My Extraordinary Ordinary Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

hardworking, old-fashioned woman, who wore her hair pulled back and favored high-collared shirtwaist dresses. She was a homebody who rarely wanted to leave her house and garden. Pops adored her, and always called her schatzi —German for “darling.” When Pops was offered a position with the federal bank in Houston, Momsy couldn’t bear to leave Granger, so Pops turned down the job.
    Pops was a fun-loving, stylish man who always dressed in a blue suit and a white shirt and tie, with a fresh rose in his lapel every day. Despite his old-world ways, he was always smiling and laughing. Pops was only sixty-six when he died—probably from meningitis contracted from a horsefly that bit him while he was inspecting one of his cattle farms. I was only three, but I have distinct memories of him. He used to carry me piggyback down from my bedroom; when I picture those stairs, it’s from up high, looking down past Pops’s ears and the back of his head, with my arms wrapped tightly around his neck.
    Momsy lived alone in that house after Pops died, and the family would gather there every few months to visit. Whenever she had company, Momsy worked in her kitchen from sunup to sundown, making bread, biscuits, roasts, and chicken-fried steak, and turning out tray after heavenly tray of feather-light kolaches , sweet pastries filled with dollops of fruit or poppyseed paste.
    Her only “vice,” as she saw it, was a fondness for television. My dad and his brother, Sam, bought her a television set when they first came on the market. She secretly loved it, but pretended not to watch and would switch off the set if she heard someone coming. Daddy would walk into the kitchen and say, “How do like that TV, Momsy?”
    “Oh, Eddie. I don’t know, I don’t watch it much.”
    But television sets took a long time to shut down in those days, and he would grin when he saw the telltale white dot glowing in the middle of the dark green screen.
    AA and Mary Spacek raised four children: my dad, Edwin Arnold, born in 1910; his older sister, Thelma; and two younger siblings, Sam and Rose.
    Thelma was the beauty of the family. As a young woman, she looked like Vivien Leigh. She was such a knockout that a Hollywood talent agent noticed her at an Interscholastic League competition. The scout, who was recruiting Texas beauties for the movies, offered to take Thelma to Los Angeles for a screen test. Pops didn’t trust the man and wouldn’t let her go with him. She always wondered what might have happened if she had gone to Hollywood—she might have become the first film star in the family. Instead, Thelma attended college, then met and married her husband, Elmore Ruel Torn, an agricultural economist.
    By luck or fate, their handsome dark-haired son, Rip, took the trip to Hollywood that Thelma missed out on. Rip Torn turned out to be an incredibly talented actor. We were so excited to have a movie star in the family. He was particularly close to my dad, who loved him like a little brother and took him hunting and fishing when Rip’s father was away in the army. I was in awe when Rip brought his first wife, Ann Wedgeworth, to a family holiday in Granger. Ann, who looked like a red-haired Marilyn Monroe, was the most glamorous human being I had ever laid eyes on. Rip seemed so dashing as he tossed a football with my brothers out in the yard. Momsy loved to watch Rip in those classic Playhouse 90 productions. Years later Rip married the stage actress Geraldine Page. And it was with their help, more than a decade later, that I would get my first taste of the acting life during a starstruck summer in New York.
    While his sister Thelma was starting her family, my dad, the firstborn son, went off to college at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. He was a history buff, but he loved the land and the soil even more, so he studied for a degree in agriculture. Pops paid his way for the first couple of years, but by then the Great Depression was setting in and times