I thought I would want to post some of my own words here on this Inauguration Day. But no.

It was all completely said. By poets, vocalists, clergy, and duly elected officials.

I really never thought about this holiday until a few years ago when I began to coach refugees and immigrants applying for citizenship. There were 100 questions they had to be able to answer. One was to name three federal holidays I refused just to drill them on the answers and always insisted on their knowing reasons and contexts.

No surprise that these “foreigners” were much more interest in learning about MLK than about Memorial Day. Like Dr. King, they were in a minority group too.

Not only had I never thought much about what we honor on the third Monday in January, I realized that I had glossed over it’s importance.

I am astounded to think back to 1963 when Dr. King made his “I have a Dream” speech. I was a sophomore in college, taking a fascinating US Government class, and there was no mention of it in class. I was totally unaware.

Do I blame this on the place, way out in the Texas Panhandle, at a very large state university?Do I blame it on the professor, a brilliant young lecturer? Do I blame myself? Do I blame the racist, fundamentalist milieu that was Lubbock, Texas, at that time? A college campus should have been a community apart. I remember hearing nothing about it.

Then, many years later when I was teaching at an Indian boarding high school, I had a student, Lillian Kobuk, from a remote Alaskan village. Lillian was one of the most interesting people I have ever known. MLK day at a boarding school was not a holiday. In class, never mind that it was an English class, the students were very interested in talking about MLK. They were from a persecuted minority like Dr. King so they felt closely related to him and his plight.

In our discussion Lillian asked, ” So you were alive when Matin Luther King was alive? Wow!”

She had no concept of periods of time. And I had no concept of being alive concurrent with King and what that should mean. A serious epiphany.

One of the most memorable activities I participated in in this regard was showing the film Selma to my Citizenship class. At that time, my class was made up of only Latinos, a very unusual occurrence. ( I often had Russians, Vietnamese, and Arabic speakers.) I asked whether they wanted to watch it in English with Spanish subtitles of visa versa. They chose English with Spanish and asked to re-wind so many times to discuss something that it took four class periods to view the whole thing. Another epiphany

Nowadays, this holiday is supposed to be commemorated by doing volunteer service. In the past, I have participated doing such things as collecting litter from my kayak on the river and gardening at the historic cemetery down the street. My only volunteer work at present is wearing a mask and staying home as much as possible.

Actually, I think I’ll watch Selma.

If you didn’t memorize that in school, learn it now. Think about what a perfect union would look like. How do we elect leaders who work to promote the general welfare and promote domestic tranquility?

Way out here in my little state, my little state capitol has become a fortress. All lower windows are boarded up. Concrete barriers are blocking access.

Until the pandemic, You could just walk all around it, snapping pictures. you could walk right in and watch both houses in session and take pictures in the governor’s office. Since the insurrection in DC, you can’t get close, fearful of thugs who have no clue what peaceful assembly means or what their First Amendment rights actually are. You can see, I stole this picture from the newspaper. We are warned not to go over there this week.

I wish everyone before getting a driver’s license had to be able to recite the Preamble to the Constitution, and then I, an old Citizenship tutor, personally, would like to quiz them about what it means.

No domestic tranquility anywhere right now.

Hope seems to be on the horizon. On the personal level, I got my first Covid vaccination this week. On the national level, actually, on the global level, a corrupt administration — dare I say regime? — will end and a new one will take its place. We can be hopeful but not yet fearless. That will take more than a swearing-in of new leaders and a shot in the arm.

Our family has some interesting expressions that are unique to us. I’ve been recalling some of them lately.

No one but us ever seems to know that a bed of quilts and pillows on the floor is called a “pallet.” But I looked it up. It’s the first listed definition. A makeshift bed, sometimes of straw.” so there!

Daddy used to say he was “all stove up” if he had worked too hard and was sore all over.

Aunt Caroline’s expression of amazement was, “Well, I’ll swan!” I never heard anyone else say that.

Her mother, my great-grandmother greeted all her Christmas day visitors when they came in the door saying,”Christmas gift!” Was she saying we were her presents?

Joannie had some cute things she said when she was a tot. If she was angry with you and wanted to put a curse on you she would point and say, “Hinks-00-kinks-oo-men,” no doubt meant to put the fear of God in you. Another was her conflation of “each other” and “together”: ” to the juthers.” We still say that. Lately, a lot. “When we can be to the juthers again. “

Elizabeth coined “mamamiska” and “kiddiewinkles. They mean just what you think.

Mother was usually very precise with correct usage, but sometimes she used words to mean what they sound like they should mean.

When it was very wet and muddy outdoors, she would say, “It’s a loblolly out there!” I’ve been saying that a lot lately too.

Will this rain ever stop? It’s a loblolly out there!

(p.s.: Someone directed me to an old dictionary listing of loblolly: “A soggy marsh.” Mother was right about so many things.)

