Bits & Pieces

By Sue Haubenstein

Bits & Pieces is an unforgettable collection of brief moments in a lifetime presenting events of humor, happiness, and sadness with great poignancy. Whether it be about an animal, a motor home, a family, or a husband, it will enable the reader to recognize, relive, and enjoy similar occasions in their past experiences, producing a laugh or a tear and for them to endear their memories forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499057898

Sue Haubenstein

Sue was born in a southwestern Virginia town. It was a coal-mining town on a road extending from the county road in to the colliery at the foot of the mountain. At twelve years of age, her family moved to Athens, Tennessee, and subsequently to Chattanooga, where she later attended the University of Tennessee. She then married and had two daughters. She lost her husband to cancer when her daughters were sixteen and seventeen years old. She then obtained an education in nursing and subsequently moved to Lakeland, Florida, to attend to her aging mother. She now resides with her second husband in Richmond, Virginia.

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Copyright © 2014 by Sue Haubenstein.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014914240

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4990-5788-1

                Softcover        978-1-4990-5790-4

                eBook             978-1-4990-5789-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/29/2014

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CONTENTS

STORIES ABOUT THE HOMETOWN

When Wiley Came Home

Back To The Past

The House On The Hill

Thank God for the Potato Patch

Fine Dining At Ruby’s

Fire!

Stories About Women

A Woman’s Dilemma

M’ Lady’s Footwear

Bad Hair Day

A Few Inches More

Reflection

STORIES ABOUT HUSBAND NO. 2

Yankee Man/Southern Woman

Farewell Family

Reunion

Menu From Hell

Big Daddy Goes To The Wedding

TV Horror Show

Tax Time

Old Karate Man

Karate Kid

Garage Sale Maniacs

Letter to Dear Joe

I Love You….. But

STORIES OF TOURS

Grand Prix To Hanna

China Trip

STORIES ABOUT FAMILY

I Saw A Man Today…..

The Perfect Tree

Fifty

Fate

Chaos In The Chapel

ASSORTED THOUGHTS

Thoughts About a Tube of Toothpaste

Supermarket Characters

The Brown Thumb

Past, Present And Future

Nicknames

Moving

Dust Bunnies

SHORT STORIES

Second Time Around

The Beast

EAST WING 4

STORIES ABOUT ANIMALS

Suave Dog

Jonathan Livingston Dog

Charlie

STORIES ABOUT A MOTORHOME

This Is My Country

The Elkhorn Mountains

Bryce Canyon

Goodbye Ole Friend

STORIES ABOUT THE HOMETOWN

WHEN WILEY CAME HOME

M y hometown was not a picture-book village nestled in the green mountains of Virgina. It was a dirty little mining town with a main street that was so narrow that two cars could not pass at the same time.

My deeply spiritual uncle was the postmaster and, much to his chagrin, the post office was next to the local bar.

Life seldom changed there. However, the war years of the 1940’s were marked with daily trips to the post office by folks hoping there would be one of those odd, heavily-censored letters from a loved on.

I was 12 when my grandparents got the dreaded message that their red-haired, freckle-faced 18-year-old son, Wiley, would not return. My grandfather was a large man, and his sobs were terrible to hear. My grandmother went to their room and refused to come out.

News travels fast in a small town, and visitors came by to offer their sympathies. Some well-meaning person spoke about bringing the body back, and my grandfather grabbed onto the idea as if it were a crutch, saying, My boy is coming home. He then went out to the front porch and spoke to no one.

I don’t remember a great deal about Wiley, my mother’s youngest brother, other than that he had a wild, curly head of hair. He was slight in build, not too tall, and got sunburned easily.

Like so many boys his age in a mining town where there was little to occupy them, he was constantly in trouble. He joined the Army when he was 17, with a little lie or so. The draft would have gotten him very soon, so my grandfather kept quietly thinking, The Army will straighten him out.

Arrangements were made through my uncle, the postmaster, for the papers to be filled out to bring Wiley home. The news came that Wiley would come home in May, and that brought a fresh round of grief for family members. That February was cold and snowy, and spring seemed far away. There was much discussion about the funeral. As far as anyone knew, Wiley was the first soldier to be returned to the town.

Word finally came that the body would arrive May 16, and the funeral would be May 17. The day of the service, the small white church was filled with friends, acquaintances, and probably curious people as well. The choir sang a mournful hymn.

When the service was over and the casket was loaded into the hearse, the procession started down the street and through the town. It had been a dreary, cloudy day, and everyone dreaded the trip throught the drab, bleak little town. The high school band had assembled a small group, and there were two flag bearers.

Suddenly, the sun broke through the clouds and the wind sprang up, making the flags snap in response. The band played softly, and the melodies of My Country Tis of Thee and America the Beautiful were heard. The main street of the little town was filled on both sides with people red-eyed and weeping. The men had their hats or hands over their hearts. Old men -- veterans of another war -- saluted, and the two policeman of the town joined in. The bar was closed, and the town hound dog didn’t even bark. All you could hear was the band music as the procession slowly made its way through town.

