My sister was a wild child!!!! and a daughter of Jesus when she died.

Jenny asked a question about Bonnie, so I'm gonna take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about things you might not know. Bonnie was quite mature for her age. She started sneaking out of the house at a very young age and would meet boys that she had met at church and school. My dad would beat the shit out of her when and if he ever found out about it. He definitely did not approve of a 13 year old having a boyfriend. So, at age 14...Bonnie decided she didn't want any more beatings and so she ran off and got married.

The way I heard the story is that she took a small suitcase full of clothes and hid it in the church. Her plan was to sneak out of the house that night and go marry Bill Blankenship. I have a photo f that church. Mlou told me this story last time we were in Alabama and I took a photo of the church. Bonnie was such a rebel and dad was so strict...it was a match made in hell. I don't think Bonnie wanted to get married so much as she just wanted her freedom. Once she was married I guess my folks thought she would settle down. However, not long after she married is when we moved to Charleston and Bonnie was just as close to mama as we all were and she wanted to be close to her. She learned very quickly that daddy was not gonna let her go back to her wild ways. I told this story in the last blog.

My oldest sister was Louise. She was born 18 years before I was. My mother wasn't married and got pregnant in high school. Can you imagine the stigma of an unwed mother in 1924??

But she had that baby and Louise was about 2 or 3 years old when mom and dad got married.

My grandfather (Nanny's dad) The one we call Papa Stidger (he is the one in the photo that looks like Jeff)....Well, he was very attached to Louise when mama got married and didn't want mama to take Louise with her. Mama told me that daddy didn't treat Louise well and had no patience with her (as he was with all of us)...But Papa Stidger wanted her to stay with him and mama let her. Louise was 12 years old when she came to live with mama and daddy and the reason she did was because Papa Stidger died. I think mama always regretted not taking Louise with her because their relationship was always strained. Louise was jealous of the other kids and never really felt as "loved" as the rest of us did. Her birth father never acknowledged her...even though they were in the same town. However, his parents always gave money to Papa Stidger to raise Louise...but they never wanted to see her.

That is another sad story. Louise's birth father's name was Short Thomas. The Thomas' were a wealthy family compared to us. Mama said she was at a dance and she and Short went out behind the church and made a pallet on the riverbank and Louise was conceived. Once he found out she was pregnant, his parents sent him off to Texas to finish school. They had no intention of letting him have anything to do with the baby. I remember when Short Thomas died. Of course I never knew him, but I remember I was 13 years old when mama told me the story of Louise. I never knew she wasn't my full sister until then. Short had just died and mama cried.

Mama was so ashamed of having a baby out of wedlock...I don't know if she would ever have told me about Louise if I hadn't found Louise's high school diploma and it said LOUISE STIDGER...How could she be a Stidger, when I was a Lawrence. I asked mama about it and she told me the whole story.

There are worse things than dying!!!

When I was a young girl I feared death. Now that I am older and wiser, I know that dying isn't gonna be so bad. There are far worse things than dying. I cannot imagine the pain of losing a child. I pray I never know that pain.

I've lost some loved ones along the way. In fact, I've lost a lot of loved ones...my mom, my sisters, my brother and my dad. I have one sister left and she is 9 years older than me. I was (of course) closest to my mom and her death hurt the most of all. When I was younger I used to really fear the day when my mom would die. she was 38 when I was born and back in those days, that was an old mother. Nowadays, they are having babies at age 50 and older. But I always felt like I had an older mother, so I thought about losing her and it would scare me to death. It scared me so much that I had nightmares about her dying long before she actually did. I would wake up in the middle of the night after a dream of her dying and I would be so relieved when I realized it was a dream. After she died I would have the same dream and when I would wake up, sometimes it would take a minute or two for me to realize if she was really dead or not. She died 26 years ago and today I found an old audio tape that I had made of me and her just talking. It was so sweet to hear her voice and it brought back so many fond memories. I was very lucky to have such a wonderful mother. I cannot say the same about my dad!!!

Jeff and Jenny have both asked me to blog more. To tell them more about my past and relatives that they barely knew. I remember wanting my mom to tell me stories about her life before I came along. They were always interesting stories. I have passed many of those stories on to Jeff and Jenny and they want to hear them over and over.

I was born in Alabama and when I was 2 years old, my dad got out of the Army. Before enlisting he had been a share cropper. We were poor and he wanted a better life for us. They had just opened up the shipyard in Charleston, SC and he learned that they were training men to be machinists and other jobs, so he went to Charleston and was there for a year learning his trade. He lived in a boarding house there and my mom used to tell me about riding the bus from Alabama to Charleston to visit him before we finally moved there when I was 3 years old.

At that time, my sister, Mary Lou was 12, my brother Jack was 9 and my sister Bonnie was about 15. My oldest sister, Louise was around 21 and she was married and stayed in Alabama with her husband. Bonnie had been married about a year. Can you believe that...married at age 14!! So, when we moved away, she moved with us. Now, I'm telling this story the way I remember my mother telling it to me. I don't actually have any recollection of this. What she told me was that Bonnie moved with us and she was quite a "wild child" and wanted her freedom but my dad was very strict and didn't allow her to date or anything like that. So, she contacted he husband back in Alabama and told him that if he would come to Charleston, they could live together again. He was 25 when they married and she was 14. So, he moved to Charleston. As the story goes, she really didn't want to live with him so much as she wanted to get out of the house where daddy was so strict. Once she got moved out and settled in an apartment, and got a job...she told her husband to hit the road. His name was Bill Blankenship and he drove a taxi and that is all I know about him. Bonnie got a job at the cigar factory there in Charleston and worked there for years and then she became a long distance telephone operator and she worked that job for many many years. It was while she was working at the cigar factory that she met Jimmy Lambracas. He came from a very strict Greek family and although he and Bonnie remained sweethearts for many, many years he would never marry her because she was not Greek!! Jimmy owned a bar and Bonnie used to take me there a lot when I was a kid and I always loved going there because Jimmy would give me a coke and a candy bar every time I would go. At this time, Bonnie was renting a room downtown with a lady by the name of Miss Streeter. I remember spending the night with Bonnie at Miss Streeter's and I wet the bed. It seemed like a real catastrophe back then when it happened. One day when I was at Bonnies place it was a very windy day and we were walking down the street and we found a little baby kitten...it was all by itself and so I took it home with me and we named it Wendy!!! I don't remember anything else about that kitty.