My Extraordinary Ordinary Life Read Online Free PDF

were hard all over Texas. Sam had just graduated from high school, and it was his turn to go to college. My dad was concerned that it might be a strain on his father to put two sons through college, so he came home one weekend and told his father not to send him any more money; he would work the rest of his way through school. He took a job mucking stalls in a horse barn in the mornings before class. Then, after he finished studying at night, he’d put on a tuxedo and play in a dance band. He was an ace on the four-string banjo and the baritone guitar, and that’s how he earned his way through college. After my dad graduated, he toured with his band for a while and I think he seriously considered becoming a professional musician. But his more practical nature trumped his artistic side, and he decided to pursue his career in agriculture.
    There must be an artistic gene in the Spacek family because Thelma was a talented painter, and so was their baby sister, Rose, who also acted in local theater productions. Rose loved hats and was always wonderfully dramatic. When I started acting, I would often send her hats that I’d worn in films. I used to get calls from her whenever my movies ran on television. “Sissy!” Rose would trill. “Guess what? I just saw my hat on TV!” She rarely mentioned that the hat she saw had been on my head.
    Daddy’s younger brother, Sam, graduated from Texas Tech and became a cotton farmer in Ralls, Texas, near Lubbock. He married Maurine Alexander, a beautiful porcelain-skinned redhead who must have kept busy looking for shade on the treeless plains. Sam had a grain elevator business for a while and made a good living. I remember him as a charming man and a real character. He would never let go of a car once he owned it, always thinking he was being cheated out of the trade-in price, so he kept their chassis around his property, like monuments to his good sense. He was also an amateur photographer and something of a storm chaser, for which there was plenty of opportunity on the plains of West Texas. He was known to hustle the family into the storm cellar when a tornado was approaching, then tie himself to the door and take pictures. The one time he didn’t have his camera with him he was driving around in his old pickup when a twister took him by surprise. The way he told the story, the tornado lifted up the truck, tore off the driver’s side door, then set the rig back down in a pasture with the engine still running. Sam didn’t have a scratch on him, and he proceeded on his way.
    Sam and Maurine liked to travel, and they used to load the family into their Airstream trailer and visit us back in East Texas. We loved to play with our cousins, Jan Kathryn and Sam Pat, who were about our ages. Eventually they all moved to Quitman to be near the rest of us, drawn by the powerful bonds of family that have held the Spaceks together for generations.
    After visiting my grandparents in Granger, we’d pack up the car again and head south. It might be chilly, even snowing, in East Texas when we left home. But the air grew warmer and the land greener with every mile of the journey, and by the time we reached the Rio Grande Valley, it was like being in the tropics. We could throw off our jackets and run barefoot in the winter sun (if, of course, Daddy said it was okay). It was exciting and exotic to spend Christmas on the Mexican border with our maternal grandparents, Thomas Holliday and Elizabeth Holliday Spilman, who we called Papa and Big Mama.
    Thomas Holliday Spilman, known to his friends as T. Holl, descended from a family of wealthy merchants in Ottumwa, Iowa, but his heart was in the South. His father, Thomas Percival Spilman, had been a major in the Union Army during the Civil War and was stationed in Mississippi. At the end of the fighting he bought a large plantation near the city of Canton, where he befriended Isaac Newton Holliday, a Confederate veteran. A year or so later, Major Spilman