Morning Person

Ok. What time do you get up in the mornings?

Is it when the coffee smell flies through the house, curls a bit in the air, and taps on your sleepy nose until you are drawn into the kitchen and hope there are biscuits with butter nearby.

My dad was religious about getting up in time to have his big glass of hand squeezed fresh orange juice. It was about 5:30 a.m. and Willie Walker prepared it for him every day.  Then Dad was in the car driving from way out in Germantown (at that time it was really considered a far trip) at least an hour to get all the way mostly empty of cars to Front St. where my father’s building awaited his arrival to start the day. It was a building down a bit from Front St. on Monroe. And the views were specially pickle green early in the mornings as the sun sort of danced a twist and turn to rise up over the Arkansas horizon, the Mississippi River, and tossed delight when the sun rose, blurring people’s eyes, from the east to wake up the day and all the people trotting around trying to get to work on time.

My dad was arduous. I’m sure he listened to Bing Crosby and Vaughn Monroe driving down Main Street to his garage. He was the ideal early morning person, and now we are told that like the Neanderthals, Dad was always fit - he was alive early in the morning and about 2 or 3 in the afternoon, he was on the tennis court in his long white trousers, a long sleeve shirt and his hat, beating as many buddies as he could. The primary tennis court was named in my father’s honor for all the years of his excellent tennis, which he played daily, even on Sundays, since he didn’t go to church after the death of his mother and then his brother. Robert Lee, who was killed in an auto accident when riding with two of his buddies, who had been partying while driving down to or from University of Mississippi (better known as “Old Miss” back in the late 90s.) There are negative moments in all people’s lives. Robert Lee, Dad’s brother, was a victim of being a popular guy who, I guess but never knew, was the life of the party and a pretty good football player.

After I had been through the mill of 12 years of school plus one kindergarten, I found myself with some sort of personality. My parents wanted me to have the experience of all girl’s school that began at Miss Hutchison’s School for Girls in Memphis (later site for the police car inspections) and for two years I was sent off to boarding school for my Junior and Senior years at St. Catherine’s School for Girls in Richmond, Va. Although I cried out and cursed and tried to convince my parents they had sent me to hell, it really was a great two years of my life. I learned about getting along with lots of girls, even though I was not sharp climbing up the famous hill for the spring party, but it was a time at the end of the Senior year, we were able as Seniors to wear long white dresses and parade across the fields of St. Catherine, pleasing our parents, I’m sure.

After graduations, with my then best friend Adrienne Aden, and I joined a girls’ group tour through Europe, we met girls we had never known but came from all parts of the USA, and I learn about men, those Italians who whistled at us all the time as we passed by in a bus, and also there were those sailors on the deck of Christopher Columbus. I was learning a bunch. My favorite part was visiting the castles in Austria and Germany. Wherever we went, guys in Italy really whistled at us continuously - that was supposed to be good news - and though we started in Italy, we wound our way through Europe (this was post all wars, thanks be to God.  In Rome, we even met Pope Pius IX.

If this reads like a high school essay, well, it probably is. Because from St. Catherine’s (where I did my first ever sermon in the pulpit or the school church), I never was aware that this would be my courage and hope and service from 1995 forward.

When I graduated from St. Catherine’s - where I learned about journalism, I was sent off to Bennett Junior College in Poughkeepsie, New York where I was awfully unpopular, and this, led me to spend weekends at the Biltmore Hotel and walking the streets of New York City to see as may theatre plays as possible. I wasn’t popular and the boyfriend I had met in Palm Beach on spring break, yes, I fell for him (his very wealthy mother really liked me) but he was in the Navy at that time in North Carolina, I think. While I settled into Bennett, I found out he had married someone who was not what his mother approved. I wept and wept and thought about jumping off the balcony of the school - I’m sure I wasn’t the first to be twisted and torn in that kind of situation. But somehow, I didn’t and some of my hometown friends were also students there. And I spent almost every weekend in theater seats in New York City. I don’t remember more than that. But that fall, after a summer wrangling at a ranch in Wyoming I was accepted at Hollins College, Va.  After editing the newspaper and creating a magazine called Sour Grapes, I graduated and was hired to work at the Commercial Appeal. 

The first year, I had been a pean before my Senior year, but then after graduation I was a legit journalist and that became my love. I even interviewed Elvis Presley a couple of times, and other famed types who came through for attention in the newspaper. But a year later, I took off for a trip around Africa, alone, visiting all the blossoming towns and learning how wonderful Africans were and are. It was a three-month trip learning about so many countries. But at the end, as usual for me, I fell in love with a coffee farmer in Tanganyika and lived on the coffee plantation for two years after a horrible bout with various infections I picked up on my trip.

I came home to Memphis, my notebook finished with articles, I was locked up in isolation for a month. But when I recuperated, rather than die, I headed back to Tanganyika and was married in the Anglican Church in Arusha — which is ironic because years later I was ordained priest in the Anglican Church in Uruguay.  But my husband became a racist and joined their groups. I showed him the door and he joined his parents in South Africa. I raised my girls with joy and adventure. My life has always been fantastic and filled with friends and adventures and service to the father of us all, and still going even today in my 84th year.

~ Rev

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audrey@audreytaylorgonzalez.com
www.audreytaylorgonzalez.com