College?

 

My parents settled me in at my brand new dormitory and as I watched them drive away down the long driveway, I was stunned by the wave of homesickness that completely enveloped me!

Then I met my first roommate who informed me that she came to have fun and if I wasn't happy about that I should probably get a new room. Approximately three weeks later I gave up and transferred to another room on the same floor and we were both relieved None of this helped my homesickness. I went home every single weekend even if it meant getting a ride with someone part of the way and making my parents drive thirty miles to pick me up.

Higgins Hall was built on the ninth hole of a golf course and it was not finished when I moved in. The phones did not work for the first week or so. Neither the cafeteria nor the laundry facilities were up and running so we had to walk to the boy's dorm across a long parking lot for both of those things. 

My resident advisor seemed very old and grown up to me. She was twenty one and she and her brother were both RA's to help pay their way since their parents had been killed in a car accident a few years before. I was seventeen but so immature and so homesick. I alternately sat in her room crying or playing little tricks on her like putting a squishy frozen gargoyle in the bottom of her bed.

I met an English major at English club, but he was Japanese and into Japanese poetry. We tried sitting up in the empty football stadium on school nights and sharing poetry, but it just never jelled. Then my girl friend invited me on a blind date with her and her date. My date was a drama student. He worked part time for the local radio station during basketball games and I loved listening to his shows. Sometimes I even got to accompany him. We would practice his parts for plays in my dorm lounge. Back then no boys could go above the first floor of a girl's dorm. I felt very cool sitting on his lap with the script hidden behind our chair, reading lines. with him.  We were very dramatic!  We had to walk everywhere we went because freshman could not have cars, so when we went to the show we would act out scenes along the way where he was stalking me, or a detective was pursuing me, or once I was a cat, and he was chasing me around the park. Goofy kid things. Very funny and just reeking of a need for attention. He made me much less homesick, but eventually he wanted to seriously make-out and pet. I thought only really bad girls did those things. We ended up breaking up and I was heartsick

My freshman English teacher was a hippie who perched on her desk in old brocaded mini dresses and black holey ripped stockings. She had a boyfriend who had just published what was reportedly the dirtiest textbook around and we had to read it. It was pretty bad. I remember one long poem dedicated to a menstrual spot. She would give us credit for going to sporting events and once a poetry reading that was so bad I crawled out halfway through. 

I also had to take a speech class and I was terrified. I thought I would die before I got up in front of people; but that teacher was amazing, allowing for lots of creativity, which was good. One time I forgot I was supposed to have a visual for a speech that I had not even written. I got up at the last moment with a handful of paper scraps and gave a speech about my pet monkey destroying my visual aids. 

They put me in fifth year French and I was lost. My years of French had been juggled around different schools and different methods, mostly just learning to speak it. Our professor expected us to read Balzac!

Gym was required, but I discovered that if I signed up for specialized classes when I showed up they would inform me that I wasn't eligible and then let me pick the class of my choice. (Otherwise those classes were often closed or full.) I managed to get bowling, golf, fencing and archery before they caught on to me.

That year was more about socialization than anything else I think. I learned to live with other young women and take part in their ceremonies and events instead of just being with my family. We used to have a thing called a Candlelight. Someone would post a note in front of the elevators that said there would be a Candlelight at 7 pm. When we went to the lounge and stood in a big circle our RA would pass a lit candle around the circle while we sang, A Tree In The Meadow. The secret person would blow out the candle when it came to her and announce her good news. Usually that she was pinned or engaged. 

I ate in our cafeteria and gained the freshman twenty plus pounds, eating hot rolls and desserts. I met girls who would iron my curly hair on the ironing board at the end of our wing, because straight hair was the "thing." I shared clothes with other girls and they became my surrogate family. I also learned to do my own laundry and discovered there were pianos in the practice rooms on third floor if I wanted to play.

I spent more time doing almost everything except studying that year and went on academic probation the following year. No one in my family seemed to notice! There were no recriminations about wasting their hard earned money, or advice on what to do next. It felt like it might be true. I was only there to get my MRS. My dreams of some day being an architect or anthropologist just all got lost in the chaos, but I never stopped writing and I never stopped playing the piano.

On May 17, 1968, my friend Mouse invited me to join her and her friends on a blind date with a guy who had a car! Now any car was something in those days. His car, it turned out, was a 1950 Jeep with a 1946 engine. It was dark green and went down the hills of the state park much better than it went up. Going up only the driver got to ride. The rest of us had to get out and push. My date turned out to be the driver. a very good looking guy who was 22 and a graduating senior. We were on what they called a laker, my first drinking party at Lake Argyle State Park. There was an assortment of liquor they placed on a blue blanket along with a carton of fresh strawberries.  The park ranger came by and my date tossed a blanket over our booze. I remember the ranger saying how glad she was to meet students  picnicking and not drinking. I had my first drink that night. I think it was CC (Canadian Club) and coke. Then I had more and more and finally I had to pee, so I went off into the trees, but I got lost trying to find my way back. By that time there were dozens of people partying out there. I stumbled from group to group calling out, "Strawberries! Who has strawberries?" When it was time to go home one of the other guys drove and my date kept throwing up in a bucket in the way back of his Jeep. Every time he did that someone would push the bucket under my nose just in case and finally the smell got to me. I ended the night throwing everything up on the way home.

The next day I called his room on some pretext and left my phone number for him to call back. He called me and asked if I wanted to go see what ducks do in the rain? I thought this was so creative and we began to date. He asked me if I wanted to go on a camp out with him just before graduation, so neophyte that I was, I called my mother and asked her if I could go! She of course said no and I, of course, went anyway. 

I was probably lucky my period started just before that camp out, because while it never occurred to me that he might expect to have sex, he was determined to until he found out I couldn't. Instead we roasted hot dogs and made s'mores. That night I saw his beer opener had a name on it. It said, "Angell." I thought this was hysterical. "You named your beer opener Angel?" I laughed. That was when I discovered it was his name. I was dating an angel, although not the heavenly sort. His  name was spelled with two L's. The next morning I woke with the sun glaring down into my face. I had just spent my first night with a boy and he was leaning over me, backed by that halo of sunlight. The radio was playing,  Angel of the Morning and these were the words he said to me, "You've just complicated my life. I think I might be falling in love with you." I was completely overwhelmed and, I thought, in love.

He graduated and I sat with his parents during the ceremony. He was easy to spot. He was the only guy wearing a mini gown for graduation because he had failed to try it on until it was time to go. Afterwards he drove me home to Taylorville and met my parents. When he went home a week later I went with him to meet the rest of his family. 

One night when he was he was at his house in Dixon, Illinois and I was at my house in Taylorville, I had a terrible dream. I dreamed I was in a church with an upside down cross and he was the priest doing a black mass. He would point at me and I would say one of the ten commandments. "I will not honor my father and my mother, "or "I shall commit adultery." I could hear ominous chanting all around us and I woke up terrified. My dad was working in his office next to my bedroom and I told him about the dream. He said to get a drink of water and go back to sleep on my other side. I did. And I had the same dream again! Maybe that should have been a warning of some kind. But I chalked it up to the fact that he was so active in his Episcopal church. Sometimes, when I was visiting, they would call him at the last minute to be an acolyte for a wedding. In fact, the church had a hidden button that would call him back from the Rec room where he played pool during communion if there were a lot of people. That way he didn't have to just stand there waiting.

When we spent time at his house his cousins said we could use an empty house on the river if we wanted time alone and at first I thought this was awesome. It turned out not to be. He kept pushing himself on me and finally forced me into having sex with him. It was so unlike anything I had ever dreamed of that I didn't know for sure what had happened. It certainly hadn't been making love. I remember saying, "I guess it would have been okay if we'd made love." The shock on his face when he realized I didn't even know we had had sex for the first time was memorable. He continued to push himself on me whenever he came up to the room where I was sleeping in his house and even my threats to call his parents didn't stop him. Of course I was too ashamed to ever call out for help or tell anyone. I think he counted on that.

It was going to be a long distance romance. The Vietnam war was in full swing. Graduating seniors were just waiting to get drafted. He decided to enlist, theoretically it meant he got to choose what he did in the army. My Dad talked him out of being an officer. He said those guys were just cannon fodder. He asked to work in supply and eventually became an E-5 Supply Sergeant.

When he was in basic training at Fort Leonard wood I rented a trailer with another girl who was dating a guy down there and we rode with that guy's entire family down to see them graduate. Their family slept in the trailer. We slept in the car. I remember they were very religious and the whole family would pray when they crossed a bridge, or it began to rain. After all that traveling I only saw him for that one afternoon and there was nowhere to go so we went bowling.

We both agreed that we would date while he was gone. I probably would have been happy not to, but he was insistent. Still, we wrote every single day and once he called me from Vietnam via short wave radio.  The surprise call came through in the middle of the night and we had to talk through someone and say "over" when we finished our sentences. When it was done he said "over and out." Then in August of that year his father died unexpectedly and the Red Cross flew him home for the funeral. I went up and stayed with them while he was home, but he only had three days before he had to fly back.

We planned an April wedding, because that was when he would come home. He took his R and R (Rest and Relaxation) in Australia and had a big fling with some Australian girl. Back in Vietnam he was fixated on the girls who did the laundry or girls he called Donut Dollies.  

