December 13, 2002

• Update: Tuesday December 17

  
  

  As you can see by the date above, I first posted this (privately) last week.  I stopped, and didn’t make it public, because I could not get more than about half the images to upload.  Monsur has offered to help me find out what the problem is.  Apparently, according to the error messages, Xanga doesn’t recognize some of my images as images.  Go figure.  Today, I still had some problems, but I persevered.  Enjoy.

  
  

  Nobody’s childhood is ever all happy.  The frustrations and disillusionments of growing up are present in every young life.  However, I was blessed with loving, well-intentioned parents, and most of my early memories are happy ones.  Few of the pictures I have show anything but smiles.  Maybe my parents made a conscious choice to record only the happier times.  There are no pictures of me in bed with any of the severe illnesses that marked my youth. 

  
  

  I get the impression from the collection of recorded occasions, that they were making a photographic record to remember me by, since I was not expected to live long enough to grow up.  That sort of sentimentality would have been very typical of my mother.

  
  

   Even without any photos to record them, I have no trouble recalling the episodes of high fever, weakness, transient blindness and incoordination and such.  The recent news about smallpox vaccine reminded me of my first life-threatening illness (following the trauma of my birth itself).  It was caused by my smallpox vaccination, when I was a baby, probably only a few months before the above shot of me cleaning the bowl after my mother baked a cake, quite possibly the same cake shown in this shot from my second birthday party.

  
  

  Every time I see a lopsided sloppy cake at a potluck or bake sale, it reminds me of my mother.  Need I say that MY cakes don’t come out looking like that?

  
  

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  This shot of me in sunglasses reminds me somehow of Bette Davis… dunno why.

  
  

  In this shot and the one with cake batter on my face above, my mother has my hair up in pincurls.  Perhaps my subsequent preference for the natural look of my flowing wavy red locks was rebellion against the bother and pain of pincurls and the stink and frizz of perms.  On the other hand, since it really didn’t set in until my hippie years, and I slept in big rollers and ratted my hair in big bouffants in the early ‘sixties, fashion and not rebellion might have been what started me on the natural look.  What keeps me looking natural is just laziness, I guess–a preference for ease, comfort and other ways than my hair to spend my time and money.

  
  

  

  
  

  The shot of me on the concrete lion in Los Gatos at left holds memories of anticipation fulfilled and frustration relieved. 

  
  

  We drove past that builders’ business every time we went through Los Gatos on the way to the Coast.  I begged many times for my father to stop, before he finally did… and of course he got a picture of me on the lion.

  
  

  I never knew the origin of the name Los Gatos (the cats) for that town, but for me it always meant the big cats I saw beside the road as we drove by.

  
  

  

  
  

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  The condition of that sad, decomposing jack o’lantern suggests that I was trying to extend the Halloween fun well into November.

  
  

  Every time I smell the mingled scents of candle wax and scorched pumpkin, it recalls to mind a bunch of childhood memories, of masks, costumes, scary walks up to strange front porches, and big bags of candy dumped onto the kitchen table or my bed for sorting and gloating.

  
  

  Halloween was my favorite holiday long before Greyfox and I married on that day 12 years ago and it became my wedding anniversary.

  
  

  I remember how that mask smelled and tasted, too.  It was red and black, a demonic thing I picked out myself.  Made of starched and painted gauze, by the time I was through with trick-or-treating the area around the mouth was wet, soft and deformed.  Being inside the mask was a lot like sticking one’s head into a paint can… intoxicating fumes.  That was the 1940s.  Needless to say, they don’t make them like that anymore, or if they do they’re not allowed to sell them in this country.

  
  

  “Bubble stuff”, the  jars and bottles of soapy liquid for blowing bubbles, was a favorite plaything.  I still have fun with it, and many times in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, long after I had supposedly grown up, I took bottled bubbles to rock concerts and music festivals, doing the Hippie thing.

