When I was young ... when all of us in the Childress High School Class of 1963 were young, more than half a century ago ... I was perplexed by the habit of my grandfather, W.C. Harp, to make frequent trips to the Childress Cemetery to "visit" with those he had known and loved, whose mortal remains rested there....
How morbid, I thought... How gross!!! How terrible to seemingly be looking forward to his own death, to leaving this life and rejoining those literal ghosts of the past. My teenaged mind rebelled against the thought....
But now, after my own decades of this life and watching so many that I have known and loved leave this world, I think I understand more of what was in my Papa's mind.... Truth: More people who were important to me, and who I dearly loved, have left this time and place than I will EVER meet again in this life.... But now I believe with all my heart and soul, as my Papa did, that I will see them again in another place and time, another life, another promised "future"....
Nicki and Jim, this is for you ... and for auld lang syne....
I will always remember Nicki and Jim as a couple; and indeed they were, almost from the moment they were introduced when Nicki's family moved to Childress before our Freshman year at CHS, although Nicki laughingly related a story for the Show and Tell blog about how absolutely mortified she was when she was first introduced to Jim.... Still, it is almost impossible to think of one without the other.... Indeed, they were lovely and graceful in their lives together, for 55 years (50 as man and wife) ... and fittingly I think, in death they were not long parted....
I had known Jim since childhood in Childress, one of the "gang" who played in the streets until dark sent us scurrying for home, and ran through lawn sprinklers, and attended each others' birthday parties, and Trick-or-Treated in costumed packs at Halloween.... By the time Nicki joined us, we had moved on to more typically teenaged pursuits such as dragging Highway 287 and Main Street and the City Park; stopping for cokes and 'burgers at the Dairy Mart; bowling at the new Childress bowling alley where Nicki's parents kept watchful eyes on us; trips to dance at the Blue Room; slumber parties; and trying to ensure that "Tuffy" Maddox wasn't around to note if our feet got a bit heavy on gas pedals, or were "busted" in some fun but ofttimes insane adolescent pranks....
Although of course I knew Nicki, we didn't actually "hang around" with the same people in high school, and it became a true blessing when she contacted me in late summer of 2007 to tell me about the blog she had just started, Relections on the Way We Were: The Class of 1963 of Childress High School. She mentioned that Clara Robinson Meek had said she should contact me to see if I was interested in working on the blog with her ... and the approximately two years that Nicki and I (joined on occasion by some others) worked together on that blog, and the ancillary blogs, Show and Tell and then Voices of the Class of 1963, proved not only to be amazing trips down the fabled Memory Lane, but also became some of the most treasured days of my life.... I was truly blessed to have the opportunity then to get to know Nicki, and Jim as well, as the wonderful, caring people they had by then become....
One further indirect and almost posthumous "gift" from Nicki and Jim, was to get to know their daughter Jami Wilcoxson Wilmarth, and to have a chance to read the blog she kept of their final days together, Aging Gracefully is an Oxymoron; and to see posts by their other daughter, Kim Wilcoxson Migliaccio and their grandson, Jordie Henry.... I never knew until their obituaries were published that Nicki and Jim had another daughter, Amy, who apparently did not survive infancy. But what a lovely family they raised and nurtured, and left with such a legacy of love and golden memories....
I will end this post with words I used in the Reflections blog on January 31, 2007 ... New Year's Eve ... which attempted to update the class on some friends and teachers who had died in the years since our graduation, and I believe it is fitting to recall them here....
"Auld" means "old" and "auld lang syne" translates literally from Scots as "old long since" ... or idiomatically, as "long long ago" or "days gone by:"
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?
Our answer to the questions posed in the song would be an emphatic "No." We should not forget who we once were, where we came from, and those who touched our lives so long, long ago ... even as we move inexorably from past through present into future.
In The Hundred Secret Senses, a bittersweet novel of the meaning of loyalty, sisterhood, fate, friendship, the supernatural and extraordinary love, author Amy Tan wrote: "If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them any time with our hundred secret senses ... memory, seeing, hearing, feeling, all come together...." The book's protagonist, Olivia, learns "the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true." The ability to use our secret senses to "connect" with those who have gone before us allows us to realize the infinite quality of time.
Nicki and Jim, it was truly an honor and a great pleasure to know you, and you will certainly live in my memory, and in the memories of others, for as long as we are in this life.... I will continue to revisit our blogs from time to time, as I have always done, throughout the years and smile at the memories we made and recorded, together ... I will add to the blog as may be needed from time to time ... and I do believe that we and all those whose lives you touched and who loved you so much will see you again....
(Post-Posting Note: Nicki may be laughing about this as I type.... It has taken me longer to try to post this than it did to write it.... Some problem with the fonts, though I have typed and retyped it.... Sometimes such things would happen and all I could do was throw up my hands and ask Nicki to try to fix it.... So am posting as it is, with apologies.... Nicki, if you're there.... (smile).... Rest well, my friend....)
)O(
Nicki Janice Sooter Wilcoxson James Marvin Klosters Wilcoxson
October 7, 1945 - May 13, 2015 November 15, 1944 - May 23, 2015
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