July 2024
I want to tell you about the worst two years of my life. Well, I guess - for accuracy - I should say the worst so far, as I'm still young, and who knows what's still to come? However, that seems like tempting fate, so let's just assume that nothing too horrible lies ahead.
My name is Daniel Whitelaw, only son of Norman and Marsha (Brown) Whitelaw. I have a sister, Marybeth, who is a couple years younger than me. We are both lifelong residents of Chowchilla, California - population about 5,000 throughout our school years - one of the hundreds of very similar small farming communities in the northern San Joaquin Valley. Neither of our parents were Chowchilla-born, but they were both products of the same general geographic area.
You may be wondering how Chowchilla got its name. A story that all of us school kids knew was that the town was named after a strange local animal, the product of breeding between chow dogs and those furry little rodents, chinchillas. Depending on who told the story, these creatures were either cute and cuddly, or (the kid favorite) they were savage and known to rip the hearts out of unwary nighttime travelers. Neither was true, of course - at least, I don't think so. I guess the real answer is that it's what the early White settlers thought the local Indians called themselves. I've seen that name spelled out more or less how the resident Yokut Indians would have said it. It doesn't look anything like Chowchilla to me, but that's the story.
Chowchilla isn't the kind of place that anybody would go, on purpose. The land is flat as a pancake. You can expect (and seldom be disappointed) that the temperature every day between June and September will be at least 90 degrees, and there won't be any rain. What precipitation you get (only about 12 inches a year) will fall between October and April. Winters won't be really cold, but they'll often be really pea-soup foggy for days at a time. Still, it's a great area for growing things - especially luscious black Mission figs, which is what my family does. Besides, it's all I knew for the first 18 years of my life - where all my early memories originate - so it feels like "home" to me.
***
In June 1984, I was 18 years old, and just graduating from high school. With Senior prom, graduation ceremonies, yearbook signings, and general "Senioritis" affecting us all with various forms of craziness, it had been an exhausting couple of weeks - hilarious, but exhausting. On the day that my story begins, I had escaped from all that, to be by myself for a little while. I found a quiet spot on the far side of the city park, leaned back against a comfortable tree, and closed my eyes. I think I really went to sleep, because it took quite a while for me to understand that somebody was pulling on my shoulder. The "somebody" was Jimmy Freed, a good-natured little kid about 8 years old, and a favorite of mine.
I captured him in a gentle head lock, gave him a Dutch rub on the top of his head, turned him loose, reached in my pocket and brought out a package of Dentyne gum. I knew he liked the zingy cinnamon flavor of it. So did I.
He settled down beside me, and we chewed our gum in silence for a few moments. "Jimmy, I noticed as I was giving you the Dutch rub, that you have updock in your hair."
He gave me a funny look. "What's updock?"
"Not much, Jimmy. What's up with you?"
He punched me in the shoulder - I think he had fallen for that one, before - but then turned a little serious, I thought. "Got a problem, Jimmy?"
"I asked Melissa to marry me."
Well, that was a surprise, considering he was 8 years old, and Melissa was my age. Still, I knew how much little kids hate to be treated like little kids by people older than them, so I didn't say any of the obvious things that came to mind. I asked him how that had come about, and how she had responded.
"She's so pretty, and she's always so nice to everybody, I wanted to ask her before anybody else did. She said no, but she told me she just wasn't thinking about marriage yet. She said she really likes me a lot, and was honored that I would want to marry her."
"That was a nice way to handle it, don't you think?"
"Yeah. Then, she told me that I should take my time, and get to know a lot of different girls. She said that there were probably many of them that I would like, and that would like me, but if I just waited, I'd probably eventually find my real soul mate."
"Soul mate?" That wasn't a term I was familiar with. "What did she mean by that, do you think?"
I didn't really expect an 8-year old to answer that, but apparently he had taken in everything that she'd said.
"She thinks that everybody has one special person somewhere. They don't always find that person - their real soul mate. If they don't, there are still lots of people who can be almost as good. It's just that the soul mate is even more special. I asked her if she had a soul mate and she said she thought she did."
Jimmy seemed to be finished with the discussion. He begged another piece of Dentyne cinnamon gum from me, punched me in the shoulder, and ran off, leaving me sitting alone by my tree. I realized I was feeling like somebody had hit me really hard in the stomach - not just kid-lightly on the shoulder - and knocked all the air out of me. Kay had a soul mate! I didn't know how I felt about that, but it wasn't a good feeling.
