Jerry Flemmons

When the decision was made to sever the lines that kept the cancer-ravaged body clinging to life, and they were folded up and stored away, that young heart within the shriveled body kept a skin and bone chest rising and falling for three more days, days seemingly endless in their torture to those waiting. While family and friends sat beside the hospital bed, or draped themselves along the hall outside, or drank hot coffee in the cafeteria downstairs, the wait for that heart to stop beating and bring an end to an incredible life, became tedious. On day four, it rested, and the courageous spirit of Jerry Flemmons, the best writer most of us will ever meet, was free.

Oh what memories he left behind! Those thoughts and impressions are sure to be shared and tossed around at the wake planned in his honor later this month. Mourners at Joe T. Garcia’s on that evening will create moments for themselves from the scattered memories Jerry left behind. No funeral service for Jerry. No burial of his remains. Just a happy sprinkling of ashes across fields where bluebonnets flourish on an early Texas spring morning. Some he wanted reserved for a friend’s tomato patch, "Just so I’ll always be around".

You don’t have to have his ashes to feel the presence of Jerry Flemmons. He left us his words to read and re-read and share with friends. Words that don’t just show you the vast green forest but grab you by the hand and guide you over a carpet of dry leaves into its dark majesty. Words that cause your heart to thump with excitement and your senses to catch the odor of fresh rain in the tree tops.

The word pictures he drew for himself and for others, left us all full of smiles and understanding. Consider this picture from his essay, "Cowboys"

"In its brush country sanctuary, the Longhorn was an evil thing. It had elk legs, could outrun a horse, was bony, high at the shoulders, low at the tail, shaggy-haired, gaunt-rumped, with a goat-limber neck holding a massive head from which grew horns curved like twin scimitars."

As travel editor on the Star-Telegram staff for many years, Jerry’s word pictures took readers who never got more than a hundred miles from the home place, on exciting, wondrous trips around the world. On a trip to Palm Springs, California, he wrote: "Palm Springs hardly is your typical small town in rural America. The statistics, to be sure, are grand. Like 7,000 swimming pools, one for every five residents. And at least 152 tennis courts. Thirty-four golf courses and 200 hotels, motor inns and resorts, but no motels, the richest Indian tribe on earth, hot springs, walnut-stuffed dates, oranges by the bag, 20 canyons for hiking, 1,000-year-old palms, a million or so movie stars who come here to be alone together and, more Rolls Royces than dune buggies."

Of that lonely, far far away Tex-Mex place called, El Paso, Jerry said, "The desert is a disease, and its own antidote. Out here, in this far flat corner of Texas, it is the only physical truth, a terrible-tempered tyrant raging with dust and heat, loneliness and unremitting linear distance. Outsiders find a little desert goes a long way. For those who have chosen to live here, the desert is a kind of benevolent malady whose very presence is the substance of their existence. For them the desert is a treeless sea of tranquillity surrounding the concrete island that has become El Paso."

And Jerry Flemmons loved to eat, especially that Texan invention, the Chicken Fried Steak. In a piece titled, Texas Cuisine....."Of the world’s four great cuisines--French, Chinese, Italian, and Texas--only the last-named requires a single knife and fork. The others insist on multiple silverware and crystal goblets, linen napkins and a guy who does nothing but pour Lafite-Rothschild ‘69."

Later the writer commented, "Texas cuisine may be separated into three distinct divisions--barbecue, Mexican food, and that rare and wonderful piece of bucolic fancy, the chicken-fried steak."

My personal friendship with Jerry Flemmons was only too brief. I knew who he was of course, had read most of what he had written, looked up with pride and a lifted chin when somebody mentioned that he was a Stephenville boy. His mother and I met once in a defensive driving class. She had got a ticket while speeding through Granbury on her to way to see her son. I got mine the other side of Mineral Wells while trying out my brother’s new Lincoln. Neither of us thought we deserved to get caught. We laughed a lot and shared family stories.

Friendship with Mrs. Flemmons’ famous son came later when he was actually winding down in life although he hadn’t yet admitted that this was the case. He’d got the new heart, the one contributed by an 18 year old gymnast, and he asked if there was a pretty young thing to go along with it. That operation took a lot out of him, and there followed just ten more years of life, at times exacting in its ability to produce extreme pain.

It was during this period that time became a priority. Little measurements of life that we spend so frivolously suddenly became like monuments along the way. He went to Houston, that vast metropolises with the ability to cure the most dreaded of diseases and came back paler and thinner but bright eyed and bushy tailed.

Maybe, just maybe there was some hope. He was fighting so hard. Maybe this time all that money donated to cancer drives had paid off. Maybe there was a cure.

And then maybe not. We saw him fade slowly away and become something else, something that near the end no longer wanted to stay in this world. So with one last long labored breath, his soul floated free and slowly we got the news that a giant had died and would walk with us no more.

Thanks, Jerry for all you brought to the table and thanks for your help and good words along the way. See ya’ on down the road.