OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: The blinding of Myrtle Lee

SAVANNAH, Ga. -- They told Mom she blinded her. Meaning Myrtle Lee. Meaning with her elbow. With her tenacious defense.

Mom was playing for Stilson. Myrtle Lee was playing for Brooklet. They were bitter rivals, about eight and a half miles apart on U.S. 80, the old Dixie Overland Highway. Stilson was small, a rural school, but both its boys' and girls' teams won the state championship in 1952. Brooklet was a little bigger, closer to Statesboro than Savannah.

In those days, the girls played six-on-six basketball and didn't cross half court. Mom was a guard. Myrtle Lee was a high-scoring forward. They were both All-State.

Mom won't say exactly what happened. Something did. Myrtle Lee came out of the game. Maybe she went to the hospital. Mom stayed in. No one ever called her a dirty player. She was just tough.

So Mom, did you beat them? "I guess we did."

Anyway, Myrtle Lee was not blinded. And a few years later, after high school, she found herself working in Savannah at Southern Bell. She was a directory assistant operator. Mom was a long distance operator. They recognized each other. No elbows were thrown.

Instead, they took an apartment together, on East Waldburg Street near Forsyth Park. Two Bulloch County girls loose in the big city. They knew to stay away from the sailors because their daddies told them to. But they didn't stay away from the airmen from Hunter Field.

Once Jack and Don climbed the big metal sculpture that served as the sign for the Globe Drive-In, where they'd all go for hamburgers and pulled pork sandwiches.

"They like to got locked up," Mom says.

But they didn't, and not too long after Mom married Jack and Myrtle Lee married Don. And it wasn't too long after that that Mom and Jack were on their way to Rome, New York, and Myrtle Lee and Don were on their way to Milwaukee. But it wasn't like they lost touch. Not at first anyway.

The main thing about New York was that it was a long way away. Rome is not far from Buffalo, which isn't far from Toronto, and it is nearly 1,000 miles from Savannah. Had Mom grown up almost anywhere else in the world she couldn't have moved so far without crossing an international border. The nights were longer in Rome, and from November through April snowbanks were a given. The cold crept in like a vise. It was pretty country, with lakes and Adirondacks, but it was much different from the red-clay place she came from, with its dirt clods and sleepy creeks and screen-doored country stores. People talked faster and through their noses.

But it wasn't as far away as Milwaukee, which was north of Chicago, and on that same lake with those same winds. (Myrtle Lee told Mom the only real difference between those two alien cities was that people in Milwaukee didn't complain as much as the people in Chicago.)

Jack went to Champaign, Ill. on a training assignment, and Mom took a train to meet him. He insisted Mom get a Pullman car, so she and her two young children--me and my sister, who was just a baby--could travel in relative comfort. She didn't want to do it, because it cost more, but she could see the sense in it.

I remember that train trip.

"Really? You were only 3 years old."

I remember moving through a station, holding Mom's hand, looking at the big steel wheels of the train. That must have been Grand Central Station in New York, though I always thought it was Chicago, though it couldn't have been because, Mom says, we didn't go to Chicago, we went to Champaign.

We didn't even go through Chicago? We didn't change trains there?

She doesn't think so, but if you made the trip today you would. You go from Grand Central to Union Station and take a spur due south to Champaign. So maybe I am right; it was Chicago I remember, and New York that I don't.

Mom remembers my sister's mint-colored dress, and how dirty it got during our travels. I remember the green marble pattern on the Samsonite suitcase and the satisfying little sproing of its locking mechanism, the luxury of its elastic interior pockets.

Myrtle Lee and Don came down to Champaign to visit. Apparently we were there a few weeks. But I don't remember that.

I only remember three places we stayed in New York. In a trailer park with an oval gravel track and two places in base housing. Mom says we had five New York addresses. And I think she's right; it was a different trailer park where I wandered off with my friend--probably another Air Force brat--and Mom went frantic looking for me. She went house to house and found me at his trailer, playing some game in the kitchen, and she had words with his mother, a Japanese woman who didn't speak much English.

No elbows were thrown, but she jerked me out of there. I felt like a fish suddenly drying in bright air, suddenly alert to a sharp new reality. I remember that feeling.

That wasn't the same place we were living when I jumped off the swing and cut my tongue on a shovel buried in the snow; where I could squeeze through a row of hedges and be at my kindergarten. She's right.

Myrtle Lee and Don came to visit us in North Carolina too. Mom and Myrtle Lee didn't lose touch until the mid-1960s, when we moved to California.

Why didn't you ever visit them in Milwaukee?

"Oh, we meant to. But there was never enough time."

In those days we took car trips, Mom. What was the driving time from North Carolina to Savannah? About five hours? When I was a kid it felt like it took a week.

"We used to drive straight through from Rome to Savannah."

Really? That's about 15 hours.

"Yep. About that. Uh-huh."

But time is different now, its character is different. Fifteen years isn't so long. A thousand miles isn't so far. Looking backwards through the telescope everything collapses. Myrtle Lee is on Facebook. So is Mom. (Twice. She can't figure out how to delete the superfluous profile.) They found each other. They've talked. Everything fell away.

Myrtle Lee has a sister living in Rincon, near Mom's granddaughter. She's coming to visit.

I tell Mom to keep her guard up.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

Editorial on 11/04/2018

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