NOT THAT EASY

Feb 1, 2020

NOT THAT EASY

In the spring after I turned ten, Bev and Gus sold the duplex on Raymond to Davona and Lou, a young couple with a baby named Thayer. I wanted to post a sketch I did of Thayer above—the last portrait I would draw for a number of years—but haven’t been able to find it yet. In any case, Davona and Lou evicted us in short order, and we had to move across the Park. They claimed they were planning to renovate, but I seem to remember some altercation that my dad had with Lou.

In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:

 My mom hated the rambling Doswell house, with its big, drafty rooms and old-fashioned kitchen and bathrooms. She’d wanted something cozy and modern. The previous tenant, a batty old lady named Mrs. Zon, had upped and disappeared several years before, leaving all her worldly possessions behind.   She hadn’t met with foul play, our new neighbors, the Balcomes, reassured us; she’d called them more than once to ask after her adult daughter, but she wouldn’t tell them where she was.

When we went to look at the house, it was crammed with dark, stodgy furniture and dusty draperies. My dad promised my mom to have the house painted, and Mrs. Zon’s belongings were carted up to the attic (where I went poking around, my imagination getting the better of me when I discovered knives among the linens). In the small room at the front of the attic, I also found a huge pile of books that had been dumped there. Sifting through them, I came across one on animal intelligence, a subject that still fascinates me, as well as a book with illustrations called Jungle Babies. I was thrilled to read the chapter on okapis, because they’d only been recently “discovered” in the African rain forest, though, of course, the native people had always known of their existence.

Besides the attic and basement, the house had five bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a separate breakfast nook in the kitchen, which my father didn’t let Doug and me leave each night until we’d eaten our vegetables. I’d distract my brother, then dump my peas on his plate and excuse myself. One night my father came home and roared, “What stinks in here?” He followed his nose to the stove, behind which he found a mess of rotten vegetables. What a dope! I thought uncharitably about my brother. He could have flushed them down the toilet (a bathroom was just off the breakfast nook), and no one would have ever known.

The dirty, cobwebby basement had two large rooms and three small ones, so I was nonplussed when one day my dad ordered Doug and me to go down and clean it all up. As I went down the stairs I thought to myself, “Grownups are always telling you how great you have it as a kid, but the truth is it isn’t easy at all.” And I charged myself to remember that moment when I was an adult so I would never say the same thing to my own children.

To me the old house had a spooky kind of romance. That summer before sixth grade, I started a club with my girlfriends, meeting in the dark little room under the staircase. We hauled a tiny table down from the attic and lighted the place with a small lamp and an extension cord. I think we had, at most, three meetings.

Then late one afternoon I came home and heard my mother in the kitchen telling my father she wanted a divorce—this at a time and place that divorce was almost unheard of. My parents had never fought in front of Doug and me, so her announcement came as a complete shock. She followed me upstairs to my bedroom, where I lay on my bed, sobbing—and promised me that despite the divorce “nothing would change.”

CHEATER, CHEATER, PUMPKIN EATER

CHEATER, CHEATER, PUMPKIN EATER

Jan 25, 2020

CHEATER, CHEATER, PUMPKIN EATER

The other day I watched the movie Wonder, with Julia Roberts. In one scene the main character, based on August Pullman, decided during a math test in fifth grade to show his answers to a classmate to help him out. And what struck me was the movie’s indulgent attitude about this cheating—it made me feel good that they didn’t make a big deal out of it.

One morning when I was in fifth grade—while a couple of my classmates in front of me were furtively trading answers on a standardized reading test—I did something that would be life-changing: Worried that they were going to score much higher on the test than I was, I tried to peek over at a classmate’s answers.

Before fifth grade I’d always felt happy and confident in school. I’d had teachers I liked and who’d liked me—and maybe that was a mitigating influence that allowed me to feel smart and successful despite my father’s daunting expectations. But in fifth grade I had a teacher, Mrs. Koehler, who didn’t like me, though I never knew why. Soon I began noticing differences in my classmates’ abilities—Ronny and Carol were best at math and Margie was best at spelling. Up until then I’d been able to keep up with all the kids in the gifted group in my class, but now, for the first time, I began to worry about measuring up.

