A peripatetic, picaresque childhood

I have just had to go read a couple chapters of Anne Lamott's book on writing and life, Bird by Bird, because this whole life of mine has just turned into such a monumentally unscalable mountain of memories. There are details that I have left out of these brief summaries, like the pink sparkly zippered purse I had in third grade that I lost down the storm sewer at the bus stop with my house key in it, or the list of churches I went to, which is short enough that I can actually remember almost every time I went; and there are big things like my grandma's house in Midwest City, which was so full of stuff you could hardly walk through the living room. It was one of those houses that came to have narrow aisles through all the furniture and knickknacks and piles of treasure. My life has been like that and now I am trying to find the aisles and maybe widen them out a bit so we can move around here.

So just to get a grand overview of the general sweep of the fractal mountain before us, remember that I was born in Oklahoma, and by the time I was eighteen the tale of how I had come to Wisconsin had gotten long enough that I was able to entertain a table full of strangers with the narrative at Thanksgiving dinner.

As an infant I lived on Mallard Drive in Del City, Oklahoma, which is outside of Oklahoma City where my mom and dad had grown up and gone to high school. But then after a couple of years my mom Elsie took me to Corpus Christi, Texas, and when we came back to Oklahoma she started to grad school in the English Department at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. We lived in grad student housing, in a neighborhood called the pre-fabs, because they were pre-fabricated wartime housing units that were all white with peeling paint that we kids liked to chip off of the walls -- like peeling a sunburn -- which probably had a lot of lead in it. First we were in G-18, where we had an upright piano, that was left behind when we went to live in A-23 (I think it was 23) which was on the other end and several rows down, where my new dad George moved in with us. He was in grad school in English too. I went briefly to the kindergarten on campus, which I recall as a big room full of excellent toys and other children, where I learned The Eensy-Weensy Spider.

But then upon gaining a doctorate, George got a teaching job in Boston, and we traveled by train to Boston, Massachusetts. That first summer for a while we lived in a basement-level sublet of one of the old row houses on Massachusetts Avenue in the Back Bay. Then we moved to the suburb of Newton, and my parents took the MTA into the city every day, where he taught English at BU and she worked at Ginn & Co as a textbook editor. I went to first grade at Beethoven School, and then we moved to a different neighborhood and I went to second grade at Cabot School. And then George interviewed and got a different job, a better position, at Harpur College in Binghamton, New York, so we moved there, and I went to third grade at Alexander Hamilton School and to fourth and fifth grade at Thomas Jefferson School.

Then my mother got her doctorate, and they both interviewed at the MLA and both were hired by the English Department of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. So we moved to Wisconsin. I went to sixth grade at Lincoln School, and then to seventh grade at Franklin Junior High School, which was possibly the most miserable year of my life as far as school went. We moved from a two-bedroom flat on the outskirts of town to a large rambling bungalow-style duplex in the downtown, on Center Street, and then we stayed there for three years in a row, which was the longest I had ever lived in the same place in my life. For eighth grade I got out of the public school and was admitted to the campus school, Roseman Elementary. But the next year my classmates and I were all dumped in with the general population at Whitewater High School. We were the peak year of the Baby Boom, and the entire four years of classes made a student body of around 800. I kept up with the French I had learned at Roseman, and went to a French summer lycee in Switzerland that the high school French teacher recruited a few of us for, and by tenth grade I started to have a group of friends, some of whom I actually still know.

But then my mother got a position in English and Women's Studies at San Diego State College in California and we moved to San Diego, taking me and my little brother with her. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment near campus. I went to Crawford High School there for about a month, and missed my friends terribly, and then I went to a private "free" school called Abraxas School, which was not nearly as well-organized at that time as it became later. After a few months, we moved to a big duplex bungalow-style house off 30th Street just north of the barrio, when my mother's boyfriend and his son came to live with us. I spent a month at the winter holidays back in Whitewater, crashing with one friend's family after another. When I got back to San Diego, it developed that Abraxas was kind of closing down, so I took the SATs and typed up a high school transcript for myself and applied to a couple of colleges in California, and a couple of colleges in Wisconsin, where my dad George was still living.

And so I came to matriculate at the UW-Madison, in 1972, at age seventeen. The first year I found myself a single room in an off-campus dorm, and the next summer I moved into a housing co-op. My boyfriend there took me to that Thanksgiving dinner where I was telling my travels.

But the story goes on. I was rather in the habit of moving house every year by that time. Doesn't everybody?