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There is an African
proverb, which goes like this, “It takes a village to raise a child”.
Hillary Rhodham Clinton wrote a book using the proverb as a title. I
don’t know about Hillary’s upbringing, it may have been such that she is
knowledgeable about the subject. I know some about the concept of a
village raising a child, but in my case, Cache was the village and I was
the child.
My world consisted
of my family, the little grocery store my parents owned- Ken’s- and
school. I was the second daughter of Ken and Joyce Maloy and I was
quite proud of the fact that customer’s walking in the door often called
me “little Maloy”. The people in my world were varied and colorful and
my memories of them are rich.
In the early days,
we had a butcher who worked the meat case - Charley Wilson. Charley
opened the store in the morning about
7:30 and then my dad went up at
8:00 , with mom waiting until my sister and I went to school
before joining him at the store. Back in those days, there was an old
woman who spent many of her days at the store, sitting back by the meat
case. She was To-pay – the last wife of Quanah Parker. She spoke only
Comanche and because the Comanches had raised Charley, he was fluent in
the language. She would sit back by his work area and visit with him. I
was fascinated by her– with her long braids always worn interwoven with
strands of colorful fabric, dark skin and the beautiful shawl she wore
wrapped around her middle. I would listen to the exotic language they
spoke back and forth and wish now that I had learned at least some of
it.
One of the first
lessons that I learned, growing up in the store at Cache during the
fifties and sixties, was the balance between being “stuck-up” and
talking too much to the customers who came in to buy groceries. My
mother was the master teacher in helping me to understand moderation –
at least as it pertained to my behavior at the store. I should speak to
everyone, always answer when they talked to me but, and she was adamant
about this – not “wart them to death” while they were trying to shop. I
didn’t question it at the time – this warting to death of people. I
have no idea how this term could have possibly originated, but if people
were getting warted to death – it was not going to be me who did it.
My dad, who may have
had the same instruction from my mother, didn’t do a lot of talking. He
was, however, quick to put things in perspective. Usually, when I was
at the store, I was back at the meat case telling him something that I
thought I needed, or wanted or just had to have. He wore a paper
butcher’s hat with “Mead’s Fine Bread” in yellow, printed along the
side. He would sharpen his knife with the swish, swish, swish
of metal against a sharpening steel while he listened to my litany of
items. Then he’d calmly say, “Aw, I think you’ve just got a case of
want-itis”. I did have quite a few cases of want-itis, but it was
diagnosed quickly and we moved on.
On the other side of
the street from Ken’s was Spiegel’s Barber Shop with the proverbial red
and white striped barber pole outside of it, a feed store, Andy’s Shoe
Shop, Darity’s Grocery, a variety of beauty shops – we didn’t call them
salons - and at the end of the street, Goldie’s. Goldie was a
seamstress who worked over in her little shop each day and Goldie was my
Sunday School teacher. I loved Goldie. She had flaming red hair and
freckles and she walked every place she went. Every Sunday when Sunday
School was over and we had sung “Jesus Loves Me” and “Jesus Loves the
Little Children”, she would send us all out the door with a big hug and
smile which would do us for a whole week. I was confined to staying at
the store with my folks most of the time, but I did get to run around
town some while I was there. I liked nothing better than to slip over
to Goldie’s to see what she was doing. She always seemed happy to see
me and would stop her work to visit. I didn’t stay long because she was
on the list, along with our customers, of those I was warned not to
“wart to death”, but through Goldie’s warm eyes I came to believe that
Jesus did indeed love me.
Something my sister
and I didn’t question was the way the fried chicken was divided up in
our little family of four when we had chicken for dinner. We had dinner
at noon ; we didn’t eat lunch
when I was growing up. We ate dinner and supper. I didn’t eat lunch
until I was a grown up and working in Lawton
. Anyway, the way we ate fried chicken was that my mother got a
whole cut up chicken at the store and cooked all of it – the breasts,
thighs, neck, back, legs. My mom got a chicken breast, my dad got a
chicken breast and my sister and I each got a leg and then we shared the
“pulley”. The pulley is a small part between the two breast sections,
which has a little bit of tender breast meat on either side. It’s a
little bitty piece of chicken – and we shared it – AND we thought it was
great. I later thought it a little unfair that when I was a child, the
adults got the best pieces of chicken and then after I grew up, the kids
got the best pieces of chicken. Of course, now we don’t buy a whole
chicken, we buy skinless, boneless breasts, or all thighs or all legs.
My dad was the one who had cut up the chickens we ate for dinner and he
could cut up a chicken faster than any human being. He even timed
himself – whack, whack, whack and then he’d place all the pieces
in a little red and white tray with the legs on either side setting all
the cut up chickens in the meat case ready to go home with somebody –
for dinner.
Another lesson in
moderation was not commenting on what people at the store bought or what
they said about buying it. We sold snuff in glasses. They were about
three inches high, not the little round tins that make white circles in
jeans back pockets. They were made of thick glass about the size of a
small jelly jar and held several ounces of snuff. One woman who came in
weekly to buy a large glass of snuff, always worked into the
conversation that she was buying the snuff because her dog had fleas
“real bad” and she was “using the snuff to kill fleas”. After she left
the first time I heard this story, I said to my mother, “I didn’t know
snuff would kill fleas” to which she quickly responded “That’s none of
our business”. End. Period. I still don’t know if snuff kills fleas.
My childhood was
bountiful with the treasures of Cache Oklahoma
. I was Ken and Joyce’s daughter, I was “little Maloy” but I was
everybody’s child. There are treasures that still abound in the people,
the history, the memories, the legacies we have in our town and the
goodness of the people in it. They are there when a child sees his or
her teacher at church and goes to sit beside them. They are there when
a Sunday School teacher leads her class in singing, to a clunky old
piano, “Yes, Jesus loves me”. They are there when a house burns or a
child is sick and the community reaches out to help a hurting family.
They are there at a school Christmas program where everyone who wants to
gets to sing a solo part. They are there at the church where you can
still hear Comanche hymns being sung. The treasures are there – don’t
miss them. |
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