention lots of laughter? And every year there would be the adventure of the Family Picture.
Usually it was Brandilyn, the youngest, who would pick out the spot to have it taken. She would scout out locations in and around Wilmore. The last several years it was just the five of them, the girls and Mommy Ruth, and the crazier the location the better. Mommy Ruth was always a good sport about, my mommy said. One year they posed on the back of the caboose at the railroad crossing right down the hill from where my mommy and I live. Another year, it was at the back of the pavilion on the city green. And one time they all stood under the Seamands Street sign, pointing up at it. Then there was the year that they posed in a pink bathtub in the Re-Store in the next town over.
A couple of years ago, it was decided that they would all dress up as Morticia from the TV show “The Addams Family.” Since it was Halloween (Mommy said she’d tell me what that is sometime), they found four long black wigs, which my mommy said fit badly – which made it even more fun – and they all pulled up across the street from a certain house outside Lexington that looked very much like the Addams family’s house and they posed in front of it. If the neighbors were watching, Mommy said, they probably thought that the girls were all crazy. Jake had been riding in Mommy’s car and for some reason the conversation got around to “bats in the belfry” and Mommy had to explain what that meant and then talked about how many years ago crazy people were locked into the attic to keep them away from the rest of the family. Jake liked that idea and he promptly dubbed the two younger sisters “the crazy aunts.”
But the best family picture of all involved the toilets. Brandilyn had spotted a bunch of brand-new toilets sitting in the garage next door to Mommy Ruth’s house at Wesley Village. The lady at that house didn’t have a car so the maintenance department was using her garage for storage. Brandilyn got permission to get into the garage, so Mommy and the other four hauled five of them out onto the driveway and lined them up in a row. Brandilyn directed Mommy and the rest of the family to choose one and sit down on the lid. It just so happened that Brandilyn’s newest Christian suspense thriller, which was set in Wilmore, had just come off the press and she had brought copies for the family. So the family photo was of each person posing on her toilet holding open a copy of Exposure and pretending to read.
I guess my mommy and the others really like to laugh. She laughed hard when she told me that story. I hope I get to meet all the sisters sometime. Maybe they’ll come here for one of their big family dinners. Of course, I always run and hide under the bed whenever anyone strange comes to visit, but I can peek out from my safe place and see what’s going on. I like to see people laugh, though not at me. No self-respective cat likes to be laughed at.
Chapter 68
My mommy is dancing around the room. She just found out that May 26 is World Redhead Day! How about that! She read to me what she had found out on the computer about redheads. Seems that less than 2% of the world’s people are redheads. The greatest concentration of them are found first in Scotland and secondly in Ireland. Besides that, having red hair and blue eyes is the rarest hair/eye color combination possible. People with red hair are more sensitive to pain, generally needing a higher dose of anesthesia than other people, and a lot of red-heads often wind up being left-handed. Redheads are less likely to go grey (that was great news to Mommy). The pigment in their hair fades from red to blonde and white, but not grey. And best of all for Mommy – it is fake news that redheads are going extinct!
Now I always thought my mommy was pretty special, but I didn’t realize the color of the fur she has on her head is that rare. But she’s got it all – the blue eyes, the susceptibility to pain, and even the tendency to be left-handed. My mommy went to India with her family at just nine months of age. When she began showing signs of favoring her left hand, she was gently but firmly kept from using it. For the Indian people, the right hand is the one used to eat with, write with, even give gifts with. The use of the left hand is frowned upon and considered terribly impolite. Mommy doesn’t even remember ever having that preference; she is terribly right-handed now.
My mommy gets her hair coloring from Daddy Jaytee, she told me, and he gets it from his own dad, Thatha. Mommy didn’t know how much farther back than that it goes. Mommy Ruth was a brunette, but she said she had a batch of cousins with red hair. According to her, the red hair has to come from both sides of the family. In Mommy’s family, big sister Sylvia was the only one who didn’t get the red hair; the other three all have it.
Being a redheaded kid in India was guaranteed to draw a crowd, my mommy said. Many of the Indian people around her in Belgaum had never seen a white person, let alone a very fair-skinned one with red hair. All of them had black hair and dark brown eyes. When my mommy and her sisters would go out into the villages with Daddy Jaytee and Mommy Ruth, the villagers, especially the children, would gather round and just stare. Freckles, too, were a new experience for them. They tended to feel very sorry for the little white children with the spots on their faces and on their hands and arms. Too bad that they had all had smallpox, they thought!
During the time my mommy was in India, and probably still today, it was the dream of every Muslim to make a pilgrimage (a hadjj, as they call it) to Mecca, the city most sacred to them. It takes a lot of money and time for them to make such a journey, and if they had been able to do so, they were very proud of their accomplishment and wanted all their neighbors to know it. So the men would dye their hair with a particular red dye to let their world know of their piety. They were very impressed that the children of the missionary – and indeed the missionary himself – were all born with their red hair.
My mommy told me she always wanted redheaded children, but that never happened. Jessica and Jaytee were both blondes when they were little and then their hair darkened to the brunettes they are today. Mommy had to accept that, but then she told me she hoped for red-headed grandchildren. That didn’t happen either. Her younger sister Sandy got all the redheaded kids – three of them — since their dad was a redhead too.
I don’t know what all the fuss is about; I’m purr-fectly happy with my black-and-white furry coat. At least I don’t have to put stuff on it to keep its color from fading, like my mommy does every now and then!
Chapter 69
It’s nearly the end of May, my mommy says. When she thinks of this time of year in relation to Kodai School, she remembers that the end of May meant that Mommy Ruth would be leaving to go back down to the plains and put her girls back in boarding. The rainy season was going to begin in the first week of June (usually June 5th, her wedding anniversary) Mommy Ruth said, and she didn’t want to be traveling during the monsoon. Mommy and her older sister would be sad for awhile but they had the last week of October to look forward to, when they themselves would make the long trip home for Christmas vacation.
Kodai School had been established in 1901 as a school for missionary children in South India. By the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s there were many missionaries of all denominations in India, the majority of them from America. Their children had no chance of an education in an American system in the Indian towns and cities where their parents served, so Kodai School was thriving. Kodai had MKs from outside India, too. Some of her best friends, my mommy said, were from Bahrain, for instance.
With that many kids in grades 2-12, the house-parents, faculty, and staff had to plan lots of extracurricular activities to keep them occupied and entertained, Mommy said. She reminded me that she was there before the days of television in India, and there were certainly no computers or cell phones. So weekends in boarding school were taken up with lots of other activities.
Hiking was one of their most popular activities, Mommy said. The city of Kodaikanal boasted lots of parks and scenic attractions to hike to, and at that time the road went completely around the lake, which was a lovely walk. Longer hikes took all day and once a semester there was a long weekend, when the older students went for overnight hikes. The school transported their food and tents out to them. Hiking, of course, was done in the spring semester, before the rains came.
On-campus activities were lots of fun, too, Mommy said. She especially like the Saturday night skating parties in the gym. The skates were the old-fashioned kind, with four wheels set on two axles, not inline skates like they have today. You had to position your shoe inside the skate just so and then tighten up the grip of the skate with a key. That’s when Mommy’s black-and-white saddle oxfords really came in handy.
At other times her class would go to a teacher’s home on the campus and make fudge or have a taffy-pull. She loved the taffy-pulls, where you could pull on the stringy taffy until it turned a golden-white color in your hands and when you could crack the long ends together, you knew it was ready to be cut into bite-size lengths and wrapped in wax paper so the pieces wouldn’t stick together. Everybody got a stash of taffy to take home to the dorm room for after-lights-out treats.
My mommy loves to read. By the time she got to Kodai for second grade, she had already read everything in the mission bungalow in Belgaum and was ready for new challenges. The Kodai School library kept her in reading materials for years. She remembers reading all of the Zane Grey books (he wrote Western novels) in the library; she began at the beginning of the shelf and read clear through to the end – more than 20 of them. Many a night the housemother, while she was making her rounds after lights-out, would have to tell Mommy to turn off her flashlight and put away her book and go to sleep.
Mommy tells me so much about Kodai I almost feel as if I know the place. The big painting hanging over her mantlepiece helps, too. But I bet Mommy and her friends would have liked to have a soft furry kitty to love on in their dorm rooms. It might have kept their homesickness away, especially at night. I’m glad Mommy’s got me living with her now. She tells me often how lonesome she would be without me, and that makes me feel really good.
Chapter 70
Mommy asked me today if I knew what a miracle was. I didn’t, so she went on to explain that a miracle is something wonderful that God does for His children because He loves them. Then she told me the story about how she and her family had come to move back to Wilmore 38 years ago. It wasn’t just one miracle, she said – it was a whole series of them, and they all took place over one weekend!
