Barbara Kelly's Reflections on Life - Entry Two

Possibly one of the cruelest ways to punish a vibrant, energetic, full of life child of around twelve years of age is to hold them captive and make them participate in singing lessons. That was the last thing on this beautiful God-given planet that I wanted to do. About the only thing that could make it worse would be if your step-father was the teacher. Well, that was the plight in which I found myself.
My step-father’s name was Mr. Tharp, at least, that what I called him to his face; I won’t mention what I called him to his back. He was a very old man; he was in his sixties when my mother married him and he seemed ancient to me. (I still think Mom married him just because he had an inside toilet). He was an old farmer, very old fashioned, sternly of the old school of mind and very fussy. I think he spent more time agitated with my niece and me than anything else. (Of course, looking back over our lives together, we provided him with plenty of things to be agitated about.) We took for our own personal use just about everything that was his including his tools, his wheel barrow, his mules; nothing was sacred. And most of the time, whatever we took would wind up broken, left out in the rain or some other misfortune would come to it. But the part of him that I hadn’t remembered until recently is that he was a music teacher. My step-father had sat at feet of such men as Virgil Stamps, of the Stamps-Baxter quartet, in singing schools. He had taken the knowledge he gained from singing schools and applied it wherever and whenever he could. He had conducted singing classes in church any time that he was allowed or encouraged to. He enjoyed singing and most of all he enjoyed teaching singing. The problem was, when it came to me, he had a very unwilling student. I remember many days when I sat in our living room singing the scale over and over…do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. I sat there trying to recognize half notes from quarter notes on his chalk board and hoping to guess them correctly so I could escape that much more quickly and get on with my life. I would look out the screen door and my faithful old dog would be looking in, panting and wondering why I wasn’t coming out to play and explore new and exciting things with him and, of course, that made me want to go even more. After multiple looks at the doors or yawns of boredom and slouching down as far as I could in my chair to make it obvious how I felt, Mr. Tharp would finally give up in frustration and tell me to go. I would burst out the door running with my dog, on to the next adventure in the expanse of the many fields that were our farm.
A few days ago, I was called upon to sing at a memorial service for someone in our small community. I have been asked to do such things over the years, but with this one particularly, there was a song that I didn’t know; actually had never heard. The song wasn’t that difficult and I was to sing harmony. A friend helping out with the song, leaned over to me and said, “I’ll just follow your lead!” We engaged in a quiet conversation at that point and I found out that she had always wanted music lessons when she was a child and her family couldn’t afford them. My friend and I are about the same age and the thought struck me, I had within my own house where I lived what she had wanted so desperately as a child and couldn’t have. Yet, I didn’t want to take the time to appreciate it. All I can think now is, “Thank you, Mr. Tharp”.

Barbara Kelly's Reflections on Life - Entry One

Life can be quite coincidental. In February of 1978, I entered the only hospital that was located in Osceola, Arkansas having a miscarriage. It was a sad occasion indeed made more so by our excitement and readiness for a baby. The hospital was extremely small, and while private rooms had not yet been conceived of in that part of the world, my first night there I was fortunate enough not to have a roommate. Shortly after that first night, the life that might have been was gone and we were left to deal with the loss in the best way that our young hearts could. I had plenty of Job’s comforters to come by with “comfort” and advice telling me such things as, “it’s for the best, you know, after all it might have been deformed in some way”. (My husband has always told me, and I quite agree with him, that people need to have lessons on hospital visitation and what not to say when visiting patients). Nevertheless, we each have our own unique ways of dealing with sadness and anxiety and the best way for me then, and even now to some extent, is to be alone. And when I say alone, that doesn’t exclude my husband. Even then, we were such a part of each other that it didn’t feel right when we weren’t together. By the second day, after a D & C and with the help of drugs that made the room spin, I was doing all right with my sadness and frustration. By late afternoon, nurses rushed into the room rolling a bed with a woman on it. Oh no, a roommate! That was the last thing in the world that I wanted! But ready or not, and whether I wanted it or not, here she came. She was a very young black woman and she was exhausted having just given birth. After nurses got her settled in, we were alone. This had really messed things up for me because now my husband couldn’t stay with me tonight. And to be honest, the last thing that I wanted was someone happily talking about the baby they had just given birth to, although she had every right in the world to be happy. One of the first questions from her was, “what did you have?” I told her a miscarriage. She just said, “Oh”. What else was there to say? A few moments elapsed and I said, “And you?” She told me she had had a little boy. This short attempt at conversation seemed to break the awkward silence between us and we engaged in amiable conversation thereafter. Time passed and eventually, the door of the room opened. A nurse entered bringing the woman’s baby for her to hold, feed and get to know. I remember thinking he was the cutest thing I thought I’d ever seen. Plump little cheeks, dark eyes and the prettiest shade of skin a baby could have. I asked the girl what his name was to which she replied, “I don’t know; I haven’t named him.”
The following day, during one of the baby’s several visits to our room, the mother asked if I wanted to hold him. I told her that I’d love to. He was so sweet and it felt so good to hold him. I remember thinking; one day… I gave the baby back after a while and the mother looked at me and surprised me with a question, “What’s a good name for a boy?” It took me by surprise and I just looked at her for a moment wondering if she was seriously asking me what to name her baby. After I concluded that she was, I replied, “I don’t know…I’ve always sort of liked the name Christopher.” She repeated the name a couple of times and looked down at the baby and said, “How do you like the name Christopher?” She looked back up at me smiling and said, “I really like that name. That’s what I am going to call him”.
As I write this, I wonder what has happened to that Christopher that I only knew for a short couple of days. Did he live all of his life in that small Arkansas town; did he play sports when he was in high school; did he go to college? Did he grow up and have a family of his own? It has been thirty years since I held and helped name that baby boy. My Christopher, our third child, celebrated his twentieth birthday last week.