Spoken From The Heart Part 3

Regan had been with Peggy at a school dance performance rehearsal, and then both had gone home to wait for their boyfriends. Regan was waiting for her boyfriend, John.

Peggy was waiting for Mike. Regan's dad called her to say that I'd been in an accident, and Regan and John rushed to the hospital. By the time they arrived, I had already been sent home, so they drove to my house. They knew that Mike had died when they pulled up to our curb. My mother met them outside and told Regan that I didn't know Mike had been in the other car, so Regan and John sat with me as I lay in bed, with this horrible, unspoken truth hovering in the air. After they left, Mother and Daddy told me.

Immediately afterward, Mother and Daddy's friends showed up, and I'm sure it was the same at the Douglases'. Betty Hackney, Johnny's wife, came over and stood at the sink and washed dishes because so many people came and everyone brought something to eat or stopped to eat something. People from our church came. Mary White was at our house almost every day. All of Mother and Daddy's best friends came. The next morning Mother and Daddy and Mary and Charlie drove over to see the Douglases. I never knew what they said, and they never told me. I only knew that they had gone.

My friends were brokenhearted, but Regan and Jan, Candy, and a bunch of Mike's friends and my high school boyfriend, now a college freshman, came over to our house to sit with me. That is the amazing thing about Midland. So many people could be utterly devastated and could wish that this terrible thing had never happened, and they were and they did, but they still found it in their hearts to be supportive of me.

I did not go to the funeral. It was held that Sat.u.r.day, November 9, at St. Mark's Methodist Church. I wanted to go, and I told Mother and Daddy that I wanted to. But they wanted me to stay home. No doubt they were trying to protect me, thinking that it would be too hard on me, and on the Douglases, if I were to attend. Whatever their reasons, I did not have a chance to decide. The next morning, no one rapped on my door to awaken me. When I finally opened my eyes, the service had started, and it was too late. So I didn't go, and I never contacted the Douglases. Like everyone else around me, I thought that they wouldn't want to see me, that there wasn't one thing that I could say to them that they would want to hear.

Pretty quickly no one mentioned the accident. My parents never brought it up.

And neither did my friends, with the exception of Regan. I remember when the story of the crash appeared in the press during the 2000 presidential campaign, two of George's cousins, with whom we're very close, were shocked. I'd never told them. I didn't even get to tell my own daughters. A Texas Department of Public Safety officer on our protection detail did that when George was governor. He a.s.sumed they already knew.

But when one of Barbara's and Jenna's best friends committed suicide during their junior year of high school, I insisted that we go over right away to see his parents. I tried to do for them what I couldn't do for the Douglases.

Once I became a mother myself, I thought more about the Douglases. I began to understand how devastating their grief must be. On some level, only when I had children could I begin to comprehend the enormity for them of losing Mike. Only then, when I could imagine that it was Barbara or Jenna.

Looking back now, with the wisdom of another forty-five years, I know that I should have gone to see the Douglases; I should have reached out to them. At seventeen, I a.s.sumed that they would prefer I vanish, that I would only remind them of their loss.

But in retrospect, I think all of us--not only me but all of Mike's friends--should have been more solicitous of them. We weren't. We were so close to leaving Midland; in a few short months we all went off to college. We did not grasp what a difference a simple visit would make. But having friends now who have lost their own children, as well as knowing the parents of Barbara's and Jenna's friends who have died--the boy who was killed coming home from the Texas-Oklahoma game their freshman year in college, the girl who died with her date when their car skidded off the treacherous, winding roads

heading back to Was.h.i.+ngton and Lee University in Virginia, the same little girl who had shown Barbara and Jenna around school and had become their first friend when we moved to Austin--I know from these parents that they like being with Barbara and Jenna.

Having their child's friends remember them, and also remember the child they have lost, gives them another way to remain connected to that adored child who is forever gone.

To them, those children will always be seventeen or eighteen years old, a little bit older than I was in 1963. Their futures exist only in the ache of imagination. I see that now, but I did not see it then.

In the aftermath, all I felt was guilty, very guilty. In fact, I still do. It is a guilt I will carry for the rest of my life, far more visible to me than the scar etched in the b.u.mp of my knee. At some point most people in these situations come to make a mental peace with the fact that it was an accident. And that it cannot be changed. There is no great clock to unwind, no choice that can somehow miraculously be made again.

