Walked along the seawall a little while ago. There were two guys fishing in the bright sun. Seems like a good way to evade the joys of family togetherness for a few hours. They were in a good mood, offering up 'Merry Christmas' with big grins and kidding me about the dog.
My mother, dead nearly 20 years, was born Christmas Day of 1910 in Cuervo, Guadalupe County, New Mexico Territory. The store-bought materials, mostly nails, cost less than a dollar in the house where she was born. It was a dugout built into the side of a mountain. Her father was a tubercular, what they then called a lunger, from Georgia. He came west in the hope that his TB would get better. He finally died in 1927 in Wichita Falls. The family, four kids that survived infancy, lived just a bit behind the closing of the frontier, but in a time that things were still pretty raw. Momma rode a stagecoach from someplace-I-forget to Ft Stockton in '15 or '16. She probably saw as much change in a lifetime as anyone should have to bear, from stagecoaches to men walking on the moon.
4 comments:
Something tells me I would have really enjoyed knowing and chatting with your mom.....but then that shouldn't be a surprise to you either. I suppose the term lunger, is right there with "consumption" as far as a word meant to describe what was actually going on in the body....
That is really interesting stuff about your mom, Mr. Loon. Perhaps when the spirit and time allows, you can tell us more about her fascinating life.
TB is still a scourge in undeveloped and developing countries even in this day and age. Although the antibiotics we have now to treat it are still mostly effective, drug-resistant strains are rearing their ugly heads far too often. If only your dad had lived a few more decades, he could have received treatment and would likely have been cured. It is a stealthy and mean organism, for sure, causing untold misery for eons. I am sorry your dad and so many others of his generation fell prey to its deadly mechanisms.
My mistake. I meant your granddad.
I was a secretary at UT in 1980 when someone came running into our office, like a town crier, crying out: "Get ready! Computers are coming! The whole world is changing!!!" We thought this person was crazy, but as it turned out . . .
I love your mother's story, and I wonder what unexpected thing will rock the world in the next twenty years? What will the town crier be crying out??
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