When I was nine, shortly after my little brother was born, I started writing rhyming verse. It was very bad, as one might expect. My parents, both of them English teachers, let me know that it was very bad. I was crushed. It is hard to be up against all of English literature at an early age. There are many teachers of writing and English who believe that harsh criticism is appropriate for anyone who imagines they want to write, basically to keep the riff-raff out.
But people who unkindly discourage a child's doggerel, honestly, shouldn't their license to parent be revoked? Ah yes, we don't actually require any certifications of aptitude for prospective parents, do we. In postindustrial society parenting is one of the last folk arts! unqualified, uncertified, unprofessional! Unlike poetry.
(As I write this, desparate parents are abandoning their children to the State of Nebraska, which has promised to take care of them, while the lawmakers hurry to revise the loophole in the law that meant only to take in infants from those unable or unprepared for parenthood.)
My career as a playwright began even earlier and has come to even less, to this point at any rate. But I digress.
At fourteen I discovered the rhyming dictionary section at the back of my Webster's dictionary. We were living on Center Street in Whitewater, during one of those periods of months when my brother Chris lived with us and went to school with me. I perused the rhyme schemes and picked a lengthy entry full of likely words to construct a rhymed, rhythmic, free verse, with a great many short lines. Chris informed me it was pretty bad. I thought a lot of his opinion, which seemed far more refined than my own, and was discouraged.
After that I confined my involvement with poetry to reading. We had a poetry section in the Introduction to Literature that was one of my ninth grade English classes (an introduction, as though we'd never met). I read more of the text than the assignments, as was my custom. That was how I discovered e. e. cummings. The journal I had started, during boring stretches of classtime and other odd moments, lost not only punctuation and capitalization but even paragraphing.
My mother had heaps of fat poetry textbooks in her office at the university, that had been given to her by textbook publishers' representatives, in hopes that she would order them for her classes, with titles like Poetry and Introduction to Poetry and even Live Poetry. So I took them and read them right through. More or less. Anything that didn't lose my attention after the first few lines, I continued reading. So eventually I read very widely among the briefer, more frequently anthologized poets.
While we were in San Diego, my mother had heaps of feminist periodicals in her office. These were publishing quite a lot of poetry at that time, as there was something of a poetry boom in the women's movement, of both confessional and political bent. As I leafed through the newsprint pages, I found some that I quite liked. There's poetry in all our hearts, though we've been taught otherwise. I began typing out copies of them for myself, as writing out copies by hand or typer was at the time the only way to make single copies. I acquired an old Underwood manual typewriter for this purpose, that had something wrong with the shift key so that the capital letters were slightly dropped. It was some time before I began using paper that wasn't scrap, discarded ditto sheets.
The next year when I went to college, I took the poetry textbooks with me. I marked my favorites with oak leaves, pressed between the pages of these tomes -- some are still there. The stacks of Memorial Library were open, and I found more of e. e. cummings in my wanderings. I had a better typewriter, and copied out some of my selections over again on clean paper, and had by this time started numbering the sheets. I continued collecting poetry, from songwriters and miscellaneous sources, anything that struck my fancy, for more than a hundred pages.
Poetry was not something that I could do, though. Not merely me. The way art classes had convinced me that I was hopelessly uncreative, my schooling had managed to inoculate me against the possibility of writing something of the kind myself. However talented I might have thought myself as a child, I was unanointed by any recognition. By the time I got out of college in fact I wasn't even reading anymore -- not even the textbooks.
For better or worse, that wore off. I got a job in civil service, and then several other kinds of jobs, and moved several times, and began to think again that I could write, although what I might write was always a question. I had no contacts of any kind with the publishing world -- except my mother, who had published several scholarly books. Like I say, no actual contacts. Another decade went by. I married, and had a child. And then I found fandom, where people read books, and fanwriting, or it found me: drafted me, picked my name literally out of a hat, and honored me.
When I wrote my Guest of Honor speech for that convention I was at the same time up to my nose in public readings and writing activities with The Writers Place, which was a sort of local arts nonprofit that sponsored classes and had an office, classroom, reading space. I had taken a class there in writing fiction -- what is called mainstream fiction, not genre fiction -- and our class continued to meet as a writing group afterwards for many months. I was writing Raymond Carver type stories, grim realism, which was the dominant style of the dwindling mainstream of the time. One of the people in the class (a colleague of my dad's at the English Department in Whitewater actually) one evening after our meeting took me for a good time to a bar, for an open-mike poetry reading, which was a new thing.