But I can never absolve myself of the guilt. And the guilt isn't simply from Mike dying. The guilt is from all the implications, from the way those few seconds spun out and enfolded so many other lives. The reverberations seem to go on forever, like the ripples from an unsinkable stone. There are the hard, inner circles wrapping around Mike's parents and Mike's sister, whose lives were changed and ruined. His parents grieved until their deaths. And then there are the more distant ripples, encompa.s.sing all of his friends and my friends. It is a grief that they had as well.

Since I became a public person, I've gotten many letters--letters from strangers, from mothers, aunts, cousins, teachers, and friends--asking if I could write a note of encouragement to a young driver who had been in a terrible accident. Each time, I've answered. I've told them that, although you will never get over what happened, there will come a time in your life when you can move on. And I've always suggested that they talk to the people whom they love. Or that they speak to a counselor or a spiritual or pastoral adviser. Sometimes the letters are to kids in situations where someone was drinking, but a lot of them are just like I was, an inexperienced, seventeen-year-old driver who didn't have a good concept of where I was in town, who didn't know how far I'd gone in the dark or how close I was to the intersection.

But while I give this advice in my letters, I didn't do any of that. West Texas in 1963 was a time and a place where no one would have gotten a counselor. People in Midland did not think of psychologists or psychiatrists. I don't remember if our pastor, Dr. Guthrie, stopped by. He must have come to talk with Mother and Daddy. But I have no memory of it, no memory of anything but my own thoughts about that dark November evening.

Most of how I ultimately coped with the crash was by trying not to talk about it, not to think about it, to put it aside. Because there wasn't anything I could do. Even if I tried.

I lost my faith that November, lost it for many, many years. It was the first time that I had prayed to G.o.d for something, begged him for something, not the simple childhood wis.h.i.+ng on a star but humbly begging for another human life. And it was as if no one heard. My begging, to my seventeen-year-old mind, had made no difference. The only answer was the sound of Mrs. Douglas's sobs on the other side of that thin emergency room curtain.

Over dinner one night my dear friend Jim Francis shared a story of a mutual friend. This man had lost his son to suicide. One day in the summer of 2009, he was sitting in a men's shop in Dallas trying on a pair of shoes when a small boy, a special needs boy, came racing up to him and nearly knocked him off the bench with a hug. The boy's mother hurried up, apologizing profusely, and pulled her son away, only to have the boy launch at the man again. As she started to apologize a second time, the father looked up at her and said, "Please don't apologize. It's been a long time since I've had a hug from a boy."

Jim cried as he told it. So did his wife, Debbie, and so did George and I. George, who lost his little sister Robin to the ravages of leukemia, and I, who will forever carry with me those four or five seconds on that blackened Midland road, and lovely Debbie and Jim, whose youngest son nearly drowned when he was two but who didn't die. He's in his thirties now, but mentally he is like a newborn baby. They have lived for thirty-four years with the grace of accepting, of not asking "why me?" of not seeking to blame, or becoming cynical, or being lulled into bitterness. Life's largest truth may be that everyone faces tragedy. Learning to accept those tragedies, learning to accept that life is riddled with events large and small, events that you may cause or that may happen to you, events that you can never control, is perhaps the hardest lesson of all. In that wrenching fact, I have faith that no one is ever alone.

In the months ahead, Lee was full of memorials for Mike. He was remembered in the school annual. His teammates picked out a little metal cannon to salute him in the school courtyard. At the end of the school year, Regan and a couple of Mike's friends went to visit his parents. Mike's mother asked them all to sign her copy of his annual, as they would have done had he been alive.

I stayed home from school for a week with my broken ankle and blackened eyes, but by mid-November, I was back at cla.s.s. I walked the hallways with stiff tape wrapped around my ankle. Almost as soon as I returned, Kim Hammond, one of Mike's best friends, a boy who had been a pallbearer at his funeral, called and asked if he could nominate me for the Rebelee Court, which crowned the princesses and queens for Lee's senior program. (Midland High's homecoming court was called Catoico, for cattle, oil, and cotton, the three industries of Midland.) I said thank you and yes, although I felt about the farthest possible thing from a princess or a queen. It was a sweet gesture of unspoken forgiveness, and I have never forgotten. Quietly, I went back to my books. My mother started thinking about what might have happened if my father had never sold the Big House. My father worried about whether there had been anything unsafe about his Chevy Impala.

But I already knew that the "what ifs" are fruitless. It's a futile exercise to go through the "Oh, if I only hadn't done that, then that wouldn't have happened."

