Different drummers play the family beat
Headed home from California, high on life and low on cash, when the Honda that crossed the Mohave played out David Norman left it behind an abandoned farmhouse somewhere in West Texas and hitch hiked home to Mt. Vernon.
“Lots of Dad’s stories from those years end with him coasting home,” said his daughter, Lauren Lewis.
Her high school car had character, personality laced with mechanical issues, no fuel gauge and no odometer. Timing trips to the gas pumps turned to an art. It broke down often enough that she kept a tow chain in the back floorboard, depending on friends knowing to watch for her on the side of the road. Otherwise, it was the Volkswagen Carmangia of her dreams.
Life presents opportunities in which style is more critical than function. Coasting in on fumes is just another way to get home. She put her faith in her father’s driveway shade-tree repairs.
Like father, like daughter, the trip began the day she was born, triggering a time of too perfect contentment.
“He held her. They wouldn’t move for hours,” said Debbie Norman. Her love-struck husband was also jobless. “If I hadn’t insisted that he go find a job we’d have starved,” she said.
Getting a job was never a problem. He’s a carpenter who can install carpet. His mechanical background began with a job at a dealership, washing cars. He worked on Mississippi River tugboats.
Debbie was a 15-year-old sophomore in the Mt. Vernon high school band the day he walked up behind the bleachers where she sat and said something charming enough to cement the deal. He was 20.
“He’s the only boyfriend I ever had,” she said.
This story’s about love: romantic love, love of old cars, music, art, marriage and family. In critical moments, its passion invites introspection.
“Camp Norman,” they’ve named the home eight blocks west of the downtown plaza, the focal point of the tale. (Little known trivia: Mrs. Norman’s mother, Teny Tom, donated money for construction of the gazebo on the town plaza in memory of her husband Dr. Calivin Tom.)
A work in progress for 47 years now, Camp Norman hosts regular family holiday games – backgammon and table tennis tournaments, cooking competitions, grown up hide and seek. It’s been home to multiple exchange students, a refuge for relatives periodically moving in, an anchor facility for stray animals reprogrammed as members of the cast.
The Norman family influence shapes lives with careers secondary to . . . other things.
Younger daughter Audrey, an artist, was the first to come home. She teaches at the high school she graduated. Last summer, hers was the first one-woman show at the town’s new Art Alliance Gallery and Frame Shop, four blocks toward town from Camp Norman.
Jason Lewis was a ladder-climbing success story in GM’s Austin office. His bride, Lauren Norman Lewis was growing melancholy as the highways channeling them home thickened with Austin-bound traffic crawling in from Memorial Day Weekend adventures. They’d had a ball in Mt. Vernon.
The son of a photographer, Mr. Lewis had gone all out shooting for a Camp Norman Holiday documentary. He likes film.
“For leisure reading, he studies Cinema,” Lauren said. Generally recognized as the Bible about film, Cinema is the classic New York publishing firm’s definitive piece on the art of the industry. She said he’s read everything written by Siskel and Ebert.
While filming and photographing the Memorial Day games in Mt. Vernon, Jason and Lauren scripted in scenes for their pet project, “Shelly, The World’s Youngest Chicken.” It’s a collaborative effort, useful for getting Jason to want to get up and go.
“All I needed to do was say, “let’s take Shelly,” she said, and he’d be up and ready to move, thinking of the universe as his set, calculating ways to shoot to fit the proposed location. Shelly had become semi famous as a regular in the crowd at Austin music events. She’d made an Alamo appearance.
She had tried heroically but ultimately failed in the Camp Norman Memorial Day Vegan division cooking competition.
On stage, there’s only so much a royal costumed egg on custom-built throne can do.
Leaving Camp Norman, windshield hours discussing a possible story of origin for Shelly, the most innovative egg on Facebook, had dissolved to the comfortable silence of people not needing words to hear the soft edges of each others thoughts that day on the road back to Austin.
“It’s so far away,” she said. It was home, Mt. Vernon, that she felt growing distant and he understood.
So a short while later she went to Mt. Vernon and found a house she liked.
“Too ostentatious,” he said, studying her pictures of a home on a shady Mt. Vernon street a pleasant bicycle ride away from Camp Norman.
He is understated.
When not in business mode, he is reserved, quiet. The potential new home she’d found was in the right place, but too much.
Lauren is effervescent.