We paused in the entry, at the door. Lights twinkled in the dark like Christmas. Someone was reading aloud inside, and as though it were a concert, we didn't want to interrupt them with our entrance. That was early days with the Cheap At Any Price Poets, where not-very-harsh criticism was given with tongue in cheek: poems scored on a ten-point scale like Olympic skating, by randomly chosen judges. We stepped in as the crowd was applauding.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
Sunday School
The longest stretch of Sunday school I had was probably when we lived in Binghamton, although now I think it may have lasted only a few weeks. I had friend named Brenda, and our friendship had progressed to the intimacy of staying overnight, and staying over on Saturday inevitably led to attending Sunday school with her the next morning. My parents were likely to sleep in on Sundays if at all possible, and did not object to me being dropped off afterwards.
Brenda was a pale, skinny girl, with a tendency to look a bit gray under the eyes. We were at that age around ten when the bones start lengthening, and the slender begin to look downright sticklike. She had pale brown hair, what we politely called ash blonde, that curled up on the ends in a fashion that in those days required elaborate preparations with rollers, making her head rather larger and her slenderness more apparent. This was the chief thing she was ridiculed for, the other children in our class being as unkind as any at that age. I had an assortment of such characteristics too, with braces, and having glasses and being "smart" were the marks of Cain that we shared. Our friendship was a refuge for both of us.
While I don't recall her house I recall the church vividly. The Sunday school was in the basement, a crowded room with white-wrapped heating pipes. I was greatly impressed with the way some of the children had learned to recite the books of the Bible (Ezra-Nehemiah-Esther-Job!) in an ongoing competition. (First and second Kings! first and second Chronicles!) You could see the list at the beginning of the book, and it seemed quite formidable to me. As it was a Presbyterian church we had history lessons from a book on the Adventures of John Knox, which were very exciting, set in Scotland, with many persecutions and narrow escapes. Being the kind of child I was, I always finished the assigned reading quickly and went on to read the earlier sections I had missed, about the corruption of the Catholic church, Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door, and ahead, to John Calvin.
Brenda's mother must have been rather appalled at the lack of any church whatsoever in my life, because soon I was going to choir practice with her too, on a weeknight. This did not last long. Easter was coming up, and at the point we were supposed to be getting choir robes, the choir director seemed to have noticed that I was not strictly speaking a member of the church, and neither were my parents. A terrible scene ensued, that simply consisted of me being pointed out as not belonging there, and all the other children staring at me. Then Brenda's mother arrived to pick us up, and words were quietly exchanged. Perhaps the lack of Christian charity in turning away a child who has come to church thus on her own was pointed out.
So I was not allowed to march down the aisle with the rest of the choir on Palm Sunday, as we had been practicing. I did get to watch the pageantry from the right-hand balcony -- it was one of those Colonial buildings with balconies on each side of the altar. Right balcony if you are standing at the door, left balcony if you are at the altar. It was something of a relief to me, actually, as I had felt ill-prepared for the performance. The songs were not at all familiar to me and Brenda was the only other kid I knew there.
But I do not recall attending the Easter service at that church. Brenda and her family were suddenly too busy.
Jesus loves the little children,
all the little children of the world.
Whether yellow, black or white,
we are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
Brenda was a pale, skinny girl, with a tendency to look a bit gray under the eyes. We were at that age around ten when the bones start lengthening, and the slender begin to look downright sticklike. She had pale brown hair, what we politely called ash blonde, that curled up on the ends in a fashion that in those days required elaborate preparations with rollers, making her head rather larger and her slenderness more apparent. This was the chief thing she was ridiculed for, the other children in our class being as unkind as any at that age. I had an assortment of such characteristics too, with braces, and having glasses and being "smart" were the marks of Cain that we shared. Our friendship was a refuge for both of us.