  
  

  Beside me on the crate at left is a puddle of spilled bubble stuff.  What’s left in the jar in my hand is barely enough to wet the wand.  My mother had heard me crying over the spill.  I was frantically using the wand to scrape up the stuff and blow bubbles before it soaked into the wood.  If Mama didn’t summon up the old saw about not crying over spilled milk that time, she made up for it a thousand other times, but I seem to recall a bit of discussion then of it’s not being milk… always the picky literal-minded Virgo, me, demanding precision and accuracy.

  
  

  

  
  

  My first movie heroes were cowboys:  Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Bob Steele, but more than any others I loved Lash LaRue.  Bob Steele was so heroic, and I loved watching him jump from rooftops onto his horse and ride after the bad guys, but the man wore lipstick, fercrissake, and that was a baffling anomaly to the child I was.  Autry was a good singer, but his movies were kinda hokey, something I recognized even then but probably couldn’t articulate.

  
  

  Roy Rogers had the same mixed Native American heritage as my family and looked a lot like some of my uncles and cousins, so he was like family, and Hoppy was just a chubby, friendly older man, but Lash Larue was SEXY.  I don’t know if I even knew the word at that age, but I felt the attraction.  The rope I’m holding in this picture was meant to be a lasso, but for me it was a whip.  I might have spent a few minutes trying to learn to swing a loop, but I spent days and days learning to crack the whip.

  
  

  

  
  

  I’ve always loved to get up high so I could see farther.  That includes ferris wheels, airplanes, and elevators to the tops of tall buildings, but often throughout my life has simply involved climbing rocks or ladders. 

  
  

  When Doug was little, I got a small taste of what my mother went through with me.  I say “small” not because he didn’t climb as much as I did, but because my parenting philosophy is a lot less anxious and protective than my mother’s.  When he was about four or five, he climbed a tree above the spring (you’ve seen it in “water run” blogs), fell from it and rolled down the slope.

  
  

  After the old lodge at Sheep Creek burned down, while the new one was under construction, Doug went to the top of a 40-foot ladder before someone noticed and called my attention.  He didn’t want to come down, and no one wanted to go up, so we had a shouted, not-so-brief parent-child conversation as I persuaded him that I knew he was perfectly safe and competent, but that his being up there was scaring some of the other adults, and might lead other, less competent, kids to try it.  Then there was the time after the lodge was completed, when he found enough hand-and-footholds to go up the outside wall.  When I saw him, he was up under the eaves, looking down on a small impotent knot of kids on the porch who were trying to find the first handhold.  

  
  

  I always find it hard to remonstrate with him for such stunts, because my predominant feeling in these instances is admiration for his courage and competence.  For me, in childhood, courage and competence were always asserted with defiance.

  
  

  I had my parents’ practical example to follow when Doug was an adventurous toddler, and I didn’t hesitate to harness and put a leash on him.  My harness and leash were brown leather.  Doug’s were all the colors of the rainbow, like Mork from Ork’s suspenders, and the leash had a Velcro band that attached to my wrist.  Harnessing kids was unusual when I wore one, but no longer.  In an earlier blog I mentioned going off the side of the Santa Cruz pier.  I think, on reflection, that I already had the harness then.  It was an incident in downtown San Jose, when I slipped away from my mother, between parked cars and into honking traffic, that motivated my mom to harness me.

  
  

  Several of the pictures I have of me as a child show me in the harness or being restrained somehow, such as this one with my cousin Duane “Buddy” Scott in my grandparents’ yard in Redlands.  I really don’t know how much influence the restraint in childhood had on my current love of unbridled liberty.  I tend to think that my innate love of liberty had more of an influence on those around me to try and restrain it.  In the days before fast films, there were no action shots.  It was either hold the kid still or get a picture of a blur.  I’m a blur in more than one of the pictures I have.

  
  

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  I have by no means exhausted the childhood photo collection, but getting these things uploaded to Xanga has exhausted me.  For now, this shot of me with my cousin Linda is the last.  Her grandpa, my Uncle Hubert AKA “Unkie” is the one in the pith helmet.

  
  

  

  • 5:18 pm
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