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We climbed. It had been too long since we had done this: too many days, weeks, months of living in our minds, far from earth and air. I had nearly forgotten.
My son and I made our way west to the hills, the small towns and the pastures, remembering a time when life was sweeter, simpler perhaps. But then again, no. It just feels that way when you look back in time. You forget the complications that filled the days and remember every moment in just one glorious moment, a boy holding berries in a bowl on a clear Vermont summer day, and you think that this is what life always was back then. You forget the times the electricity going out for days at a time, and the fleas that bit your ankles, and the dirt and the manure spreaders and the people at the town hall who mocked you privately–not so privately–because you were not one of them. You forget the dishes and the laundry and the clutter on the dining room table and the emails, and life becomes nothing but a berry tart cooling on the back porch. It was all right then, all right to be a little different, all right to let the bread rise and to have this life this wonderful life of clear days and berries and little boys.
And little boys grow up. They do! Right before your eyes they grow up and become little men, or big boys, and some days the difference between the two seems enormous; some days it hardly matters. And when we are hiking in the woods up a mountain, it does not matter at all. We are hiking, and the bugs are fierce, so we do not make it to the summit. It is humid, if not hot, and the sweat is sticking to our backs as we make our way through the woods, higher in the green wildness, sweeter still by the faint smell of lilacs, or clover. Oh yes, this I had forgotten, this sensual journey in life, these days now of the best things we find on this earth.
We climbed Mount Greylock yesterday, not to the summit. But we climbed. Then we drove. We stuck our heads out the windows, and looked at the hills, green hills, hills with cows and limestone and ponds. We drove, crossed back up into Brattleboro, across to Keene, and then back down, down toward home, slowly, slowly finding our way through this state, this state where we truly can drive one direction for two hours to find mountains, another direction to find the ocean. We passed the deer crossing, the duck crossing, the bear crossing, and saw none of those animals, but crossed beavers, cormorants, pileated woodpeckers, wrens, and finally, close to home, our friendly heron. And then we found home, a porch and iced green tea. And in the evening I sank into my bath, hills still in my mind clearly then as sleep sank into me, moments to remember, later, when enough time has passed for my mind to play tricks on me, when I remember only the things that really mattered.
It was a quilting party that day, my mother remembers. A quilting party, and she, little girl then, was allowed to stitch her part between two of her mother’s friends. It may have been one of the quilts that are downstairs on beds now, pink fabric uniting the memories of a family’s wardrobe, worn and recycled in this most marvelous of ways. So my mother, lady that she was at the advanced age of four years old, sewed, and then was distracted.
The distraction was a knock at the door. A man with a camera offered his services, and my grandmother, feeling generous that day, as she did many other days it appeared by the cat symbol on their fencepost, let him in. Yes, a picture would be quite nice, it was decided, and my mother positioned herself on the wicker couch. Her mother put a bow in her hair. Inky, one of the black cats (the other being Egbert, not present), jumped up on my mom’s lap, and the picture was complete.
The photographer visited for perhaps three years, and made pictures all of those years. Some of those photographs seem to be missing now. But this one–my mother’s favorite picture of herself–remains on a shelf in her living room, with all the memories of a childhood and a life whose pieces, retold, are precious layers of our own lives.
Yesterday my mom called to see if I wanted her waffle iron.
Today, she was trying to remember how many windows are in my girls’ room, and what size the windows are.
She has been concerned about this sort of thing lately, because she is preparing to move from the house she has lived in since 1967.
Forty years. I am forty-two, and, yes, this is the house I grew up in. It is the same house with the same basement I described in my first journal post here. It is the same house that has the mostly dry creek behind it, and used to have acres and acres of woods beyond that. It is the house I sometimes hated to come home to when I was young and wanted to fly, the house I was sometimes relieved to see. It is the house where I dreamed those dreams of faraway places. It is the house that I always think of when I think of my childhood. And soon, it will be someone else’s house.
This is hardly an unknown event. We all grow up. Most of us leave. I left home in a flash, literally, making up my mind in two hours to pack a suitcase, kiss my mom goodbye, and climb into the passenger seat of a sports car headed to Colorado. It was a crazy thing to do, unprecedented even for me, at least on that scale. Up to then, my spontaneity had been limited to an afternoon, a week perhaps… not a lifetime. Lessons learned.
