Leap of Faith (eBook)

Launch Pad I:
The Girl with the Bright Smile

The Winepress

My Mom’s name is Rosetta Bush. Rose Bush. Her maiden name was Thornton. Thorny Rose Bush. How cool a name for her. I asked about the origin of my name, and she said she picked Anita from the first page of a baby book. How’s that for not being original? Thanks, Mom. As a child, I didn’t have a cool name, or much else. The name Anita wasn’t cool, so I got the nickname Nita.

I have had a lot of sweet moments in my life and others that would make me say “Sugar Tang ‘’ in place “F U” (I’m not a big curser).

I’m the baby of a blended family of four, and the other three are colorful in their own lanes. Their names are Yvonne, Clara, and Aaron. I call my older brother, Bush.

Since childhood, I have been everyone else’s cheerleader and not always my own. My early start was fostered from the dust of a dirt road. I start you off with insignificant things to prepare you that from my entry into life, I didn’t feel significant.

Because of crushing experiences in childhood I looked at life as though the glass was half empty. You wouldn’t know it to look at me. Back then I was a little chubby, round-cheeked girl who didn’t have much to say. But when I said something, I was bossy and in charge. That much hasn’t changed. For the most part, I seemed positive.

Behind the outward façade, something else was brewing. The Anita of my early years was darker and terrified. If God had not interrupted my life, I doubt I would be the positive force I am today. I just know I would have been different.

Like most kids, I coped with emotions using food and TV. I have always loved to talk, teach, and laugh. Those have been my outlets. I longed for something in my life—I just didn’t know what. It constantly nagged at me.

I was born to an unlikely pairing of two opposites. My Dad, William “Bill” Bush, was an old man, born in 1910. My Mom, Rosie, was born in 1929. That’s a nineteen-year age gap. Dad was high yellow from the West Indies and Mom was dark ebony from Northern Virginia. Back then, color codes would have called him cream to her coffee. Neither of them was well educated, but both were smart. What a peculiar time and space God used for the mystery of me. My surprise 1967 arrival was as remarkable as it was unpredictable. My Dad was kissing fifty-seven, in remission from lung cancer, a drinker, and an average Joe when I came.

Bill Bush was ahead of his time. He was a thinker and strategist before such terms were associated with colored men of his era. What my Dad lacked in education, privilege, and good health; he made up for in making his small life bigger.

He put energy toward his ambitions. He saw opportunities and took them. He started his own concrete patio business with only a primary education. He was a survivor and made up his rules as he went along. He and his beer-guzzling friends were laborers—that is, they were reliable for a good patio before the bottles were opened. They all had hearts of gold and doted on Bill’s baby girl, Nita. I was an old man’s princess.

I don’t know a lot about my Dad. Even the fact that he came from the West Indies I know only by word of mouth. What I reflect on now is mixed with truth and projections from my childhood memories. Mom would yell at him that he was spoiling me. I remember eating bad snacks, and that after one scream of “Daddy,” he would rescue me from every situation.

We had potato-chip-eating adventures in his old beat-up station wagon. My Dad was fun. His station wagon was always loaded down with concrete bags, buckets, shovels, levels, and junk. My Mom never allowed any of that stuff into her nicely cleaned house. The tools found themselves under our house in a dark and creepy crawl space. I hated that crawl space! If Dad was too tired, he would ask me to walk the levels and shovels under there. The place was scary, and I was afraid snakes would eat me. I dragged that stuff in and ran out fast!

In my childlike honesty, I often messed up Dad’s schemes. My mouth would possibly sabotage his pulling a fast one over on a vendor. Here is a memory of a TV return. Our new color TV blew out during a lightning storm. Dad and I went to town to take the TV back. As Dad was explaining that the TV didn’t work, he omitted an important part of the story.

I grabbed his trousers. “Daddy, tell ’em ’bout the lightning.”

He pushed me off and kept talking.

“Daddy, don’t forget about the lightning!”

