Oops! I missed a day!

Here's the last of the unsent stories Mom had written.  It's pretty funny.  Enjoy!

Steve

I started to tell you how Cappy, (your Dad, Grandpa, Uncle, friend, etc., etc.And my husband!) got into the Mexican "Bracero" program.
He went to work from the shipyards to work for a friend of the family on a big dairy, and fruit farm. They had Mexicans on this "new" program the Govt. was starting and so we went to work up in Wheatland for the aforesaid guy! While there we lived in a brand new furnished house, etc. We were not too far from Beale Air Force Base and when the Mexicans would get off work at night we would take them up to a "Tavern" Roadhouse actually, and they could get a meal there and dance with some of the customers, have a drink or two and come home! Mainly the trade was from the Base and what tourists would come down the road! The guys, some of them had girl friends, etc.so it gave the workers a little recreation! After a couple of hours we would take the boys back home, singing but happy (most of the time drunk! They didn't have to work on Saturdays and Sundays there at Sandercock Farms! These guys were pretty nice and the folks who owned the roadhouse made them feel at home! Of course, Cappy and I had a ball too because we loved to dance! After a season of this the Farm Security Administration came into being or at least into the bracero program and so Cappy was hired then by the government! Rationing had come into being and we were given little ration books of stamps for groceries, that is some things, like meat, sugar, flout, etc. and we had ration stamps for shoes, and gasoline for our cars! When we first went to work for F.S.A. we were still sent to farms and had our housing furnished, if we wished their housing, or we could rent a place on our own., which we did when we first started to work for these people!

I remember the first paycheck they got at this one place near Healdsburg, Ca. they wanted to treat their "boss" I had a houseful of kids in town to take care of! Namely, Cappy's son Les, and two of my brothers and my sister Teresa had come to "visit" us for the summer and the boys got jobs picking hops, which was what the Mexicans were doing!

What a job! These hops are used in making beer among other things and they grew up on tall poles. They were sticky, smelly and when they worked in them they really earned their money!!!But this first "payday". I couldn't figure out what happened to Cappy because he was there for dinner at night but he didn't show up! Teresa had had her tonsils out that day in the hospital and even tho she had had that they sent here home that day! So, I told her,"Why don't you just sleep here in bed with me tonight" When Cappy comes home, we'll have him go up in the loft with the boys!" So she agreed and about 11"P.M. we hear this bam! I jumped up out of bed and looked out the back door. Cappy, who was never a heavy drinker, had run right into the garage door with his car! I went in and told Teresa, poor thing and I told her, I'm coming back to bed now and I'll just tell hime to go up stairs to the loft! Well, he comes stumbling in the back door and over to the bedroom door and stands there as drunk as could be! "Hello Honey!" I yelled at him, "don't come in here we'll get a cot down out of the loft for you!" I got the boys up and instructed them to bring a cot down stairs! Cappy says "I'll do it and the boys are coming down stairs with the cat and can't get by him" I pulled him out of the way and told him to sit down!!! In no uncertain terms!!! Teresa came out of the bedroom and told me to just let her sleep out there! I did, and I'm telling you once Cappy hit our bed, he was out like a light!! Good thing! I probably would have killed him!!!

Any way when that season of picking hops was over, some guy talked Cappy into going to Bakersfield to work with him, weighing cotton! But that's another story, and I'm tired! I did my watering today outside and decided to do some trimming of my roses and a few other gardening jobs, and then I had to rake everything up! By this time, (almost 10:00 A.M.) I decided to let the gardener who mows our lawns, etc., to pick up the yard and garden trash!!

Cars...

OK, So I was cleaning up the blog files under Mom's account and I found this entry.  I didn't look to see if she ever published this one. After reading it, it looks like she never finished the story, but I think we can pretty much guess the outcome. So I'll post it today in the hopes that it will interest you enough to read the rest of her entries!

Steve

What would you younger people think (and maybe some of the older ones) if I told you that we never had a "Brand-new" car?  I'll bet some of you are thinking, "Wow"!

 Well, it's true!  I started looking at some of these neighbors around here, poor as they seem to be, yet have two or more cars!  One fellow actually has three cars, a van, a truck and a motorcycle and today drove in pulling a motorboat!!  I asked him, "Hey, all these cars and a motorcycle aren't enough?'  He says, “Well, I've had this boat quite a while and had it out at a friend’s house but he wanted me to move it!" So, I asked him, "What are you going to do with it?  Put it in the backyard with your motorcycle?"  He told me he would but it wouldn't fit and besides "if" they ever build our gate back up, he could never get it in and out!  I wonder what he'll do with the motorcycle.