During this time I also went back to school and did much better because I was less distracted. Although I did have a few funny escapades now that I felt so worldly (having learned to drink and having had sex?) Once I was at a party where we were all dancing and singing Hava Nigila. They would push someone into the middle of the circle at the end and everyone would dump their beer into that person's glass so they had to chug it. By the end of the night I was seeing two of everything and I assumed my date was even drunker so I refused to ride home with him. I stayed on the couch in the living room and it was funny because when I said goodnight he stood up to undress! I quickly put a stop to that and he fell on the floor in a stupor where I let him sleep.  Another time I was riding through the beautiful snowy Illinois countryside with my friend, Gross Eugene, so named because the first time I saw him he was carrying two big bottles of beer in his arms, one in each of his boots. The new falling snow in the light of the moon was truly breath taking, but then we came to a hill and his car's racing slick tires would not go up it! We had no traction. We went back and tried to go up the other way, but the roads had become too slippery. Finally, in desperation, we pulled into a farmer's driveway and asked him if we could stay until morning when, hopefully, the roads would be better. He said fine. And left us out there in the cold all night long! When morning came we were half frozen when they invited us in for breakfast. His wife made the runniest, most unappealing, flattest fried eggs I had ever seen and served them with yellow tinted water! I was almost afraid to eat, and I didn't drink any of the water, but we thanked her and finally made it out of the country and back to my dorm. The dorm matron grounded me because I hadn't come home the night before.

In those days women had a lot more rules then men in dormitories. We had to be in before ten on week nights, eleven on Sunday and midnight on Saturday. Skirts or dresses were mandatory unless it was ten below zero and a sign was posted in the lounge. Then we could wear slacks under our dresses!

Planning our wedding was awkward. I wanted to be married barefoot in a woodsy setting, carrying daisies. His mother and mine wanted a formal church wedding in the Episcopal church. Then I wanted gray morning coats and gloves and maybe even top hats!

In the end we were married in the Episcopal church with rented tuxedos and a Juliet bridal dress with bishop sleeves and a lovely coronet covered in pearls. I carried white roses and my bridesmaids carried daisies.  They did let me have a cake with white doves on it instead of the traditional bride and groom. We had the reception in the basement of my grandfather's restaurant and left for a honeymoon in The Ozarks.

I'm not sure either of us knew what The Ozarks were, but they were close. we could drive and they sounded nice so that's what we chose. We only had a certain amount of time before he had to report back on post and we didn't have a lot of money. After many hours of him driving and me navigating we discovered we had driven straight through the Ozarks. So we turned around, found a little two bedroom cabin with a blooming cherry blossom tree in front of the kitchen window and began our marriage.My mother had packed a white nightie and robe for me.  My godmother told me to put the nightie under my pillow in case of fire. He gave me a sheer black pornographic outfit every night, which I mostly refused to wear. It was not the most auspicious start. 

At breakfast I made coffee with a coffee pot you set on the stove. I had never seen anything but a percolator, so I kept waiting for it to stop percolating! That coffee was the strongest I ever poured into a cup, but we survived the honeymoon and packed up our wedding gifts to head out for Fort Riley, Kansas.

Taylorville

 

That summer of 1966 we moved to a large old rental in Taylorville, Illinois just before my senior year in high school. I dreamed of going back to live with Barb in Springfield, but leaving the family was unthinkable. It was the only really stable thing in my life.

This is probably why the trip my youngest brother and I took with my uncle's family was not a good idea. I was already feeling a bit fragile and right after our move to Taylorville Henry and I went to Tennessee to help our youngest uncle move his family to West Virginia. He was a mining engineer and he and my aunt had a baby daughter and five year old son. Henry and I had to share a bed with the five year old who was still waking up wet, Then there was the move and new job jitters my uncle had to deal with. It was a chaotic trip. My uncle had envisioned letting me drive part of the way, but I didn't have my license yet, so he drove straight through with two very young children, two teens, an unhappy dachshund and his wife. When we got to West Virginia things were not hunky dory. The house was covered in coal dust. The water was polluted and they had to put a nylon stocking over the shower head to catch worms and bugs that came through. The drinking water was non-existent. We had to take a clean barrel to a mountain spring and fill it up.  People there often thought I was the mother of my cousins and their mother was my niece! She looked so young. In the end my brother and I came home on a very long and harrowing bus ride that tore through the mountains like there was no tomorrow. We ended up at a bus station in Ohio and my parents waited for us to come in at another bus station in Ohio. It took four hours before they realized what was going on and found us. The next week that bus went over the mountain!

My other brother and my sister went with my dad to visit his mother and sister in Texas. They met the pet skunk and St. Bernard there as well as getting to eat Grandmother's fantastic cooking. Their trip was much less traumatic.

My brothers got the third floor bedroom and my sister and I shared a double room separated by a double pocket door that we mostly left open. At night she snored like a buzz saw and set her record player so that it would play and replay the same record all night. Bobby Vinton, singing Blue Velvet, is burned into my brain. She let it play every night. All night long.

I was back in band here and back in French class because they did not teach German. The first few French tests were horrific combobulations of French and German, but my teacher was very understanding. I also took chemistry, which was not my favorite subject. I spent much of my time for this class devising what I thought were clever tricks like making a very large pink spider out of dough and having one of the boys attach it to a piece of fishing tackle in the ceiling grate overhead. He let it dangle slowly down as she lectured until it came into sight. Then our first year chemistry teacher, a tiny blonde glamour girl, flattened herself against the blackboard and screamed like a banshee. I'm surprised we did not get into trouble, but we didn't. I also roasted marshmallows over a Bunsen burner and one day, honestly quite innocently, I poured the chemicals we were using into the sink together in an attempt to clean up quickly. Instead I flooded the school with the smell of rotten eggs. I also accidentally burned the tip off of several flame testers and generally made a nuisance of myself. All of this while my dad was still the Title 3 Science director for Illinois.

I resented having to go to this school my senior year. I felt it was a step in the wrong direction, but I liked band. We had one band for the whole high school and both my sister and I played in it. Boys in band sometimes asked me out thinking I was the sophomore and she was the senior, for some reason. 

When his state job in ended my father considered moving us to Australia where they would pay for our family to come if he would agree to teach for a certain amount of time. I imagined being the kid with the American accent and never seeing my cousins or America again.  I read about dingos and wild fires and I did not want to go. My mother refused to go and in the end Dad did not take that job, but he was not having much luck getting back into teaching high school. They said he was over qualified and too expensive to hire. He was offered one job teaching if he would also coach the football team. That was like asking an owl to teach English while playing hockey with wolverines  As a boy my dad wanted to play violin, but my grandfather said the only way a son of his was playing violin was if he also played baseball. My dad tried, but by the time the ball was in sight of his thick glasses it was always too late to hit it and it often hit him.

Mom went to work for Grandma at the Big House which was now a very popular nursing home with a long waiting list. She became the administrator and loved it. My parents bought two small Datsuns with stick shifts on the floor. They warned us that we had better never have three people in the back seat unless they were three very undersized short people. They gave me the old Dodge my mother had been driving so I could drive myself, my sister and my cousins to school. We called it Shasta because she has to have gas and oil, lots of oil. I would drive to my grandmother's gas station and Forky, the owner would fill my car with gas on grandma's ticket, then put the oil he saved from other cars into Shasta. She had a few other quirks like the push button gear shift whose buttons sometimes pushed straight into the dash. I had a screwdriver and could remove the plate, reposition the buttons and be ready to go in a minute! She also had a poor defrost system, so on rainy days with a car full of kids, everyone except me, the driver, would take turns holding their breath hoping it would keep the windows clear. But I considered her my car and I spent many hours driving around the countryside exploring with my cousin and my sister by my side.

Sometimes my friend, Barb, would come down from Springfield and we would spend the whole afternoon driving around in her car, eating M&Ms and listening to KXOK radio.

I met Greg on a band trip. He was a ginger haired junior in 4H and a member of Future Farmers of America who also played in the band. I remember him defining cows for me. He said, " A bull is a daddy cow. A cow is a mommy cow. A heifer is a young cow that wanted to be a mommy but wasn't yet, and a steer is a boy cow that will never be a daddy." His face got redder and redder as he said these things! His project for 4H was a heifer he named after me! We took care of her all year until one fateful night in late summer when his parents invited me to dinner. There was cherry pie and ice cream and steaks from that heifer! We spent a lot of time together. He taught me to shoot both pistols and rifles and his mother really liked me, but that first day he introduced us he was standing in the doorway at the top of the basement stairs when he said, "Mom, this is Caroline." Immediately realizing his mistake he turned bright red and immediately stepped backwards and fell down the basement steps. He was my date to prom that year.

I played saxophone in the marching band because one cannot march with an oboe. I found the band uniforms and marching in parades and at school games fun, but I remember losing a shoe marching around the football field in the mud at Homecoming. I went to the Homecoming dance with another junior and discovered that in Taylorville, the parents came and sat in the balcony above the gym so they could watch all of us at the dances. Now I realize why parents would want to do that, but back then I considered it pretty voyeuristic. 

I didn't make a lot of friends that year. I mostly wished I was back in Springfield, but I did have one girl friend whose dad ran the pound. She was also a junior. Otherwise I was back to my old habits of reading and writing my thoughts on life as it was and as I wished it was, and I played the piano. I didn't think anyone really heard me, but just recently a man said that he used to walk by my house and listen to me playing.

My dad took me to visit several different colleges, but what I was looking for was the college most likely to have my friends from Springfield. In the end I got a teacher's scholarship to Western Illinois University in Macomb and that was where I went.

The summer following senior year was spent working in the laundry at the nursing home, or helping the cook there do odd jobs. My mother shopped for all the things she thought I might need when I went away to college and many of them were bought with green stamps. WIU was on the quarter system then and my parents dropped me off  at my new dorm right after Labor Day,

Back to my future

 

We made the traditional Christmas break move so that I could start eighth grade in my new school at the beginning of a semester. I was so hopeful about re-establishing old friendships, but two years is a long time for  thirteen year olds.