But it was still time to leave home. I never went back.
Some of the same neighbors still live in the same houses next to my mom. Most of them are very old now, and I have known them since I was a little girl. My mom is 76. She says now that she should have moved somewhere more convenient, smaller, after my dad died, years ago. I agreed at the time. I was 20, and hated going back to the ‘burbs when I quit college. I wanted my own apartment, and I wanted my mom to be the independent creature she seemed to have aspired to be. I had moved back home with her partly to help her, partly to help me. I went from door to door with my resume and found work. I was ready to leave my mark on the world when the time was right. In other words, I wanted to leave. In other words, I was determined not to die without living first. In other words, I wanted my mom to live, too, not become some lonely middle-aged woman in a ranch house with a boring job, a cigarette, and a television in the background. It frustrated me, and made me feel guilty at the same time… Who was I to judge?
We did live in a three-bedroom ranch, not unlike a lot of middle class St. Louis houses. It was a nice suburb, not the richest or most glamorous. My mom had worked before I was born, taught, dressed to the nines, drove a ’62 Galaxy convertible and had her pilot’s license. Her legacy to me: the clothes, the hats, the gloves, and 1950s lingerie. Amazing. The sense of adventure. Then she got married, pregnant (yes, in that order), went to PTO meetings, and never had a paying job again before my dad died.
When my dad finally did die (it was awful, slow, cancer), she agonized about what to do for a long time, as she does about most things. Finally, after getting fired from an evening stint selling some substandard product over the phone (unsuccessfully, which is why she got fired), she found a job in a kitchen design place. Never one to overstep her role, she cattily critiqued the designers, and was usually right, and went right on answering the phones and typing envelopes. Her boss offered her the chance to learn to design kitchens herself, but she never took him up on it. This lasted until she retired, several years after I had headed west.
She did all right, still does. It’s strange to think of her not sitting in the living room with a crossword puzzle and a cat on her lap, strange to think that she’ll be in a living room somewhere else. It’s strange to think of the bird feeders in the backyard—she will no longer have a backyard. Ah, the backyard, and its wildlife… My family had some strange customs, I realized later. One was feeding raccoons. When I was about five, a little masked thief was prowling around the backyard. My mom thought it was cute, and gave it a Hershey bar. It came back. Before long, we were feeding many raccoons regularly. Hershey bars were cheap, but those coconut-covered marshmallow puff things with the cookie bottom were even cheaper. With Mystic Mints as the choice, we also did not tend to eat the marshmallow things. At some point, my mom decided that the new wild pets needed a healthier diet, and started buying Chuck Wagon dog food–maybe that brand because my brother and I liked the commercials. We were lucky not to have skunks or larger, more ferocious wild things, and only saw the occasional possums in the mix. The birds cleaned up the leftovers the next day. I realize now that all this was a little odd. The brand of dog food has changed to Purina Dog Chow (it’s supposedly healthier), but by golly, my mom still feeds those raccoons. One night this week, I expect to hear a report on how big the babies have gotten. Her new neighbor, who has expanded her entire porch out into the woody hill, seems ready to take over the care and feeding of suburban wildlife. This, I believe, is a great relief to my mom.
Houses are containers of memories. I sometimes think about this at garage sales, and wonder about the lives that touched an ordinary object with a masking tape price: 25 cents. I can imagine the things that my mom will never be able to move, things I have no room to take, things my brother cannot use. A white pyrex dish with turquoise roosters around the outside reminds me of the rice that my mom made for nicer occasions, and the faces that sat around the table at different times that it was served. The big yellow bowl was for popcorn, on Sunday afternoons, made in the heavy frying pan, with a mismatched lid. A western was on the black and white television in the basement, and the fire in the fireplace was too hot, nice but making me sleepy on a day too cold and grey to lure any of us outside.
Once, after I had left home, I went to visit my mom’s aunt and uncle. They lived in St. Louis until I was around ten, and had always been like grandparents to me. Uncle Perry had left Poplar Bluff in his twenties, and talked about going back home. “You can’t,” he said. Things change, some remain, but the circumstances change, and you change. So what remains? What makes places and things hold us and call to us? Is it really the lamp on the corner end table? The Spode china? The piano with the recently repaired key? The button box? Oh, oh! these things enchant me and exhaust me.