Two weeks and two days later, on November 22, President John F. Kennedy was riding in a preelection motorcade through Dallas when he raised his hand to wave to the crowd and a perfectly aimed bullet whistled through the air under that all-enveloping Texas sky.

Traveling Light

As a fourth-grade teacher at John F. Kennedy Elementary School, Houston, Texas, 1970.

We knew something was wrong the moment the wooden door with the gla.s.sed-in window closed and our teacher, Mr. Carter, walked to the front of the room. Standing there, slump-shouldered, with a catch in his voice, he uttered the unimaginable words, the President of the United States had been shot dead in Dallas. Most people can remember whatever quiet, mundane task they were doing on that day when they heard the news that John F. Kennedy had been a.s.sa.s.sinated. I was seventeen years old, sitting in my senior year History of Western Thought cla.s.s at the precise moment when our own history shuddered and changed. I sat at my desk surrounded by the writings of some of the greatest minds that humanity has ever produced, and all I could feel was mute shock, utter horror, and a numbing disbelief. It was a Friday afternoon.

That Sunday, with the TV droning in the background, Daddy came rus.h.i.+ng in the side door from the carport while Mother was fixing lunch to tell us that someone had shot Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sin. The report had just come over the car radio. He stood there in the kitchen shaking his head and saying how tragic it was, because now no one would ever really know what had happened. There would always be speculation. We would never be certain of the truth.

For the rest of that day and the Monday following, I lay on the couch in our den and watched the entire presidential funeral ceremony, the inky mourning crepe looking somehow even blacker on the grain of the black-and-white TV. I was aching from Mike Douglas's death. Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sination entwined itself with my own sense of tragedy until all I felt was a smothering sadness. I could never imagine meeting a president, but I had given Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage, Profiles in Courage, to my high school boyfriend for to my high school boyfriend for Christmas the previous year. Now I was watching President Kennedy's flag-draped coffin roll by.

My mother sat glued to the ceremonies as well. She would have seen Jackie Kennedy, her face obscured behind a voluminous black veil, and known that the first lady had already buried two babies, a stillborn girl and a premature boy, Patrick. That day, along with the country, she was burying her husband.

There is a story, told forty years later by one reporter, that at a single Midland restaurant, Luigi's, an Italian pizza and pasta place where the tables were covered in red

and white checked cloths, lunchtime diners applauded when they heard the news of Kennedy's murder. I never heard that. Not at the time, not in the years afterward. Neither did any of my friends. The not so subtle implication behind the story was that Midland was fiercely conservative and more than a little racist, although many of the United States' greatest civil rights gains would come under a Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Certainly Midland in the early 1960s wasn't a racially integrated town. As in most of Texas, much of the South, and indeed the rest of the country, the schools were segregated, and there was an undercurrent of racism. The Midland of my early childhood had a few separate water fountains, each porcelain basin clearly marked "white" or "colored." But they were soon taken down. The prejudice that remained was subtler, a back-room or bridge-club type of prejudice, inflicted behind closed doors. No one burned crosses or scribbled epithets or deployed water cannons. And if some people spoke badly, most a.s.suredly not everybody did. I never heard my parents talk in a racist way. When George once used a derogatory word that he had overheard, his mother smacked him for speaking "filth." In the early 1960s, there was a small African-American section in Midland but not yet a sizable Hispanic one. I didn't have any black friends, but I didn't have any way to make black friends, and they had no way to make friends with me.

And I always knew that on the horrible night of November 6, the first car that had stopped to help and the family that had come running up to wrap me in the protective cover of their arms was African-American.

Ultimately, it took federal intervention--starting with the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education Brown v. Board of Education and continuing through years of school closings, and continuing through years of school closings, National Guard encounters, and federal marshals dispatched to open barred doors--to change the schools. Att.i.tudes changed even more slowly, because this wasn't just how Midland was, it was how much of the United States was, even places that had once been bastions of abolition, like Boston. Change had to come from the top, not the bottom.

But little, isolated Midland was also more diverse than it appears to many of the people who find it so easy to condemn.

When it came to cla.s.s, we were far more integrated than other parts of the country. Midland was a working-cla.s.s town. Most of the people who made money in the oil business came from working-cla.s.s roots. Quite a few of them had grown up with close to nothing. Even the men from wealthier families, like Mr. Bush or the Philadelphia-bred Mr. O'Neill, who had driven the car for my first "Daddy date" with his thirteen-year-old son, Kevin, had moved out to the West Texas plains determined to prove themselves.