My grandfather had remodeled the Douglas Street house after we moved. The kitchen was completely different! There was a modern corner sink shaped like two triangles and a dishwasher! The back yard had been sold off and someone had built a whole house there! 

I got the front bedroom this time and my dad said I could paint it to match my grandmother's kitchen, bright reddish orange!  My mother dyed a pair of old polyester curtains brown and somehow they came out a gorgeous brown with gold lines running through them because the dye didn't really take. My grandfather gave me his clock with a blue luminescent face and a space capsule orbiting around as the second hand. My mother let each one of us have a book of green stamps and I used mine to get a black metal bookshelf with brass legs. It felt very modern and gave me room for all my books. Add my desk and a dresser repainted from Kelly green to white and I loved this room

My sister got my old room and mom painted what had once been mustard yellow to purple, but since she didn't have purple, she added red and blue food coloring to white paint. The walls were definitely purple, but they also had tiny little red and blue dots all over them. My brothers shared a room and nobody cared what color it was. I don't even remember it now.

I walked to school with my old friend Kathy. She had learned to sew and now made all her own dresses. They were beautiful shirtwaists which were all the style right then and because they saved her parents money she was allowed to buy Capezio pumps to match the color of each one. I pretended I didn't care, but I wore black cheap pumps that had a hole in the bottom from all that walking. I just learned to keep my feet flat on the floor and no one noticed.

However I also wore many of my grandmother's hand me down clothes. I didn't mind. Grandma was a petite classy woman and I loved most of her clothes, but my mother used to try and get fancy once in a while. Sometimes that was cool, like a collar that could button down over any sweater to dress it up. It was the time she tried to make me a matching skirt and blouse set that really backfired. You could see where she had taken the stitching out of the blouse. There were miniscule holes that left no doubt something else had been there and when I walked into art class, a girl named Lana looked at me and said, "Your mother made that outfit! I can tell. It shows. Then she sneered. "You gotta wear hand me downs!" Even though she was a girl no one cared much for, it was the first time I felt ashamed of my clothes. Top that off with the brown hounds tooth winter coat that my mom's friend had given her and I started to become more and more self conscious.

But mostly I loved eighth grade. I was now learning to play the oboe, another instrument chosen by my mother because she had played it in high school. I made a clay head in art class that was supposed to be emerald green and look like the boy I had a crush on. The general consensus was that it looked like a moldy neanderthal, but to me it was art. I ate a ham salad sandwich and drank chocolate milk every day for lunch because I loved it and it saved enough money for me to buy a much coveted 45 rpm record at the record store where you could go into little booths and listen to records if you thought you might buy them.  We listened more than we bought. The Beatles were in and I loved George.

That year my mother bought me my first pair of high heeled shoes. They were spiked and very fashionable  even if they were only an inch and a half high. I slept on huge brush rollers at night so my hair would be as close to a bouffant as I could get it and I had tiny little velvet bows that clipped right into the middle of the top. My mother used  some of her green stamps to get a hair dryer! What a novelty that was with its plastic cap and hose. Now we could wash our hair and dry it right away, or in about an hour. I used Ten O Six to keep my face from breaking out when we could afford it and I was right on the cusp between playgrounds and parties.

November 22, 1963. I was home sick from school when Kennedy was shot. I remember my mom and aunt crying, but it just felt unreal to me. Then, on my fourteenth birthday he was buried. It was all that was on television and no one was really interested in my birthday at all. I was a little hurt by that, but I understood.

My grandfather was a big Republican and he had a warehouse full of Goldwater in 1964. My mother glued big  sparkly eyed elephants on either side of Uncle Ralph's wheel barrel and filled it with cans of Goldwater. We had to go door to door trying to sell it. I cannot tell you all the ear-fulls I got doing this.

In ninth grade I went to my first dance. It was the school's end of year dance and the twist was all the rage back then. I felt very beautiful when I looked in the big mirror over our buffet and commented, "I look pretty!" to my mother. She promptly replied, "You aren't pretty if you think so." That made me feel terrible.

In ninth grade I was also invited to plan an Invite. An invite was like a coming out party given by a group of girls who spent a year raising money with bake sales, auditioning live bands and checking out hotel ball rooms. We sent out very formal invitations to our friends and our parent's friends that said Mr. and Mrs. So and So announced the presentation of  their daughter, (name), escorted by (name), son of . . .  I wore an emerald green velvet gown that my mother and Aunt Lou made, with matching green satin shoes, long formal white gloves, a pearl evening bag and had my hair done at the salon. Our theme was In the still of the night and we had tiny dance cards with tassels that said this as well as beautiful bouquets to match our dresses. An emcee announced each one of us with great pomp, one at a time, while we walked down the aisle and up to the stage. These things were all the rage in Springfield and it signaled that I was old enough to date, which actually I wasn't, but since Shawn and I were both fifteen and neither of us could drive we were allowed to "date" because his father would have to drive us. It turns out that our parents actually knew each other when we were infants. They would put us in a playpen together and the story was that Shawn was nine months older than me, but I always took his bottle and made him cry.

One day when we were all in the elementary schoolyard playing baseball, a sharp little Triumph TR4 pulled up to the fence. It was bright shiny red and had a black convertible top. When the door opened, Shawn got out! He said my mother told him it was okay if I went for a ride in his new car. I felt like Hollywood royalty that day!

I dated Shawn off and on up through my freshman year in college. I guess he assumed we would get married. I never even considered it. To me he was just a friend who liked to make out, which I didn't. It didn't help that my new best friend, Barb McClelland hated him. She referred to him as that red headed leprechaun. He was terribly smart, the youngest computer programmer in Springfield when he was a junior in high school and his hair was more strawberry blonde than red. He had an in-ground pool with a dome that inflated over it so we could swim all year long and he taught me how to scuba dive in that pool. I liked him. I dated him. I just didn't love him.

High school started when I was a sophomore. I switched from French to German and band to orchestra. I was in what they called tracked classes which is where I met Barb, my new best friend, and a lot of our work was independent research culminating in term papers and long speeches in front of the class. I was busy. Physical education classes were every other day at seven in the morning. I had no study halls and after school I took Driver's Ed my sophomore year, so I got home around 7:30 P.M.  Kathy, my best friend since fourth grade, and I rode to school in her Dad's station wagon, but we often walked the two miles home after school when I didn't have to do something else. 

On Tuesday I had candy striping and there were various other things on other days. Candy striping was something I did, not because I wanted to be a nurse, but because I thought I wanted to be a nun. I fell in love with Sister Eunice at the convent during candy striper parties and picnics.. She played guitar and led us in singing folk songs. The candy striping itself was sometimes tense. One day I was given a woman in a wheel chair by Sister Gerard and told to take her from Emergency to the surgery floor. Alone. Half her face was gone and there was a beaker taped there to catch the blood oozing down. Another time I had to go through the hospital basement and up a dark hallway to an elevator that opened to a back door. There I let in the ambulance people and unlocked the door to the morgue for them. There were stainless steel coolers on stretcher wheels in there and I had to open each one and read the tag tied to the waxy looking toe of the dead person until we found the right one. Then I rode back up with them and let them out. Riding nose to toe with a corpse in a tight elevator was unsettling. I spent hours studying the Catholic saints during this period of my life, dreaming of living with the sisters in a castle like convent and spending my life singing folk songs. Then Sister Eunice died of TB because she worked in the sanatorium and my enthusiasm gradually faded away. 

After Driver's Ed my mother let me drive our family's Vista Cruiser station wagon with her for practice. I loved to drive by the house of a boy I had a crush on, just in case he might be visible. He never was, but on Christmas Eve she let me drive with her to go buy a carton of Cokes and as I passed his house I clipped the bumper of his family's classic car! It completely crumpled the right front of our car and ruined the only snow tire my dad had managed to get on it so far. It put an almost invisible tiny scratch on the bumper of their car, but his dad, who was a lawyer (and had been drinking) came rushing out screaming and yelling at me. I was in shock. I don't remember how we went home. I went straight to my room. I was so scared and upset, but no one ever said one word to me about that accident! I guess they knew they didn't have to. I wouldn't drive at all for nearly a year.

I had Miss Fogarty for English in my junior year. She made us memorize big pieces of Hamlet and Macbeth and after she graded our themes we had to rewrite them in ink with no mistakes. Nothing says mistake more than me trying not to make one. I can't tell you how many times I rewrote some of those papers. Miss Fogarty was old. I studied my dad's old Crib Notes for one of her tests, the ones he had from the 1940's and her questions came right out of them! Sometimes she would get confused and say, "When I had your brother Harold in my class," and I would remind her he was my father not my brother.

One time a girl dating one of the Hell's Angels got in trouble and in retaliation they rode through our school on their motorcycles! Then there were the bomb scares when we had to evacuate the building. Times were changing. I remember two girls whose parents were in the military got into a fight in our cafeteria and one of them ripped the other's earring right out of her ear. There was so much blood! 

But most of my life was peaceful. I took my ACT test and all the other tests, usually with Shawn and I went to the show with my girl friends, things like Spartacus or West Side Story. Sometimes I rode the bus downtown to have lunch and shop with Kathy, or stayed overnight with Barb to study for tests. I played records and sang a long with them, read Teen magazines and on Sundays usually went with my siblings to have lunch with our grandfather at his restaurant. 

My sister and I worked for him for two weeks right after my sophomore year. He was in Washington D.C. with his friend, Everett Dirksen, so we held down the office. All we really did was answer the phone, go eat lunch at the restaurant and type up one contract. I guess he wasn't satisfied with something we did because when I asked if I could do it again the next summer so I could earn money to go on the senior trip to Washington, he said no. I never understood exactly why and I didn't get to go on the trip.

