At the Lake Part 1 - The Phone Call

[note: This is an 8 part story written by my sister Esther.]

We had a good weekend. The bar-b-que was great. There was the usual crowd and the food was ever so good. Vernon loved to cook and it was so easy to enjoy cooking out doors and having all the family together. Everyone brought covered dishes to add to the potato salad, bake beans and veggie plate. And not to mention the cakes and pies! There was always enough leftovers to help with the next day’s lunch. Vernon would take those with him to enjoy when he would take time to eat his lunch on his job. And there was enough for the children to take some home too.

I remember Mom always sent Vernon home with a fresh loaf of her homemade yeast bread or if she knew of someone coming our way she would send the loaf to us with them. And of course it was good to carry home some of her goodies to eat so I would not have to cook after the drive home.

One Monday, Vernon left for work. He serviced lifting equipment for a company out of New Orleans for the Baton Rouge area. I had just hunted up the all the morning dishes and was cleaning them up when the phone rang. It was the nurse at one of the plants telling me she had sent Vernon to the hospital in an ambulance and I needed to go see him. I got there in time to see his doctor and was told it was an apparent heart attack. He did not look like he was having a problem when I saw him. He was calm and was not in any pain that I could see. But the next day when he had a second one, they confirmed he did have a heart attack.

The doctor said he would not be able to go back to work. Vernon would now have to find something else to fill his day. It was going to take some time to know what would he do with all this free time. Just the thought put his wild imagination into overload and the things he thought of were wonderful! But, no way could we afford them. Traveling seemed like a possibility. We really did have fun thinking of all the places we could go. He wanted to fish where ever there was a nice lake and I could see some of the states I had dreamed of one day seeing.