I snuggled down on her lap to listen and she began her story. It was the middle of a hot summer in 1982. She and Daddy Jim and another couple had opened a children’s clothing store together six years ago; then the other couple had sold out to them, and my mommy had been running it by herself for a few years. The previous year the economy had taken a downturn, so they arranged to sell out the store and get out of the retail business. Mommy hadn’t been able to find a job after that, and spent some weeks taking some classes at the local trade school, but nothing was happening in the job market around there.
Daddy Jim was working as an industrial electrician at a factory in the next town over. All that fall and winter, he would come home talking about one of his fellow workers who was laid off from work and how he expected just about every day to be next on the list. It didn’t happen until May but then he was laid off too. Here is where one of the miracles happened, Mommy said. Both she and Daddy Jim were out of work and there was only the unemployment money coming in (and not a lot of that), but Mommy said she was not afraid. They had plenty of beef in the freezer and vegetables in the garden, so they weren’t going to starve. Another farmer had been renting out their farm’s tobacco base so that paid the yearly mortgage. They had no job prospects, and yet, Mommy said, there was no fear. Looking back on it, she said, it was as though they were waiting for something to happen, but they had no idea what that would be.
They began exploring the idea of selling up and moving to Lexington, where, they had heard, the economy was doing better and there was work. They talked about it and around it for some weeks, until they were both tired of the subject, Mommy said. Then, one Friday in July, they decided to start setting some things in motion. The first step was to contact a realtor friend in town to ask about the process of putting their farm up for auction. They made an appointment and went to see him. When they left him, an hour or so later, they told him that by Monday they would have made up their minds about whether or not they had decided to leave, and would be back in touch with him. Now how could they have known that?
They went back home and picked up the kids, who had been left at Grandma Jesse and Grandpa Rob’s house. After lunch, Daddy Jim went out to do some chores and Mommy took the kids and went to do some hoeing in the corn patch. After some time, it got too hot (it was the end of July), so they came back in out of the sun. Mommy said she had just washed her face and gotten some cold iced tea, when the telephone rang. Now, Mommy said, there was no such thing as voicemail at the time, so if you wanted to call somebody on the phone and they didn’t answer, you just had to keep calling until they did.
Mommy picked up the phone and heard Mommy Ruth’s voice on the line, her words tumbling over each another in great excitement. “Where have you been?” she demanded. “I’ve been calling you for ages!”
My mommy asked her what in the world was going on, so Mommy Ruth explained in a rush. “You’re going to get a phone call,” she said, “but you’re not supposed to know anything about it. But I couldn’t stand it. I had to call you! Be sure and act surprised when get it!” The miracles were beginning to pile up, but I’ll have to continue this story tomorrow. Mommy said she had a lot more to tell me.
Chapter 71
I settled in on my mommy’s lap today, wanting her to continue her story about the miracles that brought her back to Wilmore to live and work. She and Daddy Jim had been living in Wayne County, about 80 miles away, for the past twelve years and Jessica and Jaytee had been born during that time. They were 10 and 9 when all this happened. Mommy had left off her story yesterday with Mommy Ruth’s excited phone call to her.
“Don’t you move from this phone!” Mommy Ruth’s story tumbled out. It seems that a new president had come to Asbury Seminary on July 1st. That was news to my mommy, as she didn’t keep up with such things. Daddy Jaytee was teaching at the Seminary of course, but other than that she didn’t pay much attention to what was going on there. The new president’s name was David McKenna and he was looking for an executive assistant. Mommy Ruth’s best friend, Sylvia (my mommy said her big sister was named for her), had been working for years for the former president, but she was now retiring. She had sold her own house and was staying with Mommy Ruth while preparing to leave Wilmore for the West Coast. In the meantime, she was filling in as the new president’s secretary.
It seems that several candidates for the position had been interviewed, but for various reasons none of them had suited. Dr. McKenna’s assistant from his previous position, Mrs. Cec Tindall, had come with him from Seattle to help him set up his new office. Mommy Ruth had been out visiting in California for a few days, leaving her friend Sylvia at her house, and had just returned. Naturally, she had asked Sylvia if the position had been filled. Not yet, was the answer, they’re still looking.
While Mommy Ruth was sitting in her office that Friday morning in July (at the same time my mommy was visiting the realtor, as she had told me yesterday) she said she heard a voice (whether audible or in her head, she wasn’t sure), but what the voice said was very clear. “Sheila can do that job!” Now Mommy Ruth was working as a typesetter for both Asbury College and Seminary. This was before the days of computers but IBM had come out with a very early version of a typewriter with some memory. They called it a “composer” and Mommy Ruth had become an expert on it. She had actually typeset my mommy’s resume so it looked very professional, knowing that my mommy was looking for work. Mommy Ruth had kept a copy of it. So when she heard that voice, she reacted the way she always did – she got right to work. She called Mrs. Tindall in the president’s office.
The conversation, Mommy Ruth said, went something like this: “Mrs. Tindall, this is Ruth Seamands. Now people who know me know that I do some crazy things sometimes, but this is the craziest yet. I want to apply for the position of the president’s secretary for my daughter, and she doesn’t even know I’m doing it!”
Cec laughed and agreed that it was pretty crazy, but she said she’d see Mommy Ruth. So Mommy Ruth went over to interview for my mommy, carrying with her that professionally typed resume. As Cec read it over carefully, big tears began to roll down her cheeks. She looked up at Mommy Ruth and said, “This is exactly the kind of person we want!”
Mommy stopped there and told me she would continue her story tomorrow. I could tell she really enjoyed telling me all this, and I could see why she called it a miracle story. Somehow all the pieces were beginning to fit together, and my mommy said only God could have thought all that up. Stay tuned.
Chapter 72
I was anxious to curl up on Mommy’s lap tonight and let her go on with her story of the miracles that brought her back to Wilmore. She had ended the last chapter in the middle of her interview – for a position for my mommy – with Cec Tindall.
After Cec’s emotional reaction to my mommy’s resume, she wanted to see a picture of my mommy, which of course Mommy Ruth just happened to have in her wallet. She told Mommy Ruth that if my mommy were to be hired, they would want her to start immediately. Would that be possible? Yes, was the answer, as both my mommy and her husband were looking for work.
Then Cec said, “But, Mrs. Seamands, I know how hard it is to find a house in this town. If they did come, where would they live?”
“Oh, we have a house,” was the cheery answer. It had happened that Ajji (Grandma Seamands) had died the previous Fall and Thatha Seamands had been living by himself in Wilmore. He was over 90 and his eyesight was fading, so he had moved into Mommy Ruth and Daddy Jaytee’s basement apartment (which they had prepared with him in mind when they built their new house some years ago). His house on Kenyon Avenue had been for sale for some months, and prospective buyers had trooped through it, but for some reason no one had made an offer on it. Now Mommy Ruth knew why – God was saving that house for my mommy and her family.
Cec told Mommy Ruth that she would be calling my mommy to ask her to come interview with her, and warned Mommy Ruth not to call my mommy ahead of time. Of course, Mommy Ruth couldn’t help herself, and called anyway. “Don’t you move from there,” Mommy Ruth warned my mommy. “She’ll be calling you but when she does, don’t let on that I talked to you first.”
My mommy promised to be surprised at Cec’s call. When it came about mid-afternoon, my mommy was surprised. She was asked to come for an interview on Monday afternoon. “If you are offered the position,” she was told, “President McKenna will want you to start immediately. So come prepared to go to work.”
After she hung up the phone, Mommy told me, she wandered around the house in a daze for a while, her mind whirling with the possibilities of a move to Wilmore. She scratched my ears absently, and said softly, “You know, Checkers, when I married Daddy Jim and moved to Wayne County and to the farm, I told myself I would be content. I would not spend my time longing for Wilmore, and I didn’t. I never once asked God to send me back there. He did that all by Himself.”
Mommy said she finally came out of her daze, grabbed up the kids, and drove around the hill to where Grandma Jesse and Uncle Rob lived. (My mommy called her Mom Lovell.) She spilled out her story, and Mom Lovell, to her credit, never uttered a word of disappointment, though she must have been very dismayed at the possibility of their moving, and very quickly, too. She was all encouragement about the possibility. Now, Daddy Jim was the eldest of her five kids, and the closest to her, and the last of them to get married. She would miss him very much. Looking back on it, Mommy said, it was pretty selfish of her to dump this on Mom Lovell without any warning. If they made this move, it would be within the next month, as school would be starting for the kids in Wilmore in late August.
Of course, when Daddy Jim got home, my mommy told him about the phone call, too. They made plans to go to Wilmore after church on Sunday and wait to see what would happen next. More tomorrow.