They didn't carry with them the trappings of moneyed East Coast homes. That kind of showmans.h.i.+p would not have sat well in midcentury Midland. The children of roughnecks and roustabouts went to the same schools and played on the same teams and were friends with the children of geologists and engineers and landmen and ranch owners, both those with oil leases on their properties and those with nothing but dry gra.s.sland. When people retract their noses ever so slightly at the mention of Midland, or West Texas more generally, I am reminded that there are many ways to denigrate a place or demean a person.

In the years that followed, my friends and I watched the civil rights movement unfold, and we embraced it. We had already learned not to judge a man or a woman based on the place that he or she called home.

And so, on those late November days, we watched and grieved in Midland as an Irish Catholic from Boston was buried at Arlington National Cemetery outside of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

It cost twenty-five dollars a semester to attend the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy when my mother enrolled, in the fall of 1936. She waited until the night before final registration to ask her father for the money. It was a bleak seven years into the Great Depression, and twenty-five dollars was a significant sum. There were women who took jobs making sandwiches in soup kitchens just so they could be guaranteed one meal a day. Education was a luxury. My mother barely worked up the nerve to say anything. In the morning, Hal Hawkins handed over the twenty-five dollars, likely counted out in part in quarters, nickels, and other small change. After that, his daughter never asked him for school fees again.

When my mother went off to college, she could no longer afford to live at home and ride the bus some fourteen miles from the upper valley down to El Paso and back each evening, so she boarded with a family in town, taking care of their daughter in return for a room and food. The father worked for the Royal Dutch Sh.e.l.l oil company.

Mother once chaperoned the little girl, Charlotte, all the way to New York on the train and then down the length of the East Coast on an oil company tanker--"the biggest s.h.i.+p I had ever seen in my life," she recalled--to Aruba. Charlotte's parents insisted that Mother pay her own way to New York, and she had to "scrounge" to gather enough to cover train fare. By 1938, she had dropped out of school altogether to earn her way in the world. My father had long since quit his own college in Lubbock.

But they never doubted that I would attend college. When I was in the second grade, my father proudly announced that he had bought an insurance policy designed to pay for my college when the time came. He walked into our brick house on Estes Avenue and said, "I bought this college plan for you." When I actually went to college, that little plan was worth only enough to cover one semester, but my parents were always determined that I have a college education. That was what so many of our parents in Midland wanted, a future beyond the best of what theirs had been.

And it was all the more remarkable that my father kept his promise. By the time I left Midland for Dallas, in 1964, an oil bust had struck. Some 4,500 people ultimately left the city. Homes went unsold or were foreclosed. My father did not build a single new house the entire time I was away at school.

After traversing what seemed like half the state of Texas with my parents looking at schools--the sprawling University of Texas campus in Austin, Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, and all the way over to Sophie Newcomb in New Orleans--I chose Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By East Coast standards, it was a young school.

The same year that it was founded, 1911, the venerable Yale University in Connecticut turned 210 years old. But SMU looked old. Its buildings were brick, and the centerpiece, Dallas Hall, had ma.s.sive white columns that appeared to have stood in exactly that spot since the time of King George III. Unlike in the University of Texas system, many of SMU's students came from other states; it drew its applicants from up and down the corridors of the Midwest. And I liked the fact that it was in Dallas, home to my uncle Mark and city of innumerable visits, especially each fall to the Texas State Fair. I had first become enchanted with SMU in the seventh grade, when I read a biography of Doak Walker, SMU's legendary football running back--not at all an odd choice for a girl from Midland, where we breathed football each autumn. Walker won the Heisman Trophy in 1948; the Dallas Cotton Bowl used to be called "The House That Doak Built." But my girlish crush was not on the running back, it was on his campus, and I nurtured it for six years. I would also be going with a group of Midland girls, including Gwyne Smith, my friend from elementary school.

The fall of 1964 on college campuses around the country was not the spring of 1968 or 1969. Far from being hotbeds of radical activity, most schools were bastions of youthful irresponsibility, worlds of br.i.m.m.i.n.g punch bowls and the nervous social banter of night after night of sorority rush in antebellum-style houses that looked like backdrops for Gone With the Wind Gone With the Wind. In our dorm rooms and sororities, we had curfews, 10:00 p.m.

on weekdays, midnight on weekends. House mothers came to do bed checks.

Irresponsibility could occur only during preset hours. We dutifully followed the rules, having no sense of the seismic fault lines that trembled beneath our feet.

