Like Me (2 page)

My values were nurtured by my hometown of Wellsville, a farming community of sixteen hundred tucked into the northeast corner of Franklin County, Kansas. Our main street was called Main Street, and most drivers treated its single flashing
red stoplight as a mere suggestion to slow down. Although Kansas City was only about an hour away, we seldom left the city limits of Wellsville. Even after all this time, it’s hard for me to find a stranger in the community of my younger years. Most folks know each other by name, schedule their social lives around high school football games, and spend Sundays at one of the two poles of spiritual life in town: the Baptist church and the Methodist church, which sit just fifty yards apart. Wellsville folks tend to marry their high school sweethearts and settle down to raise kids where they were brought up, just like their parents before them. It’s the heart of the heartland, and I’m proud to call it home.

I’m the baby of three. We were each born a year apart, starting in the summer of 1967, when my mother, Cheri, was just nineteen. Some say I get my hardheadedness from my mom. When she was four, she was stricken with polio, and doctors said she’d be unable to walk, let alone bear children. From the time she contracted polio until she was nine years old, she spent most of her life in a hospital enduring surgeries that left her with a badly scarred right leg half the size of her left. But by junior high school, she’d set her mind on walking and tossed her crutches aside. Teased for her severe limp and the surgical scars that crisscrossed her legs, my mother simply got tougher. After she married my father, she was determined to have her babies without drugs or surgery. And she did.

At twenty-one, my father, Stan L. Wright, was barely a man himself when my older brother, Chris, arrived. When my dad was five years old, his father died suddenly of a ruptured appendix, leaving my grandmother to struggle to make ends meet. The only father figures he had known were a succession of husbands and boyfriends, most of whom never seemed to stick around long. When he was seventeen, my dad enlisted in the navy, but after he married my mother, he found jobs pouring concrete and working construction. Dad worked hard to support his growing
family, but in many ways he wasn’t ready for what comes with being a husband and parent. Luckily, my older brother was a stoic and self-sufficient kid almost from the beginning—or so goes the family lore. Good thing, because my sister, Jeny, came along only eleven months later.

I arrived late, in the fall of 1970, my mother’s biggest baby at nine and a half pounds. I had long black hair that never fell out, fingernails grown out so far they curled down at the ends and—as my siblings love to point out—a soft coat of light hair down my back (thankfully, that pelt fell out). From the start, Jeny doted on me, trailing behind Mom while she cared for her newest baby. One of my earliest memories is seeing my big sister pushing her face through the bars of my crib, waiting for me to need something.

In the early years of my life, my parents scraped together enough money to buy a rickety white Victorian at 710 South Main Street that we all still call the Old House. At the turn of the century, the house had been called the Wayside Inn and was a boardinghouse for railroaders. I loved every rambling inch of it.

My father was a tenderhearted man, but he dealt with a life of hard knocks by drinking too much. When he drank, he could get mean, and it was always directed toward my mom. When I was three, Mom made an escape with the three of us kids in the middle of the night. With help from her sister, my aunt Char, she found a little pink house in the town of Ottawa and got a job at a twenty-four-hour dry cleaning store. Eventually, she agreed to take my dad back under one condition: he had to promise to stop drinking. Dad tried to make good on the deal, but occasionally he’d slip. There were times when he would go out coon hunting for the night and not return home in the morning. I’d get worried he’d been hurt in a hunting accident, but Mom always knew where he was. “Probably passed out drunk in his pickup,” she’d say with an edge of bitterness in her voice. When he’d finally stumble in, she did seem happy and relieved that he
was just drunk … and not dead. The tension between my parents hung over all of us. They argued about everything, and in our hearts my siblings and I knew they’d be better off apart. Still, whatever troubled their marriage, we knew they loved us.

The Wright family, portrait taken at the Nebraska State Fair. 1973
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In many ways, my folks were visionaries. They were true entrepreneurs and could usually create a plan and execute it well. Of course, I believe a secret to many of their successful endeavors was that they had a built-in workforce of three strong kids who did exactly what we were told to do. My brother, my sister, and I were not spared real, manual, hard labor during our growing-up years. Some of it we dreaded; some of it was incredibly fun.

When those winter months would clamp down on rural Kansas, it was not out of the ordinary for the mercury to drop below zero for weeks on end or for twenty inches of snow to fall in a day’s time. My dad and the three of us kids would bundle up
in layers of thermals, jeans, overalls, and coveralls and head out to the timber to cut firewood. Kansas kids love snow and we were always excited to go out in it, whether it be for fun or for work. Sometimes my mother, even though she was handicapped, would go along and do what she could to help. She was tough, and my folks taught all of us how to work hard and how to do a good job.

We’d park the pickup truck as far into the woods as possible, then carry the axes and chain saws the rest of the way in to the trees that we’d be taking down that day. My dad was the only one strong enough to run the big chain saw at the time, so we stood back and tried to figure out where not to be when the tree came down. Once it was toppled, we got to work. We cut the smaller branches off with our little saws, then rolled and tipped the big logs up on end so they could be ripped in half with an axe. Those pieces of wood were split smaller and smaller until they were all of a similar size that could easily fit into a stove or fireplace in someone’s home. We used our little human assembly line to move our big stack of hickory through the woods. Jeny and I would usually be singing some country music song at the top of our lungs. We sang and we worked. We’d load the wood into perfect rows in the back of the truck, making use of every square inch. We wanted to be able to get it all in the truck as neatly as we could to cut down on the number of times we had to load the truck. Then we would drive to our destination, unload it, stack it again, and get paid for it. On those cold winter days, we’d do this from the time the sun came up until long after the sun went down. I don’t know how much my dad charged the people we delivered wood to, but it must’ve been enough to get us by.