This was also the year that I started becoming obsessive and began to painstakingly write my homework in an elaborate cursive with fancy “descenders”—and if I made more than one mistake that I had to cross out, I would crumple up the page and start over.

It was the year I developed “eveningmares” and had to have a nightlight to sleep. I’d seen a movie called The Revenge of Frankenstein, and every evening after dark I became terrified of seeing the monster in a window, coming for me.

When I remember these details now, it almost seems to me that I was sensing an impending doom, and that this was a child’s way of externalizing her fear—for death was impending, though it was a psychic rather than a physical one. Because what was happening behind the scenes in my parents’ lives would, over the course of the next three years, spell emotional disaster for all of us. And, as Maurice Sendak said in one of his lectures, “Children know everything.”

When my teacher’s voice rang out, “Cathy, why do you feel the need to cheat?” I felt abjectly humiliated. What I couldn’t have known was how fateful this transgression of mine would prove to be.

CONTEMPT

CONTEMPT

Jan 18, 2020

CONTEMPT

 

EARLY BIRD

(some ear words – er sound)

 

Have you heard of the snirl who yearned to learn

At a time when there wasn’t a college?

It set out in earnest to search the earth

For a book that contained all knowledge.

It ate every book it came across,

But none answered all of its questions,

Not even the question that bothered it most—

How do you treat indigestion?

I wrote this rhyme for my The Adventure’s of Jix story collection—and it only occurs to me now that perhaps I chose to treat the pursuit of knowledge with such levity because, in my own life, it was fraught with anxiety.

There was a moment, sometime in my elementary school years, when I realized that my father wasn’t a nice man. We were in a restaurant; I no longer remember where or what was said—just that my father treated the inexperienced waitress with scorn. I saw, in their interaction, a man who looked down on the rest of the world with disdain. And it wasn’t only other people’s ignorance he was contemptuous of, I began to see, but he was critical of what he deemed their weaknesses and failings, having no sense whatever of his own faults and limitations. He didn’t seem to suffer from the insecurities that bedevil many of the rest of us, as I’ve said, and was completely indifferent to what other people thought of him.

What I learned from my father from infancy on was that intellect and knowledge were the measure of a man—or woman. Period. Other qualities didn’t seem to factor into his assessment of people at all. He was also impressed by the trappings of intellect, like degrees, awards, prizes, and relevant numbers such as I.Q.

It wasn’t until I was thirty and living with two graphic artists that it became real to me for the first time that there were other criteria I might measure myself by. They were so creative—to me, such stimulating company—that I finally understood that my creativity had value too. But that was many years in the future, and, growing up, I used the criteria I was handed. Of course, I knew it was important to be a good person as well, but that didn’t make me interesting or my opinions worthy of respect. Consequently, through all my years of schooling, even after the move to California, I would channel all my energies into achieving academically—in order never to sink beneath my father’s contempt.

Perhaps I should also mention here that though I thought of my mother as the nicer of my parents, there were a few things she said and did during these years that foreshadowed what was to come. One: I loved to sing, but whenever I did, she would effuse about her sister Dory’s beautiful voice, making me feel like mine didn’t compare. Another: She told me that children couldn’t love—that they were too self-centered. So throughout my elementary-school years, I wanted to grow up as fast as I could so I would be able to love. I felt that as long as I couldn’t, I was only a fraction of a person, and I longed to be an adult so I could feel whole.

VIGILANCE

VIGILANCE

Jan 11, 2020

VIGILANCE

For the first three years we lived on Raymond, Doug and I shared a small bedroom. Before bed, my mom would set my hair in pin curls with bobby pins; then my dad would tell us a bedtime story about the hair-raising adventures of two kids. And though neither of my parents was particularly demonstrative, we always got a goodnight kiss. Unfortunately, my dad’s tall tales often involved giants, which gave Doug nightmares—and sometimes a bobby pin would get clipped to my ear when I rolled over in my sleep, so my ear would be painfully sore the next morning.