At SMU, the boys were clean-cut. The girls didn't wear pants, only dresses or skirts, which grazed the knee. The miniskirt was not invented until 1965, and it was worn in Great Britain first. I can still remember how daring it felt to wear jeans to cla.s.s when I was a senior; I was the only one in denim in the entire seminar room. During my soph.o.m.ore year, when I went to a Bob Dylan concert, I wore a little wool skirt suit that I had bought in El Paso the summer before with Mother at the Amen Wardy department store. My date wore a jacket and tie, and so did all the other boys around him. The crowd booed when, after the first half of the show, Dylan came back and reset the amplifiers to switch from folk music to hard rock 'n' roll. They wanted him to remain a folk singer.

"The times they are a-changin'" didn't yet apply to North Texas.

I lived in the women's dorms in my first years and joined a sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, in my second. My best friends were now a new orbit of girls, Jane Purucker and Bobbie Jo Ferguson from Kansas City, Janet Kinard from Abilene, Mary Brice from Snyder, Texas, a West Texas oil town far smaller than Midland, and Susan Englehart from Corpus Christi. I was only seventeen when I started college, at a time when many of the girls I knew aspired more to getting married than to attending their own university graduations. SMU was coed; it was not a suitcase school, like so many women's colleges of the time, where girls packed up and headed off each weekend to marathon excursions with boys, trying to make a good impression as the clock ticked down the seconds until Sunday afternoon. But we had girls who pined after loves on other campuses and hundreds of others who were searching for lifelong mates among the fraternity boys on our own.

In the beginning, I didn't know whether to be social or studious. I spent too many nights on dates at the El Toro Room, and my first-semester grades were embarra.s.sing.

Not since the fifth grade at Bowie Elementary, when I received a C in social studies, had I been so devastated. Back then, my pediatrician, Dr. Dorothy Wyvell, had ordered me to come home and lie down in the afternoons to recover from a bad cough. The result was that I missed weeks of social studies and ended up with a C. Worse than my own disappointment was the thought that I had failed Mother and Daddy. Now, eight years later, that failure was magnified. I called home, cried, and apologized. It was not just my own opportunity that I was squandering; it was theirs as well, the opportunity that they had given to their only daughter, out of love and without demands or strings. After that, I became, if not a model student, then certainly a very serious one. And I had one tremendous advantage. I had already studied many of the cla.s.sics during my senior-year course in Western thought in Midland.

One of my favorite cla.s.ses was a course in children's literature taught by Harryette Ehrhardt. Ironically, my mother had already studied children's literature in Midland when I was in junior high as part of the local college extension program. One night a week, while she headed off to discuss children's cla.s.sics, I would fix dinner and silently roll my eyes. Now I saw that some of history's greatest writers had penned their best works for children. I was enchanted by the words of E. B. White, Madeleine L'Engle, the Brothers Grimm, and my childhood favorite, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and by the way Dr. Ehrhardt unraveled the layers upon layers of meaning in what others saw as merely whimsical turns of phrase. The cla.s.s was demanding, and I was one of the few students to make an A. I already knew that I wanted to be a teacher.

Having a chosen profession was a rather new concept for women in the South.

Women had always worked, doing the backbreaking labor of running a home, cooking, cleaning, hefting piles of sopping wet laundry onto the line to dry. And many women did work in jobs before they married or if they were widowed young. A few in Midland, like Mary White, worked for most of their married lives, although the oilmen whose offices they ran rarely promoted them beyond the typewriter and steno pool. Most girls, though, were schooled to dream of being wives and mothers. Their curious minds were largely self-taught--my brick-laying grandmother with her intricate garden or my mother with a book open in her dishwater-dry hands. When Betty Friedan published The Feminine The Feminine Mystique, in 1963, their lives, my life, and those of my friends were not upended. What I in 1963, their lives, my life, and those of my friends were not upended. What I see now in retrospect is that so many of my friends broke barriers not by intention but simply by doing.

With the exception of my uncle Mark, who had gone to medical school, I was the first person in my family to earn a university degree. And even Mark had not technically finished college. When he was accepted to medical school in Arkansas, he just left Texas Tech rather than spend another semester's tuition during the Depression. Mine was not an immigrant story, aside from Eva Louise LaMaire, but simply the story of families who had moved beyond the bare-bones life of small Arkansas and before that Mississippi and Kentucky farms, where families made do with a cow, a garden, and a clutch of chickens.

But in the mid-1960s, the present quickly became all-consuming.

