San Jose, CA, 1951
This episode of my memoirs fits after the series of childhood photo blogs at the beginning, and before the sex addiction blog.
My parents had grown up on farms in Kansas and Nebraska. It was the Great Depression and they were both working hard to make ends meet in Colorado when they met. Their economic struggle continued until World War II and the wonders of a booming California economy. When I was six, we moved from the rented three-room shotgun house at 302 Fox Avenue, on the edge of San Jose’s industrial district, to our own home.
Our house at 968 Delmas in the Willow Glen district had six rooms, a full basement and a garage. Front and back yards were bigger than those at the other place. We left behind an almond tree, an apricot tree, and a fence covered with red geraniums. Our new house had two English walnut trees at the curbside, three peach trees in the backyard, rosebushes lining the driveway, and an established perennial garden in which garlic predominated.
The fireplace, chimney, and hearth in the dining room were built of brick salvaged from the Great San Francisco Earthquake and its subsequent fire. That brick fascinated me. It was covered by irregular, swirled red and black glaze with a few enigmatic charred inclusions. The fireplace was in the northeast corner of the dining room, by the door into the kitchen. In the south wall was a bay window with a built-in bench. Beneath the bench, under a pair of trap-doors, was a concealed storage area. The house was full of big closets and built-in storage.
The layout of our big new house was like two of our little houses side-by-side, with interconnecting doors. Along the north side were three bedrooms. Mama and Daddy took the front, west-facing, bedroom. Between it and my room was the bathroom. Their room opened off the living room. Mine opened off the dining room. At the back, the bedroom off the kitchen became my father’s den. That room and the kitchen both opened onto a screen-enclosed porch under which was the entry to the basement from the backyard.
The slanted basement door became my favorite place to play, bouncing tennis balls and basketballs off the door. The thump-thump-thump of my studies in the physics of angular momentum drove my mother nuts, but as I think I mentioned earlier, that drive was really only a short putt.
The lathe, drill press and other tools and equipment from my father’s workshop went into the basement, along one wall where there was already a row of workbenches and shelves. In one back corner of the basement there was a square of wooden floor, and the rest, including the workshop area, was floored with dirt. It was musty, dusty, dim and chilly.
The furniture from my playhouse was placed in the floored and finished area of the basement, but I seldom played there. When I was in the basement, I was usually occupied with whatever my father was doing. When I was playing alone, it was either in and around the garage in back where I was a cowgirl riding the range beside my imaginary boyfriend Bill, or skating on the sidewalk out front and the length of the concrete driveway, playing Roller Derby.
I had wanted skates for a long time, and after we moved, in the “better” neighborhood, my parents decided I was finally old enough for my first sidewalk skates. The sidewalk was far from smooth and level. Tree roots had buckled and cracked it, making it challenging until I mastered the skates, and then a lot more fun than a smooth course would have been.
My parents and I were very happy with the house and neighborhood. Upward mobility had to have been an element, but even greater than that was having more space, so I could have a room of my own for the first time. Another great thing about the new location was that we were close enough to my father’s best friend Buck Rodgers that his family dropped in on us more often and we often went to their house for Sunday dinner. I loved that. Buck said he was Portuguese (Is Rodgers an Iberian surname?) but his culinary specialty was Italian. He did the Sunday cooking. That was when I learned to make ravioli, among other things.
Our new house also brought us closer to an old friend of the family, Eula Estrada. A widow who seemed ancient to me then and might have been anywhere between sixty and eighty, she lived alone in a big old Victorian house only about three blocks away. Sometimes I was allowed to walk over there alone to spend an afternoon with Auntie Eula, having tea and cookies with her and playing in and around the huge mulberry tree in her magnificent backyard. The yard was lush and overgrown with exotic shrubs and flowering plants, criscrossed with narrow paths, dotted with benches and birdbaths, a sundial and a reflective glass globe on a pedestal.
She insisted I call her Auntie Eula. She was of an old Californio family, always dressed in black silk, in styles that were about two decades out of fashion in 1951. Her salon, as she called the room off her foyer, was filled with aspidistra and philodendron plants, its walls lined with bookcases and curio cabinets. Eula enjoyed showing me her souvenirs and telling me their stories. I enjoyed looking and listening.
I started second grade at Broadway School weeks before my seventh birthday. So far from the old neighborhood and the kids I knew, my birthday party was mostly my parents’ friends and a few of their kids. I recall some of the gifts I received. My Aunt Nora gave me a stack of wonderful OLD used books, including Black Beauty and Heidi, some Bobbsey Twins mysteries, and Ivanhoe. My parents gave me a NEW 20-some volume set of Childcraft Books, filled with fact and fiction, myth and fable: the start of my mythology collection. My father’s cousin Richard gave me an electric woodburning kit. It was fascinating, marvelous. My mother would not let me plug it in. She was afraid I’d burn myself.
I liked the new school better than the old one. It was a sprawling single-story place with an internal courtyard, and the old one had been old, with smaller windows and a colder, harsher feel to it. It was still school, however, and I was the new kid. But there was another new kid, too, so it wasn’t so bad. Lyndon Cramer was from England. For some reason, other kids had, or pretended to have, a hard time understanding his classy accent. He was perfectly intelligible to me. Lyndon and I clicked, bonded, and he became my first real boyfriend. Donald and Leroy didn’t count, being more like brothers to me.
Second grade was very easy (the “academic” part, anyway). The rest of the class was learning to read. I had been reading the newspaper since before kindergarten. As the Dick and Jane readers were being passed out on the first day of school, I read mine cover-to-cover. My dyslexia made printing practice somewhat challenging. I was still tending to confuse b and d or p and q, to print n and a backwards, but my teacher was patient and understanding. I was a math whiz–at home we were just starting on long division and multiplication of three-digit numbers. My father was learning to do long division along with me, teaching as he learned.
On a Friday, the last day of November, 1951, I got in trouble. I don’t recall what Mama was mad at me about. I tried to lie my way out of it, and that’s where I got into REAL trouble. When my father got home, she told him and he took me down to the basement. He sat on a box, turned me over his knee and smacked my bottom with his razor strop (a thick 3-inch wide leather strap, for those who don’t recall straight razors and their accessories) three times. I cried, then he shed some tears and told me in a cracking voice that it hurt him more than it did me. I didn’t believe him. I was furious, angry as only a spoiled little red-haired girl can be.
I was still angry the next morning when I got up. Mama was in the kitchen, but Daddy was still in bed. It was Saturday, so we would have been on our way to the lake and our houseboat for a weekend of fishing, would have left before dawn, if he had been well. I’d never seen him ill. He had never missed a day of work due to illness. Mama gave me breakfast and sent me into the yard to play. She suggested I go in their bedroom and talk to Daddy, but I didn’t want to.
I was sitting on the ground at the south side of the house, playing with a lush mound of some succulent plant I called my “treasure”, when the ambulance came for Daddy. As it pulled away, I gritted my teeth and wished he would die.
I never saw him again. He had an open-casket funeral, but I don’t recall looking into the casket. What I recall of the funeral is in that sex addiction episode.
] and a different perspective on the events will undo a nasty little karmic kink for us.
My
Firewalking, anyone? 
Bleak as it is, I decided to zip out there in my robe and yeti-feet slippers and get some pics to show the transformation. *shiver* Brrr. That was imprudent. Right now, it doesn’t know whether to rain, sleet or snow, so what’s happening is that slush is falling from the sky. 
Xanga’s changed. I’m trying to decide whether to just adjust or to tweek. Whatever turns out to be easiest… I’ll adapt.
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