My business drew me to East Africa for several visits. Ethiopia was my favorite and I spent the most time there. My mind seems to connect in myth. Ethiopia always made me think of Sheba. She made me remember Solomon. Solomon led me back to Stockton, Kansas. My home town. It was settled in the 1880s along the Solomon River, in the Solomon River Valley. Rivers in the western half of Kansas are rare and very important if they have any water in them–many rarely do.
As a baby I was the heart’s desire of a woman of pure love, Ramel Schindler. I should explain to those who do not know Kansas that its few hundreds of small town make a crazy quilt of separate carefully maintained European ethnic identities. Every nation of Europe is represented. Ramel was second generation American but still as German as Rommel. Her husband Henry was too. This childless couple took care of me whenever my parents needed someone to watch me, which was often for what reason I do not know to this day, a little mystery.
I can only remember Henry in overalls. He was a mechanic. He was the first man I wasn’t afraid of. He took me fishing near the dam the WPA had built on the Solomon. He baited my hooks explaining as he went. He smelled of pipe tobacco and would sit beside me our poles side by side on the great broken slabs of concrete that were the remnants of the dam. Truly the Solomon wasn’t much of a river. The dam not much of a dam. I was mystified by how it had come to be smashed up, by giants?
I remember there were lots big trees there, Cottonwoods and Elms (this before the great catastrophe of Dutch Elm disease descended without mercy on every village and town in the State leaving them ugly nudes). I relished my visits to the river.
Ramel had the softest voice I can find in memory. She had an enormous bosom, big red cheeks and an incredible length of hair. Looking back I realize that this hair was this kindest of soul’s one vanity. I can see her brushing it often and with great care. At a back corner of their small wooden house there was a rain barrel, in the backyard and not far from their storm cellar. Every Saturday in preparation for her holy day Ramel washed her hair in rain water. Then she carried the wonderful smell of rain with her for a few days, rain that was rare, dearly prized and when it did come arrived with a real thrill.
The Schindlers home surprised me because it had only one book, the Bible. Ramel read it often. Henry never that I can recall. Of course they were my father’s parishioners, at least Ramel was. For some reason I don’t believe Henry went to church.
Ramel also had an old rocker that sat on a thick Brussels carpet It faced a Franklin stove across the room. I would rock there to my heart’s content, totally self immersed. The rocker would move forward across the carpet as I rocked. Once to the stove I needed to pause long enough to stand and push the rocker back to its starting point. I remember that as the best rocking of my life. Five stars. How relieved and content this made me feel. Best of all there was no one to watch me critically, to mock me, shame me, make me feel like a creep (which I was).
Only problem in visiting the Schindlers was music. They had no phonograph, no records, no piano. Evidently early on I expressed my need for music because then the kitchen radio was left on during my rocking trances. What music I wonder did Ramel listen to on what was surely the Hays station. Polkas perhaps. You could listen to radio programs of nothing but polkas virtually the length of the State, 450 miles of polkas.
I think I loved Ramel and Henry more than my own parents. I have no idea what happened to them except from the look on my mother’s face it was something to make her sad.
Years later I learned of something that for a time had made lost little Stockton, Kansas famous, besides the best rocking to be found any where, the rain barrel, fishing with Henry on the Solomon river, and the smell of rain that comes again with all the love I hold for Ramel. This came with the many articles in the Wichita Eagle Beacon, in New York papers, even in Time magazine. The founder and leader of the American Atheist movement, Madalyn Murray, had come to town to settle, at the invitation of a difficult and wealthy old rancher. He’d erected a very tall radio antenna, powerful enough to transmit across the Great Plains. He gave this to Madalyn along with the money to support her causes. Maybe the same money that caused her and her family to be murdered many years later somewhere down in Texas.