At SMU, we stayed up late at night smoking cigarettes and engaging in discussions about the larger meaning of life, great debates without any final resolution.

They were our own private versions of the heated debates being waged around us, debates that we watched, but sometimes with a bit of remove. When I entered SMU, the Vietnam War was not yet raging. America's ground war in the jungles did not begin until the spring of 1965. Even as the conflict escalated, SMU was not an early hotbed of antiwar protests, although the school did briefly have a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. And boys I knew in Midland or at SMU were among those who enlisted or were drafted. One of our friends, Buddy Hensley, spent hours s.h.i.+rtless in the steamy Southeast Asian heat, filling giant barrels with the chemical defoliant Agent Orange; another, Mike Proctor, was a helicopter pilot. Both survived the war and remain our close friends. The only casualty I knew from Midland was Bob Zonne, the big brother of one of my high school cla.s.smates, Bill Zonne. Among our friends who fought, he was the one who did not make it home. His name is inscribed on the Wall in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

What we felt much more keenly in the mid-sixties was the civil rights movement.

In 1961, when I was just a high school soph.o.m.ore, SMU students had already picketed local barbershops and movie theaters that practiced segregation, and even though SMU had few African-American students, the student body as a whole had voted strongly in support of a completely integrated campus, where all admissions would be color-blind. I was proud that SMU had the first African-American football player in the Southwest Conference, Jerry LeVias. In two years, he went from being pummeled on the field by other players long after the whistle had blown to winning the Fort Worth Kiwanis Club Award for Sportsmans.h.i.+p and becoming an all-American player in his senior year. When LeVias came to SMU, fellow coaches had told Coach Hayden Fry that they "would never allow" a black player on their team.

The civil rights cause gave us the words to talk about the racial divide that still stubbornly clung to our cities and towns, even our own homes. At last, I had a language to understand what I had intuitively known, that naming Lee High School in 1960 for a man who a century before, in 1861, chose his state of Virginia and his slaveholder ties over abolition while Midland's black students were still a.s.signed to George Was.h.i.+ngton Carver High School was wrong. Suddenly everything was open for question: why my father's black friends were the men who worked the stove and the grill at Johnny's Bar-BQ or why the only black women the rest of us knew were the ones who cleaned homes.

I was not a placard-waving protester. But the scenes from the Alabama marches or the riots that left Detroit and Newark in flames cemented my desire to do what I could, and that was to teach in an inner-city, minority school. I wanted to work with children who had been left out and, too often, left behind, simply because of the color of their skin. When I taught, I always asked to be placed in what were called "minority schools."

In 1964, when I arrived on the SMU campus, panicked students would ask the student health center, located only a few doors down from my dorm, for amphetamines to stay awake late to study for exams. One of my girlfriends even experimented with a California turnaround, what truckers used to stay awake on the road. She didn't sleep for three days. It was perhaps a frail line separating that kind of officially sanctioned selfmedicating from the other, illegal drugs that would start to creep onto college campuses.

By 1968, marijuana had arrived at SMU, although none of my Midland friends ever smoked pot. And the few girls at school who did try it would never admit it, in the same way that they would never reveal private details about their boyfriends. These were considered deep secrets, which girls kept to themselves alone.

Even if there was no "Summer of Love" at SMU, we did know that there was another world being unleashed beyond our white columns and redbrick walls. A few students played tracks from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper Sgt. Pepper or "Light My Fire" by Jim Morrison or "Light My Fire" by Jim Morrison and the Doors, although at parties we danced to the sounds of what is now Motown but was then called "soul music," the Supremes, the Isley Brothers, and Cookie and the Cupcakes. Once, during my senior year, I was curious to see what real hippies looked like. My roommate, Jane, and I dressed in jeans and bare feet and hung beads from our necks. Then we headed off to Lee Park, one of the largest parks in Dallas and named for Robert E. Lee, to look for the fabled hippies. But there were none--instead, everyone else in the park turned to stare at us, imagining that we were the hippies who had come to commune with nature in the middle of the city.

One thing we did in our cute skirts and bubble hair, which we teased and sprayed and rolled on big, bristly rollers clamped tight with pins, was drink, even though we were underage. All the fraternity parties served alcohol, especially in lethal blends of spiked punch, and we drank, way too much, and smoked, even in cla.s.s. By the early 1970s, our drinking would seem almost pa.s.se. By then, the drug culture had overwhelmed college life. Graduating in the South in 1968 put us just slightly ahead of the wave. But in time, alcohol would prove to be equally devastating for far too many of my friends.

