Children in the Closet....Chapter 18

    Chapter 18

      It was an early spring Saturday afternoon when I opened the knock at the front door to a man holding a Bible. He was a local pastor and lived just up the street from us. He visited for a few minutes there on the porch and invited me to Sunday morning services at Northgate Baptist Church. I had attended church all my life except for the last year. After moving away from Mrs. Morrison, I had stopped going although I still read my Bible every day. It bothered me that I wasn't in church so I accepted his invitation and assured him I would be there the next morning.
That particular Saturday was Jesse's night out with the boys. I never knew just who these boys were since we didn't have any friends other than the Parks and we seldom saw them anymore. They had moved away from Mrs. Morrison's and settled in Garland, Texas. As soon as he got home from work that evening, he bathed and changed clothes before heading out for the night. When he came in well after midnight, he smelled of alcohol and tobacco, which was odd since he claimed he didn't smoke or drink.
I woke up all excited about going to church and got myself and Summer dressed. I decided to be very brave and woke him up and asked him to go to church with us. He refused and yelled at me for waking him up and I yelled back. Not exactly the best method to convince someone they needed the Lord.  I grabbed up Summer and stormed out of the house.
The people at Northgate Baptist were kind and welcomed me. I met another young married girl there. Her name was Annie and she, too, had married young. She had been 15 when she married Billy who was a Marine and they were stationed in San Diego, California. She had just returned home to be with family when Billy left on a tour to Viet Nam.  We became friends immediately. She had a little girl about the same age as Summer so we had a lot in common.
I had always loved going to church and was thrilled to be back. This was not a Southern Baptist but something called Missionary Baptist. I didn’t know the difference back then so I placed membership after a couple of Sundays. The pastor would continue to come by the house and visit with Jesse every week and invite him to church. 
I had been going for a couple of months when one Sunday morning I woke Jesse up and had a heart to heart talk with him. I told him he needed to go to church and that he should search his heart. If he had been saved as he had claimed he had been, then he would want to go to church. If he didn’t want to go, then sin was keeping him away or perhaps he had never truly accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior. To my surprise, he agreed with me and went to church. Within another month or so, he walked down the aisle at the invitation and professed his faith in Christ and asked to be baptized. After that, he went to church every Sunday that he wasn’t working and in time to come, stopped working on Sundays so that he could attend regularly. We also started tithing, giving 10% of our income every week.
We became close to the George and his wife, Lois, who took me under her wings and encouraged me. Church was not only Sunday morning but Sunday night and Wednesday night, as well. This was the very first church I had actually been involved in. Growing up I simply took myself and my siblings to whatever church was close enough to walk to and we only attended on Sunday mornings. No outreach from Sunday School teachers for us. This felt like another step into true adulthood for me.
Since we were renting the house with an option to buy, Jesse contacted the owners to see how we would go about doing that. We were shocked when a sheriff came to the door one day and gave us eviction papers. We were too young to figure out just why we were being evicted but we began to look for another place to live. We had been given 30 days. 
Pastor George tried to help us and took me around to several rental properties in Irving but we decided to move back to Dallas instead. We searched the classified section of the newspaper and found a home near Love Field Airport. The rent was in our price range and it was a larger house than we were living in with a dormer bedroom upstairs. We were out of the place in Irving and settled in at the new house with just two days to spare before they would have come and moved all our belongings to the curb.
We moved in April – just as I discovered I was pregnant again.
We continued to attend church pretty much every Sunday. And I continued to visit Mrs. Morrison regularly and went to WMU with her on Tuesdays. WMU stands for Women’s Missionary Union. We would meet at 10:00 for a lesson and business meeting followed by a pot luck lunch where every lady brought a side dish and the church cook fried up chicken. Boy, could she make fried chicken! The food was always amazing and attendance was always good. I think the food and fellowship is what drew them all together more than the actual meeting.
Mrs. Morrison was a member of Junius Heights Baptist Church in East Dallas where nearly all the members were elderly. They loved for me to come and bring Summer. The ladies fussed over her and loved on her.
We met in the basement and the steps leading down to it were steep and dangerous for the old people but that didn’t stop anyone from attending unless they were really too crippled to make it up and down the stairs.
This pregnancy was different than my first one in that I was able to buy suitable clothes. I had two nice dresses and a couple pair of maternity pants, tops and two skirts. These were the old-fashioned kind with a half circle cut out of the middle for the growing belly and the skirt was held up with ties.
I loved this house and especially the screened in porch off the bedroom. We put a chair out there and Summer’s toys so I could sit and read while she played. 
