17 - A Date With Dephie

     

       Dephie worked for our family for a couple of my pre-school years.   We still lived on Poplar Street in a small two-bedroom house with a pretty basic room in the basement for you-know-who.   My parents were young, my father had just returned from the Navy, and his income was modest.  But in those days in the South, you could be fairly poor and still have live-in help.  

     Dephie was a prime example.   She cleaned house, did some of the cooking, all of the washing and ironing, and still managed to be a full-time nursemaid to me and my brothers.  Unfortunately she fell ill.  Very ill.  She was diagnosed around 1949 with cancer, and in those days you didn't much ask cancer of what, the unspeakable C-word sufficed to say the end was probably near!  

     My clearest memory of Dephie was when I was taken to see her at Moore Memorial Hospital in Pinehurst.  The hospital was then fully segregated with a wing in the back reserved for "colored".  Perhaps non-staff "whites" were not allowed there either, or maybe it was just that children --regardless of race-- were not permitted.   Whatever the case, my Aunt Frances' friend Rose (see Goodbye Rose), then the hospital's head nurse, sneaked my mother and me through a back garden where we remained outside, able to visit with Dephie through an open window.

     She laughed and joked with me, and she told my mother that her treatment was going well.  She said that they might not have to operate after all, that she hoped to be returning to Poplar Street back to her job soon.  

     Only she never did.  Rose later reported that Doctor Bowen had indeed operated and had removed her bladder along with other bits and pieces.  We never heard any more, and she was soon replaced in our household by Ethel.  
  

The Pleasants family, Poplar St. 1944

   I certainly cannot claim that Dephie's absence haunted me or that I gave her that much thought in the years that followed.  But as I got a little older, I guess around 13 or 14, I still remembered that hospital visit.  When I asked my parents what had ever happened to her, they explained that she had just disappeared and had undoubtedly died of the cancer.  I didn't feel they were especially evasive, it was just that they didn't seem to much care.  

     When I was a little older, in a mid-adolescent period of social consciousness, I remember seriously angering my father when I asked if he had paid Dephie any sick or severance pay.  In those days it was an insolent and rhetorical question.  

     So Dephie left our family around 1949.  Now let's fast-forward about 55 years.  

     My mother died in 1999, and my father joined her, at least metaphysically, four years later.  In the South, people drop by for condolence visits for several days after a funeral, almost always unannounced.  2003, the day following my Dad's interment, I was sitting on the porch with Dickie and his then-wife Jeanne when an unfamiliar middle-aged black man knocked on the door.  

     He explained that his mother was past 90, and he wanted to make sure he had found the right address before helping her from the car.  Was I the same Frank Pleasants who had once lived on Poplar Street?  It was Dephie, and she was superb.  I couldn't believe it.  Not only had her bladder been replaced by a pouch decades before it was common procedure, but she had given birth to two boys and outlived two husbands in the interim.  She was almost 93 and sharp as a tack.  A posthumous hats-off to Doctor Bowen would seem well in order!  

     She had been living in the country about 25 miles south of Aberdeen all these years.  She had often thought of us, she said.  She recalled what a chubby little baby Dickie had been, and she said that every once in a blue moon when she would come through Aberdeen, she'd see a fat man on the street and wonder if it might not be Dickie (she remembered fondly how Aunt Ruth had called him her little butterball).  She didn't seem to find it incongruous that Dickie had in fact turned into such a slender adult.

     She recalled a day about ten years earlier when she was thinking nostalgically about our family.  "It was raining and I was real blue.  I picked up the telephone book and said to myself, 'I'm just gonnah' call Miz Pleasants after all this time,'" she said.  She did, and they had their telephone reunion, but I had never heard about it.  Mother was probably already sick, herself, and had other priorities.  

     She recounted her life at leisure, and we spent a couple of hours reminiscing.  I was deeply moved and teared up both when she arrived and when she left.  The happy emotion was stronger than the sadness of losing my father.  

     I took her photo, and when I returned to Paris I sent it to her with a heartfelt note.  I never heard from her again.   It wasn't necessary, the pleasure rests intact.  She loved me as a small child, and her affection remained sufficient to search me out over a half century later as I, too, was fast slipping into old age.

-o-        

        

Your input is welcomed:  frank.pleasants@libertysurf.fr

CROSS REFERENCING … a look at other postings

Doctor Bowen and Moore Memorial Hospital were featured in "Doctor Bowen and Janette" from  Musings and Meanderings No.1;  Rose in "Goodbye Rose," Hotel Musings No. 61. Mother and Daddy and Frances were featured in "Stanley and Frances or the Guardian Angel," Musings No. 2; and Mother was also mentioned in "Hazeline and Josephine" from Musings  No. 8.  Frances and Rose were featured in "A Two-dollar Hamburger Under A Silvery Dome," Hotel Musings No. 4.  Aunt Ruth was featured in "Renata," Musings and Meanderings No. 4, and "Thanksgiving" from Hotel Musings No. 49  (to access, click on highlighted titles).

This is it, at least for the moment!

     With this, my Musings and Meanderings comes to an end.    I hope I'll find some more creative juice in the future for another blog adventure; for the moment I don't know what form that might take. 
   

     Many, many thanks to those who have followed these posts.  Your support and feedback have given me enormous pleasure.   It has been a special treat reconnecting with those who share a Sandhills connection and for whom there may have been a special resonance with my Aberdeen memories.

     So, it is au revoir for now, and hope to see you soon.