While I don't recall her house I recall the church vividly. The Sunday school was in the basement, a crowded room with white-wrapped heating pipes. I was greatly impressed with the way some of the children had learned to recite the books of the Bible (Ezra-Nehemiah-Esther-Job!) in an ongoing competition. (First and second Kings! first and second Chronicles!) You could see the list at the beginning of the book, and it seemed quite formidable to me. As it was a Presbyterian church we had history lessons from a book on the Adventures of John Knox, which were very exciting, set in Scotland, with many persecutions and narrow escapes. Being the kind of child I was, I always finished the assigned reading quickly and went on to read the earlier sections I had missed, about the corruption of the Catholic church, Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door, and ahead, to John Calvin.
Brenda's mother must have been rather appalled at the lack of any church whatsoever in my life, because soon I was going to choir practice with her too, on a weeknight. This did not last long. Easter was coming up, and at the point we were supposed to be getting choir robes, the choir director seemed to have noticed that I was not strictly speaking a member of the church, and neither were my parents. A terrible scene ensued, that simply consisted of me being pointed out as not belonging there, and all the other children staring at me. Then Brenda's mother arrived to pick us up, and words were quietly exchanged. Perhaps the lack of Christian charity in turning away a child who has come to church thus on her own was pointed out.
So I was not allowed to march down the aisle with the rest of the choir on Palm Sunday, as we had been practicing. I did get to watch the pageantry from the right-hand balcony -- it was one of those Colonial buildings with balconies on each side of the altar. Right balcony if you are standing at the door, left balcony if you are at the altar. It was something of a relief to me, actually, as I had felt ill-prepared for the performance. The songs were not at all familiar to me and Brenda was the only other kid I knew there.
But I do not recall attending the Easter service at that church. Brenda and her family were suddenly too busy.
Jesus loves the little children,
all the little children of the world.
Whether yellow, black or white,
we are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
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?
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?
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Audacity of hope
Today I am just going to write my words. I went into the coffee shop this morning, and as usual the baristas asked me how I am doing, and I had been thinking about it. I have been continuing a little overwrought emotionally, after holding my hopes in check for so many months before Obama's election, and carefully, right up through election night, not saying anything prematurely prideful that might attract the attention of vengeful gods. Last week I may even have privately promised any stray Powers that I will to go to church, if only this just wouldn't be screwed up. Less than a year ago I was enough of a cynic to say, No Way In Hell; now hell's done froze over, and we gots ice skates all around.
"I have been waiting for this election for forty years," I told them. "I'm like, just a minute, where am I? what happened?" How could it have taken my country so long to join me, here in the future, where my hair has gone gray with waiting?
Joe laughed, which is why I always talk to him. "Yeah, it's about time."
"Darn right," I said. That seemed a little mild. "Fucking-A right," I said, feeling like the foul-mouthed college student inside, and he laughed.
The first election I had any involvement with was Johnson's election over Goldwater in 1964. We were living on Grand Boulevard in Binghamton, and I had made a small poster for my wall from some news photo of the two candidates. It was a contest against a Republican party that was allied to the John Birch Society, most unrepentantly bigoted, and at the time ancient news stories about historical Klan lynchings were being unearthed and published in anthologies as sensational paperbacks alongside shocking material on mass murderers, so the horrors of Jim Crow were no longer concealed by the polity. Johnson had been carrying on the Democratic legacy of the mysteriously martyred Kennedy, legislation that would be called The Great Society. When Johnson won, the term landslide was used. I had no idea it would be so rare in the future. I decorated my poster with hurrahs for our side.
It is curious that a mere four years later, Johnson had become a symbol of the System, held responsible for the war in Vietnam, and just another of the old white men who ruled the world. He was compared to Andrew Johnson, the president who had been impeached while in office after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Hah! We had no idea how much worse a president could be.
I was in eighth grade during the 1968 election, and my parents were both Dangerously Radical Professors. I made posters for the Socialist Workers Party who were active on campus, at the campus elementary school I was going to, presumably lobbying the voting students who occasional walked our hallways. On one of them I used a clipping of a famous photo of a dead baby in Vietnam ("Q. and babies? A. and babies") which was actually torn down. The primaries of course had started while I was still in seventh grade, but they held far less interest than they do today. My issue was the war, although I held a growing cynicism about the general raping and pillaging of the earth and world domination of my country's military-industrial complex. I was a hold-out against the two-party system, which naturally dominated the polling amongst the eighth grade. It was a remarkably comfortable class: I was not particularly ostracized or humiliated for being such an oddball. Either that, or by that time I was rather used to it.