At the end of every year from eighth grade through my junior year in high school I played in the band for the Springfield High School Graduation ceremony in the Armory. That was where we had all our basketball games too, because the school auditorium was just not big enough. My junior year the school bought the old Orpheum theater organ and installed it in the auditorium. I was asked to take lessons on it my senior year. 

But it was not to be. The summer before my senior year my parents rented a house in Taylorville, Illinois. It was where I was born and it was my mother's hometown. She was going to go to work for her mother since Dad's job as a Title 3 Science person was a political appointment and Ray Page lost the election. Dad was going to try and get back into teaching.

Life in a fixer upper

We rented this house for $64 in 1962!  It was the only time I had any idea of the money my parents spent, or paid for bills. Although I was the one who had to answer the phone so that when bill collectors called I could tell them my parents were not home. 

My mother kept on working at the Velvet Freeze while my father took the four of us to Chatham, Illinois daily. He was plastering and painting while we played.  For lunch he brought a thermal bag with lunch meat and mustard along with a loaf of bread and potato chips. Each of us got a dime to buy a cold soft drink at the little grocery store up the street towards the square. That was a real treat back then. It was also a treat to have my dad home and available. I loved talking to him while he worked and I loved being the one to make the sandwiches.

This house was on the main street going out of town and the town was small. The population listed on the sign in front of our house said 1000 and we used to joke that now it was 1006. There was a funeral home across the street that kept long tailed smelly sheep in the back yard and an ambulance in the garage. Usually the wind blew the smell away from us. We could get our mail at the little post office near the square and the space around the square was divided pretty equally between taverns and churches. It felt very quaint, like I had gone back in time. 

I had been the only one in our family who attended Sunday school at the church next door to the house on Walnut Street and I thought I should pick a church to go to here. They were all little white wooden buildings with small steeples and they seemed much less daunting than the church in Springfield. I had not missed a single Sunday there because I wanted to win a white Bible at the end of the year, but they said I didn't get one because my parents weren't members. 

Our backyard was impenetrable, filled with apple and pear trees and two out buildings besides the old stable/garage. My dad hired a boy with a tractor to clear it out and we discovered a horse tethered by the back fence! However our attempts to ride him were futile. He simply walked over to the back porch of the house behind us, lowered his head and dumped us off! The side yard was a swamp! It turned out that when the house was built, a gazillion years ago, someone buried a barrel outside the kitchen window and the sink had been draining into it ever since.

We found some old dried up paint cans and mixed water into them to make a sort of wash we used to paint the inside of one of the outbuildings. I think it had been a chicken house. We called it our club house and cut a hole in the roof that we covered with an old grating for a door. In order to join you had to stand up on the roof and jump off. It was probably less than eight feet, but if you were standing up it seemed much higher. Playing in this yard made us feel like we lived in the olden days. We climbed trees, picked apples and made applesauce and tried to have a picnic in a sunny glade. It turned out sunny glades are full of insects that also love picnics. We were out numbered by the spiders ten to one. One afternoon my sister climbed way up into one of the trees. I can still see her standing up there. Crying. Dad had to come home and climb up to get her down.

The house was a rambling old, very old, two story wooden clapboard. Someone had tacked on odd little porches and windowed lean-tos around it, so it felt kind of mysterious, but it was damp and not well insulated. We turned one porch into a sort of play room. My dad used one for his office and books and there was one off the kitchen where our cats had kittens. We had two cats. One had a half orange and half black face. We called her Spitzer and she was a very good mother. The other was a little gray tabby we called Spit Fire who had kittens all over the room. She had one up on a ladder and one under a chair and so forth, but once they were born she wanted nothing to do with them. My mother put them on a dishtowel in the electric skillet to keep them warm until Spitzer adopted them as her own.

It was all uphill from the kitchen to the dining room. The intervening space became our laundry hall. We put the washer and dryer there. The only bathroom was off the dining room and my parents' bedroom was next to that. The living room had a staircase going up to the two bedrooms we used. One for the girls and one for the boys. These bedrooms were only heated by a vent in the floor open to the rooms underneath. I found I could watch The Twilight Zone after my bedtime if I lay just right and peered through the one in our room. The only other defining characteristic of this bedroom was the very shallow closet. It was only about six inches deep. More of a clothes press than closet.

In spite of all the work my father did on the house he described it as "Cold and drafty. At any moment I (he) expect clouds to form and rain to fall in the living room." We didn't really mind it. We were just kids. 

In the beginning we were allowed to ride our bicycles wherever we wanted. The idea was that it was a small town and very safe, but after we all rode five miles out to the quarry one afternoon, that ended. So we did what the other kids did. We watched the high school boys do tricks at the corner cafe. One of them could hold onto the pole and hold his body parallel to the ground. We decorated our club house, rode our bikes around the square and I made a secret place to hide my writing by hollowing out an old book my father had discarded. Of course that book stood out like a sore thumb among my other books, but I never noticed.

 My dad enrolled us in school. He liked to tell the story of how when they asked him which grades, he said 2,4,6 8. My school only had seventh and eighth grade. It was way out in the country and had once been an elementary school so there were swings and slides and teeter totters to play on at lunch. Lunch was different here. The food was made by the lunch ladies who inspected our trays before we turned them back in, to make sure we ate it! I felt like I had gone back in time, but they did have a personal hygiene class where they showed a movie that was very explicit. I remember the girl sitting next to me fainted and farted before she fell on the floor. Up until then I thought fainting sounded very feminine and delicate. That ended that!

They did not have an orchestra so I could not continue with my violin. Instead my mother decided I should play the saxophone because she still had her old one. My dad used to laugh when he described our band teacher. He said there were a lot of good players, but their timing was off. Everyone just played till they got to the end. Some faster than others. Band class was up on the gym stage. Mr. Chapman would direct with great gusto and sometimes got so frustrated he threw his baton up in the air over his head. One day it flew right out an open window! 

My mother quit working at the Velvet Freeze and became a Goldblatt's Paper Route Monitor. She would put us all in the car and drive around checking to see if kids had put the Goldblatt's ads on doorknobs.  Then she decided we could do Chatham ourselves. She gave half the town to two of us and the other half to the other two. She was still the checker, but we had to walk house to house and rubber band the rolled up paper to door knobs. That didn't last long. I was afraid of dogs and my siblings were pretty lackadaisical. 

My mother also decided that she and the other kids would all come to church with me. One Sunday while we were listening to the sermon everyone noticed the minister would occasionally twitch, jerk, or pause briefly before continuing. It turned out my brother, Tom, was surreptitiously shooting rubber bands at him. Mom thought this was hysterically funny? At Christmas they asked my mother if I would play my violin for the service, but I declined. I never played a piano, or violin, or saxophone, or oboe, recital. I was too scared and nobody in my family really encouraged me to do otherwise. Even though we were expected to take music lessons there was never any interest expressed in how we practiced or progressed.

I had my thirteenth birthday in this house and I remember how solemnly my father said, "Welcome to the world of teenagers. From now on you will feel misunderstood." I didn't understand, but I wanted to look cool so I pretended to. I cultivated looking like I understood many things I didn't, probably hailing back to first grade when my teacher tried to teach me that no one was perfect. And obviously failed.

My dad's mother, my grandmother Prehn, had moved after her divorce. First she, my aunt and my cousin lived in Colorado Springs and later they moved to Hereford, Texas. When I was very little she had showed me a matchbox full of dead baby mice! I thought they were so cute. Now she sent us a preserved scorpion and a horn toad from Texas. These were not so cute, but we kept them out in the toy room. Grandmother loved animals. When I was a toddler I remember walking among her pack of two collies and two English Spaniels. Later she had a pet skunk and a St. Bernard. When I was very small I would visit with her and she would give me dog cookies (Milk Bones) to chew on. I thought that was bizarrely cool. She had once been a teacher and she was very creative. She handmade many smocked dresses for me as an infant and later made us all beautiful dolls she called, Binkies. I think I have a lot of her characteristics, but after she moved away, I only saw her one more time when we visited her in Colorado. I was nine then. She and my mother did not get along. The story goes that she came for dinner one night and the napkins didn't match, so she left saying she would rather be hungry than improper. I suspect there was a lot more to this story, but who knows. Grandma was a bit of a social climber and snob, while my mother prided herself on what she considered her shortcomings like not going to college and was an ardent reverse snob. As two sides of the same coin they were bound to clash.

One of my mother's decorating techniques was hanging our stuffed animals around the edge of the ceiling in our rooms so we could see them, but not get them dirty playing with them. She also hung the souvenir dolls people gave us from our lights in the middle of the room for the same reason. Other dolls, like the mechanical babies from Germany that moved and cried, or the Dutch doll from Holland, lived in boxes in our closet along with our doll china. Her intentions were good, but somehow she did not realize that a toy you cannot touch or play with is not much of a toy.

One day my brother, Tom, caught a huge garden spider in the backyard. He put it in a jar and took it upstairs to his bedroom where he promptly lost it! It just crawled away when he was distracted and he never found it again. That night my parents were sound asleep when they were awakened by blood curdling screams. Rushing up to my room they found me in my bed, wide-eyed and still screaming. I dreamed that one of the dolls hanging from the light in the center of our room was that spider. It took them a while to wake me up and settle me back down.

Unfortunately I continued to have these night terrors and wake up screaming, sometimes running out of my room trying to escape. I still do to this day, but very seldom now. Back then they were so frequent my parents must have decided I was broken and made the decision to move back to our old house on Douglas Street in Springfield with the hope that it would fix me.

Walnut Street

 

We moved to the new house during the school Christmas break. And it was eerie to discover the house was across the street from a big stone church and right down the block from Aunt Evelyn. 