I have one curious memory I associate with this yellow-flowered bedroom. One evening at bedtime it occurred to me to wonder why I always slept on my back. Then I remembered: in my preschool years, when I’d sleep on my stomach, I had a recurring nightmare about a boogeyman who would creep up on me in my bed at night and seize me from behind—and tickle me, which was frightening both because it was so sudden and unexpected and because I sensed his malevolence. I’d started sleeping on my back in an attitude of vigilance—and the nightmares had stopped. But I wasn’t afraid anymore, I told myself, and from then on I slept any which way.

Eventually my parents decided it was time for Doug and me to have our own rooms. He was consigned to the narrow back porch, which had a bank of windows on three sides and no radiator. It was freezing cold in winter—a situation that always troubled me. Then my parents stripped off the old wallpaper in what was to be my room, and Mom set about turning it into the dream bedroom she’d never had as a child. She bought a polished-cotton bedspread with pink and purple pansies and a vanity with a skirt that matched the bedspread—with arms that opened out so you could reach the drawers underneath. It had a mirror top, as well as a triptycal standing mirror that you could adjust to see yourself from various angles. On the one window she hung gauzy pink ruffled curtains, and she bought a light gray rug to go with the newly painted cool gray walls.

I’ve never liked pink and purple together, however, and I’ve always remembered this room as depressingly cold in aspect, now that it was no longer warmed by yellow roses. I was too young to wear make-up, so instead I used the tryptical mirror to draw self-portraits when I was sick. I also recall how cold the mirror top felt when I rested my arms or elbows on it. But maybe some of this sense of chill had to do with being alone in the room now—or even with guilt about my brother’s frigid bedroom.

In any case, this was the beginning of my drawing portraits, first of myself, then of friends and family too. The self-portrait above I sketched when I was ten.

BUB

BUB

Jan 4, 2020

BUB

In my Bluebird autograph book I also came across an entry from Kathy (above), as well as one from my third-grade teacher, Miss Brown:

 “Cathy—I’m really going to miss you. It’s been a real pleasure having you in my class. Maybe one day I’ll pick up a book, author Cathy Raab. How about it?”

Kathy was my bosom buddy throughout elementary school. Her last name was Hartwick, but she was dubbed Kathy Heart-pickle-bottom by the neighborhood kids. She was pretty, with brown hair and dainty, even teeth. She was the middle child of five and lived a block away from our Raymond Avenue apartment in a white colonial-style house with green shutters. Her father was a dentist, her mother a handsome, capable woman who wore no make-up and kept a spotless house. On the few occasions I had dinner with them, I quaked, worrying I might be asked to say grace, when I didn’t know how.

I kept a diary in grade school in which, despite my resolution, I only managed to write about once a year. At eight I chronicled a day I spent with Kathy:

“In the morning we made little books with faces in them. There was a slit along the middle of the pages. You could leave the bottom part from the middle on down on the first face and the top part from the middle on up on the last face. So the faces got all mixed up. After we had done that, she asked me if I could go to her house to eat. I asked Mommy and she said yes. So we got on our overclothes.

“Off we went. When we got to her house, lunch was not quite ready. When it was, we ate and ate. Boy, that food was good. After lunch, I asked Kathy if she could come to the Farm Campus movie. Her mother said yes, but Kathy had to help wash the dishes first. The movie didn’t start for a half an hour so I walked back to my house. A little while later, I heard a knock on the door. I ran to open it–it was Kathy. Then I looked at the clock. It was time to go. The movie was very good. Then Kathy went home. What a happy day that was!”

(I’m not sure how my teacher, Miss Brown, ever imagined I was going to become a writer.)

I also remember the day we both learned to play chopsticks on the piano in her basement and the time Kathy took me up to her attic to see a bird nest on the window ledge with four baby birds in it, their yellow mouths agape.

Though we weren’t in the same class in school until sixth grade, Kathy and I took modern dance together and were Bluebirds, then Campfire Girls, in the same troop, as I mentioned in my blog “Schism.” Saturdays we went to the movies at the auditorium on the Farm Campus—the audience was all kids…no adult could have stood the uproar—where we saw Bambi and Old Yeller and Annie, Get Your Gun. Kathy had a Ginny doll and I had a Muffy, whose clothes were interchangeable. I didn’t like playing with dolls particularly, but I loved their organdy ballet outfits, white fur coats and hats, and lacy bridal gowns.

