December 7, 2004

• When I was in the third grade my dad worked for HEW, Health, Education, and Welfare, the government, in management.  My mom had her degree in teaching but stayed home with my sister and I.  It was the seventies in Denver.  They had up and coming politico friends, artist friends, and my mom used to do things like grind her own flour to bake bread.  We had a garden.  We lived in a three story brick colonial with a carriage house and a picket fence on half an acre within sight of the museum of natural history.

  
  

  I’m sure it looked fantastic on the outside.  And it was mostly fantastic, sort of.  My parents had gotten a great deal on the house because the doctor who lived there a long time before had come home and shot his wife in the face right in the entryway.  I remember looking at the heights of their kids on the wall of the landing of the stairs to the basement.  It just was what it was.  I thought there were vampires in the attic.  one weird thing, though, the family room was in the basement.  It had a wooden floor and I’ve never been one for shoes so I was CONSTANTLY getting sewing needles stuck in my foot.  My mom cleaned and cleaned down there, but any time I was barefoot in that room I’d get a needle stuck in my foot.  Yay, sewing needle ghost.  That’s not even interesting.  I held out more hope for the vampires in the attic off the third floor, but that never manifested.

  
  

  My dad was fairly routinely cheating on my mom.  Secretarys or whoever.  Mom and dad would fight.  I got in trouble a lot.  A lot.  I guess I did.  I got spanked nearly every day by my dad.  You were lucky if mom spanked you; it didn’t hurt and she was the one who ended up crying.  My sister never got spanked.  She was too little.  Funny, I don’t remember ever being little enough not to be spanked.  But dad was scary.  Once he broke a yardstick on my bare butt.  And you weren’t supposed to cry; you could get spanked for crying.  “I’ll give you something to cry about.”

  
  

  I assumed everyone lived like that.  And, well, I think a lot of people did, just not all of them.

  
  

  Things are never all bad, you know?  I had lots of friends.  I was in brownies and played soccer and tennis.  I took art lessons.  Next door lived OraJean and Fuller.  They were retired when I met them.  I would go over there after school.  During my first grade year I pretended I was a cat and I would meow at their back door after school and OraJean would let me in the milk door!  She even got me a kitten which I kept at her house, Squeeky.  She’d give me snacks and I stayed there often until dinner.  She taught me origami, needlepoint, all kinds of things.  She used to be a teacher in China when she was young.  She was a graduate of Radcliffe.  We had so much fun.

  
  

  One Christmas OraJean didn’t get a Christmas tree.  Fuller wasn’t doing well and she said it just wasn’t neccessary to go get one.  I talked to my mom and one evening when they were out we put up a tree in their house, all decorated and everything.  Mom and my sister and I spent lots and lots of time over there after that.

  
  

  Twenty years later when I was having a crisis, a single mom underground (a stalker thing), I got a call from mom.  Even though OraJean had died a few years earlier (we’d been to visit her in the nursing home, and had her out for apple blossom) her will had just cleared.  She left me money.  It turned out she was a General Mills heiress.  Kind, kind OraJean, her generosity once again uplifted my circumstances.

  
  

  So it’s understandable that I was devastated when my parents told me we were moving to North Dakota.

  
  

  more later…

  
  

   

  • 3:55 pm
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