My parents talked about what a good school it was. My dad had gone there when he was growing up. They showed us a picture of him at eighth grade graduation wearing a suit and tie! The governor's granddaughter went to school there. I would still take violin lessons and I could take piano lessons from my mother's cousin, a student of Paderewski's student. 

The first thing that happened was my mother sold our Steinway baby grand piano because it took up too much room. Then she painted grandma's player piano white and pulled all the player parts out of it. Next they set up two play rooms in the finished attic. One for the boys and one for the girls. I found a whole set of Howard Pyle's Legends of King Arthur in our toy room closet, but I also found an old orange crate and began designing my own Barbie house and the furniture for it. I used sponges and hairpins to make a couch with wrought iron legs and a cigar box to make a four poster bed. I spent hours decorating and redecorating that doll house.

The new school was not on the same schedule as our old one of course. There were new term papers to write, new rules for what you could wear to P.E. classes, different clubs and it was a much bigger school, so everything was on a grander scale. Little things like having to sit on the floor during programs in the auditorium instead of the rows of chairs I was used to at my old school seemed awful to me. But the one good thing was that here girls could be safety patrols on the street and do all the things only boys were allowed to do at my old school. And it was cool to see the guards who accompanied the governor's granddaughter to and from school. I started going to the skating rink with my girl friend after I went to the Patrol Party that year. My friend was a very good skater and could do lots of tricks, but even though my mother said I had skated very early as a two year old, I had no memory of it and I wasn't very good. It wasn't expensive because Grandma gave me her old skates which saved having to rent a pair.

My dad had to go to Perdue that summer and take a refresher course for teaching calculus, so it was just Mom and me after the other kids went to bed. She would make clothes for my Barbie, prairie dresses and sunbonnets, a satin wedding dress with a pearl neckline made from my dad's old nightshirt. She even turned a boot box into a Barbie closet with a mirror and dresser! They were the last nights of my real childhood in many respects. 

I began seventh grade in this house and on my sister's birthday my period started - barely. I thought I had done something wrong. My mother was angry that my underwear was spotted and she drove me to the drugstore to buy what we needed. That was October 5, 1961. A few months later my period was late and I was terrified. I thought I had been thinking about one boy so much that God thought I was married to him and he was sending me a baby! Looking back I remember seeing a movie with my Brownie Troop when I was nine, but no one ever discussed it and most of it went straight over my head at the time. I was in an agony of shame for over a week when, of course, my period did start.

It was eighteen blocks from my house to the junior high and I had to ride a school bus for the first time. I was the very last person the bus picked up and the driver would open the door so I could squeeze onto the first step and lean forward, then he would close the door and that was where I stood until we got to school. Once I couldn't even squeeze in and the bus driver told the office I refused to get on. I had to get a ride to school with a friend's father but someone told them the truth so I wasn't in trouble. I did discover that if I got out to the bus stop a little early my seventh grade math teacher, Miss Tate, later Mrs. Royer, would come by in her little Volkswagen Beetle and give me a ride to school. 

Junior high was different. I had to go in early for orchestra and we couldn't leave the school for lunch. I think I ate a barbecue beef sandwich and drank a carton of chocolate mile for twenty two cents every single day. My parents gave me exactly enough money every week to pay for lunch, but if I saved some by not eating the hot lunch, sometimes I could buy a ten cent coke when my girl friend and I walked home. I did this as often as I could, carrying piles of books in my arms with a violin case slung over my shoulder. There was freedom in that choice. I joined the astronomy club and the camera club and life seemed good. 

My homeroom teacher wanted to nominate me for student of the year, but I hadn't attended any dances or sporting events. I was disappointed, but I'd had no idea these things were at all important and I didn't know how to dance or have a ride to anything after school.

Looking back I think I was kind of lonely for the first time. Even though my long time friends from my old school lived in the same town we never saw each other. I spent hours listening to some old records Aunt Helen gave me and writing about things I imagined. I played with the Barbie House/crate and made clothespin dolls, but I felt separate from my siblings sometimes. My mother said I was too old to share the bathtub with them and I had to wear deodorant and there was that awful bra and I was so embarrassed when I had my period. I felt awkward. Odd. I guess I looked awkward too. My mother said I walked like a chicken with its head stuck out.

I was allowed to ride my bike more freely now that I was twelve. I discovered I could ride all the way downtown to the Capital building and I spent many hours wandering through the Illinois State Museum. I also met the elderly woman who lived next door to us. Her name was Eliza Condell and she had been a teacher. Her brother had traveled all over the world. Many of the things at the museum were donated by him, Thomas Condell. She took me through her house, telling me stories about all the intriguing antiques she had. There was a big glass box filled with birds and bees and flowers that struck little bells and made music and she had paper dolls from the Ziegfeld Follies. I loved miniature things and she had a tiny tea seat forged out of pennies from the Civil War. I could see her sitting in her rocking chair reading in front of the window very late at night and I thought how happy she seemed even though she had never been married, or had children and had always lived alone.

Seventh grade ended. My parents were running a Velvet Freeze Ice Cream store together when Dad wasn't teaching, or tutoring, or working for my grandfather. During the school year we had a babysitter, but in the summer that was too expensive, so my grandfather offered to take the four of us to his house in Minnesota for a vacation. He drove Henry and me in his Cadillac and his wife, Aunt Helen, drove Caroline and Tom in her Oldsmobile convertible. He hired a nurse to bring her family and stay in the guest house while we were there and it should have been wonderful.

It was not. My sister and the nurse's daughter made me feel like the odd man out. I sprained my ankle and then my period started! Here I was was. Far from home feeling terrible and I had to ask Aunt Helen to buy me feminine products. To top it off my youngest brother, Henry caught a big fish that got away and he was so upset he got sick and ran a high fever. My grandfather took us home.  He never took us on another vacation to Minnesota after that. 

The rest of the summer we had to sit in the back booth of the Velvet Freeze when both of our parents were working. Sometimes they let me run the cash register and once I got to help scoop sherbet when there was a sale, but those were long afternoons. We didn't get free ice cream either. It was five scents a scoop and our parents had to pay for every one. I remember watching people buying five scoop ice cream cones and wishing we could have one of those. We never did. 

In August my dad told us he had rented an old house in the small town where he taught and once we fixed it up, we were moving! It sounded like fun and I looked forward to it. As long as our family was all together it was just another adventure.

Douglas street

 

We moved into the house on Douglas Street in Springfield, Illinois right after my fifth birthday. My father had a job teaching English, Physics, Chemistry and Remedial math in a high school in Chatham and Springfield had a public kindergarten, which was evidently not common back then.

The first day we moved in I saw a man trimming the bushes between our house and his driveway and I told him to stop cutting our bushes! That was the day I met Uncle Ralph. He and his wife, Aunt Jo, would become second parents to all of us, but especially to my baby brother who was born the following April. They didn't have children of their own, so they opened their hearts and home to all the children they knew.

My mother took me to register for kindergarten and I sat in the principal's office staring at my patent leather shoes and informed him that I would go to kindergarten, but I was going to be like my mommy and not go to college! He said that was okay, we'd start with kindergarten. His name was Mr. Head.

Those were busy years. 

My youngest brother, Henry, was born April 20th, 1955 and I remember looking in his crib. He was the biggest baby I had ever seen, but part of that turned out to be because he had club feet and my mother had put a blanket sleeper on him to hide his casts. The next five years were spent making trips to Champaign to get his casts changed as he grew, or to have him fitted for special shoes and night braces, but by the time he finished elementary school he was running and playing sports! Of course he had always been very athletic. He learned to walk and then run wearing casts from his hips to his toes!

My other brother, Tom, had problems too. They thought he might be slow, but it turned out his eyes were so bad he could only see things very very close to him. He needed glasses. Plus he had a stubborn streak. My mother took him to therapy when he was six and was told he was brilliant. He could read, play chess, and do anything he chose, but he often chose not to do these things! Because of his bad kidneys my mother tended to baby him a lot.

My younger sister, Caroline, was nicknamed Pretty. When she was born she had lots of black hair all over her body and my dad had called her his ugly duckling, but once she was old enough to introduce herself as that the family panicked and renamed her Pretty.

My nicknames varied. As a toddler I was called, Angel. Then Pumpkin and finally Injun. I was considered a bright, finicky child who worried about everything. My first grade teacher called a parent teacher conference after sending home a note saying my parents should explain to me that no one was perfect. I did not have to be perfect. My dad jokingly started that conversation out with, "Nobody's is perfect. Except me." Now they were concerned because I had begun to write my name on all my papers, starting in the bottom right hand corner and writing backwards! Every letter was perfectly reversed as was my name. Sometime during the conference they called me in and asked me to show them and I dutifully did. When my father asked why I wrote my name and all the letters backwards I told him, "The teacher said start in the lower right hand corner and write your name." That was the only way to do that and make it fit.

I had a boy friend starting in kindergarten. Both of our last names started with P and so we were often seated together along with another P boy. Linda, Billy and Shawn, a threesome that stayed in contact for many years. Three bright kids who were alphabetically connected. Billy's mom was a pediatrician and his dad was a cardiologist. Shawn's parents were also professionals. Those were fun days. We learned to play chess and marbles. We rode our bikes together, played with Billy's electric train, and once I got to go see Snow White at the theater with Billy and his mom.

Going to the show was a big event back then. People got all dressed up and stood in long lines to see things like Bambi and Old Yeller.

I did most of my growing up in this house. I took piano lessons from a woman two blocks away, but I was so terrified of walking past the loose dogs, that I almost quit. I signed up to learn the saxophone in fifth grade and violin in sixth. My brother, Tom, tried out a series of instruments too, but when he played oboe they were always on the next note before he got the last one out. Then he tried the bass fiddle, but, even though he was a big boy,  he hated carrying it the block to and from school. That was the end of his musical career.