Naturally, I’ve been thinking of a lot of “things past” recently, in spite of my new year’s vow to live in the present.

I recently wrote somewhere that I wish I could relegate bad memories to a file and press delete. A counselor suggested that visual metaphor when I was going through my divorce. Unfortunately, you just can’t do that.

A yoga instructor suggested the visual of clouds passing in front of you. Just take your hand and your breath and move them aside. Another nice thought.

But I have been focusing on many happy and funny memories as much as possible.

Whenever Mother pops into my mind, I mostly think of her driving me somewhere in the car.

A very happy memory is how my maternal family (and my daddy) just loved to go for drives to no place in particular. Just out in the country. Gas was cheap. I remember when pecan trees grew along dirt roads in Oklahoma and you could just go out and pick up the windfalls in brown grocery sacks. Then in the evenings, while listening to the radio, Daddy would “pick them out.”

Mother drove me to another nearby town once a week for a piano lesson. I was terrible on the piano. I have very poor manual dexterity and poor eye-hand coordination, so piano lessons were not happy for me. One day I was doing especially poorly at my lesson. Mrs. Rubottom’s four-year-old daughter Theda was lying across the room on the sofa. Mrs. Rubottom said,”I could get Theda to come over her and play this better.” I said, “Well, ma’am, I guess you’d better get Theda to come over here and play it for you then. I picked up my music and went outside to wait on the front steps for Mother to come back to pick me up. When I told her what had happened, she just nodded and we drove away, never to return.

Very often, we did have a destination, across this bridge to Durant. I thought it was very exciting, in that flat country. I remember a driving lesson across it.

Today, Elizabeth mentioned that she might drive her dogs in to Livingston to the dog park. I remembered so many Saturday mornings when “going to town” was a tradition. My forebears lived in such tiny towns that they needed to go in to shop, socialize, and people watch.

There was a special place on Third Street in Durant where we liked to park for the best people watching. It was in front the Plaza. Saw a lot of Saturday-afternoon westerns there. And a weekly episode of “Nioka, Queen of the Jungle.”

We would go early to get a spot and then go into the drugstore right next door where Mama and Mother would have coffee for 5¢. I favored a toasted doughnut and a Coke. I don’t remember that we ever bought very much, but we did a lot of window shopping.

There was a jewelry store right there and we like to play a game,”If you could have anything in that window, what would you choose?” A generation later, I played that game with my girls. Now, when I pass by the jewelry window in Fred Meyers, I always have a look and am content to realize that I do not want a thing in that window. The Starbuck’s is right there next to it. $1.00 for the senior coffee. Not 5¢, but still a pretty good deal.

Mother sewed everything for me. To be honest, I remember that some of the results were not fun to wear, but most were quite lovely.

Mother loved for things to be surprises. When I was in grade school, Mother was what is now referred to as a stay-at-home mother. I don’t think there was any other kind except for my friend Kay’s mother who “had to work in the bank” because she was what was then referred to in hushed tones as “divorced,” now called a “single mother.”

Most days, I walked home for lunch. In order to keep what she was sewing for me a surprise, Mother would sew until lunch time and then put it all away so I wouldn’t see it. Her Singer Featherweight was the best sewing machine ever. She set it up on the kitchen table. I have it now. It is my most prized possession. Still runs perfectly and has outlasted two very expensive computerized machines of my own.

Joannie and I were both essentially single children, being born thirteen years apart. I have to point out, there are advantages to being an only child. And lots of advantages to have a sister later on.

A happy memory for me was playing with all my cousins. Here I am with just a few.

For Joannie and me, these were different generations of cousins. And, because of a a unique family configuration, most of mine were actually second cousins. Or possibly first cousins once removed. I’ve never been able to figure that out.

I loved it at my Capshaw grandparents’ house when the house was full and all the children slept in the living room on what were called “pallets,” quilts, blankets, and pillows piled on the floor. We had never heard of sleeping bags. A generation later, Joannie hated that. I must have been away in college at that point.

I took this picture on the last drive Mother and I took together. She started out driving but soon pulled over and asked me to drive. We drove all around the Pecos countryside to look at all the changes the most recent oil boom had made.

And we drove to Barstow, six miles from Pecos.

Mother loved that little town, I think because it was like the town she was born in. When she was school librarian, she drove to Barstow once a week to be librarian there. And she loved to do all her post-officing at the little post office. I received many packages postmarked “Barstow, TX.”

We saw this beautiful West Texas Sunset on our way back.

She constantly gave me advice all my life, most of it was pretty good, except for “always act like a lady.” One of the last :

Today when my credit card bill showed up, I noticed that there is no longer a charge for Mother’s cell phone. Ah. How I wish I could call her up this morning. She would want to talk for hours about the happenings in DC this week. Joannie and I do that in her stead.