We’re BACK. Jerry’s ‘Second-book’ narratives

Hi Reader-friends,

After the release and enthusiastic reception of Living With A Limp, I’ve plunged into the next chapter (pardon the pun) of my memoir narratives.

Enter the journey with me. Read week-by-week posts which I’ll include in the coming book. Simply follow this website blog. Also, it’s easy to catch the unfolding episodes by a simple mouse click. . “+follow”.

First post of the new series is Thursday, March 11, 2017. Comments, Feedback welcome!

P.S. If you’ve not picked up Living With A Limp, it’s now at a reduced rate in paperback and ebook at this Amazon site. http://amzn.to/2jBzKwW

Thankful for your friendship.

See you Thursday!

Next stop. San Antonio

I nudged the clinic door. It opened and I inched toward a desk behind which sat a dark-haired middle-aged lady. The receptionist. A pain shot through my back at the waist line. My knees buckled but I caught myself, barely dodging a crash to the hardwood floor.

“Óh, sir!” Her concern was genuine. She indicated a chair. “Here. Right here.” I eased into it, contorting my limbs and back in a few deft maneuvers.

“The doctor will see you in just a minute. Another slow turn and I was seated, a trace of perspiration beading my eyebrows. Thanking her with a silent nod, I began filling the first-visit patient form. After a couple entries, I had relaxed enough to reflect on the event sixteen hours that brought me now to this house-turned-clinic.

A wry smile momentarily hijacked my features. If Francis could see me now.

Shortly before our San Antonio move, my co-worker at Tulsa’s North American Aviation had asked what job awaited me in the Alamo City. Now, between winces, I imagined his I-told-you-so if he could meet up with me today in this bone-cruncher establishment (the average chiropractor of the era hoped to see his specialty one day rise above the “snake-oil peddler” status it was often relegated to).

Well, Francis, it’s like this. Down at the corner of Caldera and Bandera there’s this Phillips 66 station. . .

Midafternoon yesterday I had grabbed two car tires, each of them encircling its own heavy rim. Lifting a heavy load while swiveling to another direction defied sound judgment. This insight was shouted to me from that waist line point along my spinal column.

But fifty minutes from entering Dr. Brown’s clinic I left convinced a miracle-worker had signaled magic to my miserable frame. Unlike at my entry, I exited the premises without a whimper. The bone-cruncher enterprise had won my vote.

This early encounter into our South Texas move served as a kind of preview for my wife Ann and me. Twists and turns of our movements ahead would usher in adventure, discovery. Pain would play its role.

How do you turn a Pentecostal into a Baptist, then to something other, and still retain qualities of each.

A fellow with the middle name of Worthy crossed my path. I was never the same.
©2017 Jerry Lout

Unlikely Union

Southern culture calls for informal titles, the common church-goer each assigned their own. Brother and Sister. The titles carry in themselves a gentle ring of piety.

“Hi, Brother Jerry! Say, I’ve been wanting to talk with you, got a minute?”

David Worthy Mulford flashed his broad, tilted smile – the left side of his mouth elevated slightly above the other. The smile was rich, conveying the easy warmth he was known for around campus. I turned his way, returning the smile. I was ten years David’s junior and part of the Lively Stone class. David, an upperclassman, served as president of The Illuminators. Titles once again – these varieties selected and owned by each class entering the freshman year.

“Hi. Sure”. I unloaded my hefty hard-bound theology text and my equally dense Thompson Chain Bible to the sidewalk. A jumble of protruding scribbled notes flapped as a gust tried to wrench them from the large books.

David launched in, his voice sincere.

“Jerry, would you and Ann like to join Betty and me in pastoring a church the other side of town?” The question struck me. First as intriguing, eventually appealing. David, my fellow dyed-in-the-wool Pentecostal, read my quizzical gaze. it was then he dropped the ‘B’ word.

“Eastwood Baptist asked me to be their fill-in pastor, until they find a replacement for the one that left. The church was saddled with a bunch of debt through the sale by a former leader of fraudulent bonds. The congregation is hurting pretty bad financially. Although it’s a sad situation for the folks there, it seems maybe the Lord’s opened a door for us to encourage them. And to maybe gain experience for ourselves in preaching, teaching and in church work in general.”

Leading worship for Eastwood Baptist came easier for me than teaching a New Testament book to adults twice my age. Paul’s ancient letter to believers in a Mediterranean seaport had grown on me.

“Brothers and Sisters, let’s open to Ephesians. Chapter one.

My gas station work fell to the wayside when a big newspaper hired me as a teletype setter operator. How about this – coming to work almost daily right across the street from the Alamo. If Davy Crocket and Jim Bowie could have seen the edifice to one day cast its shadow over their fortress. Shading my eyes I gazed upward.

The San Antonio Express towered a full eight stories. . . matching my hometown’s all-time highest building. In child-hood I could have only imagined passing through the doors of such an imposing skyscraper. And even now I little dreamed I would witness here within this structure, one of the most monumental events of human history. A culmination of a U.S. president’s audacious pledge.

©2017 Jerry Lout

Out of this World

By my eighteenth year I had never seen a televised funeral, much less for a president.

From my elevated perch at the client’s living room I watched my dad, pipe-wrench in hand, navigating space beneath the house. Stooped beyond an open place in the hardwood flooring, he called up occasionally, assigning me a task common to plumber wannabes.

Stepping carefully to avoid a fall through the rectangular gap where the floor furnace had earlier rested I took in the somber music and snatched glimpses of the T.V.’s black and white images. The casket, draped full-length in the national flag, held the body of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It rested atop a carriage drawn by seven white horses. I shivered at the cold air rising from the opening below, the absentee furnace depriving us of warmth in the November chill.

Thirty months earlier as my Sophomore High School year was ending, this popular young president had boldly announced, “we choose to go to the moon!” He attached a timeline. By the end of this decade. That was May, 1961.
Challenging his citizens to beat the Soviets in a great skyward race, Kennedy’s speech had fueled a bigger-than-life dream. Pursue the unthinkable. That was then. An assassin’s bullet had afterward found him and eight years had now lapsed.

I dismounted my blue Vespa scooter before the newspaper plant that helped fund my college fees and support my young wife. San Antonio’s July heat bore down. Removing the bike helmet, I padded my brow and neck with a handkerchief, collecting enough moisture to quench a small fire. Relaxing a moment, I squinted across the way, marveling once more at the recently erected Tower of the Americas, landmark of the city’s historic International Exposition otherwise known as Hemisfair. Making my way to the shop floor I settled into my usual place before the teletype equipment. This, however, was no usual day.

Minutes later I joined fellow technicians before a T.V. set. In near disbelief our gazes drank in something no humans in all history had witnessed and few had dared dream. Our past president, his body long since entombed in Arlington Cemetery, had declared it, “we choose to go to the moon”.

The television crackled as a man’s voice traversed a great expanse of outer space. It found its way to an upper floor of the San Antonio Express. The voice of Neil Armstrong.
“One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

All about me the newspaper’s work area rang with cheers. I fell silent and revisited memories of a different work place. North American Aviation. Where I had not that long ago, sorted, filed and fetched engineering blueprints.

Labeled Apollo.
©2017 Jerry Lout