From time to time Kathy broke dates with me, which invariably hurt my feelings, but I adored her anyway. She was everything I wanted to be and thought I wasn’t—graceful, pretty, sweet-natured. I’m sure I was also drawn to what I saw as her family’s “normalcy.” They were Republicans, church-going, her mother a stay-at-home mom, while my parents were Democrats, my father an outspoken atheist, and my mother a career woman at a time when most women were homemakers. I worried about what I regarded as my faults—like bossiness—but I thought if I did my best to model myself after Kathy, maybe, just maybe, I would turn out all right.

HEADSTONE

Dec 31, 2019

HEADSTONE

Today, New Year’s Eve day, is the second anniversary of my mother’s death. Last spring I drove again to the distant cemetery that she’d chosen as her final resting place.

In my journal I wrote:

Today I went to visit my mom’s grave at the Sacramento Valley Veterans’ Cemetery near Dixon. At her burial, I could only stand and watch from the road as a machine lowered her coffin into the ground on a dirt slope that hadn’t yet been covered with sod. It was a dismal, darkly overcast day with rain predicted, and the terrain seemed utterly flat and monotonous, with its uniform ranks of identical white headstones stretching in every direction. It struck me at the time as a desolate place, and I wished that my mom hadn’t been so pragmatic and had chosen, instead, to be buried with her family at the cemetery in Concord.

Then yesterday I got word that her marble headstone was finally in place. And this time the weatherman on the news had forecast sunshine.

Though it’s the middle of May, the hills were still partially green—lovely! I thought—in the miles before I reached my destination. When I got out of the car and walked away from the parking lot, I noticed a gully not far off, where I heard red-winged blackbirds calling and I smelled a flowery fragrance—jasmine?—in the air. From the other side of the administration building, I could hear the splash of a fountain and see a row of hills—or mountains—along the valley perimeter. And my impression of the place was completely different than the first time.

For her funeral I’d ordered a “deluxe” bouquet from the local florist in the colors my mom loved—dark and light amethyst roses, chrysanthemums, and daisies, among other blooms. So I’d been dismayed by what I saw in the staging area behind her coffin—a scraggly bunch of flora with white lilies. I’d deliberately avoided lilies because of their overpowering scent. Today I found hedge clippers attached to a trash receptacle and trimmed the ends of my two lush amethyst bouquets, fitting them into a green plastic cone with a prong at the bottom to secure it in the ground.

And what I experienced as I stood contemplating my mom’s headstone, among a welling of complex feelings, was a sense of release—because, I realized, I was finally free to speak my whole truth.

SPEAKING OF CHRISTMAS

SPEAKING OF CHRISTMAS

Dec 13, 2019

SPEAKING OF CHRISTMAS

There were only two bedrooms in the Raymond apartment, so Doug and I shared the one with peeling yellow-flowered wallpaper. Under the narrow window was our terrarium with all the lizards we’d caught and, in time, a hog-nosed viper and a giant millipede. Besides the “sand” lizards and “mountain boomers,” as my dad called collared lizards, we eventually had blue-bellies, a skink, a chuckwalla, and a horned toad (which isn’t a toad at all). For a while we even had a couple of baby horned toads that were only slightly bigger than poker chips. On one occasion we took them out of the terrarium and discovered that if you patted their heads, they would close their eyes, but if you pinched their tails, they’d go skittering across the floor.

Despite the close quarters of our Raymond apartment, Mom found space for her Singer sewing machine in the little hallway leading to the kitchen. One of her first efforts was an orange corduroy bedspread for my parents’ bed. Sunlight through the matching curtains she made turned their bedroom—which was also my dad’s study—into a fiery orange inferno during the day, an effect I don’t think she’d anticipated.

In the evenings after Doug and I went to bed, she would make me dresses, since in those days that’s what girls wore to school rather than jeans or leggings, even in cold weather. In winter we wore ski pants—under our skirts—that we had to take off at our lockers. Despite our attempts to do this modestly, some boy was liable chant, “I see London; I see France; I see so-and-so’s underpants.”