When we got back to the house, Mom would have us pry ourselves out of our wet, frozen clothes and she’d serve us each a big bowl of her chili or her ham ’n beans. I don’t recall my folks ever
saying a special “thank you” to us kids for our hard work, but there was a general sense of “way to go, guys … you did good” in the air. I lived for that feeling.

M
y parents taught us that if we were willing to work, we could make it anywhere.

I had a paper route in first grade, and six days a week I threw the
Lawrence Daily Journal World
. In addition to our paying jobs, we had household and farm chores for which we were fully responsible. We didn’t have a nice home, but it was spotless. We didn’t have flowers in the yard, but the grass was always freshly cut. We didn’t have nice clothes, but they were clean.

When I was six, I asked my mom if I could be baptized. “I think you might be too young, Squirrelly,” said my mom. She sat down at the kitchen table that my dad had made with leftover lumber, lit up a Viceroy, and told me to sit. She asked me to explain to her what it would mean to be baptized. We talked about as long as that cigarette lasted, then she smashed it out in a Kansas City Chiefs ashtray. She stood up, and as she headed to the utility room in the back of the house she said, “Well, you better go see Warren and see what he says.”

Warren Skiles was the preacher of the Wellsville Community Baptist Church, a congregation we stuck with for a few years. He lived three houses down with his wife, Connie. I took off running and found him in his side yard, tending to his honeybees. He could see I meant business, and he carefully latched the little white wooden box where he kept his hive, taking me up to his front porch to talk.

I spoke in a great breathless wave: “I want to be baptized but Mom said I might not be old enough because she says that you have to understand what it means to invite Jesus into your heart and that He will be your Lord and Savior, but I DO know what
it means and even though I’m only six, I really DO think that I’m ready to be baptized but Mom says that I have to talk to you first because you’re the one who decides. What do you think, Warren?” Warren responded by taking me in his arms, laughing, and shouting “Hallelujah.” Then we sat a while on his front porch, sipping Connie’s iced tea, and talked about God and the world.

I was baptized the next Sunday.

My mother talked a lot about faith, and I really believe that she was genuine in hers. She read the Bible somewhat regularly and taught me to turn to the Bible for answers about any questions that I might have in life. She wasn’t one to quote scripture, but she seemed to have a clear understanding of the stories in the Bible and what they meant to her. I have always considered her to be what I call a blue-collar Christian. She’d told me that God was so powerful and great that if I ever did have a question or problem for God to help me with, I could turn to the Bible even if I didn’t know where to look. She showed me how to hold the Bible, say a prayer for enlightenment, and then randomly open the book and start to read. She told me that there was no way to go wrong, that God would always reveal the answer or some guidance in the pages. At times, I felt that this ritual helped me find answers and direction that I needed, but it could’ve been that I felt better simply because I allowed myself to be submissive to God. It’s not a big issue to me to know the root of why my relationship with God works …it just does. And for that I’m thankful.

I felt torn between the teachings of the handful of churches that I’d attended in my short life. Each church said things a little differently, but they all seemed to be reading from the same Bible. I wondered how that could be. This made me contemplate that one could interpret the exact same scripture different ways. I made note that even in my small town, people believed in different things—so much so that they went to a specific church.
If they didn’t, and if God’s word was so clear and so easily understood, they’d all go to the same church. If little Wellsville, Kansas, could have so much religious diversity and conflict, the rest of the world was probably at religious odds too.

Me at age six. 1976
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Jeny and I had been regularly attending the Wellsville Assembly of God Church when we were around the ages of twelve and eleven, respectively. My mom had informed us months before that our family was no longer members of whatever church it was that we’d attended for a year or so. So Jeny and I sought out a new church. We didn’t have a long list of criteria that determined which one to try. We had just two, actually. It needed to be a church that we hadn’t already belonged to, of course, and the other criterion was that Jeny and I would have to be able to make the journey on our bikes. I knew the preacher and his wife of the Assembly of God church because I was their papergirl, and they invited me to come to see their church.

My sister and I were instantly welcomed by the congregation, and since the town was so small, we already knew the faces and most of the names of the people who worshiped there. I remember one Sunday service at that church in particular, when a few people started shouting out words that I didn’t understand. I looked at Jeny to see if she was as confused as I was, and she was. An elder of the congregation came to the pew where I was seated and grabbed my hand. He pulled me out of the row and led me into the aisle. I resisted and tried to sit back down. He said a few things really loudly to me while putting his palm on the very top
of my head. I recall that he pushed down so hard on my head that he pressed one of my hair barrettes into my scalp. He then said, in plain English words that I understood, that I should go ahead and do it. I had no idea what he was talking about, so I just shrugged my shoulders. He told me that I too had the gift of speaking in tongues and that I should go ahead and speak it …to show everyone the “blessed gift that God has given you.” I said nothing. I didn’t know what to do, and I certainly didn’t have any special words to say. I didn’t feel disappointed that God didn’t love me enough to give me “the gift,” but I did feel scared that the elder who had grabbed my hand had some kind of spooky power. That frightened me. I wondered if he had another special gift that could tell him that I got crushes on girls instead of boys. Jeny and I never returned to that church.