You realized the people were paying homage to every service-man killed during battle.

For that one moment, the town shone brightly.

On a trip back home some fifty years later, we went to the cemetary where the various family members were buried. Next to my grandfather’s grave was a little plot with a military marker bearing the name of Wiley Andrews.

Someone told my grandfather that Wiley had died after telling a buddy, I’m going home to see my dad. He sleeps peacefully next to his dad.

BACK TO THE PAST

T here is a tiny town in Southwest Virginia where the coal mines are booming and the money flows freely. The store cash registers are ringing with sales of clothes, drygoods hardware, appliances, seed, and feed. The beer joints, as they are called by the Christians of the town, are truly busy as the long-necked brown bottle is lifted in joyous pleasure. The miners have survived the week in the dark bowels of the earth where dust and rotten timber are life-threatening. There is always the threat that if the warning siren blows in town, (the sign of a mine accident), yours might be the next name on the commissary bulletin b oard.

The town sheriff watches, knowing the need for the men to let go and relax from their daily fears. He is aware that a few of them will spend the night in his small, two-room jail in back of the main street. If things get too rowdy, he takes a long, slow stroll through the saloon and the noise level falls quite a bit. Sheriff Fritts has a reputation for having a short fuse if his presence is not acknowledged.

The local movie has a double-feature western and a continuing Flash Gordon serial. The marquee advertises Tuesday night Dish Night where some lucky housewife wins a set of dishes while watching a world she will never enter. I don’t think there was ever any better popcorn made than in that machine sitting in the small lobby. I don’t think the machine was cleaned too often, but the taste was the best. Maybe that’s what made it so good!

Andy Leedy had a small hole-in-the wall café that turned out fantastic hot dogs. (No one had ever heard of fats and cholesterol.) Andy was his own best advertisement for good food. He was huge in size with a girth that would overwhelm you. His pants were a direct import from Omar the Tentmaker, of that I am sure. His competitor, Bill Rogers, had his own little café a block or so up the street. His chili would burn a hole in your mouth, and give you a bigger problem the next morning! No big fancy restaurants here, just common food, and everybody knew the cooks.

There were two drugstores, one bank, three clothing stores, and a hardware store. There was a ten-room hotel with a real potted palm in the lobby. There were also a barber shop, and two beauty shops. In one of the latter, I remember watching my mother get hooked up to a machine that looked a lot like a milking machine on a dairy farm. The smell of the burning hair made me think of a pile of leaves burning in the autumn. They called it a beauty shop. As a child, I thought it was more like a shop from Hell. What an odor! And the curls looked like something that sits on my sink today. They call it a Brillo pad.

We had our local churches where the preachers told us of eternal damnation if we disobeyed the ‘Good Book’. I’ll never forget my fear of God’s wrath when once I slipped away from school and got caught in the crime. I don’t know which was worse, that fear of God, or the wrath of Principal Ball (a friend of my father’s) that made me sit out in the hall for a long time while waiting for his judgment day. I’m sure he called my father, and together they made me sweat while I meditated on my sin, sitting alone on that long, cold bench outside Mr. Ball’s office. You can bet I never skipped school again. I can remember as a child, in those days after the truant incident, feeling so self righteous when I walked up the street with my head turned away from the pool hall, saloon, and dens of iniquity. I never felt I had the right to cast the first stone again.

Religion is very important in a small town, and the greatest social activity is centered on the church throughout the week. I’ll never forget our little Methodist church. It was painted white with a big metal bell summoning worshippers on Sunday morns. The bell was very loud, and if you slept late, the tones would send guilty shivers down your spine.

There were two ushers, one of which parked his partially-smoked cigar on one of the vestibule window sills, and to this day, I’m sure there is a faint odor. No one complained because he was Mr. Hagy, the local bank president. The man was always dressed in a suit and tie, so he was much admired in the community because he never got dirty! When one lives in a mining town, this is quite an accomplishment. Mr. Hagy had the only tennis court in town, and my father played there often. I always wanted to slip in to watch Mr. Hagy play. I just knew he played in a shirt and tie and never dared to sweat.

Our church was not new and was rather small. We didn’t have nice pews with the usual velvet or soft fabric covering. Our pews were long and were made of bare wood, with uncovered slats which sometimes would pinch when a bored child wiggled too much through a long, hot, Sunday morning sermon. My aunt played the piano and my uncle played the violin at the Sunday night services. The hymns were simple but were performed with great vigor. My uncle had a cerebral hemorrhage a few years later, and the congregation teared up as he struggled to keep up with the piano on his first time back after his illness. My aunt slowed the tempo, but he gave it up shortly thereafter.

There were two exciting times for a child in a small church -- Vacation Bible School, and Christmas. Vacation Bible School took place after the regular school year was over. Imagine how it felt to go to school just because you wanted to, and they served Kool-Aid too!! Christmas time was almost too much to wait for. The decorations were up, Christmas music was being played, and the Nativity scene was portrayed on