I began sleep walking in this house and would wake up running down the stairs or standing in the living room. Once I read a book that talked about dough balls. I didn't know what they were and ran down to my parents while I was sleep walking to ask where the dough balls were.

I read a book called, The Fashion Doll about a girl finding a trunk in the attic with a doll who had the most incredible detailed clothing just like the most fashionable women in the 1800's wore. Then for Christmas I got the first Barbie doll whose clothing was also like real fashionable dresses! They were expensive and I only got a few outfits for birthdays or Christmas, but it was a dream come true. 

I also got my first desk at this house. It was a modern one with wrought iron legs and two drawers with a matching chair. I used to sit at it and pretend I was a teacher. The year I turned eleven I got my first bra. I was not impressed. I hated it and found nothing wonderful about having it. That year my mother also surprised me by painting my room mustard yellow and my furniture Kelly green. She thought it was a wild and wonderful teen girl room. I thought it was atrocious, but we couldn't afford to redo it.

The girl two doors down shared my birthday, except that she was two years older. When we were younger we played together all the time. We roller skated on her front porch with a broom across the steps so we wouldn't skate off. We held hands and ran to school, calling it flying our kites! We played Mother May I in the summer evenings and we tried to set up two tin cans connected by a string between her bedroom window and mine so we could talk without the phone. It never really got finished. Aunt Jo and Uncle Ralph's house was in between and there was no way to get our string over it. She used to let me read her Clara Barton and Bobbsey Twin books and sometimes we played Animal Rummy on the chaise lounge at her house. Our only problem until she went to junior high and I moved to a different elementary school was my brother's sudden interest in sleeping on the sidewalk in front of her house and her driveway. Their smooth finish that made it perfect for skating was evidently also wonderful for him as he lay basking in the sun, sometimes falling asleep with both arms crossed over his chest. My mother found this hysterically funny. Her parents did not.

Another girl father down the block was right in between us age wise. She had an antique baby doll the size of a real baby and a suitcase full of real baby clothes, but I was only allowed to go three doors down without permission for most of my childhood. At ten I was allowed to ride to the corner and cross one street in any  direction, but I could not stay anywhere. I had to turn around and come right back home. However this came in handy when my sister chased me with worms. She was not allowed to cross the street, but she stood on her side waving the wiggling worm in the air, threatening me if I tried to come home.

Life was different back then. We had a garage full of riding toys and I learned to get around on all of them. I could push myself with one leg while the other knee was in the wagon and zoom around the sidewalk. I could take corners inches from the ground on my bicycle, which backfired when I got too close one day and took about three layers of skin off my knee. And when Uncle Ralph edged his sidewalks and driveway, I would balance on the handle of his lawn mower so the wheel would create a trough around all his grass!

He had a beagle named, Hey Boy. We had a bird named Caruso. Caruso finally died of old age and we buried him in a paper bag in the side yard. I am embarrassed to say I went back many months later and dug him up to see what he looked like, but there was no sign of the bag or him by then.

We also had a few other pets that came and went. The Easter Bunny brought us four ducklings that played and quacked in our yard one summer until they disappeared. It took a while for me to connect that to the big duck roast Uncle Ralph had for the neighborhood. Then we had two rabbits for a long time until my mom gave them to my grandfather's chauffeur while we weren't home. I thought he was going to bring them back, but when I finally asked, evidently nobody had let him in on the secret because he said, "Those rabbits? We ate them a long time ago Missy."

My mother didn't have much luck with animals. When my grandfather brought her a prize dachshund from Germany she tried putting rubber pants on it. You can only imagine how that didn't work. Uncle Ralph gave me a little puppy one summer, but it wouldn't stop barking so we had to put it out on the farm and a train ran over it. Then there was Snorkel.

Snorkel was a rescue my dad brought home. He was a full grown Scottish Terrier that was already housebroken and he became my constant companion. When I ran out to play, Snorkel ran with me, Where I went he went and then one year my mother locked him in the side yard with a bone and later she let two little girls cut through there to go home. For some reason I will never know or understand Snorkel savagely bit both of them, requiring many stitches and my parents had him put down. I was inconsolable.

Later someone gave us another basset beagle, but once again my mother couldn't house train it so it lived outside on a chain and really wasn't much of a pet at all. I feel bad whenever I remember him.

This was the house we lived in when I woke up one night and heard someone's raspy breathing coming from my dresser! It was on an outside wall of the house and I was the only one in the room. I was terrified. I called for my dad who came up and listened. He heard it too, then he showed me how my sister's snoring in her room catty corner from mine was echoing off my wall. So it wasn't a ghost! I asked him if ghosts were real and he matter of factly said no one knows. That was kind of scary too.

In those days most families had one car and the dad took it to work. There were buses but I wasn't allowed to take the bus until I was thirteen, so there were no trips to the public library. Our school let us check out a book every week from the school library, but I read those right away and was left wanting. That was when I discovered the books my dad put in the hallway bookcase. I think I read every Junior Classic, most of the Books of Knowledge, and many of the Lands and People books before I began invading his personal library in his office.

It wasn't all reading though. Television was black and white and we could only get about three channels by using the rotor to turn the antennae on our house. It was a huge antennae. You could climb it like a ladder up past the second story of the house. We could tell time by what show was on. Wagon Train came on at 6:30 on Wednesday night and Twilight Zone on Thursday night. Mickey Mouse Club was right after school and on Sunday nights we watched The Wonderful World of Disney while eating hamburgers in the living room! We had wooden tv trays and felt very sophisticated.  On Saturdays we children got up early and watched the patterns on the tv until the programming came on for the day, then it was Fury and Rough and Ready and Sky King while we ate cinnamon toast sitting on the floor right in front of the television. Back then tv went off the air every night playing The Star Spangled Banner.

The house on Douglass was not as big as The Big House, but it was good sized. Upstairs were four bedrooms and a bathroom. Downstairs was an eat in kitchen, a formal dining room separated by an entry hall and foyer before you got to the living room. Then on the very end was a sun porch which varied over the years as a sewing room or office, or even a room filled with fish aquariums and one blind frog who couldn't catch flies anymore and had to be fed hamburger swinging on a thread in front of his face.

The refrigerator was so big it was on the landing outside the kitchen door and had a peddle to open it. The basement was all tiled and painted. The laundry room had the washer and dryer up on a platform next to two big lead wash tubs build into the wall. There was a toilet in the middle of the room on a big dais, like a throne. Next to that was the world's biggest hot water heater that my father claimed ate up so much money that he turned it off when we weren't home and finally a ceramic glazed shower. A swing hung next to the ironing board and an electric ironer sat in the corner. Back then my mother ironed everything from sheets to my father's undershorts. Plus we used real tablecloths and napkins for dinner! 

The middle part of the basement was our play room built around a furnace so intricate and old that when the only man who could work on it died, we had to buy a new one. There was a four foot tall incinerator against one wall for burning trash and then a little paneled room at the end that was my father's office. Like all children we took all of these things for granted.

Life was different then. Packs of dogs roamed the streets and even our school yard. We had recess until fourth grade and our playground had big jungle gyms and long lines of swings that were greatly coveted. I spent most of my recess walking around the roots of a great big tree with my friends. We never got to the swings in time, but there was a lot of imagination traveling around that trunk. If you stepped off the roots and touched the ground you might die in a swamp, or be eaten by monsters, or sometimes they just took you to a strange new world. Our imaginations were never at a loss.

These were good years, the longest I had ever spent in one house so far and then one night I had a dream. In the dream we moved to a new house. It was right across the street from a very large stone church and right down the street from a woman we called Aunt Evelyn. Aunt Evelyn liked purple and she collected elephants, both traits my sister took as her own for the rest of her life, because both she and Aunt Evelyn had asthma.

At lunch that day my mother broke the news. We needed to move, to find something more affordable and dad had found a house! It was the second semester of sixth grade and I was about to begin my preteen years making one mad move after another.

Grandma's house

 

We left Champaign just before I turned five years old. My father was invited to go on a long trip with his father and they left for Germany at the same time we moved into my maternal grandmother's house. We called this The Big House and it was big! There was a gigantic attic. Below that were six bedrooms, one bathroom and a huge hallway that were all turned into two apartments that were rented out after my grandfather died. 

The main floor was flanked by three Queen Anne porches. One in front with a big wooden porch swing. One on the side (The house was on a corner lot.) that had a couch glider and two metal rocking chairs. One closed in off the kitchen that was a sort of summer kitchen with a stove and my uncle's big tinker toy Ferris wheel filled with people just like the ones in my dollhouse. I loved those people. Their joints allowed them to sit or stand and to raise their arms, which was very up to date for 1954.

My dad called home while he was in Germany and I got to talk to him on the phone in the library. He tried to explain how big an ocean was, that I couldn't just walk around it like I did the lake in Minnesota, I was impressed. The library was one of my favorite rooms. There was an intriguing picture of a dead baby who my mother said starved to death back in the 1880's. He was my grandfather's brother. There were also shelves of books underneath big heavy curtains to keep the dust off and of course, the telephone. Our number was 123 (I think) and we would simply pick up the phone and ask the operator to connect us to other people by number, or even sometimes by name!

Each room had a great big fireplace with marble tiled designs around them and big ornate mirrors above them, but we never used any of them. Instead there was a coal furnace in the basement beside a giant heap of coal. Every night I would go down with my Grandmother to stoke the furnace before we went to bed.  I used my own tiny little black coal shovel to fill up the bucket while she used giant tongs to take the clinkers out of the stoker beside the furnace.  