Chapter 73
Mommy continued her story of how the Lord brought her family back to Wilmore after she had been away for a dozen years. I lay very still on her lap and let her scratch my neck as she told it.
That Sunday in July, the family drove up to Wilmore. Mommy Ruth and Daddy Jaytee were very excited, and so was Thatha. An Indian Bishop, Bishop Mani, was visiting Tata at the time. He seemed more excited than any of them, my mommy said. He prayed a beautiful prayer for them, that the Lord’s will would be done in their lives.
On Monday afternoon, Mommy went for her appointment with Cec. She told me she wasn’t the least bit nervous about it. God had put His plans in place and she felt as though she were just following the path that had been laid out for her. The interview went very well; as a matter of fact, they talked for hours. At the end of the conversation, Cec told my mommy, “You know, if it were up to me I would offer you the position right now, but you need to meet President McKenna and talk with him first, since you would be working for him!” So they agreed that Mommy would see him the next morning (he was out of town).
The next morning, Mommy went to interview with him at 9:30. The first words out of his mouth were, “If I hire you, I will be breaking one of my cardinal rules.” Mommy knew what he meant. It was his policy never to hire a relative of one of his professors, and Daddy Jaytee was Professor of Missions at the Seminary. No president would want a member of a faculty member’s family working for him, not least for reasons of confidentiality. Mommy had an answer for that: “I can only pledge you my loyalty,” she said, “and work to prove myself to you.” He gave her a stern warning: “If I ever hear of anything getting out of this office and it gets traced back to you, you’re out of here!” She told him that she understood completely. “Fine,” he said, “the position is yours. The starting salary is $15,000. Now go get a pad – we’re headed to a staff meeting.”
Mommy said she begged him for five minutes to call her family. They would be very worried if they didn’t hear from her until after noon. So she used the phone right there in his office to make the call (no cell phones in those days). Now, while Mommy was interviewing with the president, Mommy Ruth had asked Daddy Jim, back at her house, “What would it take by way of salary for you to decide you could move here?” He didn’t hesitate. “Fifteen thousand dollars,” he said firmly.
So when my mommy’s phone call came telling them she had been hired, of course their first question was, “How much?” Since the president was standing right there, Mommy answered in Kannada, “Fifteen.” Upon hearing that, Mommy Ruth told my mommy later, Daddy Jim threw up his hands and declared, “The Lord has spoken!”
“And that,” Mommy told me, “is how I went to work in the president’s office at Asbury Seminary at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday morning.” Her first task was taking minutes at the staff meeting. She continued doing so for 30 years, working for five presidents altogether. Over the course of one weekend, she had a new job and they had a new house. God had one more miracle in store for them, too. They did put the farm up for auction and it sold for the minimum price they thought they could accept.
“So, Checkers,’ Mommy said, “don’t let anyone tell you that God isn’t still in the miracle business. He is, and the fact that I’m here now is proof of that.” I felt good when I had heard that whole story. I think it’s a small miracle, too that Mommy chose me to live with her. Who says miracles are only for humans?
Chapter 74
I’ve remarked before that my mommy loves to laugh, and that her whole family like to have fun together, especially as they tell family stories. Sitting around a dining room table really brings out the stories. That’s why, Mommy told me, she suggested I write this diary, so that the family stories she told me could be passed down in writing to the grandchildren, who can then pass them on to their own kids and grandkids.
It seems that telling stories and having a good laugh is also a generational thing in my mommy’s family. For instance, Daddy Jaytee’s grandmother, Grandma Shields, was another of those brave Pennsylvania Dutch women who went out to India from a life of privilege in the U.S. Her daughter, Ajji, Daddy Jaytee’s mother, had followed her Arnett out in 1919 and when her their two boys, Jaytee, and his younger brother, David, were of age, they needed to be in school, which was not available in the very rural India in which Ajji and Thatha were serving. So Grandma Shields went out to India to keep house for the two boys in the city of Bangalore. The littlest boys usually went to a girl’s school for their first couple of years and that is why my mommy always teased her Daddy Jaytee about starting out life as a Baldwin girl!
Anyway, one day it seems that Grandma Shields needed to get her Indian driver’s license, so she went to the municipal offices where that sort of government work was done. She saw a group of men lined up outside one of the offices, and, figuring that they too were there for their driver’s licenses, she joined the line. A few of the men pointed and laughed, but they weren’t speaking English so she didn’t know what they had said and she ignored them. A few minutes later, an official hurried by and Grandma Shields stopped him. “Do you speak English?” “Yes, madam,” he responded. “Am I in the right line to get my driver’s license?” she asked him. He looked horrified. “Oh, no, madam,” he responded stiffly. “These men have been caught urinating on the sidewalk and they are in line to pay their fines!” Now it was Grandma Shields’ turn to be horrified, and she was quickly directed to the right line to wait in.
Mommy Ruth’s mother, Grandma Pearl, had her own story on herself. She was in the post office to buy stamps one day and got to talking to the clerk at the window. When they finished their conversation, Grandma Childers did her good deed by turning to the woman at the next window and shoving her roll of stamps at her and saying cheerily, “Don’t forget your stamps!” Then she walked righteously out of the post office only to stop dead on the sidewalk, realizing what she had done. Red-faced, she had to march right back in and grab those stamps from the very confused customer, and say, “Those are my stamps!” and march right out again. Then there was the time that Grandma Pearl spent the whole of one sweaty day digging up the wild onions that had spread out over a section of the lawn at their house in Illinois. “I declare, Henry,” she said to Grandpa Childers when he came home from work, “those wild onions are taking over the place. I worked all day to get rid of them.” “Woman,” he shouted, “I planted them onions myself!”
Mommy Ruth and her sister, Irene (whom the family all called Rene), looked very much alike. In fact, people in Wilmore often confused them for one another. One time they were both visiting in California and went into an unfamiliar grocery store. Mommy Ruth told Rene she couldn’t find the nuts, so they went their separate ways to look. Mommy Ruth found someone stocking shelves and asked where she could find the nuts. He directed her to the correct aisle. About a minute later, Rene came down that same aisle and asked that same man where she could find the nuts. “I already told you where to find the nuts!” he glared at her. She looked confused, and then said, “Oh, that was my sister you were talking to!”
The stories about driver’s licenses and stamps and wild onions and nuts have all come down into the family lore, my mommy says. As many times as she has heard and told them, she still laughs. I do, too.
Chapter 75
My mommy has talked a lot about Mommy Ruth in the past days. I asked her to tell me some memories of Daddy Jaytee. What was he like? Was he like to laugh, too? And most of all, did he like little furry creatures like me?
Mommy answered all my questions. She agreed that she needed to talk about him more. She said that she looks more like him than she does Mommy Ruth. She whispered that she would rather have looked like Mommy Ruth, since she was beautiful, but my mommy took after Daddy Jaytee, with his red hair and freckles and his same very blue eyes. My mommy always thought he looked a lot like King George Vi (that’s Queen Elizabeth’s daddy). When she showed me a picture of them side by side, I had to agree. Mommy knew what King George looked like because his face was on a lot of the Indian postage stamps.
Daddy Jaytee had a wonderful bass voice. He no doubt got his musical abilities from Ajji, his mother, who was a lyric soprano. Mommy had told me before that Ajji probably could have made a name for herself in the opera world if she hadn’t met Arnett Seamands (Thatha) and gone to India with him. Daddy Jaytee was a good musician. Besides singing bass, he played the piano, trombone, accordion, and Indian tablas. He always had music wherever he went. Mommy remembers him singing love songs to Mommy Ruth, accompanying himself on the old piano in the mission bungalow, even when it was out of tune during the rainy season. When he was a student at Asbury College back in the 1930’s he was in the Ambassador Quartet. He was the bass singer, of course, and the four college men took a year out of their college careers to make a trip around the world with an evangelist. It was during that time, when he was in South Affrica, that the Lord called him to make a decision for India as a missionary. Daddy Jaytee had told Mommy Ruth that he was going to be a music teacher. She certainly hadn’t signed on to be a missionary to India.
But the Lord’s voice persisted, and Daddy Jaytee said yes to Him. Then the Lord turned up the heat. “What about that girl back in Illinois? The one who thinks you’re going to stay in America and teach music? What if she says she won’t go with you to India? What then?” It was a great struggle, but Daddy Jaytee surrendered his love for his Ruthie to the Lord and told Him that if she said no to going to India, then he would have to break off the relationship.