No. Not the clutter. I think what we want is some piece of our lives, some tangible reminder of the stories, some mnemonic trigger to conjure up the faces, the precise feelings we still hold and cherish in our hearts. The comfort of things. And at some point, the courage to let them go.
Coinciding with Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mix Tape, I recently found in my attic a wooden box of cassette tapes. Unlike Sheffield’s, though, mine chronicled an earlier era: early Elvis Costello (at least one whole tape) and Squeeze/the DBs, Bob Marley. We considered this cutting edge at the time. This was even pre-U2. My graduation present was a boombox. When I went away to Mizzou, my brother, a senior in high school at the time, keeper of the stereo and record collection, made two cassettes for me to enjoy in the dorms. He titled one, “Music of Your Life”; the other read “Music of My Life.”
Looking back over years since he made this tape, I remember our basement. My dad, who was a carpenter by trade, finished a playroom, a sewing room for my mom, and a family room—complete with fireplace—in the early 1970s. Our house was a small ranch. Because it was on a hill, it felt like two stories in back, with the basement opening up to the backyard. The room with the back door was the family room. Then there was a hall, a tiny sewing room that my mom never used because it was claustrophobic and lit with fluorescent lights that buzzed. The playroom was at the foot of the stairs that came down from the kitchen.
The playroom had large toy boxes decorated with decals we had picked out to distinguish them. For some reason, I chose frogs and flowers. My brother’s had various American-themed stuff, maybe planes, too. The playroom also had swings, and a train table, complete with train and fake trees. It was fun. Barbie shared her camper with the “Pogo people,” as we called them, that came free with Proctor & Gamble products, and with Big Jim. Barbie may have been infatuated with Ken, or intimidated by G.I. Joe, but we didn’t own those. Big Jim was no match for Barbie. For one thing, she was taller. She also had big boobs and better clothes. I managed to break Big Jim’s bicep by flexing it too many times, and had to spend my own allowance to buy my brother a new doll. Alas, the new Jim never shared the camper with Barbie.
The family room was where all the really good stuff happened. Because it was the only room in the house with a fireplace, it was where Santa had to come in. To make things easy for the overburdened elf, we just put up a second tree down there, for Santa’s presents only. When we got the color TV/stereo/speaker piece upstairs, the old black and white moved to the basement, along with the old record player, and most of the LPs. (The old green radio that had to warm up, that played WIL 1430 in the kitchen when we were getting ready for grade school, also ended up in the basement, but in the unfinished part where my dad had his workbench. We could hear it just fine anywhere in the basement.) The family room was carpeted in the same olive-green shag carpeting that graced the living room floors upstairs. The gun cabinet was there, next to a lumpy fold-out couch. When we built fires, I can remember being excited to hear popcorn hitting the pot lid upstairs. A few minutes later, my mom would carry down the big pyrex yellow mixing bowl, and sometimes we were allowed to have Vess cream soda then. The soda was bright pink and bubbly and I still have never found another brand I like better.
I grew up with a lot of country music. For a long time I didn’t like it because it replayed the wars my parents had on Saturdays. This was the day of the week that two radio shows aired: the Metropolitan Opera, which my mom has always loved; the other the Grand Ole Opry, which my dad had listened to since he was a boy. Sometime after the second or third feature movie on Channel 11, Dad switched on the green radio. My mom by that time already had started listening to Puccini and the witticisms of the opera quizzes upstairs while she worked crossword puzzles and read mysteries in the living room. For at least a couple of hours, both programs overlapped, and my parents used to turn up their own radios to ever increasing volumes to drown out the other. It was quite a cacophony, but Grand Ole always won because it went on into the night.
We didn’t always listen to it all night, though. Hee Haw and the Porter Wagoner Show were on Saturday night, as well. Before my dad started drinking heavily, we used to watch these shows as a family on the color TV upstairs after dinner. As years passed, though, my dad was asleep by the time The Love Boat came on.
