Eyes are the Mirrors of the Soul

Today I'll talk about two people you might or might not know. The one in the first photo is me. I was 46 and I was auditioning for some plays and commercials that year. It's a head shot from my contact sheet. When we got married, Tom kept it on his night table so I was the first thing he saw in the morning, whether I was there or not.  The poem below he wrote about my eyes the year before he died.

ICICLE

Icicle, Icicle, burning bright,

light of mystery, light of delight.

What is the fire I see,

burning bright, burning true?

Do you love me, as I love you?

Can there be true fire in eyes so blue?

Hush, sweet crystal eyes.

I hold you now, sleep through the night.

Icicle, icicle – eyes that delight,

first green, then violet, then blue.

Will love that burns with such

sweet passion, stay forever true?

First you see me, then I see you.

I stroke your heart, and the fires flame.

Then they flicker violet, or is it blue?

If I should fall in love this night, I blame you.

Thomas Carmack Rice

This is Tom when he got his BA in playwriting and directing. You can't see those amazing, sapphire blue eyes, but you can see that wild, red hair! Below the picture is the poem I wrote about his eyes the same year he wrote the one about mine.

THOSE EYES

Those eyes have seen a lifetime of pain and hurt,

yet returned only kindness and understanding.

Those eyes have seen a world that looked so bad,

and still managed to pick out the hidden good.

Those eyes have seen the hopelessness in humans,

but found a way to give them a glimpse of hope.

Those eyes have seen my mind, my heart, my soul,

and joined lockstep in the eternal dance of love.

Karen Mabry Rice

George and Sophia

                                       Grandmother and Grandaddy Smith

                                                Two Sweethearts on a Rock

As I recently said, I’ve blogged about everything under the sun, and now I’m starting with my family. This is my grandfather, George Sidney Smith, and my grandmother, Sophia Kathleen Chastain Smith, sitting on a giant granite boulder at the Wichita Wildlife Refuge north of Lawton, Oklahoma. This picture was taken in the spring of 1916 when my mother graduated from Porter High School, just north of the Smith farm, and just south of Altus, Oklahoma. They loaded up the senior class (all 6 of them!) in the buckboard and drove the team to the Wichitas for a picnic. Grandmother fried the chicken and made the potato salad the night before. I’m sure Grandaddy took along a dutch oven and baked some sourdough biscuits. He was the master of sourdough biscuits, having begun his cowboy career as “Little Mary,” the cook’s helper. You can see they took their shoes off for the climb. Grandmother grew up wearing high button shoes and always had to have something with a bit of a heel. Grandaddy grew up wearing cowboy boots and had the same problem.

They met at the annual May picnic at the Doans Store, pictured above. The Doans crossing is where the cowboys forded the Red River to take their herds up to Dodge City, Kansas, to sell. Grandaddy had many stories to tell of the wild and wooly days of Dodge City. He didn’t like Wyatt Earp, having watched him pistol whip a cowboy nearly to death on Front Street. He didn’t like Bat Masterson either. The kindest thing he had to say about Masterson was that he was a whoremaster. He did have a great deal of respect for Marshal Bill Tilghman of the Oklahoma Territory.

The picture above was taken on the Smith farm, probably by my mother with the red Brownie box camera Grandaddy gave her for graduation. You can see Grandaddy was happy holding his fat grandbabies in his lap in his old wooden rocker. That solemn critter on the left is me. The happy lad on the right is my cousin Billy (William Charles Smith, Jr., named after his father, third of the Smith children. My mother was the second, and Aunt Opal the first.) Opal was the only one born in Texas, at the home of Grandmother’s parents, William Edgar Chastain and his second wife, Rosa. At the time, Grandaddy was the foreman of J. R. Sumner’s Rocking Chair ranch.

That’s all for now. I won’t bore you with more, because I’m writing their life story, and I’d like you to buy the book.

Karen Mabry Rice
Author of Ghost Walk
Soon to be published by
4rv Publishing, LLC
Of Edmond, Oklahoma

Yipppee-ayo-kai-yeah!!!