At that time, it took two weeks to get a letter from South Africa to America. Daddy Jaytee wrote Mommy Ruth that very day and knew that it would take four weeks to get an answer from her. But two weeks later he had a letter in his hand! Mommy Ruth wrote that at a church prayer meeting she had picked up a brochure written by Thatha, Daddy Jaytee’s father, and a voice had said to her, “Ruth, if Jaytee goes to India as a missionary would you be willing to go with him?” Mommy Ruth thought that was the silliest thing she had ever heard – he was going to be a music teacher in America. But the Voice persisted, and she said, “Lord, this is really crazy, but if Jaytee is going to India and he asks me to go with him, I am willing.” She said so in her letter to him. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do with your life, and you’ve never talked about going back to India as a missionary, but if you go and you want me to go with you, I am willing.” When they compared the dates of the letters later, they realized that they had been written on the same day. God had spoken to Daddy Jaytee in South Africa at the same time he was speaking to Mommy Ruth in Herrin, Illinois.
Wow – it was another miracle story, like the one my mommy had told me about her coming back to Wilmore. How does God keep all these miracles up His sleeve? Does God even have sleeves?
Chapter 76
Mommy opened the windows for me this morning, but it got pretty hot later on in the day. I was quite uncomfortable in my fur coat, and it took a lot of meowing to make her understand that I was too hot. But she finally got it and closed the windows and turned on the air conditioning. I felt much better after that Mommy felt bad about it, and then she realized that she had missed my birthday yesterday! I don’t know what she would have done that was any different – I don’t like sweet things, so that meant no cake – and she did buy me a new water fountain last month, so I guess she really did get me a birthday present after all. Anyway, I am now a whole year old. I still chew on things and I love my paper-clip toys, so I’ve still got a lot of kitten in me, I think.
Yesterday, my mommy had told me stories about Daddy Jaytee. She told me about how God had called hm and Mommy Ruth separately to the mission field in India, and the miracle of their letters crossing in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Now I was ready to hear some more about him.
She said that Daddy Jaytee was a really good story-teller. He could tell jokes and never crack a smile until the end when everybody was laughing. When my mommy was a little girl she would crawl up in his lap in the mission bungalow in Belgaum and ask him for a jungle story. He would make up something on the spot, with jungle animals as the main characters. And sometimes he would do something mysterious with his handkerchief and suddenly bring out his pet rat. That make me prick up my ears. A pet rat? He had a pet rat? I thought he chased rats with his hockey stick. Mommy assured me it wasn’t a real rat. He would take his white handkerchief and make certain folds and tie knots in it and it would look just like a white rat, with a long tail and ears. He would position it over his open palm and somehow move his fingers in a way that would make it jump at his little girls, who, of course, would squeal with laughter.
Daddy Jaytee had a real heart for the Indian people. He had grown up in India since the age of three and had graduated from high school at Kodai School, just like Mommy’s big sister, Sylvia. He had gone to America for college and seminary in Wilmore and then had gone back to India. Mommy Ruth always said he was more Indian than American. He even spoke with a soft but distinct accent. And when it came to the Kannada language, he was a real pundit (meaning he was a scholar). He learned to speak and read and write it so well he was even able to write song lyrics in the language. American poetry rhymes at the end of the line, usually, while Kannada poetry rhymes at the beginning of the line. Daddy Jaytee wrote song lyrics in Kannada that rhymed both at the beginning and at the end of the line. In true Wesleyan fashion, he borrowed Indian popular melodies and wrote Christian lyrics to fit them. Then he published little songbooks (words only) in Kannada so the Indian Christians could use them in their church services. His praise choruses and songs are still used all over South India.
When the Lord slammed the door shut on his return to India from furlough in 1960 (Mommy reminded me that she had already flown out to Kodai School ahead of the rest of the family), it must have been devastating for him. Mommy said she hadn’t realized at the time what it must have meant for him to no longer serve in the way that he had prepared for all his life. Then Asbury Seminary offered him a teaching position in the missions department. He had always said he was a missionary, not a teacher. But he came to realize he could prepare his students to be missionaries or, if they were studying to be pastors, to grow mission-minded churches. In that way, his influence would spread even farther. In those days, there were no textbooks on cross-cultural communications – he wrote his own, based on his experiences in India. And because he had lived what he taught, his students respected him very much. Mommy sounded proud of Daddy Jaytee – I wish I could have met him – and his white handkerchief rat!
Chapter 77
Mommy participated in her church’s prayer meeting again today. It was held over Zoom on the small black box she calls a laptop. I thought that Zoom is what I do when I have lots of energy, but she said no, that’s called the zoomies. Oh. Anyway, she doesn’t go to her church building right now because of the fear of spreading the disease that has taken the whole country captive. I think she really misses seeing all the church people and I know she misses singing. Mommy loves to sing. She is usually in three choirs during the year and now she isn’t in any at all. I guess that’s why she sings to me so much.
Anyway, the church building is very important to her life. It is to the Indian Christians, too. When Thatha Seamands went to India as a missionary, he went as both a civil engineer and an evangelist. As he preached in the villages, people would come to Christ. After a period of preparation they would want to be baptized. They would meet outside for their worship services, sitting under a tree for shade. It wasn’t very conducive to worship, Mommy said, especially when the dogfights began among the curs in the village or the wandering water buffaloes would come by mooing. The Hindus had their temple in the village and the Muslims their mosque – why couldn’t the Christians have a church? They would come to Thatha with their request and he would lay down the conditions under which he would help them build a church. First, they must provide the land. Either they would pool their money and purchase it or some member of the congregation would donate it for a church building. Once they had the land on which to build, the church members had to promise to provide the labor. If those two conditions were met, only then would the missionary agree to help raise the funds to buy the building materials.
Thatha had drawn up building plans in varying sizes, depending upon the needs of the congregation. The village churches were simple buildings, designed in the shape of a cross, made of mud brick with tin sheets for the roof. Thatha had a large mailing list of churches willing to help him in his work and he would write to one or more of them and lay the project before them. Many of them responded with cash gifts with which he would purchase the materials. On the day of the groundbreaking, the congregation would arrange themselves in the outline of the church building. The people would sing and shout their praises to God, there would be prayers, and then the first shovelful of dirt would be turned. The people, even the children, would all pitch in, mixing the mortar, shaping the bricks, and carrying them to the building, where the bricklayers would fashion them into walls.
On the day of the dedication of the church, the people would put on their best clothes and parade through the village, singing and playing their instruments and cymbals. The parade would stop outside the church, where prayers would be given, and then everyone would file inside to sit on the ground for the celebration service. No one minded if it were a long one, with much preaching and again more singing. A meal would then be served outside. The congregation would sit cross-legged on the ground, and banana leaves would be laid before them for plates. Pots of curry and rice would be carried among them and large helpings dipped out onto the banana leaves. Everyone ate with their fingers, and when the meal was finished, they just rolled up the leaves and threw them away. Very little cleanup necessary!
The Indian people were very proud of their churches. Now they had their own place to gather and a church building as a symbol of God’s presence in their village. During his time of service in India, Thatha built hundreds of village churches and some in larger cities, too. He used his engineering skills to bring glory to God through those church buildings. I understand now why he was so beloved of the Indian people.
Chapter 78
I really liked hearing about Thatha and his building all those churches in India when he was a missionary there. Altogether, my mommy said he served there nearly 40 years. And even after he retired, he spent his remaining years raising money to build still more churches. Ajji would despair of his messy desk, with letters and papers scattered all over it, but she didn’t try to clean it up. Thatha would receive requests for help with building a church and he would pick out the plan that was best suited for that particular congregation. Then he would write some of his friends and tell them how much money he needed. When he had the funds in hand, he would send the money and the blueprints to trusted contractors to see the project through. And many times he made trips back to India himself and would dedicate several of the churches during that time. He called them his “shuttle service” trips. He was actually on one of those trips when he died in India and was buried there.
Besides church buildings, he designed and built parsonages, schools, medical clinics, and even hospitals. Many, many buildings in South India have cornerstones with his name on them. But Thatha didn’t always build big things. At one point, he gave his attention to the simple Indian plow. It was made of wood and was heavy and inefficient, but the people had used such implements for many, many years. He figured out a way to make a very simple, inexpensive metal plow, which cut through the soil faster and was easier to use. That plow helped revolutionize many Indian villages as the farmers began to use them in working their fields.
Daddy Jaytee, while not in any way a civil engineer, made a similar improvement to the village woman’s way of cooking. He noticed that the village wife cooked with wood over three stones placed in a shallow depression in one corner of their hut. As the hut had no windows, all the smoke simply filled it, and she would be in the middle of it, tears streaming down her face, trying to feed her family. Daddy Jaytee devised a simple stove with a pipe that would direct the smoke out of the hut through a hole in the roof. It was a small improvement, but it meant a lot to the people’s daily lives.
