May 8, 2003

• San Jose, 1952

  
  

  The immediate background for this part of the story is HERE and HERE.

  
  

  

  
  

  I saw a lot more of my father’s best friends Al Walker (2nd from left) and “Buck” Rogers (the tall man with bottle and gun, flanked by his sons Roy and Bob) after Daddy died than I ever had while he was alive.  They stepped in to help fill his shoes for a while, and it was fortunate that they did.  My mother was devastated and not up to the task she was faced with.  Buck and his wife, and our old neighbors Erne and Ella Gustafson, helped her clean out a lot of Daddy’s things, sell his power tools, etc.  We had an immediate need for money without his paycheck every week.

  
  

  Mama had worked part-time since I started to school and now she was looking for better-paying full time work.  She entered an on-the-job training program for “nutritionists” (just cooks, nothing more) in the public school cafeterias.  She was overjoyed that it meant she would not be working weekends or school holidays and could be home when I was.  I don’t think she thought it through very fully.  She soon found out that her paychecks for that full-time work were less than she was making part-time in the Thrifty Drug lunch counter, after her tips were figured in.  But she didn’t have to pay child care or work weekends, so that helped.  She also hadn’t thought through what she would do for income during the summer months.  When she finally thought about it, we scrimped and tried to sock a little away for summer.

  
  

  Someone must have suggested to my mother that I needed diversion.  The first thing she suggested to me was music lessons.  I recall a shopping trip to a music store where we looked at instruments.  I saw a “beautiful” accordion.  It was all shiny and colorful, and if I were describing it from my current perspective I’d call it garish.  But the little girl I was at the time coveted it immediately.

  
  

  My mother’s budget might have stretched to cover a harmonica or a little recorder, possibly an ocarina, maybe, but not the lessons to learn to play any of them.  I never heard anything more about music lessons. 

  
  

  Marlene Gustafson (kneeling to left of me) was a few years older than I.  They had lived two doors down from us in the little house on Fox Avenue.  I had been wearing Marlene’s hand-me-downs all my life.  She was taking twirling lessons, and that was where I ended up.  I did eventually gain some twirling skill, on my own over years of solitary practice with the baton Mama bought for me then. 

  
  

  In those lessons with Marlene and about fifty other girls, in a quonset hut that had been an airplane hangar during WWII, all I ever got was bruises from the rubber baton tip, frustration, and public humiliation.  When the instructor told my mother I needed a sequined costume so I could march with the company in a parade, Mama explained to me that she couldn’t afford the costume.  I dropped the lessons.  I wondered even then why she had let me start it if I just had to quit so soon.

  
  

  One Saturday when Marlene and her mother came for a visit, Marlene brought her new puppy, Trinket (the lighter-colored pup in the crook of my right elbow here) and Trinket’s brother.  The male puppy was for me.  I didn’t expect my mother to let me keep him because she had always made me give back every dog I’d ever been given.  This time she relented.  I named the black and tan pup Mugsy, after my favorite Bowery Boy.

  
  

  I checked out a book on dog training from the library.  My mother’s chief concern was Mugsy’s housebreaking, and I watched him like a hawk, scooping him up and setting him on a newspaper each time he started sniffing around or squatting.  Very soon we only needed to put down paper for him when we left for school, because he would let us know when he needed to go out.  He was so well paper-trained within a short time that once when we went on a quick trip to the grocery store and forgot to put down a paper for him, he left a neat pile of feces on a small strip of cash register tape under the table. 

  
  

  I loved that dog.  He owned my heart.  He became the first dog my mother made me take to the pound when we moved.  For some reason, she would never consider taking a dog with us when we moved… but I’m getting a bit ahead of my story here.

  
  

  The spring after my father’s death, we got our first TV, a 17″ black and white Zenith.  I recall the season because one of the first things we watched on it was the Kentucky Derby.  My mother bet me a quarter that Native Dancer, the favorite, would win.  I watched the horses prance to the starting gate, and bet on the one who showed the most energy and spirit:  Dark Star.  Dark Star won.  I’ve always been good at picking winners.

  
  

  Needing more money, Mama decided to rent out part of our house.  Buck Rogers and his sons built a partition and installed a shower on the screened-in back porch where there was already a toilet and a pair of laundry sinks.

  
  

  Mama slept in one corner of the back bedroom that had been Daddy’s den, and I kept my room, sharing it with boxes and heaps of Mama’s stuff.  Her clothes went into my closet and her closet became our pantry and dish cupboard.  She cooked our meals on a 2-burner electric hot plate on a metal cart next to the closet door.  The other four rooms she rented to Marie (right, above) and Tobe Patterson.