I've blogged about my pets, my family, just about everything in the world but the horses I've known and loved. The first photo is of me (age 2 1/2), my great uncle Charley Smith, and my grandaddy, George Sidney Smith. Uncle Charley was born in Saxony, Germany. His real name was Karl Wilhelm Schmidt. So was their sister, Katerina Schmidt. Grandaddy was the first person in his family born in America. Both of them were real, honest-to-God, working cowboys.  I'm sitting on Choklit, the brown and white pinto pony they bought for all the Smith grandkids to ride. Mamma wasn't happy. (she took the picture) Grandmother was happy. She loved to ride horses (side saddle!). Grandaddy, Uncle Charley, and I were as happy as three ducks in a room full of June bugs. I was just impatient and ready to ride with the wind blowing through my hair. The picture was taken in Uncle Charley's front yard in Wilbarger County, Texas. He was a widower who had married his boss's daughter, inherited the ranch, and struck oil before the war, so he could pretty much do what he darn well pleased. By the way, the photo was taken in 1945 when the war was almost over.

The next photo is well after the war. It was taken in 1949 when I was seven years old, and we are at the Altus, Oklahoma train yard getting ready to ride in the Fouth of July rodeo parade. Uncle Charley was always asked to carry the American flag in all the rodeo parades around. He was very proud of his American citizenship. He was naturalized during WWI, when they were killing so many Germans. Grandaddy bought a gun during that war for the same reason. A six-shooter, it was the first gun he ever owned. My cousin Monty owns it now. He inherited it from my youngest uncle, Carl, (named after Uncle Charley) who was too young to be in WWII. 

I was proud to ride in the parade with my Uncle Charley. I was born in Altus, Oklahoma, July 30, 1942. The horse we're on is named Silver. He lived to be 21 years old, and starved himself to death, grieving when Uncle Charley died in 1952. Horses are amazing people.
By the way, those hats we're all wearing are genuine Stetsons, and the boots custom made in Nocona, Texas.
Signing off for now,
Karen Mabry Rice, aka Min Cotton (the protagonist in my mystery novel Ghost Walk)
Soon to be published by 4rvPublishing, LLC, of Edmond, Oklahoma.

Canine Utopia

I'd like you to meet the newest member of our pack. Though lowest in the pecking order, Shepherd is a real top dog, and he knows it. He's a three year old purebred short haired Chihuahua.  A nice couple who live not too far away rescued him from an abusive home a few years ago. They are getting out of the Chihuahua breeding business, so Shepherd got to come live with us.  The shots below are of Shepherd and his buddy Freckles, whom you've met before. As you can't plainly see, they are both dressed to the nines. In the first pic they are napping on my sweater. In the second, the scarf is a hand-me-down from Freckles. I haven't had time to make Shep any of his own.

Freckles & Shep

Shepherd, the Manly Man



Those giant hands holding little Sheppie belong to my grandson, Ethan. Since he came to live with us we adopted Shep for him.  It wasn't the yellow Lab he wanted, but the dog food bill is a lot lower! LOL. Welcome to the pack, Shep.

Four Labs & a Tomcat named Trespasser

Howdy y'all!  That's "Okie" for "G'day, mate!"

And that's apropos of nothing except it's my day to blog about dogs and cats.
The first Lab I knew up close and personal was a guide dog for a blind girl named Kibby. She was a black Lab named Dolly.  Kibby was in my physical anthro class at OU, and we were lab partners.  It was an amazing partnership. I could "show" Kibby things she couldn't see with words, and she could show me things I couldn't see with words, but which she could feel when putting her small hands inside a human skull.  It goes without saying what a help Dolly was to Kibby, but she was the best "Lab" partner an old lady like me (I was 49 when I when back to finish my degree.) could possibly have.  Dolly was getting along in years herself, and the class was in a cold basement with a cement floor.  Dolly liked to sleep on my feet, and I appreciated the warmth, both physical and spiritual.