***
Kay - well, Melissa Kay Whittier - has been my best friend pretty much my whole life. I guess we didn't really know each other until kindergarten, but we'd been born in the Chowchilla hospital just a couple days apart. Our parents weren't really friends, but they knew each other, like people do in small towns, and lived not too far apart. Kay's parents owned a furniture store in town, and Mr. Whittier was well-known in political and administrative circles. I think he had served as mayor of Chowchilla for a couple of terms while Kay and I were quite small, then later he was a town councilman, a member of the school board, et cetera, et cetera. My folks did a lot of business in town, pertaining to our fig orchards, and also were quite active in civic affairs.
Beginning with playing together in kindergarten, progressing to studying together, and then walking home from school together, Kay and I became pretty much inseparable. The fact that elementary school always organized things alphabetically - and both our last names began with "w" - meant that we often ended up in the same classes, on the same teams, in the same work groups, et cetera. I don't think it was necessary for us - we just automatically gravitated to one another - but it helped make regular contact inevitable. We were in and out of each other's homes so frequently that, if we didn't know our own addresses and what our own parents looked like, we might have gotten confused about who belonged with who.
I don't mean to suggest that we were carbon copies of one another. We definitely were not. We both had strong personalities, and often liked (or hated) books, movies, music, food, pets and people that the other hated (or liked). Still, on the important things in life - "the big issues" - we were like the proverbial two peas in a pod.
Well, realizing all this, and then finding out that Kay had a "soul mate," shook me up more than I had first thought. I wouldn't have considered she had room to be closer to anybody than she was to me. Part of the problem was that I really didn't understand what a "soul mate" was. In the context with which Kay discussed it with Jimmy, it seemed to imply romance and marriage were involved. We had never talked about such things. The closest thing we'd ever had to a "date" was going together to our Senior prom. I have to admit that seeing her in her beautiful prom gown, and me with her in my first-ever tuxedo, was an experience that I wouldn't mind repeating a few more times. But I also had to admit that, if that's what being a "soul mate" was all about, I had been badly negligent in not arranging for more of those kinds of incidents.
From what Jimmy had said, it seemed like "soul mates" were rare enough - or, at least, hard enough to find - that it would be criminal to deter her from being with hers, now that she'd found him. I was pretty sure that I cared enough about her that I would give up some of my happiness in exchange for hers. I knew we could still be friends, but I suspected it couldn't be the kind of no-holds-barred friendship that we had, then. Besides, I wasn't sure I could stand to see her being as close to somebody else as she had been to me. I doubted I could stay around.
I made a rather precipitous decision without consulting Kay or my parents. I enlisted in the Army. Well, "precipitous" isn't the right word, as it implies I didn't think about what I was doing before I did it. I didn't think very long, true, but it seemed to me joining up would be a two-year commitment that I couldn't back out of. No matter how my thoughts about Kay changed, I had to pretty much stay out of her life for two years. Also, I didn't have any specific plans about what I was going to do after graduation, so this solved that issue, gave me a place to live (the barracks), and a pay check. I had no interest in being in the Army, but there were no active wars at the time - and no obvious ones on the horizon - so it looked pretty likely that I could do my time without having to kill anybody, or have anybody try to kill me. It seemed like a good answer to letting Kay work out her new relationship without any confusions from me.
I stayed away from Chowchilla and home for most of the first year, had no communication with Kay, and very little with my parents. When I finally came home on leave, Mom and Dad and Marybeth were obviously glad to see me. We were catching up on their lives and mine, but it wasn't long before Kay came into the conversation.
"You just missed Kay," Mom said. "She just went back to San Diego."
I asked the first questions that popped into my mind. "Is she married, then? Are they living there, now?"
All three of them had mystified looks on their faces. "Married?" my mother asked. "Why in the world would you think that? Her aunt Jennifer - you know Jenny - has been having some medical problems, and she needed somebody to stay with her for a while. Kay volunteered."
I felt confused and puzzled - but also somewhat elated. I don't know what that was about. Anyway, I managed to divert the conversation away from Kay, and soon escaped the house to be by myself for a while. We managed to get through the rest of my visit without any deep conversations about Kay and me. My mother did voice her concern that we didn't seem to be as close as we had been all our lives, and made a tentative inquiry into if I'd "found somebody new." I made a quick decision and didn't say yes or no, hoping maybe a red herring would help keep us out of any real discussions about Kay and me. I really didn't want to talk to my mother about it.
I returned to duty without talking to Kay, and settled back into barracks life. However, rather than getting Kay out of my mind, I found my thoughts more and more dredging up memories of our times together. One thing came vividly to mind that I hadn't thought about in years - the Chowchilla kidnapping.
If you were listening to the news in the summer of 1976, you heard about this. I don't mean just in Chowchilla - it was worldwide news, at least for a few days, before something else took its place on the news wires. To jog your memory - or tell you about it, if you never heard the story before - two dozen kids were on a school bus, returning from a swimming party at the Madera County fairgrounds. The kids were from kindergarten age to around 15. Most of them were girls, but there were six or seven boys. The only adult was the bus driver. (This puzzled me in later years, but nobody seemed to think it was odd that - with kids as young as five years old - there were no parents on the bus with them. It probably wouldn't have made any difference with what happened, but it's just something I wondered about.)