He brushed me off for the final time. The guy didn’t know what I was going on about. As the story ended, we walked out of the store with a new color TV. Turns out the lightning was not significant after all.

My Dad was a man of charm, cunning, and great charisma. He was half bald and stood 6’1” with a bright smile. For the most part, he wore sweat-stained T-shirts, spackle-spotted khaki pants, and his beaming smile for everyone he met. Working hard was his swagger. When he and my Mom shined up, they looked like movie stars. He built our home with his own hands before big machines and gadgets. Any excess lumber or supplies from his construction jobs found their way into our home. Taking care of his family was his life. To this day I wish I grew up in the age of having a camera to take pictures clearer than my foggy memories. His videos would have been priceless. My kids could have seen their grandaddy in action.

The fun times were few, the suffering vast. I saw from childhood to eleven years old hospitals, sick people, and incomprehensible things. Life’s opening round for Anita Bush was a sucker punch to the gut. Words like cancer weren’t spoken back then. Practices like hospice for poor black people were not available back then. From late 1978 to January 1979, my Dad lay in bed, dying by himself, with me, a latchkey kid, coming home to play his nursemaid. I recall the many days I walked into the kitchen and yelled, “Dad, Dad, Dad!” hoping to hear him respond.

I didn’t know a lot, but by sixth grade, I felt he could die soon, and I’d be the one to find him. I would round the corner of the hall to look into the dark room. I would see him lying there motionless. The covers and his chest hardly moved. Finally he’d flinch, and I would know he wasn’t dead. I could breathe again.

I would then warm up a can of pea soup. That was the only thing he could keep down. Oftentimes, he ate nothing all day. He barely existed. I lived those terror-filled moments every day for weeks.

Before he got so sick, I could get him to eat a little, help him to the bedside toilet, and run and get him a cigarette. I wanted to do something, anything to help him. I would watch as the unnamed sickness destroyed him. There were too many gross things to speak about. The sickness destroyed his body, his swagger and did many abnormal things.

I witnessed my giant of a father shrivel to pint size. In the end, you subconsciously wish for the suffering to stop. You don’t wish for your Dad to die, but you want his torture to end. As a child, you don’t know there is no ending the torture without ending him. No torture, no Dad.

Decades after his death, my kids asked me what I admired about my Dad. I found the question off-putting and disorienting. I never reached back to the winepress of those hidden memories. The child who was terrified to turn the door handle for fear of finding a dead body left those thoughts far behind. The woman Anita left a lot of my childhood behind. I’d reflect on big wheels, playing, and the fun of my childhood, but not on Dad. When I escape a horror, I don’t take drive-bys even with my memories.

My Dad gave me life, my smile, and my love for possibilities. When people react to my smile, I think of my Dad. The irony is he and my Mom wore dentures. They both lost all their teeth early in life. I remember that cautionary tale and brush my teeth all the time. God has let me keep a mouthful.

Unlikely Pairing

Growing up without a Dad in much of my life has had an impact. There are vulnerabilities I didn’t know to watch out for. I know of them now because I fell into traps back then. I had moments and gaps that having a man in my life would have helped me navigate. I leaped into situations that on the surface looked safe but were deadly.

With both my parents there were fractures. Their love and attraction was a mystery. They were opposites. Even though I didn’t experience their relationship of marriage for long, as a child I could see their differences. I saw my Mom, a risk-adverse woman maneuvering and fighting. She married my Dad, a fearless and sometimes reckless risk-taker. He unsettled her.

My Dad loved track races. His ill-fated bad checks would race his money to the bank every week. Dad hoped his deposits were faster than the bank’s check processing. When the bank was faster, my Mom would pitch a fit. She had lungs over money, especially mismanagement of it.

The biggest fights my parents had were over those damn checks dribbling all over town. That’s the only time I heard her lose it. I had no idea at the time how basketball and checks had any connection.

My Mom did not like to play games...