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  My parents and me at the Texas State Fair.

  Spoken from the Heart

  Laura Bush

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  ISBN 978-1-4391-5520-2

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6034-3 (ebook)

  For the joys of my heart,

  my husband, George;

  my daughters,

  Barbara and Jenna;

  my mother;

  and the memory of my dad.

  CONTENTS

  Through the Nursery Glass

  Dreams and Dust

  Traveling Light

  One Hundred and Thirty-two Rooms

  Goodness in the Land of the Living

  "Grand Mama Laura"

  "I Told You I Would Come"

  Prairie Chapel Mornings

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  Through the Nursery Glass

  My first birthday.

  What I remember is the glass. It was a big, solid pane, much bigger than our little rectangles at home, which sat perched one on top of the other. I can still picture that window and the way it seemed to float on the wall without any curtains or wood. Beyond the glass was the nursery, where they kept the babies. I don't remember looking at a baby. In my mind, there is only the window, although my brother, John Edward Welch, is lying on the other side of the glass. It is June of 1949 in Midland, Texas, and I am two and a half years old.

  I do not remember if I stood on my tiptoes or if my father held me, smelling as he often did of strong coffee and unfiltered cigarettes. He would have dressed me himself that morning in a pretty cotton dress that my grandmother had made. She made almost all of my clothes, choosing her own cute patterns and fabrics, sewing them on her old treadle Singer sewing machine, the needle clacking up and down as she pumped the pedal with her foot. Whatever scraps her scissors had left behind she would take and carefully turn into matching doll dresses. Then she would bundle them up, a few at a time, and mail them from El Paso to Midland. Later, when the ranchers' daughters and the oilmen's girls were riding with their mothers on the train into Dallas to buy their first school dresses, pink or ruffled, with white lace or pert satin bows, at Neiman Marcus or Young Ages, my grandmother was still posting her cotton creations for me on the mail train from El Paso.

  Although the Western Clinic was less than ten blocks from our little house on Estes Avenue, with its hint of a front porch and postage stamp yard, where the grass was continually battling drought and dust, we would have driven there, in my father's Ford.

  I was born on November 4, 1946, at the same little Western Clinic, a one-story building, concrete and cinder block, with rows of decorative thick block glass and thin windows. It was built over a decade earlier, in the lean years of the 1930s, when Midland was a town of some 9,000 people. But by 1949, Midland was closing in on 22,000 people, and Western Clinic was still all there was. It had a scant thirty-six beds. Patients were simply patched up and moved on. There was a long waiting list for surgeries. The clinic could not afford to let anyone dawdle; as soon as they were able, perhaps even before, patients went home. Dr. Britt, who ran the clinic, had been brought in to practice in Midland by the oil companies. He birthed babies, treated sick toddlers, set broken bones, and watched hearts fail. Western Clinic didn't have a blood bank until 1949. Its X-rays were packed up and sent by commercial bus to a radiologist in Fort Worth. The drive alone was more than six hours. And once that bus had left, Dr. Britt could only wait until the next one was ready to depart from the depot. The city also kept a small Cessna-style plane parked alongside the grassy landing strip at the airport to fly patients in and out and to ferry pathology samples over to a doctor in San Angelo. When the brand-new, $1.4 million Midland Memorial Hospital opened, in 1950, the X-rays were still bussed and the surgery samples still flown.

  But this was 1949. There was barely an obstetrical or surgical unit inside Western Clinic by the end of that year. My parents would have known this. My father's brother, Mark, was a doctor in Dallas. But we lived in Midland, and there was no way to move a fragile baby, born unexpectedly two months too soon.

  My father had always wanted a son. In February of 1944, when he and my mother had been married for a few weeks, he wrote her a letter from a training base in North Carolina. A thirty-one-year-old GI, he was waiting there to be shipped to England. On thin airmail paper, in his tall, narrow, and meticulous script, Harold Welch wrote to his new bride, Jenna, who was not yet twenty-five, "Honey, what do you want, a little boy or a little girl? What you want, I want, it makes no difference to me, but I'd kind of like to have a little boy, would you?"

  I see them now in an old photograph, my grandfather Hal Hawkins, looking hot, uncomfortable, and a bit dour in his jacket and tie, his belly straining against the buttons of his white shirt, his hair refusing to stay slicked back and instead slipping down over his forehead. On the other side of the picture is my father, a head taller, hair neatly cropped, in his dress uniform, grinning and handsome, "so handsome," as my mother says, "with the most beautiful blue eyes." And between them is my mother, her arms through the arms of the men beside her, her head flung back in laughter, her whole face alive with a look of pure joy. Harold and Jenna waited two years for each other. My father shipped home in January of 1946. Two years beyond their vows, they were still newlyweds.

  My mother was an only child, and when I was growing up, she would say with a wink in her quick, witty West Texas way that she would have been "insulted" if her parents had had more children. But that is only part of the story, the way when you dig down through the dry West Texas flatlands you discover the fossilized remnants of shells and underwater life, what remains of the ancient, vanished Permian sea.