Well, what I haven't yet said - and the point of bringing up the story, now - is that Kay and I were on that bus. We were 10 years old. There were a few kids older than us - mostly boys - but most were younger. I'm going to tell the story like we knew what was happening at the time. Of course, we didn't. We were there, but we got most of the details later from our parents and from the news.
Anyway, we were coming back into town on one of the back roads, and found it was blocked by some trucks. Three men with guns took charge of the bus, drove it to an isolated ravine where they hid it deep in the brush, and moved us to two vans. They drove us around for a long time - the news reports said 11 hours - finally taking us to an abandoned dump or quarry 100 miles from Chowchilla. They had obviously planned all this ahead of time because there was a big closed-in truck partially buried, that they had either found ahead of time, or had put there on purpose. Well, they transferred us all to the truck, sealed us in, and started to pull more dirt down on top of us. So, there we were - two dozen kids buried alive, with hardly room to move around, no light, very little food or water (the news said we had "snacks." I don't remember anything - maybe potato chips or something, but definitely not real food and not enough to feed two dozen kids for very long.) There also were no toilet facilities, so things got pretty awful pretty fast with all those little kids, and all of us scared to death.
We found out later that this was supposed to have been a kidnapping for ransom, but it seemed pretty clear afterward that - whether or not a ransom was paid - we were not intended to be rescued. It's very lucky for us that a couple of the older boys decided to try and escape. Our bus driver was a nice man, but he was as scared as we were, and didn't offer any help. The boys managed to get a hole cleared in the top of our container. They had to get something like a manhole cover moved, which was very heavy and also was weighted down by the dirt that had been dumped over us. After they finally opened a hole, the boys had to claw their way up through the deposited dirt until they were completely free. I don't remember how they got word to the authorities - we were in a very remote location - but somehow they did, and eventually we were all freed from our planned tomb, and on our way back to Chowchilla - very tired, very scared, very hungry and thirsty, and very smelly! - but without any serious physical injuries.
The three kidnappers were easily identified - two of them were the sons of a prominent local doctor! - and were eventually sentenced to life in prison. That harsh a sentence was given because they used guns, and because it was pretty clear that they intended "bodily harm" to us. A judge later threw out the original ruling, because no deaths or physical injury had occurred, and all three were eventually freed. This decision has always bothered me because there was no question that the men intended for us to all die horrible deaths, and only the actions of some of our fellow students had saved us. Besides that, there may not have been any physical damage done, but emotional problems plagued some of the kidnapped for their entire lives. I think there may have been at least one suicide attributed to the after-effects of our imprisonment. No harm done?
What I was especially thinking about was how Kay and I had reacted to all of it. We were definitely as scared as anybody else - we were 10 years old! - but we seemed to just kind of meld together, lessening our fears and giving us some self-confidence. We couldn't do much in the circumstances, but we did what we could to calm the little kids. We held them, and talked to them, and sang to them. We got them to sing some songs together - not much consolation, but maybe it helped. At least, Kay and I felt that we weren't just victims, who had no choices.
Following the incident, neither of us had any real trauma. We both had a nightmare or two, but they ended quickly, and the main thing we remember is how strong we felt being together. I think that was really significant.
***
About the same time I was remembering things like how Kay and I reacted to the kidnapping, I got what amounted to a really angry letter from my mother. The gist of it was that she didn't know what had happened between Kay and me, but Kay was a mess, and I "damn well" (!) better get with her and straighten this all out. In very un-dad-like fashion, my dad had penned a short note of his own. He made it clear that I had the right to decide my future for myself, and he wouldn't tell me what to do about anything, but (1) adults resolved problems, (2) there was clearly some problem between Kay and me, (3) I had to know that she was one in a million - maybe in several million! and (4) I better be dead sure that I wanted to give up on everything we had together without some serious thought and quick action.
I took both messages to heart, especially because I had been having some similar serious discussions with myself. I had decided that I probably had done the right thing in getting out of the way of Kay and her "soul mate," but that I had taken it too far. I cared too much about what we had -well, I loved her too much to just let things end. It seemed like she was having some trouble with her new relationship, and if she needed my help, I felt I was ready to give whatever she needed - even if I wasn't her first choice!
The first chance I had to take leave I went to Chowchilla, and showed up at her doorstep. I admit she didn't seem particularly glad to see me, but she did agree to go for a walk, and "talk things out." We ended up in the city park, not far from where this had all begun for me.
We hadn't said much to each other on the walk, and when we sat down on the grass, she waited for me to start the conversation. I jumped right in.