At SMU, the wild boys were not the drunken fraternity brothers who would go on to become bankers and businessmen; they were the boys who drove motorcycles and who rebelled against anything that smacked of authority. Yet even they were not as freed from convention as it seemed. Chuck, the long-haired boy with the devil-may-care smile, who rode a motorcycle and dated Bobbie Jo, volunteered to go to Vietnam. Another of his biker friends once stole a suit, which he wore to his seminary interview for the Episcopal priesthood. He got in. But there was a James Dean-style restlessness that gripped our college years, a desire to throw off one by one the conventions of our parents and our grandparents. The gross injustices underpinning the need for the civil rights movement, the pat explanations that "certain groups had to earn their rights," in order to justify the sins of segregation, and subtle racism made many of the previous generations' values seem suspect and shallow. A few of the more vocal among us rejected everything.

Indeed, most of the cla.s.s of 1968 had grown up during a period of unprecedented abundance. We had never known a great depression or a global war that ran hot rather than cold. Our parents' sacrifices had s.h.i.+elded us from these things. But now our own generational discontent had produced a highly combustible equation. I remember sitting in our sorority house on the last day of March 1968, when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection. We watched largely in silence; there was no collective gasp of regret.

At my commencement, just over a month after Martin Luther King was a.s.sa.s.sinated and a few weeks before another bullet felled Bobby Kennedy, SMU's president, Willis Tate, implored students not to abandon rational thought and judgment, saying, "We live in a day when contagious hysteria and social pressures can completely anesthetize a person's ability to reason," and adding, "In times of rapid change, the old may be destroyed along with the decayed. There are some time-tested, eternal values."

Not everyone partic.i.p.ated in the upheaval of the late 1960s. Many of the girls I knew, including most of my Midland friends, were getting on with the next phase of their lives. They had become engaged or had already returned home to their childhood churches for their weddings. I fully expected to be married by the end of my senior year.

I thought about it whenever I caught sight of a beaming bride preparing to walk down the aisle under the serene cream spire of Perkins Chapel at the center of the SMU campus. I even dated a young medical student at the start of my senior year and a.s.sumed for a while that I would settle down with him. But I graduated with no ring on my left hand and no immediate prospects for one.

For my graduation gift, I wanted to see Europe. Midland was still firmly in the grip of an oil bust, so my parents looked for something affordable. The answer came in the form of my uncle Mark, who was taking his family on a fourteen-day trip, stopping in ten different countries. He invited me to come along. My cousin Mary Mark and I saw a

huge swath of the continent at a rapid clip. What captivated me was the age of all the places, stones that had been quarried, cut, and laid over a millennium ago, sculpture carved by hands that could not imagine a wild gra.s.sland where Indians had pitched animal skin tents and stalked buffalo. I would look up and see stained gla.s.s that had already survived multiple wars before Midland even had a name or an old railroad boxcar to hold its mail.

My first job, if you could call it that, was making coffee for my parents in the pot at home--I got a nickel if I made coffee for Mother and Daddy every morning. I also set the table and made my bed, and I kept a little chart of all the ch.o.r.es that I had done, a kind of grade-school time clock, I suppose. My other bits of gainful employment were teaching swimming at the Midland public pool and working as a counselor at summer camps. One summer, Jane Gray and I opened our own three-hour morning camp, advertising it on mimeographed flyers and holding it in her mother's Jack and Jill school.

Now I was about to set foot in a fourth-grade cla.s.sroom, with nothing more to prepare me than a few months of practice teaching at one of Dallas's most elite elementary schools.

Bradfield Elementary, where aspiring SMU teaching students went to practice, wasn't even in the Dallas Independent School District; it was in the separate city of Highland Park. My second-grade practice cla.s.sroom did contain one surprise: the football legend Doak Walker's seven-year-old son. He was a shy boy; his parents had been divorced for several years. His quiet presence was a reminder that not even childhood idols remained unchanged; Doak Walker was no longer a young man charging toward the end zone, and I was no longer dreaming of college from the shelter of the seventh grade.