There were also heavy ornate chandeliers in the center of every room. Once they had been attached to gas lines, but by then they were all electrical. They just ran the wires through the gas tubes. The rooms were very tall and had doors with transoms that we could open or close to let air pass through.

My grandmother and my great Aunt Lela were sister-in-laws who stayed together after their husbands died. They shared a bedroom next to the downstairs bathroom. There was a big cardboard Donald Duck on the wall in there that I thought was very fancy and also a large sombrero my mother had brought them from Mexico. The bathroom was an add on to the rest of the house. 

My uncle, who was only nine years older than me, had his bedroom in the old downstairs music room. My sister and I had our beds set up in two corners of the gigantic dining room. In the third corner was a green velvet lounge that we liked to do somersaults on. We crouched at the top and rolled down to the bottom. Once in a while I was allowed to get out the doll china that had belonged to my mother, or sometimes even the miniature doll china that had belonged to my great grandmother and play with it on the dining room table.

The downstairs front hallway was much bigger than my whole apartment is now and the back hallway had a shaving sink, a closet for coats and a big Gothic hall tree chair with a bench for umbrellas and boots right outside the library door. Both hallways had staircases.The one in front was a fancier one with carved oak balustrades, but the one in back was mahogany with dark wainscoting. There was a sort of secret tunnel hallway under the front staircase that led into the library from the front hall.

There was a big kitchen with a large pantry between it and the dining room and my grandmother stored her wringer washer in that pantry, bringing it out very early on Monday mornings and setting it up in the kitchen to wash clothes before she went to work. I remember she used a big stick to push the clothes down inside of it.  Afterwards I helped Aunt Lete hang those clothes on the three lines out back. I had my own tiny wicker basket and I carried the clothespins. Once a line was full we would hoist tall poles under them to keep the clothes from touching the ground. 

I used to play in the garden behind the clothes lines.  I would help grandma pick flowers for a bouquet  to put in her glass basket, or catch butterflies and spiders by sneaking up and grabbing them then letting them fly or crawl away. Sometimes I played in the huge truck tire they painted white and filled with sand for me. And sometimes, in the evenings, we would set up the croquet game in the side yard and all play croquet. Grandma always got the red ball because that was her favorite color, but if she didn't play, I got red!

There were so many things to do. I would climb on the rocks that flanked the back sidewalk, balancing and very proud of myself, or walk down the concrete balustrades in front of the front steps. Sometimes my mother spread a blanket under the shade trees and I played with my dolls there. Inside, if I asked, I was allowed to play with the tiny china figurines on the what not stand, or listen to the player piano play by itself when we put music rolls in it. But sometimes Aunt Lete would play the piano. She played by ear and I was so impressed! And sometimes Grandma would sing. She had a very high soprano voice and people used to have her sing at weddings, but mostly she sang the old Baptist hymns.

Grandma had a television in the living room and I was allowed to watch Ding Dong School with Miss Frances. One day she opened some Russian nesting dolls and I have been fascinated with them ever since.

In the morning when I got up I would go into the kitchen and sit at the big wooden table on my tall tin chair. It had been red when my uncle was little, but they painted it pink for me!  Whoever was working in there at the time would make me toast with butter and grape jelly and serve it to me on a black cookie sheet to try and keep the crumbs off the floor. Sometimes they would make as much as I wanted, but sometimes there was a limit. Afterward I got to use the big kitchen broom to sweep the floor and I was proud of that job, but sometimes if I acted up, I had to sit on a chair in the corner by the potato and flour bins and stare out the window thinking about what I had done.

My mother would dress all of us every morning. I remember how she put my socks on then smoothed out all the creases and rubbed my feet to make them warm before she put my shoes on. Some one bought me a pair of real cowboy boots and I loved those! I could put them on myself.  Otherwise I would lie on the floor and put my shoe up on my mother's lap so she could tie it. One day my baby brother came by and peed in my face while I lay there. My mother told me if I hadn't dawdled it wouldn't have happened. The only thing I really hated was having my hair combed. My mother would put a comb in a glass of water and then tackle the snarls in my curls until she had perfect long curls all around my head. If I pulled away or complained she would crack me on the head with her comb.

When my father came home from Germany he worked selling cars in St. Louis and only came home on weekends, but on Thanksgiving I had my fifth birthday and he told me we were all moving to a new house. I remember how happy that made me, but some of my other presents also made me very happy. My Aunt Lete baked me a cake with a doll in the middle. The cake was her skirt! My uncle gave me a big blue plastic piggy bank with a red hat. Every time someone put a coin in his back, the hat popped up. I spent the whole afternoon going around getting aunts and uncles to put pennies in my bank.

The next day we moved to Springfield, Illinois.

A shift in support

 

My father sold his Chrysler, Plymouth, Dodge, dealership in 1953 when both Chrysler and Plymouth began having problems. He decided to go back to school and finish his Master's Degree and took a teaching position with the U of I. 

Part of this had to do with the birth of my brother, Tom, who had serious kidney problems and needed treatment that could be found at a clinic in Champaign, Illinois. I went with my parents to look at houses and I remember a dining room full of people sitting at a round table that seemed to be made of rock! They all were very kind and spoke to me while smiling and laughing.

We moved into that tiny two bedroom rental with a little picket fence around the backyard and a small sun porch off the front of the house. In the beginning my brother slept in a bassinet in the dining room, but when he needed a crib my parents took the closet door off of our bedroom and bought us bunk beds. The room was so small that the ladder to the top bunk ended up underneath the crib!

I loved living in this house. My dad had an office in the basement and he built us a playhouse in the rest of the basement with two big platforms under windows looking out over the rest of the basement. There was a big floor lamp outside his office door and one day, while trying to reach up and turn it on I got a very nasty shock! I still remember the buzz running through my hand and arm!

I was the oldest of three now and my mother gave me a rag and a can of Ajax cleanser and let me clean the bathroom floor. I had a ring just like my mother's engagement ring and like her I always took it off before cleaning, Then, one day, it slipped down the drain! I was inconsolable. My engagement ring from Daddy was gone. He took the whole sink apart and found that ring, making him my hero forever. Another task that my mother gave me was ironing Daddy's handkerchiefs. While the other children napped she ironed and I ironed right next to her with my own little ironing board and iron. Back in those day three year olds played with real tiny irons and even my toy stove could boil water! I remember how seriously I made each fold in the handkerchief while ironing out the creases.

My parents decided we should have a cat and my father brought home a gray tabby from the pound. They named it Pretty Soon, because pretty soon they would know if it was a girl or a boy. One morning I woke up and went into the kitchen where my mother excitedly had me look out the window into the backyard. There were cats everywhere! Cats sat on the roof of our garage, on the fence ledges and even on the swing set and sandbox. Mommy said they had all come to court Pretty Soon because she was the prettiest girl cat around. Then a few months later I woke up to another surprise. When Daddy got home from school he took me down to his office and showed me a whole box of tiny kittens!

Later my mother told me that Pretty Soon had taken a walk in a field full of kittens and picked out the ones she like best to bring home. I dreamed about that field of kittens for years.

One Saturday morning my mother dressed me in my best crinoline slip and fullest skirted dress. She combed my long curls and gave me white gloves to wear. I even had a tiny red and blue plastic shoulder bag with the head of a Scottish terrier in bas relief on one side. I had a date with Daddy! We went to a carnival and he tried to get me to ride the merry-go-round. It looked very fast, even the small one and I refused. On our way out a lady in a very tall wagon gave me an orange sherbet ice cream cone, but it dripped all over me and my father coaxed me into dropping it on the ground, saying he would buy me a hamburger.

On another Saturday my father took me to see the movie Pinnochio. We didn't have a television so this was the first moving picture I had ever seen. I will never forget how huge Monstro was. I have one other memory of going on dates with Daddy and this one was a long anticipated rite of passage. Once more I was dressed to the nines. We went to the pen store (which was probably a drug store.) I saw a carousel filled with ballpoint pens of every color and got to pick out the one I wanted. I picked a sky blue pen with a silver top and thus began my writing. I was so proud of that pen.

I remember one Christmas and one birthday in this house. For my birthday I received a baking set with tiny cake pans, a cupcake pan and small boxes of cake mix. I remember actually making one of the cakes and putting it in my electric stove's oven to cook, although I suspect my parents probably took it out and put it in the big oven when I wasn't looking. I had my first birthday party that year. My mother and I cleaned up all my dolls and stuffed animals. She even drew new eyes on the Dydee doll whose eyes I had scratched off and we lined them all up on the couch on the sun porch. Then my mother had each one knock on the door and I answered it and invited them in. Once they were all in the living room we played drop the clothespin in the milk bottle, but some of the dolls declined to play.

We got our milk every morning from the Milkman who arrived in a yellow truck pulled by a horse! On Easter that horse wore a bonnet that it got to eat later on. Waiting for the milk was a big event in our day.

On Christmas Daddy took us all for a ride in the car to look for Santy Claus. I remember wondering if every cloud might be him up in the sky, but then we went home and he had already been at our house! I had a beautiful dollhouse filled with furniture and people up on the dining room table! I played with that house for many years.

I remember the day my parents put us all in the backseat of the car and my brother threw his clown rattle out the window. We had to drive all around until we found it. Then we went to a store and waited in the car with Mommy while Daddy went inside. There were two little Chinese children and my mother used to tell stories of how we all chatted back and forth in spite of the fact that we spoke two different languages. That night a man brought a television to our house! It was a big, beautiful mahogany, piece of furniture with doors that closed to hide the screen when we weren't using it. Daddy turned it on and a tiny white horse with a man in a white hat and black mask galloped up the hill then reared up. I wanted my dad to open up the top of the TV and get them out so I could play with them!