The disasters of Nixon's administration and the continuing Viet Nam War would dominate the political landscape during my years in high school and college.
In the fall of 1972 I was still just seventeen. The first election I was able to vote in was the next spring midterm election, in which Paul Soglin was first elected mayor of Madison. I took that as a hopeful sign, and understood clearly that I would very seldom in the future have the person I had voted for actually win office. I also voted for local character Eddie Ben Elson for State Superintent of Public Instruction, whose platform was to abolish compulsory education, a cause I could get behind, given my experience. Of course he never won any public office. Later he ran for Judge (he was a lawyer) with the slogan, Live And Let Live. It made a stunning poster.
"I have been waiting for this election for forty years," I told them. "I'm like, just a minute, where am I? what happened?" How could it have taken my country so long to join me, here in the future, where my hair has gone gray with waiting?
Joe laughed, which is why I always talk to him. "Yeah, it's about time."
"Darn right," I said. That seemed a little mild. "Fucking-A right," I said, feeling like the foul-mouthed college student inside, and he laughed.
The first election I had any involvement with was Johnson's election over Goldwater in 1964. We were living on Grand Boulevard in Binghamton, and I had made a small poster for my wall from some news photo of the two candidates. It was a contest against a Republican party that was allied to the John Birch Society, most unrepentantly bigoted, and at the time ancient news stories about historical Klan lynchings were being unearthed and published in anthologies as sensational paperbacks alongside shocking material on mass murderers, so the horrors of Jim Crow were no longer concealed by the polity. Johnson had been carrying on the Democratic legacy of the mysteriously martyred Kennedy, legislation that would be called The Great Society. When Johnson won, the term landslide was used. I had no idea it would be so rare in the future. I decorated my poster with hurrahs for our side.
It is curious that a mere four years later, Johnson had become a symbol of the System, held responsible for the war in Vietnam, and just another of the old white men who ruled the world. He was compared to Andrew Johnson, the president who had been impeached while in office after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Hah! We had no idea how much worse a president could be.
I was in eighth grade during the 1968 election, and my parents were both Dangerously Radical Professors. I made posters for the Socialist Workers Party who were active on campus, at the campus elementary school I was going to, presumably lobbying the voting students who occasional walked our hallways. On one of them I used a clipping of a famous photo of a dead baby in Vietnam ("Q. and babies? A. and babies") which was actually torn down. The primaries of course had started while I was still in seventh grade, but they held far less interest than they do today. My issue was the war, although I held a growing cynicism about the general raping and pillaging of the earth and world domination of my country's military-industrial complex. I was a hold-out against the two-party system, which naturally dominated the polling amongst the eighth grade. It was a remarkably comfortable class: I was not particularly ostracized or humiliated for being such an oddball. Either that, or by that time I was rather used to it.
The disasters of Nixon's administration and the continuing Viet Nam War would dominate the political landscape during my years in high school and college.
In the fall of 1972 I was still just seventeen. The first election I was able to vote in was the next spring midterm election, in which Paul Soglin was first elected mayor of Madison. I took that as a hopeful sign, and understood clearly that I would very seldom in the future have the person I had voted for actually win office. I also voted for local character Eddie Ben Elson for State Superintent of Public Instruction, whose platform was to abolish compulsory education, a cause I could get behind, given my experience. Of course he never won any public office. Later he ran for Judge (he was a lawyer) with the slogan, Live And Let Live. It made a stunning poster.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Aren't we nearly there?
So it was in the summer of 1966 that we arrived in Whitewater, Wisconsin. The summer had started, no doubt, with yet another bout of sorting through everything and packing it into a moving van; then a drive from Binghamton through the southern tier of New York State (Oleanna? Erie?) to Ohio, possible overnight stop in Akron with old academic friends from OU, Holiday Inns across country, until we could stay with kinfolk in Oklahoma, although exactly which iteration of this experience was that year is now vanishing into the proverbial mists of memory. But finally north, possibly through Iowa City it occurs to me, where my parents had other friends from university. And thus to Wisconsin.
As one drives north out of the flat prairie, Wisconsin becomes all green rolling hills, with neat farmsteads, barns and cornfields, and cows, for the most part black and white. Many cows, and at that time not so much of other types of livestock -- occasional pigs or sheep or horses. But mostly cows. Holsteins. The highway curves through a continuous panorama of picturesque pastoral scenic beauty. And all the time we were getting closer to where we would soon be living. At midsummer the corn is tall and green.