When the Gospel came to an Indian village, my mommy said, it changed not only people’s hearts, it gave them hope that they could better themselves. The Hindu religion teaches the idea of reincarnation, in which the soul is born again and again, into different bodies. Depending upon whether people did good or bad deeds in their past life, they would be rewarded or punished in this one. Of course, they never knew what they had done to deserve their present lot. For the people of lower castes or for outcastes, in Hinduism they had no hope of bettering themselves in their present lives; they just had to accept their fate. But Christianity told them that Christ loved everyone equally and that they were all people of worth. That gave them hope. Life didn’t have to be one of misery forever. In many Indian villages in which people became Christians, their neighbors began to see differences in them. They cleaned themselves up, physically and morally. The Christians told the truth and did their work willingly and helped their neighbors. They would tell others about Jesus and in this way often whole villages would turn to Him.
The Christians would usually want to build a church before anything else, but then they would start thinking about educating their children. Over the years, hundreds of the village boys and girls were brought to the mission compound in Belgaum and housed in hostels (dormitories) so they could go to school. A Christian elementary and a high school were built in the town, which also had public schools and even some colleges. Mommy Ruth found herself overseeing the boys’ hostel, which had resident teachers living there full-time. She had some stories to tell about that, and my mommy promised to share them with me. I think I would have liked to visit the hostels; I bet the kids staying there had plenty of neck scratches and tummy rubs to give.
Chapter 79
Mommy was sitting at a computer drinking out of her glass mug tonight. Of course, I had to amble over and see what was in the mug, but it was something sweet and I wasn’t interested. She told me it was Coke, the best soft drink in the world. OF course, she is watching her waistline and so drinks the Zero kind, but her drink of choice has always been Coke. America has lots of colas and India had its homegrown colas, too, but none of them can come up to Coke, according to my mommy.
When Mommy was growing up in Belgaum in the ‘50s, you couldn’t buy Coke there. The only way to get it was to have Daddy Jaytee bring it by jeep from Bombay, about 200 miles away on the coast. He didn’t go over there very often, but when he did, on church business, he would bring home a case of Coca-Cola for the family. It came in glass bottles then, of course, 24 to a case. The bottles would be apportioned out to the two parents and the two older girls. Mommy remembers taking her precious bottles of Coke – she would get 4 of them – and hiding them so no one else could drink out of her stash. Then she would force herself to make it last as long as possible, since nobody knew when Daddy Jaytee would take his next trip to Bombay. That is why, Mommy told me, she turns up her nose at Pepsi or Mountain Dew or Ale-8-1 or any other soft drink in the world. For her, Coke is the best!
Mommy had said to me last night that she would tell me a story about the boys’ hostel on the mission compound. The story has to do with one of the Indian women my mommy remembers best in Belgaum. Her name was Alice and she was a nurse, the wife of the Methodist District Superintendent at the time. Mommy remembers Alice because she was different from most Indian women that she knew. Alice was amply proportioned and had a big laugh. Many Indian women were quite shy and retiring, but Alice was very outspoken and brooked no nonsense, especially from the hostel boys, who were under her care for medical issues.
Alice had been treating some of the boys who had been genuinely sick with stomach distress, but she suspected that others of the boys were pretending to have stomach aches, too, so they wouldn’t have to go to school. This happened frequently, especially if they were going to have a test that day. So Alice decided she’d have to put a stop to this.
The next time one of the boys told her he had a stomach ache and couldn’t possibly go to school, she just smiled at him sweetly and told him she had just the thing to take care of his problem. He watched with interest as she prepared an enema can and just grunted when she inserted the tube. Fifteen minutes later, when the flash flood was over, he just sat there, shocked and speechless, and cleaned out!
When Alice told Mommy Ruth that story, they both had a big laugh about it. It seems that the Belgaum schools had pretty nearly perfect attendance when word spread of the cure Nurse Alice had in her medical cupboard. Stomach aches nearly disappeared from among the boys and if Alice ever again suspected that one of them were faking one ailment or another, all she had to do was to head toward the cupboard and that ailment would miraculously clear up all on its own.
My mommy says that Alice and Mommy Ruth are together in heaven now, and no doubt Alice is telling Mommy Ruth of her further adventures as a dispenser of medicine in rural India and they are both laughing and entertaining the saints and the angels with their stories. What fun they must be having!
Chapter 80
Mommy says that today is the Sabbath Day, what she calls Sunday. She had read me the stories out of her big book about how God made the world and all the animals and creatures in it. She told me that after doing all that, God took the seventh day off, showing by example that it was good to rest regularly. I also think that He must have been pretty tired – making all those plants and animals and trees and humans sounds like a lot of hard work to me.
Mommy enjoys Sundays, though they have been different for her recently. She used to go to her church on Sunday mornings and then she would often go over to Jessica’s house to have lunch with several of the grandkids. All that stopped when she started staying home from work. Now she goes to Sunday school using her small black box she calls her laptop. She talks to her friends and they pray together and study the big book. Church is a bit different. She just listens, though she sings along with the songs they sing. I know she misses singing especially.
Sundays at Kodai School were different from every other day. The students attended a beautiful stone church on the school compound. Different classes helped out with the service each Sunday, reading scripture or making announcements, even playing the prelude on the piano. My mommy says she did that every now and then. She really didn’t enjoy taking piano lessons or playing in public and when she was a teenager she told me she finally was able to convince her parents to let her stop. She loves singing, but not piano-playing.
After church the students would go to their dining rooms, grouped by age. Sundays were always special because that was the one day of the week that they would get ice cream for dessert. Add on some crushed-up pappadams and drizzle some Lyle’s Golden Syrup on top, and she said she had herself an ice cream sundae, both crunchy and sweet. No one ever missed Sunday lunch! After lunch, the students had to go back to their dorm rooms for a one-hour rest period and to write home to their parents. Mommy had already told me about this part of a Kodai Sunday.
When they were down on the plains in Belgaum, church was held in the church that Daddy Jaytee built on the mission compound in the late 1940s. It was a long service, sitting on hard benches, and not really understanding much of what was going on, Mommy said, as it was entirely in Kannada. When Daddy Jaytee preached there, he would wear a white sherwani coat buttoned up to the throat and look very handsome.
When Mommy and two of her sisters went back to India for their visit after 50 years, they went back to Belgaum and were there on a Sunday. They went to church at the mission compound, feeling right at home, only this time they were the special guests. They were greeted with sweet-smelling flower garlands and many handshakes and namaskaras, the traditional Indian greeting (others call it namaste). They were overcome with emotion at being there after so many years. Mommy spoke for the family, and especially for Mommy Ruth, who would have loved to have been with them. She tried her rusty Kannada on the congregation, making some mistakes, she knew, but hoping they would understand her at least a little.
Church means a lot to my mommy. She is looking forward to the day when she can go back to the building and gather with the other members of her congregation. She knows that you don’t have to be in a building to have church, but they are sacred spaces, she said. For right now, I’m glad she can stay home with me.
Chapter 81
Mommy and I spent a pretty quiet Sabbath day yesterday. She went to Sunday school and church by Zoom and then had another four-hour meeting for her church in the afternoon. Tomorrow begins another work week, she tells me. As for me, I work every day. I chase the birds at the bird feeder while sitting on the windowsill, and I carry my paper-clip toys all around, and I get the zoomies a couple of times a day, and I get Mommy up and remind her when it’s time to go to bed. No wonder I’m exhausted!
Mommy told me that June 6th was a special day of remembrance in America. It was D-Day, the day the Allied forces swarmed onto the beaches of Normandy, France, in 1944, in an operation that eventually led to the Allies taking back Europe from the Nazis. America got into World War II following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. American women and children were soon evacuated from India. Mommy Ruth and her baby, Sylvia, made the very dangerous trip by sea back to America while Daddy Jaytee stayed in India. In December of 1944 he was able to return to America and they spent some time in Connecticut attending the Hartford School of Missions, and that is where my mommy was born. The family, which now included two daughters, returned to India in the Fall of 1946, when my mommy was nine months old.
By that time, India had been a British colony for nearly ninety years. Many rajahs ruled over various city-states in India, like the family of the Rani of Sawantwadi, Mommy Ruth’s good friend. The royal families were permitted to rule over their lands with a fair bit of independence. While mostly a Hindu nation, India had many Muslims living there also, in relative peace under the British. But after World War II, India worked to be independent of British rule, and that happened at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. At that moment, the subcontinent of India was divided into largely Hindu India and largely Muslim Pakistan. A border had been drawn between the two new nations and there was a tremendous slaughter as Hindus living in the new Pakistan tried to get back into India and the Muslims living in India tried to flee to Pakistan. Mommy Ruth and Daddy Jaytee were relatively safe in Belgaum, which was in Mysore State. Uncle David, Daddy Jaytee’s brother, and Thatha Seamands, their father, both lived in a neighboring state and they found themselves in danger.
