Oklahoma is OK

    Right about the time we realized we were expecting our second child, in the spring of 1986, my husband accepted a job offer in the newly created biotechnology department at Phillips 66.

     In Oklahoma!

     Literally, the very first thought that ran through my head when Hubby first mentioned a job opportunity in Oklahoma was “some night something alive is going to run over my foot as I walk through the house in the dark!” What did I know of Oklahoma? Tornadoes and tumbleweeds! The flora and fauna and culture would be all so very different from everything I knew. Unfamiliar wildlife could somehow get into the house?

     One Sunday, before our move, I looked out the window of our living room in Alden, New York. Staring at the trees and again wondering what Oklahoma was going to be like, my eyes moved to something in the grass. There was a snake - a huge snake, bigger than any I'd ever seen in the wild before! It was slow and majestic as it made serpentine progress across the yard. I gaped in amazement – it was just the sort of wildlife I had imagined I would be seeing in Oklahoma, and yet here it was – parading itself before me just as I was leaving Western New York!

     Movers arrived from Bartlesville. What a great perk for us! They had boxes and a huge truck – and they assured us as they started filling boxes that the contents of our entire house would fit into half of the truck. (They would be packing another house somewhere else into the other half of the truck before meeting us in Oklahoma to unload!)

     Sarah, who had just turned two years old, and I stayed out of the way of the movers, mostly hanging around in the living room with the television and some toys. One of the workers asked, “Ma'am? Are you taking the foam?”

     Oh my gosh! Foam did not make sense, so that meant I was not understanding her accent! I had not anticipated that Oklahoma was going to be this strange! “Pardon me?” I asked.

     “The foam. Are you taking the foam?”

     I pleaded with my brain to figure out what she was really saying!

     “Does the foam belong to you or the foam company?”

     Oh the phone!

    “Yes, the phone is ours, it can be packed, thank you!”

     I put my head in my hands, what am I going to do – not even in Oklahoma yet, and the adventure already felt like a fail.

     A young man who was with the packers and did not appear to be older than high school age, put a box together, grabbed our record albums, put them into the box, taped it, and then wrote with a marker across the top Ricords.

     I admit to being a spelling snob, and I will also admit that there have actually been occasions when I myself have spelled a word or two incorrectly. But ricords? Really? I worried that this young man was a reflection of the educational system of the entire state of Oklahoma.

     Having ricords stuck in my brain instead of giving the state, and even the young man, the benefit of the doubt would eventually cost us some big bucks.

     In July of 1986, we got into our Toyota Tercel and began the trek to Oklahoma. We were mostly on highways, and every time the iconic golden arches came into view, Sarah would proclaim from her car-seat in the back, “Mac Don alds!” Fortunately she did not pitch a fit when we did not stop at every single one!

     It was not too long after we left town, that a bad storm hit Western New York, and an actual tornado touched down damaging a restaurant in a familiar suburb! Tornado? No! Western New York only gets snow! Not hurricanes, not earthquakes, not floods, and certainly not tornadoes! We were on our way to a place nicknamed Tornado Ally – so what was up with a tornado in Cheektowaga? Nothing less than the irony, I guess.

     Bartlesville is in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, an area called Green Country. And it is green – I did not see a tumbleweed the whole time we lived there!

     As we drove into the downtown area, the sign on the bank said it was 115 degrees. Just what a pregnant lady who has spent her whole life in Western New York needed to see!

     Along another street downtown, there was a marquee to a theater saying Louise Mandrell was coming! I thought perhaps cultural/entertainment events would be more affordable in Bartlesville than in Buffalo – but that turned out to be wrong – we did not see Louise Mandrell nor did we even step foot inside the theater during our time in Oklahoma.

     This reminds me of a comment from a graduate student who was in the lab at Roswell Park when I worked there – he was from India – and one day he asked me how much tickets were for something that was going on downtown; and when I answered him, he said, “So here in America, culture is reserved for the upper class?”

     There was a marker in downtown Bartlesville, I can't remember now if it was on a pole or the side of a building, but the marker was about 18 feet up from street level. A plaque, at eye level, explained that the mark was the highest spot that the Flood of the Century had reached! Floods? We were in Tornado Ally – and now we were finding out that there are floods?

     The Caney River flows through Bartlesville. And apparently it overflows from time to time. My thought when reading the plaque was that if the area has so-called Floods of the Century, then based on the date on the plaque, we were probably due for one soon!

     Yikes! What more surprises were we going to encounter?

107 20150417 Oklahoma is OK