Mom also made clothes for my 12-inch doll and several costumes for me—first, a yellow tutu I loved. I have a photo of me in clashing red skating socks attempting a balletic sideways leg extension. Unfortunately, my pigeon-toed left foot is turned in, hanging perpendicular to the floor. For Halloween one year, she made me a harem costume in cocoa-colored satin, but after the boys at school teased me with the aforementioned chant, I refused to ever wear it again. She never held it against me, though, and went on to make me a colonial gown for the 4th of July that I did wear and never complained that olive green was my least favorite color.

As for the newly finished dress I wore to Wolfy’s birthday party—and ripped—I don’t recall her getting mad at me or even scolding me.

And speaking of scolding, my dad didn’t scold either; instead he meted out swift and decisive punishments. My brother he spanked with a belt; me, he gave cold showers.

I talked back to my dad just once that I can remember. I don’t know what set me off, but I complained that he and Mom didn’t do anything for Doug and me. The next thing I remember is having to wash my own clothes on an old-fashioned washboard in our old claw-foot bathtub.

As for Doug, he often recounts how he handled a gun of my dad’s carelessly one time, inadvertently pointing it in Dad’s direction. My father grabbed the pistol out of his hand and hit him in the head with the butt end of it.

Curiously, my parents never made Doug and me do regular chores. Come to think of it, I have no idea who did the dishes after dinner—whether my father did them before Mom got home from work or she did them later in the evening. As for the other housework, we had a cleaning woman come each week—Mrs. Fales, who took me to her place once to see her daughter’s fabulous dollhouse, everything handmade out of wood.

Other memories of life in the Raymond house:

  • One day Dad got a ladder and climbed into the attic. What he brought down was a small rock collection with geodes and large polished slabs of agate—to me, as miraculous a find as buried treasure.
  • For one of his birthdays, Doug and I bought Dad a ceramic kangaroo, which he kept on his desk; you could hang your keys on its tail and put your spare change in its pouch. Now I’m also remembering a small iron paperweight—a brontosaurus-—that we probably gave him too. (In his top desk drawer, he always stored candy to keep him from smoking, sweets Doug and I never dared touch.)
  • During one of those years I drew a large picture of a black octopus and colorful fish that my parents hung over the desk in the living room. (One of my favorite artistic activities was to make a crayon drawing of underwater creatures, then wash blue or black watercolor paint over it to create the background.)
  • Recognizing my artistic ability, my parents bought me a blackboard easel, where I did a chalk drawing of an ocean liner and a locomotive from a drawing book. They also got me a box of sixty-four crayons with a crayon sharpener at the back (we didn’t have markers back then), and after serious deliberation I decided that my favorite colors were turquoise, lime green, and magenta. (Some things never change.) I had a coloring book of nursery rhyme characters that I loved because I thought their faces were so cute—I’m still obsessed with faces—and I always was careful to color within the lines. Whenever my parents bought me a drawing tablet, I’d get excited just to see the smooth white paper, experiencing it as an irresistible invitation to create…what?
  • My dad bought me a little baking set after a visit to the dentist, my favorite gift from him ever. (Mostly he gave Doug and me “educational” presents.) The set came with miniature boxes of cake mix and frosting, and on Wednesday nights I baked cakes the size of small pancakes and flat cupcakes as big as silver dollars to serve when my neighbor Alvin came over to watch Disneyland.
  • I started a sewing club with my friend Margie and made—without a pattern-—a pair of flannel pajama bottoms for my twelve-inch doll. (Those did make it to California—in my little suitcase—though I never got around to making the pajama top.) To this day I still make doll clothes, but only with patterns I’ve devised myself.
  • I liked to try to do things without instructions—to figure things out for myself, which meant a lot of my cooking experiments were inedible, and I was left wondering why my efforts to create perfume out of flower petals and water in a bottle always wound up smelling so foul.
  • Doug and I often played caroms with our friends on the carom board my dad bought us, which is a little like pool but without the cue. 
  • When I was old enough and became a Camp Fire Girl, my friends and I sold chocolate creams at Christmas, raising a lot more money than we ever made selling peanut candy.