When independence came, the Hindu rajahs, for the most part, ceded their lands to the new Indian Union, though they were allowed to keep their riches and their houses. Their titles became largely symbolic. However, the largest princely state in India, Hyderabad, refused to give up its independence. Though the population was largely Hindu, Hyderabad was ruled by the Nizam, a Muslim. The Nizams had ruled Hyderabad since the early 1700s and this one was not going to give up without a fight. He began to recruit an irregular army, known as the Razakars, which came from the Muslim higher class. Within a year after its independence, the new Dominion of India could no longer tolerate this militant group living within its borders and made plans to invade Hyderabad and take over the Nizam’s territory by force.
My mommy said this long history lesson was necessary for me to understand the danger that Uncle David and Thatha and their families were in. They lived in different cities, Bidar and Gulbarga respectively, in the Nizam’s territory, both on their Methodist mission compounds, and both were helping to lead their local Christian communities in the midst of much larger Hindu and Muslim populations who had little love for each other. The Hindus had chafed under their Muslim rulers for a very long time and a great slaughter was feared in Hyderabad, too. Word came in mid-September of 1948 that the invasion was imminent.
Mommy said she would continue this story tomorrow as she has just found parts of a diary that Uncle David wrote of his adventures at that time.
Chapter 82
Mommy settled me on her lap and began to scratch behind my ears. While I purred her on, she once again took up the story of the fall of the Nizam of Hyderabad and what happened in Bidar and Gulbarga during those days. Bidar was a town with a massive 500-year-old fort, about 90 miles from Hyderabad. It was an important city, though not as large as Hyderabad City itself, but its inhabitants knew that when the Indian Army came into the principality of Hyderabad, they would have to take Bidar also.
In the last week of August 1948, heeding the advice of the American embassy in Delhi. Uncle David took his wife, Helen, and their small daughter, Sharon, to safety at the Mission Hospital in Kolar, which was in Mysore State. A rally of some 15,000 Muslims and Razakakars (militiamen) had been held recently in the territory and everyone was preparing for war. On September 9th, back in Bidar, Uncle David received a coded telegram conveying the message that all foreigners who wanted to get out should meet at an appointed place in Hyderabad. He had decided to stay, as had some other missionaries, including Paul Wagner.
On September 13th, four small fighter planes flew over the mission compound and, accompanied by a larger plane, bombed the nearby airfield in the military section of town. Other planes dropped leaflets on the city, warning that the Indian Army had begun their invasion but would stay only as long as necessary. Radio news declared nearby cities falling to the Indian Army, while the Razakars tried to convince the terrified people that there were thousands of Muslim troops and airplanes coming to their rescue. At the same time, their officers were fleeing the city.
By September 16th, the city just 17 miles away from Bidar fell. A fast fighter plane flew over and dropped bombs on the fort, where the Razakars had taken refuge. It then strafed the area with its machine guns. Uncle David, who watched the whole thing from the roof of one of the buildings on the mission compound, said that that little plane had in effect captured the entire city of Bidar with two bombs and a few rounds of machine-gun fire. All the inhabitants of the city immediately did one of two things: they either ran to nearby villages or they ran to the mission compound for safety. At first all the Christians came, then the Muslims, and then the Hindus. The compound was bursting at the seams. The missionaries said they could come in, but with absolutely no weapons – all weapons were confiscated and locked up.
The missionaries had painted large red crosses on their buildings and had written a huge sign in white-washed stones: USA MISSION. And a big sign was placed at the compound entrance saying “MISSION HOSITAL.” The Indian Army was coming. The wait was excruciating, and finally Paul and Uncle David decided to go out and meet them at the entrance to town. They saw the initial force and introduced themselves to the Lieutenant in charge. He said the main Army was right behind him. They were expecting a big battle because the planes that had flown over the day before had reported that the fort was full of Razakars. The missionaries informed him that that had been true yesterday, but they had all fled, and the city could be taken without a shot being fired. They learned later that this action on their part actually saved the city of Bidar from a terrific bombardment and great loss of life and property.
Another Army contingent arrived, led by a Colonel this time. The missionaries told them about the cache of weapons and ammunition that they had confiscated and said they would take them to the mission compound. The Colonel agreed that he would make the compound his headquarters, especially since all the weapons were there. And so it was that that the whole armored unit which had been sent to capture Bidar – tanks, armored cars, Jeeps, lorries, and troops – entered the town of Bidar led two missionaries on bicycles at their head.
Chapter 83
Mommy continued her story for the third night. The Indian Army had come into Bidar expecting strong resistance, but had been told by the missionaries, Uncle David and Paul Wagner, that the Muslim troops and Razakars had fled. The missionaries were introduced to the General who was in charge and was soon to be named military governor of the entire state.
The soldiers went to the fort and discovered one ton of gunpowder and arms and other supplies. With the Army’s permission, the missionaries took what blankets and grain and mosquito nets they could pack into the ambulance they brought from the hospital, and took it all back with them. By that evening, the radio said that the Nizam had told his troops to stand down. The Muslims had always said, “When Bidar falls, Hyderabad will fall” and they were right. Outside the hospital that night, a delegation from the Muslims who had crowded into the compound for safety were waiting to express their gratitude. They literally got down and touched the missionaries’ feet; some were openly weeping as they said their thanks for their lives having been saved.
Unfortunately for the Muslim residents of Bidar though, the Hindu community was taking its revenge. The looting began that night, shops and homes. Uncle David took some of the Christian elders of the town with him and went to the homes of several Christians who had participated in the looting and made them take back what they had stolen. They frightened the townspeople by telling them the Army was coming back and would find out who they were.
The next day, destitute people from surrounding villages, knowing the Indian Army was returning, swarmed into Bidar and did their own looting. The missionaries tried to stop it but as soon as their backs were turned it would start up on another street. About mid-morning, Army tanks and lorries showed up, commanded by the General of the entire Southern Command of the Indian Army. When he learned what was happening, he left some troops to help.
Then the missionaries discovered that the granary was being looted and people were using carts and their own manpower to haul away bags and bags of grain. If they had succeeded in carrying it all away, the people of Bidar would soon be starving. The soldiers – and the missionaries – used lathis – stout sticks, to beat the people back and when more soldiers came, the looters ran away. Every single Muslim shop in the city had been looted. At one point, shops were set ablaze, but thankfully the fires were put out before the entire Bidar bazaar area burned down.
The next day some agitators spread the rumor that the missionaries had taken a fifty-thousand-rupee bribe to hide the Razakars on the mission compound. The Colonel knew this wasn’t so and went around setting the story straight. Many Muslims were beaten in the streets and had to be carried in to the mission hospital on stretchers. The doctors told the missionaries some of the Muslims taken refuge were on a list being kept by the District Superintendent of Police (the D.S.P.) and were going to be shot. Once again, Uncle David grabbed the Colonel and told him what was happening and he put a stop to that sort of talk. Still, many Muslims continued to be hunted down, and one man brought to the mission hospital had been beaten so badly he died that night.
Meanwhile, Uncle David told the Colonel that the Razakars had fled to certain nearby villages, and he sent tanks and troops to round them up. Thousands of weapons and a great deal of ammunition were confiscated in that effort. Mommy had to stop there for the night, and promised to finish up the story tomorrow.
Chapter 84
I settled in comfortably and Mommy began to wrap up the story of the fall of Hyderabad principality in 1948. On September 20th, Uncle David noted in his dairy that there was no food for all the refugees on the mission compound and the patients in the mission hospital. None of the grain shops in the bazaar had opened up as yet. He gave them several bags of the school’s food. Many of the people had not eaten in two or three days.
The hospital doctors showed the missionaries about twenty very badly beaten Muslim men and they all realized that the beatings continued. Now there was a quandary: the missionaries had already endangered the mission compound and themselves by reporting the violence, but they felt that had no choice but to tell the D.S.P. and even the Colonel, if necessary. The victims all testified that the police had done it, and the D.S.P. got very upset and shouted that all his men had been trained for only one mission: Kill all the Muslims! It was a very hard thing to put a stop to it, and the Colonel himself had just beaten two policemen caught in the act of beating Muslims. The D.S.P. said if the Muslim refugees were taken home, he would try to guarantee their safety.
Paul and Uncle David spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening ferrying nearly 400 women home. They were going home to nothing left. And yet they were grateful to the missionaries for saving their lives and many got down at the missionaries’ feet to express their thanks.