  Only when I was much older did I learn that my grandmother had lost her own babies, two babies, my mother thinks, both of whom were born too soon and died. But she never truly knew because no one spoke of it. You might talk about the wind and the weather, but troubles you swallowed deep down inside. My mother's own pregnancy with me had been hard. She did as the doctors told her and spent most of it in bed. This time she had gone to bed too, but the baby still came early, gasping, with no high-tech incubator to warm him, no pediatric IV line to put in his tiny arm, nothing but swaddling blankets and a few sips of formula from a glass bottle or given with an eyedropper, the way one feeds an injured baby bird.

  He would ne
ver know the sting of a baseball hitting a leather mitt, or ride his bike up to the edge of Big Spring Street, where the road turned abruptly from pavement to flattened dust, or get his first tooth or report card or walk into church in shiny, stiff shoes.

  He would never come home from the Western Clinic. He would never have his intended name. My parents had planned on naming him Hal, after both my father and my grandfather. But no one wanted to bury Hal Welch, three days old. So his official name was John Edward. Hal or Harold was a name they would save for another boy.

  John Edward lived only for those few days and then he died. He had a birth certificate, but I never heard him spoken of as a live birth. A "late miscarriage" was how it was euphemistically put. Newnie Ellis, the city undertaker, tended to his lifeless body. He was buried in a tiny box coffin in an unmarked grave alongside other Midland babies who had, over the years and decades, come ever so briefly into the world and then passed on.

  There were two more lost babies, a girl, Sarah Elizabeth, when I was eight and another boy when I was thirteen. The doctors called them late miscarriages too. I remember when I was eight that my mother had a blue and white polka dot maternity dress and I had a little navy blue and white polka dot dress. They weren't really matching, but they were the same polka dot, and I loved that we almost matched when we wore them. But by midsummer, her dress and the baby, who would have been my sister, were gone.

  I don't know if my mother cried for these babies when I was out playing in the yard, or rapping on the door of our back-door neighbors over the fence, or darting with the other kids between the gangly, dark limbs and feathery, green leaves of the mesquite bushes that grew over the vacant lot down the street. I don't know if the tears came when she smoothed sheets in the linen closet or hung wash on the clothesline to grow stiff and dry in the hot Midland wind. Or if she trained her eyes to look away whenever she caught sight of a baby carriage or glimpsed a big, boisterous family being herded into a wood-paneled station wagon. In those times, in West Texas, in the 1950s, we did not talk about those things.

  The mother I knew laughed and loved. But there remained a corner of her heart that longed for those vanished babies, a corner that dreamed of a big family of her own. Now, at ninety, when she cannot recall someone she met the day before, she remembers those babies. She sits in her green chair in her plain Midland living room and says, "We would have had two boys and two girls if they had all lived. It would have been quite a family, wouldn't it? I sure wish one of those little boys could have lived at least, because my husband wanted a boy so bad."

  But even back when nothing was said, I knew how much both my parents wanted those other children. I wanted them too. I remember as a small girl looking up at the darkening night sky, waiting for the stars to pop out one by one. I would watch for that first star, for its faint glow, because then I could make my wish. And my wish on a star any time that I wished on a star was that I would have brothers and sisters.

  But year after year, the sound of feet darting down the sidewalk, and up over the front porch, and through the screen door was always mine and mine alone.

  Dreams and Dust

  On the porch in Canutillo with our dog Bully. Grammee laid the orange brick by hand.

  When my dad was fighting in Europe in the war, he made a bargain with God. He promised God that if he got home alive, he'd never own another gun. And he never did. There was never any kind of a gun in our house, although most boys in Midland by the time they were fourteen could knock off a row of cans with a .22. My father did not go hunting for dove or quail or geese or shoot for sport, like a lot of other Texans do. He drank and he gambled, he bet on football games. He played cards and rolled dice. But he never had a gun. Ever.

  He and his friends were passionate gamblers, especially on football. They used to meet on Sunday afternoons at Johnny's Bar-B-Q on Big Spring Street, right at the edge of downtown Midland, when the tables were empty and the restaurant was closed to huddle over pro games. They bet on pro games, on college games, even on the high school games that packed the stadium in Midland every Friday night. They played cards, especially gin rummy, rolled dice, and a few of them, including Daddy, occasionally packed up and flew to Vegas. Once, I came home from college with a boy I wanted my parents to meet, and my dad was squatting down on the kitchen floor, shooting craps with his buddies, the dice skidding across the flat tile and bouncing against the cabinets. The lot of them barely looked up. I was mortified, but I think my college boy loved it.