I had decided to remain in Dallas, at least for the moment. Susan, Janet, Bobbie Jo, and I rented a little postwar-style garden apartment amid a cl.u.s.ter of two-story brick buildings with white trim and stairs. Our building sat at the end of the block, only a few hundred yards from the train tracks. Susan used to dash across the rails to go visit her boyfriend, Mike, who lived on the other side. All I needed was a job, preferably a job that didn't involve a long drive. Ever since the accident, I preferred to cede the driving to friends like Regan, who loved being behind the wheel. I did not want a long commute, and I turned down jobs at two Dallas schools because they were too far away. Finally, the personnel director for the school system called back and said, "Well, Miss Welch, how about the school on your street?" And I said, "Oh, good, that will be perfect." So every morning, I walked to Longfellow Elementary, two blocks from my apartment.

Longfellow had been built amid large, gracious two-story homes that sat back from the roads on acres of manicured green lawns, but very few of the local residents sent their children there. Many were older people whose children had long since grown. But the well-to-do also largely avoided the Dallas Independent School District. Those who didn't settle in places like Highland Park sent their children to private academies instead.

The students at Longfellow, a solid two-story, tan brick school, were bused in from other neighborhoods, close to downtown. Most came from a predominantly African-American neighborhood near the new Parkland Hospital, which had replaced the old redbrick building where John F. Kennedy was rushed after he was shot.

I loved my students. I was just twenty-one when I entered that fourth-grade cla.s.sroom, and my students in so many ways taught me. I had only twenty in my cla.s.s, a luxury at a time when many public schools had upwards of thirty or forty students in a single room. My cla.s.sroom was on the first floor, with windows all along one side because there was no air-conditioning. We opened the gla.s.s and hoped for a breeze. It was in that school in the September heat, as sweat glued my blouse to my back, that I felt the physical demands of teaching, six hours or more on my feet, standing at the blackboard, on the recess blacktop, or in the cafeteria as students navigated the lunch lines and downed their meals. And I had to keep their attention, by myself, alone.

The realities of an elementary school cla.s.sroom are far from the Hollywood romance of tweedy academics or wisecracking professors. The movies can condense an entire school career into a little over two hours. That doesn't take most teachers even through the morning. Teaching is, even for those who love it, at times isolating. It happens behind closed doors, one adult navigating the needs and complexities of twenty or more children, twenty or more entirely different personalities. We are not, in truth, so far removed from the days of the one-room schoolhouse. As much as teachers may talk to other faculty members, they don't go out to lunch or briefly laze by coffeepots or watercoolers. Elementary school teachers must calculate when their cla.s.srooms are subdued enough for them even to escape to the bathroom. But I never found it boring, and as I got my bearings, it became deeply rewarding.

My education degree had not prepared me, I quickly learned, to teach reading.

Like many new teachers, I followed the textbook teacher guide provided by the school system. But that did little to make words and stories come alive. It was when I began a story hour after lunch that my pa.s.sion quickly became the children's. We read books like Where the Wild Things Are, and the children would pretend that the characters had come and the children would pretend that the characters had come alive in the cla.s.sroom. We saved a s.p.a.ce in the corner for a web for Charlotte, the famous spider in Charlotte's Web Charlotte's Web. Wilbur's pen was a nearby locker. Bunnies lived in supply closets; monsters screeched on the blackboard. Every book came to life, and the children would gaze eager and wide-eyed, leaning forward as I turned each page. I had them write poems and created books of their poetry, each bound between two cardboard sheets and secured by a ribbon threaded through hand-punched holes. I would save up the funny things they said and call home to regale Mother and Daddy, who laughed at the other end of the phone.

Four decades later, the antics of my students would become the inspiration for my first book, a children's story, Read All About It!, Read All About It!, which I penned with my daughter Jenna. which I penned with my daughter Jenna.

Like me, Jenna would begin her career as a teacher in inner-city schools, hers in Was.h.i.+ngton and Baltimore. In Read All About It!, Read All About It!, as in my first cla.s.sroom in Longfellow, as in my first cla.s.sroom in Longfellow, cherished storybook characters magically came to life.

By the end of that year, though, I was ready to leave Dallas. I had lived there for five years; most of my close college friends were now drifting off to other cities. And I had never lived outside of Texas. I was twenty-two and restless. My students were moving on to the next grade, and it seemed time for me to move as well. One of my roommates, Bobbie Jo, wanted to head east, to Boston, which to our imaginations seemed a world removed from the Texas and Kansas plains. She planned on getting a job at Filene's department store; I would just get a job. We hopped in my car and started across the country, stopping in Nashville and other spots to visit college friends. When we arrived in Boston, neither of us knew one single person to call or where to look for an apartment. After three days, we left, this time driving south to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

In the nation's capital, we rented a cheap room at the YWCA and washed our