Many of the Hindus became instantly nationalistic in their new-found freedom, smearing huge caste marks on their foreheads and wearing the dhothi and the Congress cap. Uncle David remarked on a funny sight he saw: a Muslim man wearing a sherwani and a Ghandi-cap, carrying an enormous Indian flag, and shouting “Jai Hind!” (Victory to India!)
Uncle David concluded his dairy entries by saying that he whole-heartedly approved of the Indian action – it was necessary. He was also impressed by the professionalism of the Indian Army. The Christians in the town played a huge role in trying to be peacemakers and reconcilers; he said he shuddered to think what would have happened if they had not been there. The Colonel said that if it the two missionaries had not been there, a lot more people would have been killed. Uncle David noted that some eight years previous there was a Muslim uprising against the Hindus and the Hindus flocked to the mission compound. Now it had been the Muslims’ turn to flee there for refuge.
In the city of Gulbarga, where Thatha Seamands lived, there were many rumors and much anxiety. People got their news from the radio. The Nizam’s 500 regular army troops stationed there mostly deserted when they heard the Indian Army was coming, and though some of the Hindus began retaliating against the Muslims, things didn’t get as bad as they did in Bidar. The mission compound was prepared to take in refugees if they came, but the takeover of the city was done fairly peacefully and looting was kept to a minimum.
I was worried about Mommy Ruth and Daddy Jaytee, but my mommy assured me that as Belgaum was in Mysore State, which was not under the Nizam, the time of Indian independence had gone fairly smoothly there. I was relieved to hear this. Mommy said she herself was just two years old during all these tumultuous times, so she has no memory of them. I was glad to hear that she wasn’t in danger. Safety means a great deal to me, and I’m glad that God kept all those missionaries safe back then.
Chapter 85
I’ve trained my mommy so well! She now knows how to play games with me. She gives me colored paper-clips to carry around. They make such fun noises when I drop them on the big plastic sheet her desk chair sits on or on the big box under she has kept for me to play in under the card table or on the card table itself. I bat the paperclips around and of course they fall off the table, and then I look over at them and then up at her. I’ve taught her exactly what to do. She picks them up and gives them back to me. The same with her red pen. I played with it for a long time yesterday afternoon, lying on her desk and batting the pen off onto the floor. Sometimes she caught it before it fell and other times she had to go hunting for it. She told me I was worse than a two-year-old but I knew that wasn’t right ‘cause I just turned one last week. I was tired after all that playing and curled up in her lap for more stories.
Mommy had told me about all the miracles that brought her and her family back to Wilmore after living on the farm in another county for twelve years. Now she began telling me about what it was like to come back here to live. Mommy had gone through high school (except for that one semester she was back in Kodai by herself) and college in Wilmore. During that time, she had lived in three houses in town. Ajji and Thatha Seamands had retired from the mission field in India in 1957 and had built their dream home directly across the street from the Asbury College campus. It was on the corner of Kenyon Avenue and was made of Bedford stone, Mommy said, and had marble windowsills. Thatha had designed it himself.
After his formal retirement, Thatha declared that he wasn’t really retired – he was re-fired and rehired! For several years he took his “shuttle-service” trips back to India to dedicate the churches he had built, and my mommy told me she was the one who stayed with Ajji to keep her company. She never, ever dreamed that she would someday own that house and live in it with her own family. Because she and Daddy Jim and the kids made many trips up to Wilmore from the farm, the kids were very familiar with that house as well as the one that Daddy Jaytee and Mommy Ruth had built up on Talbott Drive.
When Mommy Ruth and Dddy Jaytee knew that they would be staying in Wilmore and not going back to India to serve on the mission field there, they had bought a big old two-story white house (it may have been a farmhouse itself at one time) on Hughes Avenue, the street right behind Ajji and Thatha’s house. The first thing that Mommy Ruth did to that house was to convert its old back porch into a second bathroom. Poor Daddy Jaytee had been sharing the only bathroom with five females, and my mommy said he was greatly outnumbered! (I’m glad I don’t have to share my litter box with anybody.)
Some years later, they learned that Asbury College wanted to buy up the entire length of Hughes Avenue because they were going to build a brand-new women’s dorm at its far end. And to sweeten the deal, the College would give each of the homeowners a plot of land on the new Talbott Drive on which to build themselves a new house. Or they could move their old house up there. Mommy Ruth jumped all over that and began planning her dream house right away.
The plot they chose was a good-sized one and the house she planned was big, too. Mommy Ruth loved to entertain and she wanted lots of bedrooms and plenty of bathrooms, too. It was on three levels and contained a basement apartment for Thatha and Ajji to live in when they could no longer live by themselves. By the time my mommy needed a home to live in in Wilmore, Ajji had died and Thatha had moved into the basement apartment on Talbott Drive. So their house on Kenyon was empty and just waiting for my mommy and her family to move in. Mommy said she’d tell me more about the two houses when she continues her story tomorrow
Chapter 86
Mommy had gone to the pet store yesterday and brought back something new for me. It was black and had a little round thing on it that made noise when I moved. “It’s a collar, Checkers,” she said happily. “I think it looks very nice on you.” I didn’t like it at all and immediately began trying to bite it. I caught it between my jaws but couldn’t move it any farther than that. I just ran away, but I couldn’t run away from it. Somehow it went with me everywhere and the bell (Mommy said it was a bell) wouldn’t stop ringing. Finally, at suppertime, Mommy took it off my neck. “Okay, Checkers,” she said regretfully, “I guess it isn’t worth your not being happy.” I’m glad she wants to keep me happy and that the collar and the bell have been put away. I was so relieved to be rid of it I climbed right into her lap later and let her continue her story.
Mommy Ruth was in her element, my mommy said, planning her new house. She searched for a plan that she liked and then began to modify it even more. She designed the living room and dining room, a kitchen, and a den. Long before the idea of an open concept was being used for house planning, she eliminated the wall between the kitchen and the den. “I’m tired of being stuck in the kitchen getting dinner while everybody else is in the TV room talking and having a good time. I want to be in on the action.” While the house was actually going up, the contractor said she should put a wall between the two rooms, like he was used to doing, and she told him nothing doing – leave it the way she had it.
Mommy Ruth still had one daughter at home at the time, so one bedroom on the main floor was to be hers and she drew a second large bedroom at right angles to it, both to be served by the main floor bath. “I can easily make you three bedrooms there,” the contractor told her. “All we have to do is –.” “Nothing doing,” was her reply. “You leave those bedrooms alone – I want two big ones, not three little ones!”
The living room, at the front of the house, had a large opening into the dining room. The walls on either side of this opening had been drawn in at different widths, so the opening was actually off center. While the house was going up, Mommy Ruth was out there nearly every day with her tape measure, making sure the builders were sticking to her plans. Sure enough, they had begun framing that doorway between the living and dining rooms to have walls of equal length on both sides and she made them take out that framing and do it her way. Her reasoning was sound. She and Daddy Jaytee had both a piano and a small organ and the piano was the larger of the two, so it needed a longer wall behind it than the organ did. The doorway may have been off-center but it fitted the two musical instruments exactly.
The master bedroom upstairs had two closets built under the sloping eaves at the front of the house. Mommy Ruth had designed the closets to come out into the bedroom farther than the builders thought they should. Once again, she and her trusty tape measure caught them in the act and made them frame out the closets as she had directed. “I don’t care if they take a few feet off the bedroom,” she said firmly. “That bedroom is plenty wide and I need some more closet space!”
She designed a large landing at the top of the stairs so that it would be an office area, with twin desks for her and Daddy Jaytee. She added a small storage area off the office area for file cabinets and shelves. To the left of the landing the contractor showed her a bonus area and said it could be used for storage. “Nothing doing,” she said, delighted. “Frame it out and add a built-in closet and we’ll have another bedroom!” Mommy Ruth got the house of her dreams but she had to fight in real life to get it.
Chapter 87
When my mommy and her family moved into the Kenyon Avenue house in Wilmore that Ajji and Thatha Seamands had built, it was the fourth house in town that she had lived in. What she didn’t realize at the time is that that street had a long history with members of the Seamands family living on it.
Daddy Jaytee had graduated from Kodai School in 1932. His family came back to the States the next year and lived with Ajji’s mother, Grandma Shields, who had bought a house in Wilmore on Kenyon Avenue. When their parents went back to India in 1934, the two boys stayed on with Grandma Shields and she kept house for them while Daddy Jaytee went to Asbury College and his younger brother, David, attended the Asbury high school on the College campus.
When Mommy Ruth and Daddy Jaytee got married, she was attending Asbury College and he was a student in Asbury Seminary. They lived in a little apartment in the house that is now the OMS house just opposite across the street from where Ajji and Thatha built their retirement home some years later. So when my mommy and her family moved into that house, Kenyon Avenue had already had a lot of Seamands relatives moving on and off it.