And speaking of Christmas, I loved everything about it—not just the getting presents part, but the carols and caroling (I’ve written a Christmas carol for children you can listen to on my Song Page); the decorations we made at school—ornaments like family photos in jar lids hung with ribbon; the Christmas pageant at school of the nativity; and decorating the Christmas tree with my dad—neither Mom nor Doug ever joined in. Today I have a large collection of traditional glass ornaments that I started buying in my twenties, when I wouldn’t spend an extra nickel on anything else.

From the outset my parents told Doug and me that there was no Santa Claus—they didn’t want to lie to us—but I kept this secret from my friends who still believed there was. And that reminds me of another inadvertent mistake I made:

Before Christmas one year, Mom took me to Dayton’s department store to buy a gift for the teenage daughter of friends of ours. Mom chose an expensive 18” Madame Alexander doll—a grown-up doll with breasts (this was before Barbie)—a big mistake because, of course, then I wanted one too. For Christmas the following year, she surprised me with the same doll in a pink satin evening gown. The week before I’d copied, in chalk, an illustration of an old-world “Father Christmas” making his way through a town with twinkling lights after dark. Christmas morning, I unthinkingly stood my new doll on my dresser, leaning it against the wall my drawing was on—and got navy chalk all over the back of her satin dress. For the rest of my childhood and adolescence I took great pains to make sure my mom never saw this damage.

I gave this doll to Emma—who didn’t mind that its hair had become matted over the years—and I took a picture of it for the scrapbook we were making together. She named the doll Rose. I also gave my godkids a carom board one Christmas, but it was no competition for the latest video games.

SCHISM

SCHISM

Dec 5, 2019

SCHISM

I’ve decided to try an experiment—using train of thought to write a vignette about my parents, beginning with:

We hardly ever did things together as a family—as far back as I can remember, anyway. Nor did my parents spend much time with each other, though they did go to the occasional party together. My mom had an hour-glass figure and used to wear a beautiful black sheath with flocked red roses when she got dressed up. At one party, she told me years later, she was introduced to the novelist Saul Bellow. When she said she was a social worker, he reached out his arms to her and exclaimed, “I need relief!”

We didn’t even eat supper as a family. My dad fed my brother and me before my mom came home from work, though I can’t remember what he cooked. He was uninterested in food, so whatever it was must have been easy to prepare—my dad wasn’t in the habit of doing anything that didn’t suit him. What I do remember, probably because I found it repellent, was tongue…and pickled pigs’ feet that came in a jar. Putting on my thinking cap, I find I can retrieve a few more culinary recollections: chow mein—it wasn’t takeout, so it must have come from a can—and spaghetti (with button mushrooms that also came in a can).

The only time the four of us were regularly together was Sunday mornings, when my brother and I would pile on my parents’ bed before they got up—to read the Sunday comics while my parents read the news. Then my mom might make us French toast for breakfast or whip up some banana eggnog. Afterwards she would often go downstairs to talk to Beverly. Bev and Gus owned the duplex we rented and had a little boy named Greg, who said he wanted to marry me when he grew up.

So the things my brother and I did with our parents, we did with one or the other of them. In the evening my mom would read to us—until we learned to read ourselves—and we three would watch TV while my dad was holed up in his study. (We got our first TV when I was in second grade.) This was the heyday of the western—Wyatt Earp, Cheyenne, Have Gun Will Travel, Maverick, Sugarfoot… I can still remember all the words to the theme songs. Some of our other favorite shows were Robin Hood and Davy Crockett (all the boys had coonskin caps at the time)—and on weekends, the Perry Como Show (he was a barber who became a crooner), Sid Caesar’s wacky comedy hour, and the Hit Parade, which showcased the ten most popular songs of the week.

Which reminds me that one school day before a PTA meeting—I don’t know what grade I was in—our teacher asked us to draw a picture of our parents, intending to put our portraits of them on our desks that evening and have our parents guess which desk was their child’s. Mine was a no-brainer because of my dad’s red hair. But, interestingly enough, I started my picture with a vertical line down the middle of the page. This represented the wall between my parents’ bedroom and the living room. On the left side of it, I drew my dad in profile, lying on the bed, reading (which he did almost nonstop). On the right side, also in profile, I drew my mom, sitting on the sofa with a box of chocolates and watching TV. (Not that she ate chocolates that often; I just knew that she loved them.) What’s more, my parents were facing in opposite directions—and that just about sums up their marriage.