We stayed overnight, several I think, at a Holiday Inn in Janesville, about twenty miles from Whitewater. My parents went on to scout the situation and find housing. The roads of this area would later become familiar to me, but the ten miles off the interstate, north to Milton, turn right, and another ten miles to Whitewater, took a breathtakingly long time to travel. My brother with me in the back seat of the gray VW was just three, and I was eleven.
The Whitewater we arrived in had a Main Street lined with yellowy cream brick Victorian homes, and a campus in part just as old, with the oldest building Old Main standing at the top of a hill up a dignified drive off of Main Street. It was an old land-grant college, and in the mid-sixties was just getting a lot of brand-new boxy international-style buildings to accommodate the growing student body. The first offices my parents were given were in the basement of Old Main, which did not bode well for the respect the English Department was held in; but before the school year had started, they had moved to the fourth floor of brand-new Heide Hall. Both of them were working in the English Department, my mother specializing in Victorian Literature and my dad in Medieval Literature and Linguistics. The chair of the department, who had hired them, was Jack Heide, who died within weeks of our arrival in a housefire in his home, and thus had the new humanities building named after him. But I had met him only briefly on our arrival.
The other connection we had in town was with a family that lived out in the burgeoning suburb of new ranch houses on the west side of town, who my parents had also known in graduate school in English at OU. We visited their house for a cook-out, and admired the massive strawberry planting that took up most of their back yard. This was a vision of the possible middle-class splendor: a suburban ranch house, and tenure-track positions.
The wife of that family was a musician, a cellist, who gave my parents a reference to a violin teacher for me in town. By this time I had my own violin, a $20 student violin purchased in a second-hand store in Ann Arbor. The new teacher was even more bohemian than I might have expected, the wife of an art professor at the university, who tied back her long hair with athletic socks. She was appalled at my lack of knowledge of scales or keys, or vibrato technique, and set about diagnosing what I could play. It was grueling for me to be such a disappointment to her. The violin as I practiced began to sound to me like a sick cat, and I gave up entirely after a couple of lessons. Eventually the cellist was given the violin to sell.
The apartment we moved into was a two-bedroom flat on the ground floor of a large new red brick building on Tratt Street, a couple of blocks from the campus. At some point my half-brother Chris joined us, for most of the year I was in sixth grade, and he and I roomed together, with bunk beds, Chris on the upper. On the wall above his bed we had a poster of the famous castle in Germany built by the mad king. My little brother had an end of my parents' room, divided off with metal bookcases. It was a building of standard design, with a galley kitchen off the entry way, bathroom, two bedrooms, and both the hallway and kitchen opening onto a large living-dining room, with linoleum flooring on the kitchen end and dark green wall-to-wall carpeting in the rest.
As one drives north out of the flat prairie, Wisconsin becomes all green rolling hills, with neat farmsteads, barns and cornfields, and cows, for the most part black and white. Many cows, and at that time not so much of other types of livestock -- occasional pigs or sheep or horses. But mostly cows. Holsteins. The highway curves through a continuous panorama of picturesque pastoral scenic beauty. And all the time we were getting closer to where we would soon be living. At midsummer the corn is tall and green.
We stayed overnight, several I think, at a Holiday Inn in Janesville, about twenty miles from Whitewater. My parents went on to scout the situation and find housing. The roads of this area would later become familiar to me, but the ten miles off the interstate, north to Milton, turn right, and another ten miles to Whitewater, took a breathtakingly long time to travel. My brother with me in the back seat of the gray VW was just three, and I was eleven.
The Whitewater we arrived in had a Main Street lined with yellowy cream brick Victorian homes, and a campus in part just as old, with the oldest building Old Main standing at the top of a hill up a dignified drive off of Main Street. It was an old land-grant college, and in the mid-sixties was just getting a lot of brand-new boxy international-style buildings to accommodate the growing student body. The first offices my parents were given were in the basement of Old Main, which did not bode well for the respect the English Department was held in; but before the school year had started, they had moved to the fourth floor of brand-new Heide Hall. Both of them were working in the English Department, my mother specializing in Victorian Literature and my dad in Medieval Literature and Linguistics. The chair of the department, who had hired them, was Jack Heide, who died within weeks of our arrival in a housefire in his home, and thus had the new humanities building named after him. But I had met him only briefly on our arrival.
