Where was I? & Bluejacket

A time passed, and now it seems,
everybody having those dreams.
Everyone can see hisself
walking around with no one else.

I'm going to back up a bit here and explain, which bit? how I got to Wisconsin from Boston? or how I got to Boston from Oklahoma? Not all at the same time, please. This is actually a Boston-to-Oklahoma piece. We did all this more than once, with variations.

I had a teenage babysitter in the neighborhood, but I was not allowed to cross Cabot Street except with the school crossing guard to go to school. There was a lot for my parents to do in the evening in Boston. I gave this babysitter a hard way to go one night, and ended up weeping in her arms and best of friends.

On Cabot Street my mother became hugely pregnant. And when I say hugely, she was originally due in like March, which was obviously a mistake, because my little brother did not arrive (all nine pounds and ten ounces) until the end of May. That was 1963.

We spent a lot of time in VW showrooms, when the price of a VW bug was $1195. I read all the brochures. At some point in that spring our family purchased an anthracite-gray VW, although my father could not drive it. He was a bit of a backseat driver, though, always pointing out to my mother the sound of the engine revving when it was time to shift to a higher gear. It was of course a standard shift, the kind with a clutch, which perhaps needs to be made explicit. He also had seatbelts installed, with giant bolts and shiny metal fixtures attaching them to the frame of the vehicle, which was (unlike the clutch) a big deal at that time. He was that kind of forward-thinking man.

By the end of second grade I had a friend who lived down the block. It is possible her name was Jennie, but I could be mistaken on that. She had a swingset in her back yard, like my cousin's, and we practiced swinging as high as the bar. She taught me "Hook's Tango" from some musical production of Peter Pan that I not seen and still haven't. And then at the end of the school year, we were moving, and I would not see her any more.

We packed everything for the summer into the VW, which was an interesting exercise as the trunk in the VW (you may or may not recall) is under the front hood. We had a luggage rack on the top too. The air-cooled engine is under a tiny little panel in the back. Everything else, and I mean everything, because we had acquired thousands of books in the second-hand bookstores of Boston, went into a Mayflower moving van. And we drove (me in the back, with my brand-new little brother in his carseat) off to the west.

At the time the width of the State of Massachusetts seemed quite wide, a long distance to me. Then there was the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We stayed in Holiday Inns, and I ate fried chicken at every dinner stop. We crossed the Mississippi on a huge bridge, with the map on my lap, and at St Louis we found our way through the city to meet my grandma Verdy at her office job. She was living separate from my granddad at that time.

That left the width of Missouri, which has a fine interstate highway, and a bit of Oklahoma, for the next day's drive. Outside of Tulsa we got off the freeway, and drove up and down increasingly small and dusty red roads to find Bluejacket, Oklahoma, which was not much more than a crossroads, and then its rural Route 2, in the late afternoon, to my dad's mother's ranch. Are we there yet? Turning to cross the cattle guard, a long drive up to the house. The drive was of red-brown smooth washed pebbles, of strangely irregular shape.

Grandma Alice had married a rancher named Guy Holden, who was not going to be a granddad for me, but kept to himself and sat in his chair in the evenings chewing tobacco and spitting into a metal coffee can. He went out every day to take care of the cattle. Sometimes you could see the animals when they came up into the corral next to the barn, safely on the other side of the wooden fence, or the barbed wire, big red angus type steers. We were not allowed in the fields behind the barn. And they had horses. There was a tall white horse named Topper that Gramma Alice said had retired from the circus. There was a smaller riding horse named Lady and a half-pony named Little Horse. And cats, lots of cats that came around the back door to be fed but weren't allowed indoors. Barn cats.

The kitchen was filled with a long table down the middle, with the range and ovens and the area where my gramma cooked on the north window side. On the other side was a fireplace in the middle of the house that opened into the living room as well. We sat in the row of chairs, with Guy on the end like a proper head of the house, and she doled out pancakes, or dinners, or sugar cookies, like she was feeding a farm crew. The back hallway, along the whole rear of the house from the kitchen to the bathroom, held a big chest freezer, and outdoor gear.

There are photos of my little brother, not yet sitting up, in his bucket seat on that high heavy table. But then they were gone, off to Norman for six weeks or so of the summer, for my mother to work on her dissertation. But I was there, with my half-brother Chris for some part of the summer, in the care of our Gramma Alice. It was heavenly, and if I wasn't already horse-mad I was after.

I was a hopeless city kid though. She smacked me once, grabbing me as I walked behind Lady at the feed trough, "Never walk behind a horse!" and gave me to understand it was a living thing that could be startled and kick you senseless without a thought. Nonetheless I thought of them as something like cars, only way cooler. She saddled up Little Horse for me once, and laughed cruelly afterwards at the daylight that showed between my butt and the saddle when he ran away with me.

Alice had a scary old chicken-coop shack out back where she had a collection of toys, that she had stored there for some charity, to which Chris & I had full access. These were other kids' castoffs, dolls which never interested me much and somewhat used stuffed animals, which were not as interesting to us as the collection of mysteriously elegant empty perfume spray bottles.

She dressed us both in little cut-off striped overalls and teeshirts -- there are photos of us, much the same size, tanned and with cropped hair. There was a tornado shelter in the back yard, its slanted door set into the ground, and roses. The yard was fenced off with barbed wire so the stock couldn't wander in. The gate had a weight on it to make it swing shut, which fascinated me, and we were cautioned not to fool with the well cover between the house and garage, which she could see from the window above the sink. On the other side behind the house was a big garden. Alice showed me peanuts she had pulled from the ground, and we took them inside and roasted them in their shells in the bottom of the stove. Just following her around was pretty interesting. She had an electric organ that she practiced every day, and volunteered to teach me a bit, "one up and two down, it's easy as anything, practically plays itself".

Elsie & George got in a bit of a lather when one of the horses chewed a bit on the VW when they had parked it outside the corral. But the garage already had a big Caddy and Guy's pick-up truck in it.

In the back bedroom she kept her son George's medals from Korea, and for sharpshooting. The vanity was hardly more than a shelf, with a skirt that swung out on arms. On the wall was a print of the Guardian Angel, protecting two little children from the storm, which she explained to me.

We visited again on those annual trips to Oklahoma, and then over the years I stayed in touch with her. She told me once that George had been changed when he went to Korea: quite a different person than the bright hopeful son she sent off. And of course she told us about traveling with the circusses and wild-west shows in her youth.