  The gambling part was a West Texas thing. People who live in this place where the desert meets the tip of the plains, where the soil fractures and cracks and blows up against you with the wind, are risk takers, and my dad had grown up in the heart of West Texas, in Lubbock, which is about 120 miles or two hours north of Midland. My mother told me that he had learned to shoot craps in the basement of Lubbock High when he was sixteen or seventeen. He shot a lot of craps in the Army in World War II. But unlike some of the men in Midland, and a few women too, there was never, ever an occasion when he gambled what he didn't have, or if he did, I certainly never knew of it. We never wanted because of his gambling.

  My dad always considered himself lucky, and he was. He carried himself with a confidence that made it impossible to believe he could lose. Even his meeting my mother was luck. Or so the story went. She spotted him on the street in El Paso when she was looking out a second-floor window of the Popular Dry Goods Company, where she worked in the advertising department. Of course, it helped that one of her friends in the department was married to a man who knew Harold Welch. She remembers her friend saying, "Look, there's Hal," which was what they called him then. But the fact is that my mom went over and looked out the window at that exact moment, and there he was.

  They had their first date at the Tivoli nightclub in Ciudad Ju'rez, directly across the border from El Paso. My mother remembers how everyone parked in El Paso and then, all dressed up, paid six cents to walk across the footbridge into Mexico. Ju'rez was a glamorous place. When I was little and we went to visit my grandparents, I remember Mother and Daddy getting ready to go over into Ju'rez for the evening, Mother in a big circle dress, Daddy fussing with the knot on his tie to get it just so. I begged to go with them.

  The first club, right at the base of the bridge, was the Tivoli, and then a little farther down was another place, called Lobby Number Two, and other clubs fanned out from that. The "braver people" ventured farther out into the city, where at one time there was a jockey club and bullfights staged for the Americans, but my mother says that she and Harold never did any of that. The clubs had exotic--exotic at least for West Texas--floor shows and orchestras for dancing, and that first night over in Ju'rez, my mother and father ordered Boquilla black bass for dinner. The next morning, a little item ran in the gossip column of the El Paso paper noting that "Jenna Hawkins had been seen dancing with a handsome stranger at the Tivoli."

  More than sixty-five years later, my mother still claims that she didn't want to be written up in the newspaper. But the Popular Dry Goods Company was the biggest advertiser in the local paper, and Jenna Hawkins worked in the advertising department. And making the news didn't seem to deter Harold Welch.

  My parents started dating, and they were smitten fast. It was wartime. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States was also at war with the Germans. My father was nearly thirty years old, but he enlisted. His assignment was an antiaircraft brigade attached to the 104th Infantry Division, known as the Timberwolves. His unit trained in Florida, Louisiana, and outside of El Paso at Fort Bliss, the Army's massive military installation in the West. When he was on leave, he courted my mother. Once she invited him on a picnic up in the El Paso foothills. She carefully packed a basket and a blanket, but Daddy, who was spending his days mired in the dirt of basic training, declined to eat on the ground. They balanced their plates on their laps and ate sitting inside the car with the windows rolled down.

  My father was seven years ol
der than my mother, but both of them had left school after two years of college to make their own way. In Daddy's case, it was because his own father had died and he needed to support his mother. My father's parents, Mark and Lula Lane Welch, were truly Victorians, born in 1870, five years after the Civil War had ended and while Queen Victoria was still on the throne. My grandmother even had a biography of Queen Victoria with a big oval picture on the cover and heavy embossing. My paternal grandparents were both from Arkansas, but they met in Ada, Oklahoma, and married when they were forty years old. My uncle Mark was born when they were forty-one and Daddy when they were forty-two. They moved to Fort Worth for a while and then ended up in Lubbock, where my grandfather built homes. He was, I think, a jack-of-all-trades, a carpenter who could put up a frame, lay pipe, shingle a roof, and run some rudimentary wires as well. I never knew him. My mother never met him either. By the time my parents met, only my grandmother was left. I remember her as a big, sturdy, but very elderly woman with heavy, black lace-up shoes. For years she had belonged to the Methodist Church and the Temperance Society, which apparently did nothing to stop her son from driving over to the county line to buy his liquor at Pinkie's package store. Midland was a dry county back then, so people simply drove out along the highway to the next county to buy their alcohol. When Grandma Welch came to visit, Daddy would still drink, but out of deference to his mother, he poured his bourbon into a Coca-Cola bottle.

  When I was little, we drove to Lubbock every other weekend to visit my grandmother so that Daddy could check on her, make sure her house was tended to and her bills were paid. She came to our house for Thanksgiving and Christmas. My parents would go up and get her, and she would bring a bag of her pickled peaches that she put up each summer in heavy glass jars. Each Christmas she would make her famous coconut cake. Santa would leave a big, fresh coconut in my stocking, and then Daddy, with great ceremony, would crack the coconut with a hammer. My grandmother carefully drained the clear, sweet milk and grated the coconut meat with a hard box grater, which if you weren't careful, would cut your fingers raw. Then she sprinkled the tender curls over the frosting like a fine, white snow. She would spend Christmas Day making the cake for Christmas dinner. I'm not sure if she had a recipe or if she merely mixed the proportions in her mind, but every bite was delicious.