The second Lab I met was a yellow female named Ralph. The kids down the mountain who "owned" her named her Toto.  It just didn't fit, and she adored my friend Bill, followed him everywhere on his farm. He's the one who named her Ralph.  We were visiting on the occasion of my daughter marrying Bill's son.  One day we were all sitting out on lawn chairs smoking, drinking coffee, and eating cookies.  The only part of that social event my grandson, the Cookie Monster, was sharing in was the cookies.  He had one in each fist, and Ralph trotted by, helping herself to the one in his left hand.  Ethan immediately began to cry over that lost cookie. C'mon, he was only 3 1/2 and he was there to be the "ring bear."  He was deeply disappointed he didn't get to wear a bear suit.  He got over that when he found out he got to wear a cool grey tux just like uncle Blaine's.  He got over the loss of the cookie, too, when we assured he did not want one with doggie slobbers on it and magically replaced it with one just like it.  I don't know why I don't have a picture of either of them, but these two could be Ralph and Bear:

Bear was an abused pound puppy rescued by my grandson Ethan and his mom.  She was truly a loyal, loving creature who saved my grandson's life more than once.  As I mentioned in my post about Bubba, my Basset Hound,
my grandson was one of the smallest preemies ever saved back in those days. As a result, he's had sleep apnea all his life.  He was only on oxygen and a heart lung monitor until he was about two, but he would still stop breathing in his sleep.  One night, in the middle of the night Bear woke my daughter up barking insistently. Thinking the dog need to go out, Kristin said, "Okay, okay." But Bear wouldn't go past Ethan's room and insisted Kris go in there. When she did, Ethan wasn't breathing, and Kris had to revive him.

When I had sell to Mama's house, Kris and Ethan had to move to an apartment where they couldn't have dogs.  Bear came to live with Tom and I.
She stayed until I had to find homes for both Sky and Bear. They were just too big and Tom kept tripping over them. Once I had to call 911 to help me get him up off the floor.  So Sky and Bear went to live with our friend Sarah on her blackberry farm in Tennessee until Sarah got a divorce.  She gave Bear to her three grand daughters, who fussed over her and played "dress up" with her.  Last time I talked to Sarah, the girls' parents had just bought Bear her own yellow Lab puppy, and her heart's desire to be a mommy was fulfilled.  Sky had gone to live with Sarah's son Joel, a grad student in Boulder, CO, so he finally learned that Huskies DO like snow!

The last Lab is a sweet old girl named Dottie.  Like me, Dottie is a senior citizen.  She lives next door to my God daughter in Dongola, IL, where I started writing Ghost Walk.  Dottie loves to play ball, especially with a basket ball.  She'd rather watch someone else run down the hill and fetch it.  So, thanks to Dottie, I lost about 40 pounds while living there.

Trespasser 

 

This big ole marshmallow goes under a couple of names.  He doesn't belong to anyone, just to himself.  Carlene, my God daughter's neighbor, calls him "Papa," because when he first arrived on the scene his goal was to people the neighborhood with little replicas of himself.  After the first litter by another stray cat arrived, the mama cat died.  Carlene helped Papa care for the kittens, then coaxed him into a cat carrier for a trip to the neighborhood vet.

 

Mary Rae has four adorable cats, Pokey a long haired calico, Iesca a big black and white, Pancake a white cat, and Sparky a black cat. Pokey and Iesca are litter mates and don't get along well.  Pancake was a rescued cat, hit by a car on Hwy 51 near Dongola.  His jaw was broken and his tail bobbed.  Mary took him to the vet and he survived.  Sparky we found in the electric company parking lot.  She'd been abandoned one night in a driving rain.  Anyway, Iesca was prone to misbehaving when upset.  Once Pokey was particular mean to him, so he pooped in the kitchen sink.  Mary Rae tossed him out in the cold to ponder his miscreant ways.  Papa promptly beat the snot out of Iesca, and Mary Rae just as promptly let Iesca back in and dubbed the grey tabby Trespasser!

 

Trespasser loves to share meals.  One morning I was sitting on the back stoop eating a bowl of oatmeal with butter and brown sugar in it.  Trespasser stuck his paw in to beg for a bite, and was thrilled to find himself in possession of the entire bowl.  At noon he reciprocated by bringing me a dead frog.  I declined, but that didn't stop him from bringing me more frogs, once a baby bird, and once a shrew or a vole, I'm not sure which.  He's a love, and I'll miss him when I move back to Oklahoma.     

 



 

Tales of Three Cats

Hope this is readable. Today I'm using the "royal purple," because once again I'm blogging about cats - and we all know cats think they rule - and often do.

