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.

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’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.)