The other connection we had in town was with a family that lived out in the burgeoning suburb of new ranch houses on the west side of town, who my parents had also known in graduate school in English at OU. We visited their house for a cook-out, and admired the massive strawberry planting that took up most of their back yard. This was a vision of the possible middle-class splendor: a suburban ranch house, and tenure-track positions.
The wife of that family was a musician, a cellist, who gave my parents a reference to a violin teacher for me in town. By this time I had my own violin, a $20 student violin purchased in a second-hand store in Ann Arbor. The new teacher was even more bohemian than I might have expected, the wife of an art professor at the university, who tied back her long hair with athletic socks. She was appalled at my lack of knowledge of scales or keys, or vibrato technique, and set about diagnosing what I could play. It was grueling for me to be such a disappointment to her. The violin as I practiced began to sound to me like a sick cat, and I gave up entirely after a couple of lessons. Eventually the cellist was given the violin to sell.
The apartment we moved into was a two-bedroom flat on the ground floor of a large new red brick building on Tratt Street, a couple of blocks from the campus. At some point my half-brother Chris joined us, for most of the year I was in sixth grade, and he and I roomed together, with bunk beds, Chris on the upper. On the wall above his bed we had a poster of the famous castle in Germany built by the mad king. My little brother had an end of my parents' room, divided off with metal bookcases. It was a building of standard design, with a galley kitchen off the entry way, bathroom, two bedrooms, and both the hallway and kitchen opening onto a large living-dining room, with linoleum flooring on the kitchen end and dark green wall-to-wall carpeting in the rest.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
16 Grand Boulevard
In the fall of 1964 I started fourth grade at Thomas Jefferson School, and in 1965 I was there for fifth grade as well. We still lived in Binghamton, New York, but we had moved house again, for reasons unknown to me, to an old prairie-style duplex at 16 Grand Boulevard. One year we lived upstairs, and the next year -- maybe the landlady moved out -- we moved downstairs. Or maybe it was downstairs and then upstairs, but I think not. The house had dark wood trim, and some interesting old furnishings, like the dining room display cabinet with curved glass doors that seemed very classy to me.
There was never enough shelving for all the books. Thousands of books. My dad began to acquire black industrial metal shelving units (years before high tech became any kind of style), from the Sears catalog I think, and let me help him assemble them. This was a step up from the grad-student bricks and boards shelving. He had a taste for avant-garde design well beyond any professors' salary. The butterfly chair got a wild sixties orange floral print stitched over the black canvas. He disassembled he dining room chairs we had acquired in 1961, covered their beige plastic seats with squares of bright blue-green prints using a staple gun, spray-painted the metal legs and back supports white, and reassembled them thus transformed. The round formica table that came with them had its legs replaced with short ones, to make a coffee table. For a larger dining table he attached legs to a hollow-core door from the lumberyard. There was another coffeetable he constructed from a narrower door. He took me not only to bookstores but to haunt Scandinavian modern design stores. In Ann Arbor no doubt on sale he had purchased a set of Dansk stainless tableware. So our humble functional furniture accumulated through the moves, beyond the minimal box springs, mattresses and metal bedsteads required.
At Grand Boulevard I had a middle bedroom, off the dining room, and a double bed as my parents had purchased a new one for themselves. Pigeons cooed under the eaves. I had a desk and small dresser that had been purchased unfinished (Sears again) when I was in first grade and painted light blue. In Binghamton I also acquired from some second-hand source a dark wood deco-style vanity, with a tall mirror between two small cabinets, and a large trunk. Eventually these things were painted. We were continually slapping coats of white paint over our new habitations. My mother constructed simple curtains for each room from lengths of fabric, with simple sleeves run over standard curtain rods. The long windows of these old houses required a lot of measuring before we went off to the fabric store.
This was a roomy house, that my little brother learned to walk in, emptying and and crawling through the kitchen cupboards. At that early age he had the nickname Zoopy. In those days egg cartons were constructed of folded cardboard with dividers inserted to divide the trays into rectangular compartments, and he tore these cardboard dividers in half and collected them by the hundreds, calling them "dibs", a word he had mysteriously come up with himself. His bedroom was in the back of the house, behind my parents' room.