Mommy tells me that they were very happy in their new home in Wilmore. The kids were in fifth and sixth grade, attending Wilmore Elementary, which was in a stone building just up the street from the IGA store. Jessica and Little Jaytee could walk to school and Mommy walked to work at the Seminary by crossing the Asbury College campus. Daddy Jim first found work at a plant in Nicholasville but before too long he got on at the maintenance department at Asbury College, doing electrical and plumbing work. Between the two of them, Mommy joked that they kept the two institutions running.
One of the fun things about living in Wilmore was the fact that the Ichthus music festival happened every April. For many years it was held on the old camp meeting grounds. The local Lions Club always helped out with parking and traffic control, which was no small thing when literally thousands of people came into town and walked from wherever they were staying down across the railroad tracks to the campground. After Daddy Jaytee joined the Lions Club, he and my mommy worked the grounds every year. As there was limited space for camping on the festival grounds, the youth groups attending would stay in people’s basements and in the town’s churches. The Methodist Church always had a big pancake breakfast fundraiser during Ichthus weekend. Mommy told me about the time that Little Jaytee didn’t come back from working at Ichthus until nearly three o’clock one morning. She just knew he had been kidnapped or killed but nope – he had been helping to load all the sound equipment into the tractor-trailer of one of the bands playing that night, and he had the tee-shirts they gave him to prove it! In Icthus’ later years, the owners bought a new location out on US 68, which had much more room for people to pitch their tents. There too the Lions Club helped out with parking, and they also had a food truck. They sold hotdogs and hamburgers and cotton candy. Daddy Jim turned out to be the master cotton-candy-make.r Once again, Jessica and Jaytee got to help out during that weekend.
As Ichthus was held in April, the weather was always problematic. One time during the event, a tornado warning was issued for Wilmore and everybody had to evacuate the grounds and take shelter in houses and churches in town. Imagine evacuating over 10,000 people that quickly! But the town stood up to the challenge and no one was hurt. Mommy said it was a sad thing when Ichthus was discontinued, but the April weather became too much of a problem. Mommy told me you could hear the music from Ichthus all over town from both locations. It must have been really loud! I don’t like loud noises much, but I guess one weekend a year wouldn’t be too bad.
Chapter 88
We had a hard rain this afternoon. Mommy had to close the windows, it rained so hard A big loud noise came overhead and I ran away from the sunroom where I was snoozing to be closer to her. She told me it was just thunder and that wouldn’t hurt me, but I wasn’t so sure. It took a lot of neck scratching and belly rubbing on her part to convince me.
Mommy continued telling me about living in the Kenyon Avenue house. She and Daddy Jim were there for sixteen years, long enough for the kids to grow up and leave Wilmore and get married. When they first moved back to Wilmore, there were no cell phones and personal computers were just beginning to come into use in homes and offices. After some time, and to Little Jaytee’s great delight, Daddy Jim agreed to buy a Commodore 64, one of the earlier word processors. At that time there was no internet, and to Mommy’s way of thinking, it was just a typewriter with a memory. She used it a lot, however, writing letters for herself and Daddy Jim. But for Little Jaytee, it was a way to play computer games and he was on that computer every chance he got. He found a modem someplace and plugged it in and began using it to talk to friends in Lexington. There was no cable or Internet, of course, so the only way one computer could talk to another was over the telephone line. Of course that would tie up the phone line for anyone else trying to call out or in. Mommy said if you picked up the handset to try to place a call while the modem was in use, all you got was a loud static. She would have to yell across the house to LIttle Jaytee to get off the modem so they could use the phone. But all those hours of fooling around on the computer, that early one and the ones that followed, gave him the love for things high-tech that ultimately led him to where he is today as a data-base developer and application programmer. Mommy says she doesn’t really know what all that means – just that he can fix her computer whenever she needs him to!
Because Mommy and Daddy Jim were both members of the Lions Club, when Jessica and Little Jaytee were teenagers they decided to sponsor some Japanese Lions exchange students to come and stay with them for six weeks one summer. One of the boys lived with them and two other young men stayed at another house in town. The youth spoke varying degrees of English so communication was always a challenge and a delight. They had trouble with Daddy Jim’s Kentucky accent, especially when he pronounced words like “miles” as “malls.” They learned lots of new vocabulary. One of the first words they learned was “leftovers,” since Mommy fed them lots of those. One night she announced that they would have tacos for supper and the students looked mystified when she handed out plates of corn taco shells filled with spicy meat and topping. “What is this?” they asked politely. “These are tacos. I told you that’s what we’re having for supper tonight.” Oh,” they said, “yes, tacos.” Turns out that the word “taco” means “octopus” in Japanese and they were expecting some seafood delicacy. But they loved the tacos.
That was really a fun summer, Mommy said. The family showed their Japanese friends all around central Kentucky. They rode the Valley View ferry, went to Shakespeare in the Park and the “Stephen Foster Story,” went hiking at Natural Bridge, enjoyed county fairs, and visited Trooper Island, a summer kids camp program supported by Kentucky Lions and run by state troopers on an island in Dale Hollow Lake. Mommy said they were sad to say goodbye to the boys at the end of their stay. She still exchanges Christmas cards with one of them, all these years later. Mommy said she saw more of her own state during their visit than she had in all the years before. They enjoyed it so much they had other Lions Club exchange students in other summers, a couple from Japan, one from France, and one from Peru. I think I would have enjoyed meeting all of those students from other countries. I bet they gave good neck scratches!
Chapter 89
I have had such a busy day taking care of the birds attending Mommy’s bird feeders just outside my window. She and I had a lot of entertainment today watching the blue jay who has discovered the free food. He has had a very frustrating time trying to balance on the small rim at the bottom of the feeder. We watched him make several attempts and fail and just fly disgustedly back into the trees. We don’t know why he can’t do it – other big birds like the grackles have no trouble at all. Then all of a sudden we looked and there he was, perched on the rim and eating away. He flew off and disappeared for a few hours. When he came back, he apparently forgot how to do it because he once again couldn’t get his balance. Mommy kept telling him to fly in from the top of the feeder and not up from the bottom, but he just wouldn’t listen. Once again, he had to fly off without his snack. No wonder they call them bird-brains!
I just love stories about Mommy Ruth. My mommy has lots of them. She began telling me today some I hadn’t heard before.
Mommy Ruth was blessed with naturally curly hair. She had four daughters, but did she bequeath her curls to any one of them? No, she did not! My mommy was indignant about that. Her hair is very thick and straight and for years she paid to have perms put it in it until she says she finally got smart and let it do its thing.
But Mommy Ruth had naturally curly hair, of which she was quite proud. Her family had no money for going to a beauty shop when she was a teenager, so she learned to cut it herself. That came in handy when she had four daughters to care for on the mission field. When she and Daddy Jaytee first went out to the mission field, they went by ship – a six-week trip. During that voyage, he suggested to her that she should learn to cut his hair. They had packed hair scissors and clippers in their big steamer trunk so Mommy Ruth got them out, placed a chair in the middle of their stateroom, and told him to sit down. She wound a big towel around his shoulders and began.
Now these weren’t electric clippers, but the kind where she had to squeeze the handles and move the clippers at the same time. The harder you squeezed, the faster the haircut went. So she started on the back of his neck – but that’s where things got complicated. She hadn’t counted on the Pacific Ocean. As she was squeezing and clipping, the ship suddenly listed to port. But the clippers had a mind of their own and nipped up and over the back and top of his head. Mommy Ruth didn’t scream – she just caught her breath. There was nothing to do but try to even it up. So she started on the other side of his neck, not realizing that when a ship lists to port . . . As she got going with the clippers, the ship listed to starboard and she was suddenly staring at where X marked the spot on top of Daddy Jaytee’s head.
The ship righted itself and she got out the scissors and tried to cover up the damage. She finished up as best she could, though she couldn’t really do anything about the bald spots here and there. She swept the floor, took off the towel, and handed him a mirror. He looked at one side – which looked fine. Then the other side – which looked fine too. Then he turned around to look at the back and top. He didn’t have his glasses on so at first he couldn’t believe what he saw. He put them on, and still couldn’t believe it. He handed the mirror back to her, turned green, and pronounced himself seasick. He went to bed and said he didn’t even want her to bring him any food from the dining room.
Mommy Ruth didn’t get seasick at all, despite the rough seas. She enjoyed every meal and reported back to him about every menu, but he just wasn’t interested. Fortunately, by the time the six weeks were up the bald spots had disappeared, and from then on Mommy Ruth cut his hair all the time – on dry land.
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