First a word about Charlie. I forgot one funny story about Charlie that bears telling. When Charlie was a kitten, he loved playing with toys on a string, or just a string. As he moved on into a rotund adulthood, he still loved to play, but wasn't as highly motivated.  One Thanksgiving, my younger daughter (yes, his rescuer) was over to visit.  I was tempting Charlie with a fluffy cat toy on a string. He rolled this way and that on his roly-poly behind, batting at it haphazardly while we all laughed.  She promptly dubbed him "Jabba the Hut!"

During my second marriage, my husband Tom and I were owned by three cats.  The first was Coffee, a little tortoise shell, with ideas of her own.  Busy with a full time job, a husband going back to college for a third degree (no pun intended - Tom was a retired cop), and a red Husky to care for, I guess I didn't get the litter box cleaned out fast enough to please Coffee.  That night, she climbed into the bed and peed on my back.  If the loud cursing while we changed my nightgown and the bedding didn't clue her in, Coffee had to know her days were numbered.  Within the week she found a new home with Wanda, the girlfriend of a rock musician who used to live with us from time to time. 

A couple of weeks later, we were shopping in Wally World.  You know how they cunningly display those appealing pictures of pets who need to be adopted near the pet supplies aisle?  Well, there he was - a purebred Siamese, neutered, named "Tom!"  I knew "Tom" was coming to live with us, and he did.  However, the name just didn't suit him. Tom had had a purebred Siamese named "Sammy" when growing up, so "Tom" became "Sammy Two."  Once we got him home, I did two terrible things to him, quite unwittingly.  We bought him one of those webbed cat collars which was way too long, so I nipped it off to a reasonable length. Unbeknownst to either of us, the damned thing was wicking up water every time Sammy took a drink, then when it dried it shrank until it was eventually choking him.  One day Sammy went missing. We looked all over the house, upstairs and down.  We even got Sky and the De Soto cops in on the search. At long last, I found Sky sitting in the basement, whimpering.  I looked up, and there was Sammy, perched in the basement rafters, unable to meow or even croak. I brought him upstairs, and we cut the offending collar off, doctoring his wound, which encircled his entire neck, with Neosporin.  He forgave us, or at least forgave Tom.

                                 Sammy, post dental surgery to remove the bad tooth.

To add insult to injury, when we got Sammy home, we discovered he only had two toes on his left foot. We never knew if he was born that way - Siamese are prone to foot deformities, but usually it's polydactily, not the other way around, or was the victim of a botched de-clawing.  Once Tom named him Sammy, I promptly nick-named him Sammy Two Toes.  He was not amused, in fact, he was downright offended.  He never forgave me.  Sam also had a lower canine that stuck out, giving him  an upside down sneer, a la Elvis. You know me - I couldn't resist. I called him Snagglepuss. He was also highly offended by that, but at least he had the good grace not to piss in the middle of my back!

When Sam reached the end of his days, about age 17 or 18, my younger daughter paid to have him cremated, and he's in the basement, in a plastic tub, in his pretty little urn, waiting for the move to Mountain Air, NM, a writer's colony where Tom and I intended to retire. Since we never got to make that move, as soon as I find Sammy he's going to reside in my shrink Ray's pet cemetery. Ray is a fancier of the noble Siamese.  

The final character in my litany of felinis nobilis is Larry.  Tom got the bright idea that I should have my own cat, though I was perfectly happy with my red Husky.  He adopted a lilac Burmese with china blue eyes named Ling.  When we got home from our second honeymoon, a trip which entailed picking up my grandson to spend part of the summer with us, they went to the vet and picked up my birthday present - Ling.  Well, Ling hated everybody and everything.  He wouldn't have anything to do with any of us.  Morty, the rock musician I mentioned earlier, promptly diagnosed the problem.  "The problem is, your cat doesn't like you, because you're calling him by the wrong name."  

                                                Larry getting a chuckle under the chin.