Anyway, Cappy bought the first car that we had just before we were married! Seemed like a good idea! That was the main reason he kept breaking our first dates! He had to borrow his brother's car!  I can't remember what brand it was but it had one seat in the front and a "rumble" seat!  Do you know what that is?  The trunk opened up from the top and a seat popped up!!!  It was a good car and we had it for a good long time!!! 

Finally though, it just absolutely conked out on us while driving to Mother and Dad's for Christmas!  We had no children yet and this trip gave us nothing but trouble for all the miles that we were able to travel in it!  We spent an hour here in a garage, and then would go a little farther and have to pull into another garage.

By six O'clock after one garage up by Livingston, Ca. stayed open for a couple of hours to get us on the road again, the car finally gave up the ghost again, not too far from Stockton, Ca. Here we sat! The car loaded with presents, and we didn't have cell phones or anything like that.  

Cappy recalled seeing a Motel back about a mile and said he would see if they had a room and at least we could call the folks and let them know what had happened!! He left me sitting in the car and I was crying my eyes out!!  I started to pray, first of all that I would be alright and then, that he could get a room! 

Before long I saw two people coming down the highway! One was Cappy and the other guy said that if we wanted to get to Stockton, he was heading that way and we could just load everything into his car and leave our car sit there till the day after Christmas when we could make some arrangements to get home and get the car back to Fowler, where we were living at the time!  We got to Sockton and he let us off at the Bus station. We called a cousin who lived in Stockton, and she and her husband came over and got us! They said we could spend the night with them and they would go up with us to Mother and Dad's! 

We didn't let the folks know anything about it after we had called them in Livingston!    

The Parable of the Persistent Widow

The Parable of the Persistent Widow

 The Gospel of Luke Chapter 18, verses 1-8

Then Jesus told them a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary. He said, “There was a judge in a certain town who neither feared God nor respected any human being. And a widow in that town used to come to him and say, ‘Render a just decision for me against my adversary.’

For a long time the judge was unwilling, but eventually he thought, ‘While it is true that I neither fear God nor respect any human being, because this widow keeps bothering me I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.’”  The Lord said, “Pay attention to what the dishonest judge says. Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night? Will he be slow to answer them?  I tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily. But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

We should all be grateful Angela was such a warrior when it came to prayers.  How many of us drag ourselves back home after work each night wanting to say prayers finding that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak as we try to get our prayers said? How many of us have fallen asleep while saying the rosary?

Angela, on the other hand, had a regular regimen. She prayed the Liturgy of the Hours every day for as long as most of us can remember. She said a minimum of 3-6 rosaries a day, and at 3 PM every day she would drop everything to recite the Divine Mercy prayers. Steve says that many discussions with Grandma revolved around one Novena or the other that she was praying on behalf of her children or grandchildren. At her age she considered it her “job”, and she rarely “called in sick”. When she had problems keeping her schedule, she worked twice as hard in the next few days to “catch up.”

When you think of Grandma's prayers, you come to realize what an example she was for all of us. Think of her prayer regimen this way: When on a commercial airliner, usually while taxiing to the runway, the flight attendants will explain the safety features of the aircraft. In case of the loss of cabin pressure, the oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling above you. You are supposed to put your own mask on first, then turn to help the others around you, especially the small children and elderly. Angie’s rosaries and novenas were not for HER sake, but for those of us who haven’t put our own masks on yet and expressed our love of God and neighbor through the prayers our Blessed Mother has asked us to pray. Grandma felt it was her duty to “breathe” for us until we learned to do it for ourselves.

And our Prayer Warrior was very busy! Let's run the numbers. Consider just the rosaries she has said. She usually said between 3 to 6 rosaries a day. Let’s be conservative and say 5. That’s 35 rosaries a week, 140 a month or 1,680 per year. Steve said this was her regimen for at least the last 10 years (probably 20, but we’re being conservative), so that’s 16,800 rosaries said on the behalf of her family in just the last 10 years! If you break that down to individual petitions—after all, a prayer is a petition for intercession—there are 53 Hail Marys, 6 Our Fathers, and 6 Glory Bes to every rosary, in addition to the Hail Holy Queen(1). That’s a total of 66 individual prayers during each rosary. Are you ready for the total number of prayers she has said on our behalf in the last 10 years? Drum roll, please…….. 1,108,800. That’s over ONE MILLION prayers, boys and girls! Not counting Masses and weddings and funerals and Liturgy of the hours. And that’s just 10 years! And no one that knew Angela thinks she has prayed this hard only in the last 10 years. If you speak to anyone who really knew her over the last 70 years or so, the testimony you will hear is how she was such a prayer warrior, and how we were all helped at one time or another by her prayers.

And when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth? 

He will if Grandma had anything to say about it! And I’m quite sure He found it in His servant Angela.