Blogging A-Z: K Is for Kansas

            Jack was from Kansas. He was born in a small town, was moved at age 2 to government housing in Wichita, and when he was 12, the family moved again, into the city and a small house—I think it had three bedrooms, but can’t be sure. By this time, his older sister had married and left home, but his older brother, after he did his army service, came home to live, and Jack slept in the basement while his younger brother had his own bedroom.

            I’m not sure when Jack decided he had to leave Kansas. But when his father died suddenly

when Jack was 20, he knew that if he didn’t leave Kansas soon, he never would. He saved his money, he flunked out of college again, and in the late summer of 1963, he got a ride to Kansas City with a woman friend (I think her name was Carolyn Markley, and she drove a little red sports car really fast), and took the bus to Washington, D.C. He went to D.C. because a high school friend was a student at George Washington University.

            I first went to Kansas in the ’60s, when we’d been married for almost three years. Jack’s older brother, Larry, met us at the airport and drove us to their mother’s house. After we’d been driving for several minutes, I saw a few two-story buildings and asked, “When are we getting to the city?”

            Jack said, “This is the city.”

            I was abashed.

            In those years, I think I’d talked on the phone to his mother for less than a total of five minutes. In those days, I was still very shy and not good at meeting new people. So I think I still said very little to her. And we didn’t stay at Jack’s childhood home. No., we stayed at Larry’s, with his extremely pregnant wife, Coyita, and their toddler, Michelle. And a couple of days after we arrived, Coyita was off to the hospital to have Renee.

            Wichita was one of the cities where food products were tested. Here is where I first encountered Pop-Tarts. Coyita offered one to Michelle. I tasted one and no more.

            Jack next went to Kansas with Christie in 1981, and I went to Kansas two more times, for Thanksgiving in 1985, and two years later for his mother’s funeral. A few years later was Jack’s 30th high school reunion. Three of his friends called and wrote, urging him to go. I urged to him to go—I wanted to meet some of the people he’d been telling me stories about for years. But he was adamant. He was not going back to Kansas. And then he confessed that he’d been telling his family that the reason he didn’t come back to Kansas more often was because I didn’t want to go. I was so angry. I would have been happy to travel to Kansas, but Jack was lying about me to excuse his own desire to never return to that state.

            He never went back for a high school reunion. But he did go back to Kansas a couple more times, after his older brother was diagnosed with lung cancer, and then his sister was diagnosed with cancer. He didn’t go back for their funerals. He cared about living people.

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.