Knowing Morty sometimes appeared to be a few tacos short of a complete meal, I snapped back, "How do you know that?"  I shoulda known. "Because he told me so." So, of course I had to ask, "Oh yeah? So what's his real name?"  "Larry." Not wanting to offend Mort, we began to call the cat Larry.  And guess who became Mr. Friendly?  You guessed it.  We discovered a few things about Larry during his tenure with us.  One, he was a bit of an escape artist, which is probably how he came to reside in the pound.  One Sunday morning when chow was served, Larry didn't show up.  As in the case of the missing Sammy, we searched upstairs and down with no result.  I thought I'd take a look outside before calling the cops.  Sure enough, between the wall and our huge dog carrier on the front deck was a pitiful, chilled, very bloody Larry.  Apparently, one of the teenagers who speed up and down this street when school isn't in session, or one of the early arrivers at the church across the street hit Larry.

We weren't able to reach our vet, but found one 50 miles away who was willing to come in on a Sunday to treat our feline foundling.  He howled for 50 miles going and 50 miles returning. All he had was a broken leg and a lot of missing hide.  The vet set the leg, splinted it with a couple of tongue depressors, and wrapped it in gauze. Once we got him home, we discovered it was impossible to keep him from trying to chew the gauze off, so I rigged up a contraption consisting of an empty toilet paper tube fastened on with more gauze. Our gauze bill for the next four weeks was astronomical!

The six week recuperation period was the only time Sammy ever allowed Larry in the bed with us.  He allowed him to sleep between Tom and I.  Since Sammy was doing the fur hat number with Tom, Sky liked to sleep spooned up to me while I was spooned up to Tom, and my grandson's yellow Lab, Bear, liked to sleep on our feet, it was pretty crowded in that bed! By the way, Larry never tried to escape again.

We also discovered Larry was an absolute slut for shrimp. Sammy didn't care for them, he preferred his dry cat food. So when we had shrimp, Larry got the lion's share.  After Tom died, I started remodeling the house for a quick sale and a move back to Oklahoma.  I also decided I never wanted to clean another litter box again as long as I lived. Larry now resides with a friend of mine named Steve. Steve and Larry are great buds, Larry gets the occasional shrimp feast. He even goes outside to poop, and has never attempted to escape.  Go figure!

I know I said this would be my last post on felines, but on the next post, when I talk about Ralph and Bear, two of the most unique female yellow labs I've ever known, I'll also tell you about an adorable black Lab named Dottie and a feral tabby named Trespasser.

Fred the Alligator

I still have a couple of cats and a couple of dogs I want to talk about before I abandon this obsession of reminiscence about what my crazy old cowboy uncle used to refer to as my "livestock," but today seemed like the perfect, dreary day to talk about the most unusual pet my kids ever had.  One day my cousin David was fishing in a bayou somewhere between Houston and Galveston.  He came across an abandoned nest of alligator hatchlings.  The mother had probably been poached for illegal shoes and purses.  He couldn't rescue them all, but good old David decided my kids needed a new pet - like a cat and four dogs weren't enough?

He brought said creature over after the kids and I had gone to bed.  He and my husband decided the best temporary domicile would be our bathtub.  About 2:00 am I had to get up to use the restroom.  Eyes bleary with sleep and nearsightedness, I was totally unaware of my surroundings. Something to my left made a "s-s-s-s-s-ach-ach-ach" sound. I looked over and saw a prehistoric reptile rearing its ugly head in my bathtub.  I instinctively left my seat in mid-stream, literally, and landed on the cold tile floor.  I gathered my jangled nerves, cleaned myself up, found a fresh night gown, glared at the demon long enough to decide it would not be a long term resident, and went back to bed.  

 Next morning, the kids were wild with excitement - it was almost impossible to get them to settle down to breakfast. They couldn't get home from school soon enough.  I have no idea why, but they named it (gender undetermined) Fred.  There was no real emotional bonding on Fred's part, but the kids were entranced.  They dug up an old cat collar, and made a leash from a length of cotton clothesline rope.  For the next three months, Fred lived in an old washtub in the garage, and my kids were the sensation of the neighborhood, taking their alligator for walks on a leash.  Even the neighborhood bully was in awe.

Fred consumed a great deal of hamburger and rapidly outgrew his home. When it became clear that Fred was growing into something that would soon be looking at my kids as lunch, I demanded that David donate him to the Houston zoo.  Instead, David returned him or her to the bayou where it lived out its days being an alligator, hopefully never becoming a pair of alligator boots.  The kids mourned about an hour.  I think they had begun to realize Fred's carnivorous potential, and I mourned not at all.