Beyond Commonplace

Clutching her tan suitcase, Thelma stepped aboard the Greyhound bus. With her free hand she swept a film of dust from an empty seat. Dust. It was like a crazed intruder. “What is it like anyway”, Thelma wondered, “the Golden State?”*           

During the writing of Living With A Limp I would periodically pause and immerse myself in scenes of the imagination. The aim was to re-live as best I could a crisis here, an adventure there from true-life happenings of a bygone era. I had been granted through the years the luxury of catching bits and pieces of story as shared and then repeated in various settings by my near and distant kin. So LIMP is personal for me.

Many, if not most, works of memoir call up a collection of narratives featuring among the principal characters any number of close family members.

Thelma Christine Bay, the excited, apprehensive. westward-bound country girl, would traverse seventeen hundred miles by bus. My (future) mother had tasted her share of scarcity through most of her growing-up years. The onset of the Great Depression followed immediately by long years of drought across the Southern Plains (forming the Dust Bowl), made survival itself a burdensome day-by-day task.

My mother’s Schulter – eight miles to the south of Okmulgee – Berkeley, Phoenix, Mohave Desert, (again) Berkeley and finally Okmulgee habitations did find her at certain seasons plodding along through that mundane ordinariness common to most of earth’s pilgrims. Still, hers was clearly no insignificant life.

But then, neither is mine. Nor yours.

There is no such thing as an ordinary life**

©2025 Jerry Lout                 *Amazon. Living With A Limp            **Mark Twain

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