West of Indianola,Iowa

For years I’ve wanted to write my father’s life story, at least that part that started on 18 May 1960 when I came home from high school and found a note that read, “I have to leave.” ¹ The note went on, saying he thought I was on my own now and didn’t need him anymore. As for my brother, he had regrets, but felt he had done all he could do for Mark. He didn’t really mention my mother, except to say he had loved her. He sent his love to the three of us, me, Mark, and mother, and said the car was parked next to the public boat house in Muscatine. He said he didn’t need the car anymore. So Mark and I drove off to Muscatine which sits on the edge of the Mississippi River to retrieve the family car. We both cried, and then I told Mark that we had to be men now. I was 18 and he was 14.

So we returned home to mother who was crying and watching “I Love Lucy” in the living room. She was sitting in my father’s recliner, looking out over the corn fields through the picture window my grandmother had installed because she’d seen one in a remodeled country home in Better Homes and Garden. Lucy was yelling at Ricky, and Fred and Ethel were sitting on the sofa giggling. It seems that Ricky had promised to take Lucy shopping, but he had gotten tied up at the club and had forgotten his promise. Lucy was making him pay for his forgetfulness, as he peeled out five $10 bills and sent her out the door with Ethel to buy whatever she wanted.

My father died on November 1, 1995. It went fast, he was in the hospital for three weeks, and never came home. The next to last time we talked, he said he had given it a good run, and he guessed it was his time to let go. I cried when he said good bye.

Anyway, after his funeral, I learned that my mother had moved back to Lone Tree, a little farm town about 10 miles from the house where we had lived when my father left and took his boat trip up the Mississippi river in 1960.

Driving home after the funeral we crossed the Mississippi 20 miles north of Muscatine. I looked down from the bridge and imagined my father in his boat, and I thought I saw a houseboat, filled with a family. One summer Sunday in 1959, my father had coerced the entire family into a boat trip up the river in a houseboat he had rented for the weekend. Up-river we went, nobody talked.

I realized that I no longer had to tell my father’s story to anyone. We had made up, and his life was no longer a mystery to me. All these years, it was my mother’s story I needed to tell. There are many mother stories, so here is one of them. It involves Lucy, Ricky, mother, and Mark.

When I was ten and Mark was six, we moved to Indianola, Iowa. ² My father was the new county agent for the Farm Bureau. I was tall for my age and that summer, I mowed yards for spending money. My best friend was Billie. He was real tall and skinny and played center on our basketball team. Mark and I weren’t talking in those days. Actually we’ve never talked much. In those days, he had asthma and grandpa said he was a mommy’s boy. Mother was ill. Dad was gone a lot and doing some pretty heavy drinking. A woman named Sarah came in and did housework. She fixed lunch and supper every day. Grandpa paid for this.

Every afternoon, after mowing lawns in the morning, Billie and I rode our bikes five miles out of town to the lake in the woods where we swam out to the diving boards and took turns doing cannon balls, splashing the girls from junior high who came every day to sunbathe on the banks of the lake. We listened to Buddy Holly and Richie Havens on the radio. The girls danced with each other, and Billy and I watched.

I’d get home between five and six every night. Mother and Mark would have eaten and dad usually ate out. The table would be set for me, and supper would be in the oven where Sarah had left it. In my memory, mother and Mark were always out on the sun porch on the sofa watching “I Love Lucy” on the black and white Sylvania TV with the halo light around the screen. Mother would have a blanket over her legs and Mark would be curled up with a pillow at the end of the sofa, mother’s legs across his lap. I would come in with my dinner on a plate, and pull out the TV tray which had a picture of pheasants in a field on it. I would sit with them and watch Lucy, Ricky, Fred, and Ethel. I remember one episode, Lucy and Ethel were dressed up as cowgirls, playing two wild cowboys in the Old West. Fred enters the “saloon” at the end and arrests them both. Mother roared.