She radiates charm you can see for yourself on the emerging YouTube Series, “Fort Lewis,” their first-aired adventures in moving pictures. Like an emotional extension, a different connection, his cameras love her.
In 2005, after wrapping up studies at Northeast Texas Community College, Lauren went to Texas Tech where she successfully developed shoals of friends, a free spirit network funneling her into working life in Austin. She sold vacuums door to door for a time. She worked at Threadgills, an Armadillo World Headquarters-styled barroom dance hall and cultural center before 6th Street went counter-culture chic upscale.
Bright, conversational and adept with telephones, she upgraded employment to the Austin GM complex customer complaint line. Proving to be a counselor walking GM buyers with ease through understanding of things like early GPS satellite on-board options, she was promoted to corporate trainer for incoming telephone operators, then promoted again.
Jason landed in her 30-day ramp up for new hires coming aboard as dealer liaisons.
She held him in genteel disdain.
“He wore a suit and tie on casual Fridays,” she explained.
He passed her class but gave management a scathing review of her classroom style.
“It made no sense,” she said. “Everyone loved me.”
His first promotion required him signing on again as her student.
Coincidentally, like her father, Jason is a non conformist, as evidenced by the employment record prior to General Motors.
After studying Hospitality and Tourism at the University of Wisconsin he managed a bar. He worked in restaurants. In Montana he’d been a camp counselor for young, wealthy incoming Frenchmen coming in for a summer learning English while horseback riding in the mountains. They enjoyed exotic field trips into the American West.
Yellowstone was fun, but then he’d landed a dream job. When his Austin sister had her first child, he packed up and came to Texas. He worked as a nanny. For four years, Uncle Jason was Adalae’s companion and driver, exploring museums, hunting music, reading aloud.
An avocational gambler, he took off one evening a week for a back-room card game. Life was wonderful.
In retrospect, it wasn’t the effervescent vixen corporate trainer that had so irritated him – it was outgrowing his nanny slot, trading after-hours, backroom card games for corporate.
“I really didn’t want to go,” he said. “It took some time to adjust.”
It was when he signed up for the second class that the story took rapid and dramatic turns in reports back to Camp Norman.
“One week she called talking about the guy she hated showing up in her class again,” her mother said. “The next week she called planning to marry him.”
So she did.
They gambled on her dream of teaching, establishing a one-room school where she leaned heavily on art and dance, good ways to connect with children filtering life through Downs Syndrome. She loved and she taught in a one-room school.
Wonderful as it was, after the end of a holiday return to Austin, life remained too far away from Camp Norman.
She had no ready response when Jason declared the potential new home she’d found too ostentatious.
“Okay,” she said, a year later. “We don’t have to have our own house.” So they quit their jobs and moved in with her sister, Audrey the Mt. Vernon High art teacher.
He found an administrative slot with a local manufacturer. She went to work with a lake-shore resort, first booking guests, then managing the operation.
When the Ostertag family arrived and began restoration of town square landmarks, she signed on with Shannon Ostertag re-purposing the downtown hardware store of her youth to a new M.L. Edwards, a venue, a boutique, a place with a wine list, a curated gift shop with designer coffees. They make room for musicians.
One day Lauren found a way to slip into the too ostentatious house. Time had passed and the price had fallen to half. From the inside looking out, Jason’s view of it changed. They painted, moved in, hung their artwork.
Moonlighting lovers, Lauren and Jason work evenings planning and scripting new episodes of their Fort Lewis with Laura Lewis soft launch on YouTube. He’s bought new equipment, booms and lights, rolling camera dollies allowing seamlessly flow of moving shots.
His study of film helps with editing. Episodes to date revolve around her vegan kitchen, the gardens nestled into the lawn. The style is instructional; they’re discussing a more narrative turn, easy story lines opening portals into their understanding of the best ways to live.
Cutting back 50 years to the Genesis account, rather than starving while admiring the new baby, David Norman took a job as a surveyor in the Titus County coal mines. Debbie went to work as nurse. They retired in 2004, when their younger child launched.
However it is, whatever’s guided life rising from Camp Norman, here’s something: When younger daughter Audrey took a militant turn into her first venture with a no sugar diet, as Debbie was flirting with their earliest vegetarian dishes while Lauren was adamant about the preservation of Steak Night, she cooked three meals every day because that was what was needed to assure that every evening the family gathered for a meal, time to talk, time to listen, long years of days ending with time to discuss everything.
