We met a couple of new friends, Patty and Eddy, and they quickly brought us into their very very large extended family,
and into their even larger extended family at Calvary Baptist Church.
That gave us a very large circle of friends, and it took away the
loneliness of moving to a new city, knowing no one. Calvary brought
us many friends, such as Wes and Cheryl, who we also stay in touch
with today. They were both teachers. Wes was an Industrial Arts
teacher, and he and his buddy made a couple of really neat handmade
canoes. Barbara later bought one of them for me, something she had
been saving her substitute teaching money for a month to buy. Now,
who else in the world would put up with substitute teaching for a
month just to buy a birthday present? That's just Barbara for you. I
got a lot of mileage out of it over the years. But a heavy limb fell
during an ice storm years ago, like a spear, and took the bottom out
of it. I still have it, though it's unusable, and about rotted out,
but wild cats still raise their brood under it regularly. Our little
cat house.
Barbara and I moved to towns
where we knew no one several times, in our moves during my teaching
career. It always made our own family closer. We had each other.
Calvary Baptist Church was like no
other church we had ever known. They always seemed to have it figured
out, and the people who we knew seemed to be there for the right
reasons. The church services were never really quiet, because they
always bussed in lots of poor kids. They always had lots of outreach
going on. When we left Hannibal three years later, we searched
twenty four years for another church like it, and never found it,
until we showed up one day at Fellowship Bible church in Arkadelphia,
a new church just starting up. Today, we are still there. Barbara and
I are the only members from that original church still present. How
that came about is a long story in its own right, and I will tell you
more about that later.
We finally managed to get a loan,
and we bought an old, old house up on top of one of the highest hills
around. You remember Tom Sawyer, Injun Joe, and all those other
characters of Mark Twain? Well, the cave Tom and Becky were lost in,
supposedly, was in that area. We had an acre up on top, and we made
the most of it. I could finally grow a garden, like I grew up with at
Wing. The neighborhood was great, lots of other kids close to the
age of ours.
One house, down the street, was a
little different. The adults were not friendly, and we quickly
learned that our kids were picking up a lot of words from their kids
we didn't want them to know, and they were very rough around the
other kids. Our kids were instructed to come in the house when the
wild ones were outside. Most of the other neighbors had learned what
we learned, and often a kid came running up the street, shouting,
“The wild ones are out!" followed immediately by a dozen kids
running indoors. We never knew, while we lived there, just how bad
the situation was for the poor "wild ones."
In the spring, the people in
Hannibal didn't brag about how many fish they caught, like in
Arkansas. They bragged about how many Morel mushrooms they had found.
For two weeks or so in the spring, people just seemed to put
everything else on hold, and hunted the mushroom. I finally found out
exactly what they looked like, and Corey and I walked miles along the
Mississippi River hunting. When we got home, totally exhausted, with
nary a mushroom, our neighbor boy came over and showed us the bucket
full of Morels he had found in our back yard, in our woods, while we
were walking the river bank. They shared, and they are wonderful to
fry up and eat.
As the weather finally warmed,
seemed like forever, I went in search of the catfish with my church
friends. The mighty Mississippi and the Salt river were much colder
that I was used to, and the fishing was slow. I made the mistake of
bragging to my friends that I could dress a catfish in 30 seconds,
and not a one of them would buy that. They ragged me pretty good
about it. Finally, one night, we caught a few, they all came over to
my house, and told me to put up or shut up. I dressed it in 23
seconds. They just had no idea how many catfish I had skinned in
Arkansas.
When fall rolled around, we went
“muddin'” a few times with our friends Wes and Cheryl in their
jeep. I had traded brother Harold out of his trail bike, tied it on
top of the Corvair, and hauled it up to Hannibal. When hard winter
hit, Wes and some of the guys wanted to go camping and Muddin'. I
took the trail bike. The river had been frozen deeply for a long
time, then a thaw had put six inches of water on top of the still
hard ice. They drove all over the river in this mess, and not to be
left out, I drove my trail bike along, most of the day. We slept in a
tent, freezing, and a heavy snow fell. When we got home, Wes, the
experienced mudder, also a good mechanic, made sure he got all the
water out of his motor. I, the novice and not a mechanic, let the
trail bike sit, never cleaned it out. It never ran again
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