So, I did not question why my brother had included the various Hank Williams songs, Jerry Lee Lewis’s menacing rendition of “Chantilly Lace,” Claude King’s “Wolverton Mountain,” or “Tennessee Bird Walk” (my brother won the album from WIL when he was five). I did notice one song of our youth that I had forgotten.
The first song my brother selected was David Rose’s “The Stripper.”
We just always knew that my dad had bought it for my mom before they were married. It was right next to the Jerry Lee Lewis and Hank Williams records in the basement. My grade school friends and I used the fireplace as a stage. We also used to turn off all the lights and put a flashlight on a turntable with mirrors around the room so the light would bounce off. (I’m not sure how we did this while playing the record, but I remember that detail distinctly.) For more mood, we put the cellophane red wrappers from bunches of bananas over the flashlight. This was what my slumber parties were like. I even convinced my mom to buy me a boa once from Eunice Farmer’s, the fabric store we went to at least once a month.
In the cedar closet off the playroom, my mom had a wardrobe of beautiful clothing from the 1950s and 60s. It was an era when ladies wore hats and gloves, girdles and wildly colored slips. Well, at least, my mom did. My mom also flew an airplane and bought a 1961 Galaxy convertible on a whim, so I cannot say her tastes were representative. Still, from the things that she allowed us to have for dress-up, we found plenty to take off, and even got a pretty good idea about how to do a bump and grind. For some reason, no one ever seemed offended by our shows, even though we giggled a lot. Then we chased my brother around the house with Jean Nate or Tinkerbell, or Avon’s Moonwind, collected in bottles shaped like deer or cats or mermaids. No wonder Big Jim left the camper. Oh well, it undoubtedly gave Barbie more time to organize Pogo’s run against Nixon. And Carter. Forget Jim, honey. He wasn’t that big, anyway.
Other selections from the tape came from the soundtrack of The Pink Panther. Henry Mancini was a big part of my life. “If you’re ever going to kiss me, it had better be tonight/while the mandolins are playing and stars are bright.” We used that stuff in the basement when we’d set up the family room as a cocktail lounge. Still the same red-cellophaned light revolving, but now we had set up wood-grained TV trays around the room, with cups of soda and Pepperidge Farm crackers and mixed nuts. I got into trouble more than once for sneaking the adult snacks downstairs. If my friends weren’t over, Pooh bear and Raggedy Ann were the audience. In retrospect, I realize that the cocktail lounge was patterned after the only nice restaurant we ever went to when I was a kid. It was called the Flaming Pit, on 66 in Crestwood. It was the kind of place with dark lighting, a miniscule but expected dance floor, Muzak, gin and tonics, and a deep male voice over the intercom saying “Number 32” as orders came up. I don’t have a sense of what happened in any other sort of restaurant in the 1970s, except Howard Johnson’s. Hojo’s was not the effect I wanted.
On occasion, the family room was a coffee house, and I eased the Morton Salt girl mugs off the umbrella in the kitchen, and tried to play my dad’s huge guitar that he couldn’t play, or my brother’s tiny ukulele, if he let me. He usually didn’t. I wasn’t too successful at either one of those, anyway, so the electric organ was another option that I actually did know how to play. It just wasn’t the effect I was looking for. In fact, I had little idea what kind of music I was supposed to be playing, anyway, beyond “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and the Coke song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” and other things that didn’t openly criticize the war or glorify drugs by sending representatives to Woodstock. Hell, I didn’t even know what Woodstock was when I was a kid; I just knew that it caused a lot of uproar around the house when it was mentioned. I had an older half brother who smelled funny (I recognized that same smell later at a reggae concert) and wore a headband and a leather vest with fringe and had something called VD, and a motorcycle that I burned my leg on. He was also a source of heartache for my dad, even before he started jumping from airplanes. Still, for some reason, it was all right to sing about going to San Francisco with flowers in my hair. Mostly, I played from the Girl Scout Handbook.
My ideas about post-Woodie Guthrie folk music were not to unfold until later. That had to wait. When my brother made the tape, I was innocent. The music we listened to was early REM, the Police, stuff like that. It wasn’t until I started dating older men that I got to hear a lot of Dylan. Bob Dylan, that is. Dylan Thomas was in a poetry anthology up in the living room, and I used to copy “Fern Hill” for calligraphy practice. Still love the stuff.
Wow. What memories…