"Kay, obviously something has gone wrong between you and your 'soul mate.'"
"You're telling me," she replied.
"I don't know what's happened..."
"Neither do I."
"But I'd like to help, if I can."
"That would be nice."
Well, obviously, she wasn't going to make this easy, but I forged ahead. I told her that I'd found out about her new friend and, knowing how important it was to find and keep a "soul mate," I stepped aside to free her from unnecessary complications from the past. I still felt I had done the right thing, but - as I'd told myself when I was discussing it with myself - I'd taken it too far. "I don't want to lose all the good we've had, and I love you too much to just let it slip away. If I can't be everything to you, I'll gladly be whatever you need me to be."
I thought she'd listened pretty carefully, but she seemed confused about something. "You say you found out about my 'soul mate.' How?"
"From Jimmy."
Now, she looked even more confused. "Jimmy? Who is Jimmy?"
"Jimmy Freed. You know Jimmy."
"We're talking about 10-year old Jimmy Freed telling you I had a 'soul mate'?"
"I think he would have been about 8 at the time but, yes, that's who I mean. It came up when we were talking about him asking you to marry him."
Kay smiled at that. "Yes, that was very sweet of him."
"He said that you told him to take his time, not just pick anybody to marry, but try to find his true 'soul mate.' He said you told him that you had found yours."
The look on her face had changed from confusion to speculation. "Let me take a stab at summarizing what you've said, just to be sure I understand it all. Jimmy told you I had a 'soul mate.' Thinking you knew how important that was to me, you joined the Army and left town for two years so I would be free to build my new relationship. Lately, you've begun to think that things are not going well for me, and you think you should make yourself available, again. You care so much about preserving what we've had that - even though you can't be first prize for me - you're willing to just be second prize. Have I got that straight?"
I thought she phased it a little flippantly, and I came off sounding pretty egotistical, but she did say the right words. I told her so.
"Okay, good. Now, thinking back to the couple of years before graduation, I seem to remember that we were seldom out of each other's sight, except for a few hours when we were asleep in our own homes. Considering that, did you ever wonder how I could have met somebody special, and why I wouldn't have told you about him?"
"Sure, I guess I've wondered when and where you met him. As far as you not telling me, I guess you just wanted to wait until you were sure."
"Okay, despite the improbability - maybe impossibility - of my hiding someone so completely, and considering what a good, close relationship we had in the previous 13 years or so, did it ever cross your mind that, when I talked to Jimmy about my soul mate, I might have been referring to you?"
It hadn't, and I said so.
"Why? Does it seem so impossible?"
"Well, in the context I was considering, soul mate seems to refer to a situation in which romance and marriage would figure. Ours has never been about those things."
That stopped her for a moment. "Okay, soul-matery can certainly include romance and marriage, and for many, those are hopeful developments. Did you ever consider that maybe we hadn't quite got to that point yet? I mean, we were 18 and not exactly looked on as the frontrunners in advancing high school boy-girl affairs. Perhaps you wrote off the possibilities a little too soon?"
No, I had not consider those possibilities. Was it possible that this was all a crazy misunderstanding? She was obviously waiting for some response from me, but I couldn't quite get any words to come out of my mouth.
"I think I heard you say - I don't think I misunderstood - well, did you use the term 'love?' The word spelled L-O-V-E? If you did - if I heard you right - did you mean it in the usual sense that you are extremely fond of me? And if that's what you meant, isn't that a logical preliminary to thinking about romance and marriage?"
My brain was whirring, but my mouth wasn't saying anything.
"Let me put this into a statement, and then you can say you agree or disagree. Okay, here goes. You, Daniel Whitelaw, completely misunderstood what you heard from an 8-year old boy. You very chivalrously thought you should step aside to let my new relationship grow. Then, you very stupidly wasted two years of time when we could have been adding to what was already a wonderful life together. Then, even before you realized your basic mistake, you realized how much you love me, how much you value our friendship, and how much you want things to be back how they were two years ago. Does that come close to summarizing?"
My mouth finally was able to form the word "yes."
"Okay, then I have one suggestion. Neither one of us should ever use the term 'soul mate,' again. Agreed?"
I did.
***
As I've read over what I've written, I suspect that, almost from the start, almost all of you understood what I had misunderstood about what was (actually, wasn't) going on. You're probably wondering why it took me so long to catch on. My only excuse is that I was 18, and nowhere near as smart as I thought I was.
I'm happy to report that Kay and I are now very definitely back on track, and even thought we don't utter that one particular phrase, we are really the ultimate examples of those. We have added romance and marriage to what had already contained quite a list of delectable elements, and all's right with our world.
***
"Things get complicated when you get past eighteen."
The Statler Brothers
To the Writing It Down Homepage
Why don’t you leave a comment?