We had used a diaper service with Sumer and would continue to used one for the new baby but we really needed a washing machine. It was time consuming and expensive to go to the laundry mat every week. Jesse started looking at garage sales and found a beat-up washer for $15. It was really ugly so he sprayed it with a can of copper paint. The machine worked fine on the wash and rinse cycles but it would not spin. Jesse fixed that by rigging it up where you hold a button down for the spin motor to activate. The only thing was-- you had to continue to push that button for the entire cycle! But we had our needed washing machine! There was already a clothes line in the back yard so we were set and I could do laundry every day now.
Since Jesse had started having a weekly night out, I suggested he and I have a monthly date night. He would pick Mrs. Morrison up and she would stay with Summer while he and I would go out to dinner and a movie. Dinner in a restaurant and a movie theater instead of a hamburger and drive in. I would dress up and I wore a pair of white gloves just as I had seen in an issue of Woman’s Day magazine.
We ate dinner at El Fenix on Lemmon Ave and then went to the Majestic theater in downtown Dallas to see The Sons of Katie Elder. I think we had three or four date nights during the summer and early fall of 1965. I did feel like such a grownup when I turned 18 years old that September.
The church hosted a baby shower for me that October. It was wonderful to have lots of brand-new baby clothes and I was grateful to the ladies who gave them to me. They served cake and lunch and played funny little games. I thought, "so this is what a baby shower is like." I remembered Mother hosting one for a family member in the back yard when I was little and I felt truly special that this shower was for me. 
To this day I regret that I did not know enough about manners to send thank you notes.
The due date for my delivery was November 28th. My doctor was once again Julius McIver – and even though he was an OB/GYN – he was a family doctor as well.
We prepared for our 4th Thanksgiving as a married couple and bought a nice big turkey even though I had never cooked one before. This year we planned to cook a big meal and eat at home instead of going to Jesse’s mother’s house as we did the first Thanksgiving or just ignoring the holiday as we had the past two years.
We had moved Summer from the downstairs extra bedroom to the one room that was upstairs where we had set up a little bed for her with a small chest for her clothes hoping this made her feel special instead of resenting having a new baby take over her baby bed. Someone had given us a bassinet to use and we had that set up in our bedroom.
Summer had been born exactly on her due date so I expected to deliver this baby the same way. I was surprised when I started having contractions the day before Thanksgiving. In my youthful naivety, I assumed all babies were born on their due date. Jesse took Summer over to stay with Mrs. Morrison while I packed my bag for the hospital.
With Summer, I was in labor a full 12 hours and given twilight sleep drugs. This labor was completely natural and I was totally not expecting that. Dr. McIver and Jesse sat on chairs at the foot of my hospital bed and talked like I wasn’t even there. Dr. McIver was fond of Jesse and asked about his stone work and they even watched a little TV together. I moaned and groaned and could not believe how much pain I was in. I was scared but no one seemed to care.
After being in labor all afternoon and into the wee hours of the morning, I was finally wheeled into the delivery room where the bright lights blinded me. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I was looking at a large mirror set up so I could watch my baby being born. Except I was not interested in looking! By this time I truly believed I was going to die and I thought it was such a shame since I had my doctor right there.
Jesse Lee Davis, Jr. was born at 1:37 on Thanksgiving morning 1966. He was perfect. We were so excited to have a baby boy.
I stayed overnight in the hospital so Jesse picked Summer up at Mrs. Morrison’s, went home and decided to wait to cook the turkey until the day after Thanksgiving when I got home from the hospital.
He didn’t have a clue how to cook it so he just unwrapped it, put it in a big pan, sprinkled it with salt and pepper and shoved it in a hot oven – our oven was old and always baked at 400 degrees no matter what temperature you put it on. Then he came up to the hospital to get me. By the time we got home, the house was smoky and that turkey was crisp as bacon. But we ate it anyway.
Christmas came and went that year in a blink of an eye. The one memory that stands out in my mind was Christmas Eve when we baked sugar cookies as a family. I propped the baby up in his little carrier and placed him in one end of the table while Summer, Jesse and I kneaded food color into the cookie dough. We rolled them out and helped Summer use a cookie cutter in the shape of a Christmas tree.
I was so proud of those cookies and that we were now a real family doing things together.
After the cookies baked and cooled, we fixed a bottle of formula for Baby Jesse, made Summer some chocolate milk and filled a thermos of iced tea for us and put some of the cookies in a bag. Jesse drove us around to look at Christmas lights in the Cedar Springs and Highland Park areas of Dallas.
I felt like I was living a story in a magazine. I had a family and we were doing family things. Surely this was the way to live a grown up life.