In my blog post “The Expurgated Version” I wrote about the things my brother and I did with our dad, including catching butterflies and fishing. Every fall a lepidopterist Dad knew would pay us to net as many monarchs as we could during their migrating season (they’re the only butterflies that migrate). We also caught morning cloaks, with their velvety dark purple-brown wings edged in yellow; commas and question marks, whose punctuation appeared on their back wings in silver; dogfaces that were lemon yellow and had the black profile of a dog on their upper wings; as well as fritillaries, red admirals, tortoise shells, buckeyes, and viceroys, which looked like small monarchs, hence the name. But the greatest prize of all was a tiger swallowtail—bright yellow wings with black stripes and delicate tails.

As for fishing, we’d stock up on Baby Ruth bars—my dad’s favorite candy—and minnows, rent a motor boat, and roar out to the middle of Lake Independence in Minneapolis. As we approached any area my dad thought might have fish, he would cut the motor and row stealthily the rest of the way.

On one outing my dad was thrilled to snag what he thought must be a huge fish since it was hard to reel it in. Instead it turned out to be a gigantic snapping turtle that he managed to drag into the boat with a net. “Kids, we’re going to have turtle soup tonight!” he exulted. But the turtle had other ideas. It lumbered out of the net and advanced toward us, snapping viciously, equally determined, apparently, to have us for his next meal. My dad tried to fight him off with an oar, but the turtle bit into it and wouldn’t let go. It was only after a considerable struggle that my dad was able to pitch the rabid creature over the side of the boat. To this day, I’ve never tasted turtle soup.

On another occasion, when Doug and I each had a friend along, he let us off on the island in the middle of the lake so we could go exploring. Instead, we found the whole place so infested with wood ticks, we couldn’t pick them off fast enough. Soon, it became clear that the safest thing to do was sit tight because, even then, enough ticks crawled on us to keep us busy. As we waited for what seemed like—and may have been—hours for Dad to come to the rescue, we made a game of keeping a running tally of who had picked off the most ticks, though I no longer remember who won. Which reminds of something my mom told me years ago—that shortly after she and my dad were married, they were walking on a beach and he wandered off, forgetting she was with him.

One of our traditions as Dad headed the boat for shore at sunset was to sing “To wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen, salty old queen of the sea…” at the top of our lungs. Even then we could hardly hear ourselves over the outboard motor. It was a line from a song in the movie Hans Christian Andersen, with Danny Kaye. Mom said I cried after the movie when I was little, so entranced by it that I didn’t want to leave the theater. No doubt I was captivated by Andersen’s fairy tales. But also, Danny Kaye looked very much like my dad, only with a warmer, gentler aspect.

Once in a while we did all go to a movie together—usually at a drive-in theater. Doug and I would get Cracker Jacks and go excavating through the caramel corn to reach the toy at the bottom of the box. Since Dad wasn’t about to go to any movie that didn’t interest him, we mostly saw nature films as a family, like Disney’s The Living Desert and The Vanishing Prairie.

Now those wood ticks are reminding me of the one and only time our family went to a resort together to spend the weekend—Black Duck Lake. I don’t remember seeing any black ducks, but I do remember my brother and me running down the pier, jumping into the lake, and swimming like mad to shore, where we peeled off all the black leaches that had latched onto us, sometimes even managing to squeeze between our toes. That done, we’d dash down the pier again…and again. Not surprisingly, my parents never joined us for a dip.

We didn’t even play games as a family. My father taught me the rudiments of chess, and he, Doug, and I sometimes played cribbage, but that was about it—Mom never joined in. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever played any kind of game with my mom.

I do remember her taking me to the Children’s Theater in Minneapolis a few times, however, to see plays like Aladdin and occasionally driving both Doug and me to Lake Johanna on summer weekends. While she worked on a suntan, we swam and cavorted all afternoon, leaving me with a succession of sunburns. On the way home, we always stopped for fried chicken at the Roadside Drive-In—even after the yellow arches of the first McDonald’s appeared farther down the road.