My mother was still at home, working as an editor on galleys that she was still getting from Ginn. I learned quite a bit about copyediting by observing the red ink marks she made on these. I also collected the galleys (which were printed in very long columns, not yet paginated), cut them into lengths and pasted them into scrapbooks to make my own editions. She was working on an eighth grade reading textbook at this point, an anthology of stories that greatly impressed me, like "The Most Dangerous Game", Leacock's "The Night the Bed Fell", and as a sample of drama, "Twelve Angry Men."
At the same time she was occupying herself with a spasm of domesticity. She sewed clothing for me as well as for herself, collected recipes and learned to bake yeast bread. She and George had collaborated on making a simple cocktail dress for her from an elaborately embroidered kimono he had brought back from his service in the Far East, and the scraps from this were also used to make clothes for my cousin's Barbie. For Christmas she sewed a whole set of clothing from the doll pattern collection included in the envelope, which went off to my cousin. I have no idea what happened to the silk dress, or the rest of the scraps. I got the pattern, and began to teach myself how to sew, using the old black Singer portable she had always had. The doll pattern gave basic procedural instructions, but I could read and follow instructions for the full-size patterns too, and began to take more interest in what was available in the fabric stores.
My dad took a big part in housekeeping, which was unusual at that time, as well as with cooking and childcare. I still associate the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcast with memories of him running the vacuum cleaner, a Eureka canister vacuum.
My fourth grade teacher was named Mrs Houlihan. At some point in the year she had us cramming for the Iowa Basics, which are achievement tests still given nationwide to fourth-graders; and it must have been after we had already covered quite a bit of material, because for a while she had us outlining a chapter from our Social Studies textbook every night as homework. It began with the Pacific Northwest (60 inches of rainfall per year) and went on to describe the lives of children in different parts of the U.S. I was keeping up with this work, barely, and there was much indignant discussion among the class, surreptitiously, about how impossible it was. My parents agreed that cramming for such a test was not the point of the test at all. So one afternoon I left on her desk a carefully-composed note suggesting that this was too much work -- and boy did I catch hell the next morning. I walked in, and "boy are you in trouble" my classmates informed me.
The teacher walked in, and first I was in trouble for not having signed the note. (As though there were any doubt who had written it, whether from the evidence of handwriting or my fellows having already given me up.) First she humiliated me in front of the class. Then she took me out in the hall, cast more aspersions on my character and made me cry. Then she took me to the principal's office. There was not much more trouble you could get into in those days, short of being beaten. The principal, who I saw on that one occasion only, showed me a shelf of large books and asked paternally if I knew what a curriculum was, and explained how important it was for the teachers to follow the curriculum. I promised fervently never to obstruct the pursuit of a curriculum again.
This was the same teacher that I got into an argument with when I asserted that apricots were not the same thing as dried peaches. I was pretty sure they were a different fruit, not that I had ever seen or had any. She was drawing a parallel between prunes and plums, grapes and raisins. I was attempting to make a point of information, which was clearly a mistake. She was a bit of a battleaxe. I always liked my teachers, though, so it was fairly painful when they apparently didn't like me.
This was the same teacher who hit Joseph Barr on the head with his dictionary, when she found him reading it behind the raised desk lid instead of paying attention in class. Probably looking up naughty words, knowing him. Joseph Barr was a big boy -- actually not any larger than the rest of us, but one year older was a big deal at the time -- who had been held back a year to repeat the grade.
OMG, this means that this was the same year that I got in another nine kinds of hell from my classmates when the girls were all taken off to see a health film (courtesy of the Kimberly Clark corporation) on Becoming A Woman. "The fun is just beginning!" It was a great secret, that had involved all the girls taking home sealed envelopes explaining to our parents what was up, because it required their signed permission. Times being what they were, the boys were mystified, except for Joseph Barr, who teased me into revealing that the subject of our private girls' lesson was Growing Up. He apparently already knew the word menstration, or something close. This made me a traitor to the girls, because this subject was of such acute embarrassment all around.