Those were years where I was noticeably older than my siblings. My brother wore the seats out of all his clothes because he got around by scooting on his bottom, using his legs to pull him forward, but he got around. My parents gave him his first educational toy, a tiny wooden hammer and a little work bench where he could pound pegs in one side then flip it over and pound them back. He used the hammer to completely destroy the front of their radio/record player piece of furniture, leaving little round dents all over the front.

It was also years before infant car seats were more than a seat that hooked over the car seat with a steering wheel and horn. Once you were too big for that, you sat on the grown up seat. In front. And that was how my sister got her first nasty bump on the head. A bicycle drove in front of us and dad hit the brakes hard to avoid hitting him. My sister was thrown into the dashboard like a startled bird into a window.

All of our meals without dad were in the kitchen, but when he came home for lunch we ate in the dining room and I had to have exactly what he did, a cheese sandwich and a bowl of soup. I remember very little about eating in this house except that sometimes at night my dad would bring home a treat. I loved the Cheetos and I loved the strawberry ice cream with little pieces of frozen strawberries in them. I even loved the white coke. It was years later that I discovered this was seven up.

Just before I turned five we moved again. I remember going with my parents to look at houses and one house had a toy room with a stick horse I really wanted, but it turned out this house had been hit by a tornado the year before and my mother was very leery of it. Someone told her tornadoes never hit the same place twice but this house was hit again the next week. 

We ended up moving in with my grandmother.

In the beginning

 

A young man, age twenty, graduated from College and was working on his Master's Degree when his father helped him start his own car dealership. He was already engaged and on his way in the world when he was talking to his friend one afternoon. \

Happening to glance out the window, the most beautiful red head he'd ever seen was crossing the street. He exclaimed, "Who is that woman?"

His friend, a little less enthusiastic, responded, "That is my sister."

After a whirlwind courtship that included dancing in the moonlight to the car radio on a covered bridge, he called the woman his little bean blossom, because, he said, she was beautiful, delicate and rare. They tried to elope the night before their wedding, but changed their minds and were married in a big church wedding on August 15, 1948. Just three weeks after meeting.

He arranged for a furniture store to open just for them after hours and they picked out the furniture for their first home. Never people to put anything off, they immediately tried to start a family and like many young people were very impatient. They thought it was never going to happen.

I was born the day after Thanksgiving, by ceasarean section, a blonde, blued eyed baby girl with curly hair on November 25, 1949.

My earliest memory is looking through the bars of my crib at a lamp that my mother could twist to send the light out in the direction she wanted. My next one was sitting at the end of a big table staring up at the most beautiful cake I had ever seen. It looked like a fluffy lamb! My Great Aunt Lela had baked it for me as she would bake one every year for the next few years. It turned out I did not like the coconut that made it look fluffy and shortly after that I got a splinter in my bare foot that had to be removed. I remember the faces of my Aunt Betsy and Uncle R.I. and others surrounding me telling me it would be okay. It still hurt. I was two.

Those were huge years for me. We lived in a large Georgian house with a living room that had two giant double doors, one on each end. I would ride my tricycle through one door, down the dark scary hallway, past the staircase and in the other end's door.  And in the afternoon I shared a big green armchair with my mother while she read to me. From that chair I could see through to the hallway and our front door with a half moon transom above it. On some days I would see a red scarf, tied in a square not like it was ready to be worn around the neck, fly through the transom and land on the hallway rug. I knew that meant my grandmother would soon arrive and shortly thereafter, the door would open and in she would come. I loved having Grandma there. She was my mother's mother.

My other grandmother came one night with two blue metal trunks. Inside each one was a doll that stood on big flat feet and had a whole wardrobe of clothes. The girl doll was mine. The boy doll was for my baby sister, Caroline, who was two years younger than me. One night my Daddy woke me up and unlatched the baby gate that crisscrossed in front of my door. I got my finger caught in the gate and began crying. He said I had a present to give Mommy for Mother's Day. We went down to the dining room and there was a beautiful yellow Canary that my mother named Caruso.

Not all of my night awakenings were so joyful though. Sometimes I would waked up in my youth bed with the half sides so I wouldn't fall out and there would be flames covering my blankets! It was very scary and I remember wondering why they didn't hurt me this time? I've always wondered about those times. They continued until I was close to four or five years old and I have no idea what caused them. I had never been in a fire.

The first Christmas that I remember was magical. There were two green foil wrapped packages with gold ribbons on the top shelf of the pantry that I was told Santa had brought. The night before Christmas I lay in my bed looking at the shadows that danced across the wall of windows and wondering if they were Santy Claus. The only memory I have of Christmas Day was getting a little metal refrigerator filled with real tiny food! There was a tiny restaurant size glass jar of milk, a tiny can of Hershey's chocolate and some cheese. 

My father built a small porch off the kitchen that he told me was just for me so I could go out and play in the yard. I had a sandbox out there with a canopy over it and toy sifters and shovels and pails to play with. I remember a girl called Becky Brooks who was a little older than me sifting all the sand out so that there were only tiny pebbles left. She told me it was popcorn and I ate it, but it didn't taste like popcorn. 

I loved that yard and my porch. I could look up and see my mother leaning out the second story window washing the outside panes and our English bulldog, Cappy, would wander around while I was out there. One day I was in the house and I heard Cappy, crying at the basement door. I opened it and was met by Cappy, frothing at the mouth and howling as he lunged at me. My uncle slammed the door shut just in time! Someone had put ground glass in hamburger and thrown it over the fence for Cappy to eat.

The only other memory I have at that house was when I was supposed to be napping. I got up and managed to put on my new little blue crepe nightgown and robe along with some white bunny fur slippers. I was so proud of myself! I went downstairs to show Mommy, but all that happened was she got upset because I had not stayed down for my nap. She didn't seem to notice how beautiful I looked.

In 1952 my brother, Tom, was born and we moved to Champaign, Illinois.

What a difference

 

I believe in something. I just don't know what to call it.

No religion seems to fit. I don't believe I have to curry the favor of some quasi human creature or call this power by any name man has made up. I don't believe any religious myths are much more than man's attempt to explain the way things work, or try to control whatever this power is by doing something magical.

I do believe that there is power in creation. Whether that power is inside or outside of me I don't know, but I do know that changes in me take place inside me. And I believe that there are things I can do that make my life better.

Eliminating stress. Focusing on the present moment. Opening myself to healing wherever it comes from and however it comes. And then just doing common sense things like trying to control my blood sugar or drinking lots of water for my kidneys. I think it is highly possible that healing is part of who we are if we give it a chance.

But I don't know any of this.

Four months ago my kidney doctor suggested I start looking into dialysis. My numbers were low and getting lower. This past week she told me that whatever I was doing I should keep doing it! She'd never seen the kind of improvement I was showing. 

Now all that being said I am still in stage four kidney disease. That's not good. 

But right now I am better than I have been in four years.

It's a little scary because I truly don't know exactly what I've been doing to achieve that. I've been eating terribly. My A1C is way too high and I am still anemic after seven iron infusions, but my kidney's are much better and I have a strong heart. 

I'm going to focus on that while I work on the rest and the hardest part is not to let the bad thoughts take over, because I suspect it is my attempt to live in the moment that has made a difference.

Family heirloom

 

I don't know whether I believe in Fate or not, but sometimes an event occurs that makes me wonder.

I looked for a family heirloom before my daughter's wedding. It was a necklace that belonged to my great grandmother and was worn by both my mother and me at our weddings. 

I remembered offering it to my son for his wedding, but his bride wanted nothing to do with it. 

I thought I put it away in a chest where I placed many important family mementos, but it wasn't in there. Then I assumed I gave it back to my sister who collects everything, including jewelry. She could not find it.

Thinking back I assume I must have looked in my own jewelry box. In fact, I would have sworn I did, 

I seldom ever wear anything except a pair of platinum hoop earrings, but lately I have felt more like my old self. I've been wearing make up occasionally and even a bit more jewelry. 

Today I found that family heirloom in my own jewelry box! I am astounded! I am also thrilled and grateful to know it is not lost.

Now I must decide who it should be given to and when.

It is that important to me.

Tolerance

 

A human being's ability to tolerate inconveniences depends on so many things.

Some people do not deal well with the smallest things, a hang nail can turn them into raging maniacs. Others generally build towards some invisible and variable point known only to them.

And then there are those people who seem to be able to rock and roll with whatever punches come at them. My youngest son is like that. It is terrifying to think that his kayak could be caught upside down in a raging stream and he would be calmly probing his brain for his next action.

Today a block of people in our apartment building were told we would have no water until further notice. That meant no drinking water, no showers, no flushing toilets with no advance warning!

The optimistic goal of water being turned on by noon was tolerable for most of us. Three thirty didn't seem totally unreasonable since it was a water main they were fixing. But my phone call at three forty suggested it might be five, five thirty, or even six. 

I asked how we would know when the water was back on and discovered they had no plans for how to let us know. It simply hadn't occurred to them! 

That is when almost everyone's tolerance wore a bit thin. Not using the bathroom is no big deal if it isn't your bathroom and they did make other bathrooms available. One on the top floor. One on the main floor. 

I found myself on the way to the modern version of an outhouse. Not really an outhouse of course. It was a fully functioning, fully flushing toilet down the hall and ten floors away on an elevator. When you are an older woman you will understand how inconvenient that is.

Hours more holding-it-in awaited us all, but soon after I hung up the phone someone knocked on my door. The water was on and bathrooms were once more usable! Seven hours of horror ended! The sun came out, birds twittered cheerfully and little angels sang in choirs on every corner.

Thank goodness I made that call. I shudder to think we might have gone the whole weekend thinking we didn't have a pot to pee in.