Читать книгу Indeed You Can: A True Story Edged in Humor to Inspire All Ages to Rush Forward with Arms Outstretched and Embrace Life - Elleta Nolte - Страница 7

These words “still I am learning,” translated from Italian ”Ancora Imparo,” and credited to Michelangelo, are inscribed on a necklace given to me. The words symbolize my inherent nature. God gave me two indisputable traits for learning: curiosity and motivation, along with the distinct drive to turn defeat into determination, to turn “No, I cannot” into “Indeed, I can.” But I was long into life before I realized these qualities, for I was painfully shy and inhibited in my early years. I believed anything I could do, anyone else could do better, an ingrained streak that sometimes hovers and keeps me humble. My mother dragged me to a little country school three mornings before she could disentangle me from her side and enroll me in first grade.

Perhaps my timidity and fear of people outside of my immediate environment was due in part to the fact I was a child of the Great Depression and its most disparaging forms of poverty, as were many others in Oklahoma where we lived. When my parents divorced in my early teens, my mother and I had little means of survival. In order to remain in high school my senior year, we rented an apartment for $3.00 a week, while my mother kept house for a large farm family, working seven days a week for $3.50. (Looking back, we wondered what we did with the extra 50 cents a week.)

But in the midst of deprivation throughout these years, something unexplainable within me promised, “In time I’ll learn and achieve much.” The vow remained, for shortly after high school graduation in 1937, I dated a young petroleum engineer who proposed marriage. Although I cared for him, I turned down his proposal with the assertion, “I have things to achieve before I marry, and no, we cannot do them together.”

Those “things” began when my mother and I moved to a small town in New Mexico where we lived in a one-room shack for three months. This enabled me to attend a business training school during the day and to work as a carhop at a drive-in during the evening. The training led to another place and position in late 1939, to the small town of Pampa in the Panhandle of Texas and the early-day Radio Station KPDN.

Radio work and I became well suited, but I changed locations, for my curiosity and motivation surfaced as I realized the tremendous changes occurring in our country, and I had seen little of other places. Not long after the attack on our naval base Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in December 1941, I rode a bus across the map to Seattle, where my brother lived. In answer to my resumes to radio stations, three job offers awaited me. I accepted a position at KIRO, the most powerful radio station in the Northwest during the war years, with its transmitter on Vashon Island. The personnel found my accent unique, and they always addressed me as “Texas.”

I was enchanted with Seattle, the beautiful city built on hills, its parks strewn with rhododendrons in brilliant colors, with ferries to enticing islands in Puget Sound, and with Saturday night USO dances for the many servicemen who awaited further orders. Their images remain in my memory: John, a soft-spoken sailor from Alabama; Garth, a self-seeking airman from Maine assigned to Officers Training School; and Ray from Michigan, the one I could have fallen for but did not. The one who had a fiancé back home.

I left Seattle and KIRO in October 1942, and returned to Texas to Pampa, now dotted with servicemen, for the city had lured an Army Air Force base to establish nearby. It was there I met Quenton, a newly recruited tech sergeant from Iowa, one of the first five enlisted men to activate the field (and the last to leave the base after its closure). Shy, dark-haired, and handsome, I thought he could have doubled for movie idol Tyrone Power. My shyness briefly took a holiday, for shortly after we met, I dropped a telephone number and a comment to his co-worker, “If Quenton doesn’t ask me for a date, I’ll ask him.” Quenton called that night and showed up at my door. It was Halloween, and he always said I tricked him. I did. We married in January 1944 in the little chapel at the Air Force base, followed by an eventful 63 years that blessed us with nine children. During that time, I found that indeed, I could do a great many things.

As my single years were seldom dull, neither were the long years Quenton and I shared as we worked to provide for our growing family. Yet even now, it’s difficult to realize the major step we took in 1960, the action culminated in my book, Westward, Ha! Its flyleaf gives a glimpse of the struggles:

When the Noltes and their eight youngsters left a comfortable and secure life in Texas to establish an uncertain homestead on a section of intractable sagebrush in a remote part of Nevada, they had no premonition of the real price one can pay for an independent venture. Their trials run from the animosity of a quick-tempered rancher who had long leased the land for cattle, to a hasty retreat from a major flood that drove them from their home—this in the driest state in the union. In spite of the obstacles of dust, heat, wind, water and errant cattle that threatened that first important crop on new land, the Noltes gained a patent for 320 acres of land. They later sold the land and returned to Pampa in Texas in 1962.

We established our former ties with Pampa, and settled into life in its usual course of happenings. Quenton opened a bookkeeping and tax office; I accepted an office job at Cabot Corporation; the children finished their education, moved onto their chosen careers, and created their own nesting. Life became secure and satisfying.

But it was not to last. Our fourth son, Alan, graduated from Texas Tech University in Lubbock and Baylor School of Dentistry in Dallas and began his dental practice at Cleburne, Texas. On a spring day in 1978, he died while scuba diving, leaving a wife and two small sons.

After Alan died, I became deeply depressed, sensing emptiness, sadness and withdrawal; emotions of that depth were strange and unusual for me. I continued to sink in despondency, though I never confided in anyone.

Perhaps this period of depression had a bearing on the life-changing event that occurred in 1985. One day I simply opened my mouth and without any thought beforehand, blurted out a question to Quenton: “If I find a house near a lake would you move?” He answered, “Yes.” Little discussion followed; it was simply something we felt we were to do. In a domino effect of events within a few months, we sold our home and Quenton’s business and bought a house overlooking a lovely lake in a small West Texas town with the intriguing name of Ransom Canyon. A section from my book, A Place Set Apart, describes the site:

For miles and forever miles, the flat and featureless land with its sweeping beauty of space and freedom spreads out in all directions from Lubbock on a high dry plateau on the South Plains of Texas. Suddenly and dramatically, the flatland falls off the edge to a full depth of 190 feet in a deep, wide canyon on the Caprock, a canyon that grew a town in the 1960s.

At age 66, we began a new chapter of contentment and fulfillment in our lives. The Texas area, home of the Comanche Indians for 150 years, lay ripe for research and its telling, while my curious nature caught the uniqueness of Ransom Canyon, and I began fact-finding and writing. Quenton became involved in civic activities and served as mayor for a term.

But enough: this writing is not about all those earlier years, it’s about what additional things I discovered I could do with my curiosity and motivation in advancing years. Age was only an illusionary figure in my life, not to be taken seriously. I found I could enroll at a prestigious university as a freshman at age 71 after 53 years from high school graduation. My college graduation at 89 inspired many people of all ages to say to me, “You need to tell people what you did, and what they can do, that age can have a positive effect on their lives.”

This is that telling.