1968

A Crazy Leslie

My parents were very young when they found one another. My father told me once, when I was far too young to know such things about my parents — either one of them — he told me that the main reason he didn’t leave my “crazy” mother was me. Daddy omitted, as he did habitually, the fact that I have a younger sister. Then he added that the other reason he didn’t leave my mother was that her parents were the family he had never had. And that was true. But my grandparents were far from an idyllic choice of substitutes and the mere fact that Daddy settled on them as the parents he never had speaks volumes. I am truly sorry about that.

When I was very little, I spent many nights on the orange vinyl pull-out couch in the living room at my grandparent’s house on Aurora Street in the Houston Heights.

My “Pappy” was a construction worker in Houston. At the peak of development and growth in the post-war years he did very well. He was called all over Texas and Louisiana to manage special private and public works projects. Pappy put the great big statue — I think they were horses, it’s a fountain, actually — Pappy put the statue in the middle of the University of Texas campus. He was very well respected among his peers. And he was one of the construction workers who survived the massive gas explosion in Texas City when flammable compound ammonium nitrate ignited back in the forties…