What I did on my summer vacation

The summers from third to sixth grade (1963-66) are a little mixed in my mind. This was the period of time when my mother was going to Oklahoma each summer to work on her doctorate from OU, and my dad being also on the academic calendar, we had other activities scheduled too. Since we had family in that part of the country, I spent a fair amount of time with my maternal grandmother and my aunt's family as well.

So there was one year when I started school in Norman, Oklahoma, went for a week or several, and then traveled with the family back to Binghamton to start school again in yet another new classroom. In Norman I had a plaid-patterned metal lunchbox, and a blue canvas bookbag like the college kids carried, which I wore holes in by dragging it bouncing down the sidewalk on the way to the rendezvous where I was getting picked up. By this time I was horse-mad, played at galloping around the school grounds with another girl who was likewise hooked, and also reading the Misty of Chincoteague series. Our family wasn't actually staying in Norman, though, so that must have been the summer when the day included a commute on the interstate to and from Norman to my grandmother's house in Midwest City, outside of OKC, where she was back together with my granddad Mike. I spent part of one summer there, too, writing ironic pastiches of Dick and Jane stories in my grandmother's back sunroom, which was under construction when my brother Geoff was a toddler, so that must have been after my granddad finished the addition.

Another year I had stayed for some weeks with my aunt and uncle in Wichita. My cousin Kathy and I had always been friends and we had lots of adventures, and then when her school year started I went along for a couple weeks in some grade school in Wichita. My aunt and uncle were both actually working days, as I recall, but my cousin was a year older and we were apparently old enough to look after ourselves during the day that summer. (This was something my mother and aunt would assume as they had been on their own at six and eight.) My cousin and I had known each other forever, and she had always lived in the same fifties aqua-colored ranch house in Wichita, and had all the toys I could possibly envy -- the easy-bake oven, the stuffed panda, the toy piano, the spring horse, the swing set, the barbie dream house -- not to mention the Siamese cat. My aunt had recently redecorated the house, with pop art paint and a few pieces of super modern furniture, so Kathy and I spent quite some time that summer drawing elevations and planning our own remodeling, and then composing an elaborate fantasy of having a whole mansion's worth of servants stuffed into that little house and where they would stay and what their duties would be (this was mostly my cousin's idea, possibly from reading Jane Austen, because I knew nothing of butlers or tweenstair maids). We also explored the house upside-down, with the help of a mirror, pretending it was upside-down like the house of Mrs Piggle-Wiggle, one of my own literary favorites.

Then I went back to Binghamton for the main part of the school year, once college classes were in session again, and my dad was teaching there. It seems like those must have been fourth and fifth grade. But perhaps Wichita was before the third grade, as I seem to have been so young, and so extraordinarily disoriented by the move from Massachusetts to New York; and the summer with my dad's mother Alice was the next summer.

Our next cross-country move, when I started sixth grade in yet another new school system, was included in the summer of 1966, when my mother finally got the doctorate and started as an Assistant Professor of English at UW-Whitewater, Wisconsin.

But those summers also included a summer school session when my dad studied in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and another in New York City. (He was studying Arabic at one, and the Noh drama at the other, possibly in that order.) In Ann Arbor we lived in a grad student housing complex, in an upstairs apartment of standard red brick four-unit buildings, with a playground located in the large grassy yard the buildings centered on. My little brother was a toddler there, and enlivened the summer by getting hit in the forehead by a flying wooden swing, which possibly involved emergency stitches although I don't recall going along for the event. There was quite a troop of kids living in those houses, of course, and one evening during a wide-ranging game of tag someone knocked over a grill stored by the back entry of a building that disturbed a colony of hornets, wasps, maybe German yellow-jackets, and I was one of the unfortunates who was chased by far too many of the insects. I was bitten twelve times, mostly on the face and neck, and when there was simply nothing to be done about the pain went on in tears to practice my violin for the usual half-hour.

While we were in Michigan, we also did some family-vacation type things. We went to the Kellogg's plant in Battle Creek, and toured the factory. We went to Dearborn, Michigan, and looked at every blessed thing in the Henry Ford Museum, which has one of the largest automotive collections around, and at every house in nearby Greenfield Village, which was my first encounter with this kind of re-creation and reconstruction of historic buildings. I believe they had some Thomas Edison buildings there... remind me to check my postcard collection.

There was a bookstore that my dad took me to in Ann Arbor, that had a rack of the recently re-issued Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, which he remembered from his boyhood and recommended to me. I studied the offerings, and managed to acquire not nearly enough of them. I learned to check the science fiction racks when we went to any bookstores. Ace Books were putting out not only the Tarzan series, but Burroughs' the Venus and Pellucidar series, with sensational Frank Frazetta or Roy Krenkel covers, and Ballentine was putting out slightly larger parallel editions of the Tarzan books and the complete John Carter of Mars series, although their cover art was not nearly as interesting to me; this was during a period of time when the copyright for the books was apparently in dispute, having possibly fallen briefly into the public domain.

Whenever it was we went to New York City, I was already immersed in Burroughs. In New York we stayed at a hotel for a while, the Atlantic, and I well recall curling up in an armchair, devouring whatever latest Burroughs I had acquired; and then we got a summer sublet, somewhere in midtown maybe. The idea that we were living in someone else's flat was somewhat lost on me, as we always lived in rental housing. My half-brother Chris joined us for part of this time, and we amused ourselves drawing with a set of colored pencils we found in the big desk, and we discovered they would magically make more intense colors when combined with water: now I know these were expensive watercolor pencils, and we sharpened our way through the set with abandon.

But there was a lot to see and go to in New York too. My parents even sprung for some theater tickets for me too, for some of the things they went to see, like A Girl in My Soup and some off-Broadway revues. I saw Everyman being played as street theater in Greenwich Village. My dad took me particularly to the Metropolitan Museum, more than once I think, because the Egyptian exhibits at the entrance became familiar to me; and to the Guggenheim, which was more interesting to me as a building at that point than for anything it had in it. We took a series of busses north to The Cloisters, to see the famous unicorn tapestry, and I was blown away at the idea of the whole building having been taken apart in Europe, labeled, shipped, and reassembled. There was a doll and toy museum, and who knows what else. We walked around the city a lot, and went to a lot of bookstores, because that was what we always did.