Making of a Writer by Nixon Joan Lowery

Author:Nixon, Joan Lowery [Nixon, Joan Lowery]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307820464
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2013-09-24T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Dora was Nanny’s fifth cousin and lived with her husband, Ed, in nearby Huntington Park. Overly round and rouged, Dora was pleasant and friendly with an ever-ready smile and a halo of short, permanently waved gray curls. Best of all, Dora had a talent none of the rest of us had. Dora could communicate with the dead.

Ed, on the other hand, was a gruff, meat-and-potatoes, no-nonsense person, muscular and sun-weathered as dark as my second-best brown oxfords.

Dora and Ed eagerly accepted every invitation to our family’s big Sunday dinners because Nanny was a truly great cook.

Each Sunday afternoon’s feast began with a Jell-O fruit salad and relish dishes full of sliced celery, carrots, and olives. These were followed by a large roast of beef with browned potatoes and gravy, string beans, fresh corn cut from the cob, sliced tomatoes, and sometimes creamed pearl onions, a favorite of my father’s. There were always fresh yeast rolls, set to rise that morning after eight o’clock Mass, and at least three of Nanny’s special fruit pies—peach, cherry, apple, or strawberry-rhubarb, depending on the season. We always had Sunday visitors, and Nanny enjoyed that. Her talent lay in cooking, and she loved an appreciative audience, invariably urging them to “have a second piece of pie.”

Dora always ate with a healthy appetite, so it was hard for me to believe that she had been quite ill a few years before—so ill that her doctors didn’t know how to help her.

However, as Nanny had told me, a friend brought a spiritualist to pray over Dora, and she was cured. Dora was so fascinated with the man’s religion, which was called “spiritualism,” that she studied it and became a spiritualist herself.

Any type of fortune-telling, psychic reading, or public visitation with the dead, unless it was in conjunction with a church service, was against the law at that time in California. So Dora opened her own church in Huntington Park; she became a spiritualist minister, and her church thrived. She loved to go into trances and believed that a messenger from the next world inhabited her body and could speak through her.

Ed obviously loved Dora, but he had little patience for her so-called dealings with spirits. He enjoyed repeating his story about an incident during a severe earthquake that took place in Los Angeles on March 10, 1933.

According to Ed, Dora had spent the two previous Sundays preaching about the next world and how she looked forward to entering it. “I’m not afraid of death,” she had told her congregation. “I welcome death.”

But at 5:54 P.M., when the first and strongest jolt hit, Dora raced out of her house and dropped to her knees in the middle of the street. Raising her arms to the heavens, she shouted, “I didn’t mean it, God! I didn’t mean it!”

When Dora and Ed visited us after her church service on Sundays, Dora was often on a roll. That meant we might have a few extra guests no one but Dora could see.

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