The longest times we ever spent together as a family were our cross-country trips. First we’d head to Oklahoma to see Frank, Margret, and Dad’s other relatives, then to California to visit my mom’s family and friends. Along the way we drove through all types of terrain—the Badlands of South Dakota and the Painted Desert in Arizona—and we stopped at all the scenic sites (in no particular order): Mt. Rushmore (also in South Dakota), Carlsbad Caverns (New Mexico), Devil’s Tower (Wyoming), the Indian cave dwellings (Colorado), the Grand Canyon (Arizona), Crater Lake (Oregon), Yellowstone Park (Wyoming mostly), and Yosemite (California).

Wow! I just looked up the Petrified Forest to see what state it’s in and saw a dizzying array of fabulous photos of the Painted Desert. And what I’ve been feeling as I write this train-of-thought blog is the richness my dad brought to my life, even if he could be unfeeling, even if he did intimidate me. But when my mom broke her promise to him in their divorce agreement never to take my brother and me out of state, all that richness came to an end.

As I reread this account, I think to myself: My father was always more invested in Doug and me than my mother was—he spent far more time with us—though I considered my mom the more sympathetic and approachable of the two. (She would one day say that he loved us, perhaps, as much as he was capable of loving anyone.) 

KISSING GAME

KISSING GAME

Nov 22, 2019

KISSING GAME

In a box of childhood mementos, I came across my Bluebird autograph book with the entry above.

The Cow Pasture wasn’t one, and there wasn’t a single desiccated cow pie to prove it ever had been, as far as Wolfy and I could discover. It was a rural patch of land in the middle of the city, belonging to the Farm Campus of the university. On the other side of a busy avenue, it was bounded by thistles that deterred all but the undeterrable, for whom scratches, like skinned knees and mosquito bites, were normal summer accoutrements. Beyond the thorniness was an expanse of brush that formed a low, dense canopy with tunnels between the trunks—a labyrinth just high enough to crawl through. Behind it were small poplared hills, which shimmered silver in summer, gold in the fall. On one especially grassy slope that we dubbed “Lovers’ Lane,” Wolfy and I devised a hit-and-miss kissing game dicier than Spin the Bottle. The rules were we had to roll down the hill together with our eyes shut and smooch whatever we bumped into—knee or elbow, stump or stone. From second through fifth grade, Wolfy was my boon companion. When I set out to write and illustrate my second children’s book, as I explain in my bio, “It started as a story about Wolfy’s and my escapades together but quickly became a fairy tale about an opinionated little princess who didn’t believe in fairy tales and her savvy little fool, who knew better.”

To read Sir Little Fool and the Skeptical Princess, scroll up to Categories in the right-hand panel and click on Children’s Stories.

 

WOLFY

Nov 15, 2019

WOLFY

Since Wolfy’s younger sister Mary was my brother’s friend, we were liable to make mischief as a foursome. Winter evenings we sat around telling spooky stories in my dark, starry bedroom. We’d turn out the lights and put a flashlight under an overturned wicker laundry basket, projecting constellations all over the ceiling, like at the planetarium. Weekends we went sledding down the steep slope in College Park and skating on the ice rink—a flooded the tennis court—where we staged races, tearing across the ice and plunging headlong into a snowbank to brake our speed. Or we skated to music at the Langford Park rink, which had a warming house that smelled of wet wool. Summers we played kickball in my neighbor Alvin’s front yard, where the trees were perfectly spaced to serve as bases. Evenings, drenched in mosquito repellent, we played Moonlight, Starlight—a nighttime version of hide-and-seek—until long after dark.

On one of Wolfy’s birthdays, I remember, I rashly climbed into his tree house in the party dress my mom had just made me. The skirt caught on one of the wooden steps and tore. When my mom saw the rip, she cried.

Another time I dashed into the street to catch up with Wolfy on our way to the Congregational Church fair—and got hit by a car. Though my arm ached and turned black-and-blue, I hid the injury from my parents, wearing long sleeves for weeks on end, afraid they would punish me for my recklessness.

And then there was the time Wolfy and I were climbing up near the top of his maple tree. The branch under me broke, and Wolfy, who was hanging onto the trunk, grabbed my hand before I could fall—and saved my life.