Now

Now

Hard to believe those school days pictures were made 60 years ago. I remember my dress—Mother made it, I think my grandmother embroidered the daisies around the neck. It was my favorite dress for about three years because I was tiny and didn’t grow very fast. I made up for it later!
So sixty years later what are these two up to? We’re displaced in South Georgia and like whooping cranes want to get back to Texas. I say I leave fingernail marks on the state border sign where I10 crosses the Sabine and becomes Louisiana. Bob has to peel me off, I’m trying to stay in Texas.
Maybe someday!
Meanwhile, how have we kept this together for all these years? We truly met in 1956. More about that another time.
We’ve had some rough times with each other. We got married very young, but we didn’t grow up until much later! Rolling with the punches and being able to laugh make the rough times smoother, or at least easier to bear.

Like a couple of weeks ago when one of our old growth one-hundred-and-fifty foot pine trees toppled over into our neighbors’ yard. We were gone when it fell. What a surprise to stumble over this in the dark! After the shock wore off, we mourned the loss and the expense and called the tree man. Then we set up the camera and took our picture. Might as well laugh—it could have fallen on the house or into the street taking out the power and telephone lines.

Here’s some more silliness. In 2006, our daughter treated us to a Christmas Eve Atlanta Falcons game. (Yes, the Falcons still have fans!) Here we are in our Christmas gift jerseys. Talk about good sports, those are our birth years on the back. Since we’ve left their home state, our kids call their dad “Tex.”
Just this month, Willie Nelson hit Tallahassee. What did these displaced Texans do? Go. My Tex wore his Willie groupie outfit. Lots of fun.

Then

Then
Aren’t they darling, those two? Wolflin School our first joint alma mater is in Amarillo on the high plains of Texas where the wind blows not only free but just about all of the time. For the longest time, I thought girl babies got born with scarves on their heads. Whenever I left the house, even to ride my tricycle up and down the driveway, Mother called out, “Put your scarf on.”

In the 1947-48 school year Bob was a big boy. He was in the fourth grade, upstairs where they got to change classes and study important things like geography. I was stuck downstairs. Being what they thought then was “slow” (we know better now), I spent the day trying to conquer the second-grade reader. Never did. In the first grade we had Cadillacs, Buicks, and Fords. Guess what I was? Now in the second grade we had Red Birds, Blue Birds, and Sparrows, guess what I was. Don’t worry, in the third grade I zoomed right out of the Cars, passed the Trains and was an Airplane in no time at all.

The big boy upstairs and the little girl downstairs didn’t know each other. Our parents must have met at PTA meetings or at the neighborhood Piggly Wiggly. but Bobby Pando and Trilla Nordyke lived in the same and different worlds. Today. we share lots of memories and, after all these years, lots of good friends.

A good beginning.

Finally getting started

Maybe I minded getting older more than I realized. I created this blog, declared myself both a crone and a diva, and then. . .what happened? A year and a half slid by. Time does that.

Now I'm back for a couple of good reason. First, I'm invited to participate in a panel on blogging at the Story Circle Network's February conference, Stories from the Heart. (Learn more about this women's lifestory organization athttp://www.storycircle.org/ ,) I have a small-town living blog http://trillap.blgspot.com/ which I kept very active for a couuple of years--but I'd let that one slip as well. I have to play some catchup in the next couple of weeks.

There's another very good, no, better reason. This crone is in her fiftieth year of marriage--to the same person. We both say we've been married more than once, but always to the same person--never a divorce but some serious rule changing several times.

I'll be using this blog to recount how we are spending this "golden year" as well as putting our story in context.

I'll begin tomorrow, meantime here I am--Trilla Pando, all grown up at 67

and here are the children playing grown up--Trilla and Bob have been a married couple for about five minutes. We're in what was deemed my parents' garden (usually it was the plain old backyard) in Amarillo, Texas on the morning of August 30, 1958. I'd been 18 for a whole month, Bob was not-quite 20.