by Pa Rock
Rural Resident
Living on a country lane far out in the Missouri Ozarks, it is sometimes easy to forget that there are others in the world, besides myself, who do not fall down in adoration every time Donald Trump's name is mentioned. Yesterday I had some company from an urban area - Memphis, Tennessee - whose work experience and thoughts on life and politics are more closely aligned with my own than those of most of the people whom I have lived around for the past decade, and the experience was refreshing and delightful.
My father served in the Army Air Corps in Europe during World War II. His best friend and tent-mate during much of his time in England and France was a a young man from Memphis by the name of Joe Spake. I have previously mentioned some of some of the experiences that Dad and Joe shared during the war in this blog. Joe and Wanda Spake and their two older children came to visit us in Missouri a couple of times when I was in the early years of elementary school, and we visited their home one time in Memphis when all of us kids were very young. Joe died young at the age of forty-one, and our families lost contact, but I always remembered the unusual "Spake" surname and the fact that they were from Memphis.
I was a civilian working as a social worker with the US Air Force prior to retiring about ten years ago. From the summer of 2010 until the summer of 2012 I was working at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa. One day sometime during that two-year period as I was driving back onto the air base following lunch, I was listening to Armed Forces Radio (AFN) on my car radio and a program featuring blues music was playing. As I was pulling onto base, the show ended, and the host came on to sign off. He said that the programs had featured Blues from Beal Street in Memphis, and that his name was Jim Spake.
When I got back to office I got on Google and began to explore. I found a Spake in Memphis who sold real-estate and emailed him. In his response Joe said that he was the son of my dad's friend from the army, that Jim, whom I had heard on the radio from the far side of the world, was his brother, and that he was going to refer to email on to their sister, Carrie, who "ran things" for the family. Carrie, who was also a social worker, and I became friends through email and have corresponded off-and-on ever since.
This past week Carrie and her husband, a retired school psychologist and also a "Joe," have been on a mini-vacation in Arkansas and Missouri exploring museums and Harry Truman sights, and yesterday, on their way home to Memphis, they stopped in to see me at my home. It was the first time Carrie and I had seen each other since we were very little children. I told her that I felt our fathers - who are both gone now - would have been very pleased to know that we had connected again, and she agreed.
Most of our time together was spent having a long lunch at a large cafe in town. In hindsight it was sort of amusing. The restaurant was crowded when we arrived and much of our conversation centered on politics and our mutual dislike of Trump - and we all spoke in very quiet and hushed tones so as not to be noticed by others in the restaurant, most of whom were undoubtedly Trumpers. But it was fun, almost exhilarating for me to be able to say what I pleased, even if it was very quietly!
As an indication of the type of place where we dining, there there was a fancy new pistol and case being raffled off at the cash register. Although there were no signs posted about the purpose of the raffle, there was a sign saying that the tickets were ten dollars each. Carrie and Joe said they didn't own any guns, and neither do I - which definitely makes me an outlier in this community!
Back home after lunch we strolled out to my paw-paw patch were the fruit is ripe and beginning to fall from the trees. I sent my guests home with a bag of fragrant "Ozark bananas."
We had enjoyed a very nice visit, and it had been so good to break bread with intelligent, unarmed people!
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