A Fighting Chance

This seemed deeply unfair. Did he have any idea how hard people worked when starting a business? Big businesses that fell on hard times were given lots of special protections by the bankruptcy courts so that they could restructure and keep going. Why shouldn’t little businesses have the same chance to survive?

The judge and I were seated at a table on a small stage, and we got into such an intense back-and-forth that the other panelists started inching away, leaving the two of us to jockey for a single microphone placed between us. The judge probably had a hundred pounds on me, and he started shifting himself closer to the microphone and edging me out of his way. I grabbed the table for leverage and pushed my way to the microphone, going shoulder to shoulder with the judge as I hit back with arguments about giving everyone the same chance to rebuild. As we escalated the fight, we leaned harder and harder into each other. The scene was rapidly becoming more than a little ridiculous, but for me this didn’t feel like just another theoretical debate. I felt I knew the people he was dismissing so easily. I thought they were worth fighting for.

I glanced over and noticed with satisfaction that the veins in his neck were throbbing and his face was red and sweating. I wondered briefly whether he might have a stroke right there on the small stage.

It was not a nice thought for a suburban mom who tended roses and dutifully brought chocolate-oatmeal cookies to every church bake sale.





Leaving Texas

In 1985, the University of Pennsylvania called to ask if I would be willing to interview for a job opening. The next year, independently, they called to ask Bruce if he would consider interviewing for a different job opening. It took a while for us to work it all out, but the law school needed two professors—someone to teach contract law and bankruptcy and someone to teach legal history. Two good jobs in the same city—finally!

I should have been thrilled, but I wasn’t. Penn was a great school, but Philadelphia felt like a million miles away from my brothers and all my assorted nieces, nephews, and cousins. And the prospect of moving two kids, my parents, Aunt Bee, and two dogs seemed overwhelming. But Penn was a great place for a legal historian, and they promised to support my bankruptcy research. And Bruce’s commute to St. Louis was hard on all of us. So after a lot of discussion, we decided it was time: Bruce and I took jobs at U Penn in the fall of 1987. We bought an old stone house about five miles from the U Penn campus. It hadn’t been updated in decades, but it was big and roomy.

Aunt Bee was packed and ready. She was eighty-six now, and she and Bonnie the cocker spaniel were eager to come live with us. But as we started preparing for the big move, Daddy said he and Mother had decided to stay in Austin a while longer.

Mother and Daddy came to visit us in Philadelphia soon after the move. Mother sat by herself in the living room, playing the piano and singing for hours at a time. She talked more about when she was a little girl, about growing up out on the prairie, and about when she and Daddy were first married.

My parents visited us two or three more times over the next few months. Each time, I pressed them on when they would move to Philadelphia. Finally Daddy said, “Betsy, we aren’t moving up here. We need to go back to Oklahoma.”

The kids were older now, and I didn’t need as much help as before, but I very much wanted Mother and Daddy close by. We were kin; we were part of each other’s lives. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t agree to come, and I wheedled and pleaded and even cried. But Daddy was quiet and calm and immovable. “We need to go back to Oklahoma.”

Bruce and I helped them buy a house in Oklahoma City, which Daddy promptly named “Old Blue” because of its offbeat color. It was just a few blocks from my brother David, and my brother John was a short drive away. A few weeks after they moved, David called me. “Talk to Mother,” he said. “She says she won’t get a new driver’s license.” In a place as spread out as Oklahoma City, that seemed crazy. Besides, she was only seventy-eight.

I called her, but she wouldn’t change her mind. “I’m through driving.”

I remembered Mother behind the wheel of our old Studebaker. When the car stalled at a stoplight, she would put it in neutral, set the brake, pop the hood, grab the huge screwdriver from under the front seat, jump out of the car, hold the screwdriver by the blade, and pound on some part of the engine while she shouted at me to push down on the gas pedal with my hand. She couldn’t name a single part of the engine and didn’t know why this worked, but it was what Daddy told her to do and we always made it home.

Now my mother would never drive again.