I was born a first child to Carson and Marie Nail October,22 1938, in Houston, Texas. My parents were originally form Mississippi and Louisiana. According to my daddy, he moved to Houston to escape cotton picking season and for an opportunity to work for the Southern Pacific Railroad. My mother who was a Louisiana school teacher with three years of college education was anxious to leave the one-room school house with its wood-burning stove, outdoor privy, and eight grade levels all in the same classroom. Ida Marie Mills married Carson Nail, packed her bags, left her family, moved to Texas and never returned to Louisiana or taught school again.
If I have any memory of those early days most likely it comes from what I've been told and what I've seen in old photographs. I know that in Houston we lived in a little house that was built by my daddy and some of his railroad buddies, and I know that we had a goat named Ally Oop. I also remember our neighbors, the Masons who lived across the street in a somewhat finer house than ours. The Masons had four daughters, Sister, Anna Marie, Deedles and Pam. The Mason family holds my earliest memories of family friendship. The two families kept in touch through the years and eventually, because of pleasant memories of each other, became neighbors again some 50 years later in Cleveland, Texas.
When I was two or three years old, Southern Pacific transferred my dad to Galveston to continue his signal work with the railroad. We lived in two different Galveston houses with the last one being located on Avenue P 1/2 not two blocks from the Gulf of Mexico sea wall. My memories are of a huge, two-story frame house with five gigantic palm trees in front lined adjacent to the sidewalk that bordered our Ave. P 1/2 block. Actually, the house was only a row house built to fit a 25 ft. city lot with most residents being renters. At three or four years of age, I thought it was a large and grand house, and we were as rich or richer than any neighbor on the block and, in fact, we were.
Galveston impressed me with its sea breezes, palm trees, wooden houses, mosquito nets, davenports, tropical decor, and easy life-style. The life-style certainly seemed easy to me: I was a kid with permission to play outside most of the day. I have vivid memories of the Gulf of Mexico and all of the fishing and commercial tourists piers along the sea wall. On special occasions, maybe only one occasion, our family dined out at the now famous Hills Restaurant. The restaurant was located on a street directly across from the sea wall. Of course, I remember it as a grand and fine place with little fish tiles built into the facade near the entrance. While on Vacation years later I found the old restaurant which had long since moved to another location. On that old original building, I found the little fish tiles under layers of dirt and grime, but my memory of that grand place with its exotic aroma has not dimmed. I can still smell it and see the white table cloths and snappy waiters and our family dining out in style.
After his work I often rode behind my dad as he peddled his bicycle to the sea wall. The salty breezes and the brightly clad people walking along the beach are forever implanted into my memory. I played in the gulf sand, attended kindergarten, made leis form Oleander blooms, ran up and down the sidewalk that bordered our block, and generally soaked up an understanding and a love for tropical life that remains to this day.
What are memories? They certainly aren't facts in which one can place any confidence. My memories are more like feelings or impressions that invade my mind on an every day basis. Why do I feel nostalgic every fall and at the same time feel exhilaration when the lights are turned on for the first football game of the season. I am happy when we go to the beach because I loved going there with my dad when I was a child in Galveston, Texas. Happy memories bring happy present day experiences. Sad memories may be conjured up from a past sad experience. It seems that those very first experiences with sound, sight, smell, and touch imprint us forever.
I am sobered by nostalgia and introspection, and I am exhilarated and excited by almost everything else. Thank you, Carson and Marie Nail, for balancing my memories which have in turn balanced my life, My memories, thanks to you two, have carried me far and I plan to ride this wave right through to eternity.
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