Mostly, when we watched the Lucy shows, nobody talked. Mother would giggle now and then, and Mark might laugh out loud. I would eat, and then do my dishes, then I’d run out the backdoor, find Billy and we’d play basketball until dark. This was how we had dinner every summer night in 1951.

1950: Denzin family photograph, 403 West 3rd Street, Indianola, Iowa.

 We stand in a group, looking western in western dress: father, hand on hip,

 cowboy hat pushed back on his head, cowboy boots, dark slacks, cowboy

 shirt with white snap buttons, wide silver belt; mother, cowgirl hat, red

 bandana around her neck, wide silver belt; Mark, my brother and me,

 Norman, wearing little cowboy outfits—cowboy hats, vests, cowboy boots,

 toy pistols in faux leather holsters. Forced frozen smiles, we have

 slightly downcast, but far-off looks in our eyes.

If you could read between the lines, you’d say our family was falling apart and everybody knows it. Seemingly normal people dressed in western clothes, we’ve maybe gone too far, something is not quite right.

Meagan Morris writes about her mother and father yelling at each other as they watched Lucy on Australian TV. Her father couldn’t stand Lucy’s yelling at Ricky, so they fought about the volume on the TV. My father was never home, so mother and dad never yelled at each other. Mark and I didn’t talk to each other. Nobody yelled in our house, just Lucy screaming at Ricky.

Now I think I understand why mother loved Lucy. Mother didn’t have my father to yell at, so Lucy did her yelling for her. Mother sort of got her own way, after all she could put her feet on Mark’s lap, and Sarah fixed all the meals and did the house cleaning. You’d think mother had it made. In fact, grandma took care of Mark and me during vacations, and Grandpa was like Ricky, he gave mother money whenever she needed it. Later, when we moved back to the farm, we spent more time with grandma and grandpa than we did with mother and dad. I mean, really, mom had it made.

1961: October 30, Denzin family photograph, mother’s birthday, grandparents’ living room, family farm, eight miles south of Iowa City, Iowa.

 The notation to the photo reads: Betty Townsley Denzin and Kenneth

 Denzin and their children Norman, 20, and Mark 16. Mark and Norman

 stand behind Betty and Ken. Mother, is wearing a dark red dress. Her

 hair is pulled back. Her head is bowed. Her face appears to be painted

 white, as if she was wearing the white mask of a Kabuki dancer. Her eyes

 are downcast, focused on the white birthday cake with yellow flowers

 that is placed in front of her. Father is looking up, the light glares off his

 glasses. He is wearing a cowboy shirt, with white snap buttons. Mark and

 I have forced smiles on our faces. Grandmother took the photo.

This was the last Denzin family photograph, that is, the last photo with Ken, Betty Mark, and Norman. Sometime before this photo, they passed the point of no return. About a month after mother’s birthday, our little world changed forever. That is when I came home and found that note from dad.

Sometime later, I think it was on New Year’s Eve in 1962, mother told me that Elizabeth Taylor was her favorite actress, and like Elizabeth, she too had been married to an alcoholic. But she and Elizabeth knew how to survive, and by God you had to learn to work with men, because they were kind of dumb. But they were sure a lot of fun. About that time, mother started mixing milk with her Ten High bourbon, and she was drinking this for breakfast. Lucy had gone off the air, but Lucelle Ball was still around. Mother said she didn’t like women who dyed their hair red, but “I love Lucy” had been one heck of a TV show. Were she alive, I doubt that mother would remember those old Lucy shows today, but I remember that my father never watched TV.

1973: October 30, Family photograph, author and his daughters, with Betty and George Campbell, outside the bunkhouse at George and mother’s Arizona ranch; mother’s birthday, Cottonwood, Arizona

Ten years after Ken left, mother finally went west of Indianola. She met and married George Campbell, a 25-year lineman with Bell Telephone. She insisted they move west, “I’ve always wanted to be a cowgirl,” she told George. And west they went, 60 miles from the Grand Canyon, high desert county, 10 miles outside Cottonwood, Arizona house perched on the banks of the Verde River. She never looked back.