scarcity – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

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**

Connecting the two words Train and Track evokes images. Linked-up railway cars snaking over a mountain pass or across a sun-beaten desert or through a city’s colorless industrial park.

I was born the fourth child of Clyde Baxter Lout, whose own entry into the world in 1912 followed another birthday by just five years – that of his native Oklahoma – into Statehood.

While both of them, Clyde and Oklahoma, were in their youth assaulted by merciless dust storms and drought, it was only Clyde who could escape the brutal territory, at least for a time. He gathered the few clothing items he could take along to bum his way westward and headed for the nearest rail yard. To one train track, then to another, and another. With each morning’s sunrise to his back he pressed on, riding the rails to a place near Berkeley.

Yet, as he would come to find, that same pair of ‘T’ words, train. . . track, would impact Clyde’s life in a very different kind of way. His gaze was to shift, from squinting along railway lines by the mile to engaging a vision of life itself. He would elect to think deeply, to ponder, to purpose, and – with some help from “the good Lord above” – to even prosper.

Clyde was poor, very poor. With some sort of actual training and a few sensible means to mark out his progress, the young Okie figured he might break past the survival mindset (a condition pretty much defining his whole life) and arrive at an improved state of being.

Certainly, any advancement would beat hoeing cotton at 50 cents a week. But he wouldn’t want that as his grand aim, to merely get out of poverty. He took hold of a notion, teasing him from somewhere inside or outside himself, that he could aim for something loftier than bare survival. Still, he knew that dreaming alone would not get him there. He would have to do some things, two things especially.

Clyde must train. Clyde must stay on track.

Train and Track. In union together, like bonded friends, the two curious elements could make all the difference, helping propel the orphan-boy-turned-adult beyond a life of scarcity and into one of plenty. To material well-being indeed, but maybe to an abundance far greater, a life of riches not measured in coin.

Clyde’s future lay before him. He must choose.

So must we.

Tag: scarcity

Beyond Commonplace

A Pivotal Place