  
  

  Mama started talking about leaving California not long after that.  The way she kept presenting the idea to me was that she saw Daddy everywhere she looked in that house.  It made her cry.  He wasn’t there for me, but then of course I’d killed him, so I supposed that was to be expected.  I didn’t know what she meant.  I didn’t really want to go anywhere. 

  
  

  I learned much later that Mama’s determination to leave California was based on an incident with the state’s child welfare agency.  One day when I was ill she asked our tenant Marie Patterson to look after me while she worked.  A neighbor across the street saw Mama leave for work without me and called the welfare people, thinking that I had been left alone in the house. 

  
  

  The incident was easily resolved, I’m sure, but it left Mama shaken, scared, and wanting out of there.  She told me years later that she just couldn’t cope on her own and wanted to get back “home” to Kansas.  When she felt she was threatened with being declared an unfit mother and having me taken from her, she wanted to flee. 

  
  

  She knew that California had the country’s strictest child welfare laws and wanted to live somewhere with more old-fashioned codes of family law, where children were their parents’ concern, not the government’s.  Being “on Welfare”, going begging to the government, was anathema, a scarier thought than going hungry.  We didn’t really ever go hungry, but we ate lots of cheap starchy food.  Both of us were pasta and potato addicts, as far back as I can remember.

  
  

  I had never gone hungry in my life, but she had.  It’s probably one reason she tended so to run to fat.   The first time I recall ever going hungry was during that time that my father’s friends were including me in their weekend plans to give my mother some leisure alone.  I went with the Walkers to a reservoir an hour or so out of town.  We ate the picnic lunch early and didn’t get home until after dark.  I got hungry long before we got home. 

  
  

  It was the first time I felt the deep ache of hunger in my belly and the headache, chills and nausea that follows the first pangs.  I was crying most of the way home.  I told my mother I was starving to death.  She sat me at the kitchen table and looked in the cupboard.  There was one can of soup, chicken noodle.  I hated chicken noodle soup.  The only canned soup I liked at all was tomato, but I’d tolerate vegetable.  We had no tomato, and not even any bean with bacon, only nasty chicken noodle.  I sniffled and sniveled and ate the chicken noodle. It was delicious–best food I had ever tasted.  Since then, it has always been my favorite soup.

  
  

  I was in second grade at Broadway School in our new neighborhood when Daddy died.  They promoted me to 3rd grade in the middle of that year.  My mother finished up her training and went to work as a cook’s helper in a high school for the rest of that school year.  That summer, we went from one aunt’s or uncle’s house to another, living off our relatives.

  
  

  The best was “Aunty Pat”, my mother’s half sister, Nora Gavin.  She had all the class in that family.  She was widowed young in World War II, childless when my mother’s brother Earl’s wife had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized.  Nora adopted their middle child, red-haired Virginia. (shown here between my father and her adoptive mother Nora, who preferred being called Pat) She supported them and sent Virginia to college working in the lingerie department of an upscale department store.

  
  

  She had books, not very many of them, and not one piece of trashy fiction.  Her apartment was small, quiet and cool.  There was a comfortable chair under a floor lamp where she read in the evenings.  While she was at work I’d curl up there and read.  At her house that summer I read all of Poe’s “Tales”.  I also read Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.  I got so into Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that I later checked it out of the library so I could finish it.

  
  

  The year I was in 4th Grade, my mother was to be the sole kitchen staff at Longfellow Elementary School on the north side of San Jose, across town from where we lived.  She got permission for me to transfer to that school so I could go in early and stay late with her, and not need other afterschool supervision.  I spent most of that time on the monkey bars in the schoolyard.  When the weather was bad, I would hang around the cafeteria, either reading at one of the tables or standing on a chair beside Mama, watching and learning.  Many of my basic, most important culinary skills go back to that.

  
  

  

  
  

  That winter, my mother got an exciting phone call late one evening.  Jim Henry had been her first boyfriend when she was about sixteen.  My grandfather had run him off.  My great Uncle Walter, Mother’s father’s brother, and his wife Lilly had been traveling through Arkansas when they had a flat tire.  They ended up in a tire shop in Pine Bluff near Little Rock, where they saw a familiar face:  Jim Henry.  When he found out that his old time sweetheart was newly widowed, he got her number and called her.

  
  

  That changed everything.
  

  • 10:24 pm
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