I still have in a collage the front page of the little booklet we were given, "Growing Up and Liking It", with the photo of the perky girl in a flip hairdo. Let me not even begin on the stringent procedures required for hair care in those bad old days. It is a subject my hairdresser and I have fun with. Oh, okay: the brush rollers. The hair picks. Trying to sleep on them. The dryers, which cost money, or the putting a big scarf over your head full of curlers and going out as though no one could tell what was under there while your hair air-dried. The permanent wave that would make the set stay in your hair for more than a single day. My mother was going through the whole rigamarole. Fortunately all that was about to change. I had a babysitter who set my hair one night, and it produced nowhere near a big enough improvement in my personal appearance to make me want to go through all that regularly. I already had braces, and glasses. Like Ugly Betty, only it was not considered in any way cute or a joke: it was just ugliness.
The next year I was at the same school, in Miss Jablonsky's class. Miss Jablonsky was a nice pretty young teacher, with blonde hair she wore in a chignon, a French upswept thingy. Unfortunately Miss Jablonsky was in an auto accident in the middle of the year, a fairly serious one, and we spent several winter months in the care of Mrs Tyler, who opened the windows every day for calisthenics by our desks while she played the record "Chicken Fat". A quasi-military ditty, Go you chicken fat! go away! go, you chicken fat! go! with push-ups and so forth. I was informed by a classmate that Mrs Tyler not only had favorites, but I was not one of them. What? what did I do?
Well, I did not win any flashcard competitions in math. This was a common educational technique, and maybe still is in places: making a competition out of simple drills. Two students compete to answer the card first, the one who loses sits down, eliminated, and the other continues on to the next student's desk for more fun. General cheering, commentary and verbal mayhem encouraged. I hated flashcards on the times tables. But I was still winning spelling bees.
There was never enough shelving for all the books. Thousands of books. My dad began to acquire black industrial metal shelving units (years before high tech became any kind of style), from the Sears catalog I think, and let me help him assemble them. This was a step up from the grad-student bricks and boards shelving. He had a taste for avant-garde design well beyond any professors' salary. The butterfly chair got a wild sixties orange floral print stitched over the black canvas. He disassembled he dining room chairs we had acquired in 1961, covered their beige plastic seats with squares of bright blue-green prints using a staple gun, spray-painted the metal legs and back supports white, and reassembled them thus transformed. The round formica table that came with them had its legs replaced with short ones, to make a coffee table. For a larger dining table he attached legs to a hollow-core door from the lumberyard. There was another coffeetable he constructed from a narrower door. He took me not only to bookstores but to haunt Scandinavian modern design stores. In Ann Arbor no doubt on sale he had purchased a set of Dansk stainless tableware. So our humble functional furniture accumulated through the moves, beyond the minimal box springs, mattresses and metal bedsteads required.
At Grand Boulevard I had a middle bedroom, off the dining room, and a double bed as my parents had purchased a new one for themselves. Pigeons cooed under the eaves. I had a desk and small dresser that had been purchased unfinished (Sears again) when I was in first grade and painted light blue. In Binghamton I also acquired from some second-hand source a dark wood deco-style vanity, with a tall mirror between two small cabinets, and a large trunk. Eventually these things were painted. We were continually slapping coats of white paint over our new habitations. My mother constructed simple curtains for each room from lengths of fabric, with simple sleeves run over standard curtain rods. The long windows of these old houses required a lot of measuring before we went off to the fabric store.
This was a roomy house, that my little brother learned to walk in, emptying and and crawling through the kitchen cupboards. At that early age he had the nickname Zoopy. In those days egg cartons were constructed of folded cardboard with dividers inserted to divide the trays into rectangular compartments, and he tore these cardboard dividers in half and collected them by the hundreds, calling them "dibs", a word he had mysteriously come up with himself. His bedroom was in the back of the house, behind my parents' room.
My mother was still at home, working as an editor on galleys that she was still getting from Ginn. I learned quite a bit about copyediting by observing the red ink marks she made on these. I also collected the galleys (which were printed in very long columns, not yet paginated), cut them into lengths and pasted them into scrapbooks to make my own editions. She was working on an eighth grade reading textbook at this point, an anthology of stories that greatly impressed me, like "The Most Dangerous Game", Leacock's "The Night the Bed Fell", and as a sample of drama, "Twelve Angry Men."
At the same time she was occupying herself with a spasm of domesticity. She sewed clothing for me as well as for herself, collected recipes and learned to bake yeast bread. She and George had collaborated on making a simple cocktail dress for her from an elaborately embroidered kimono he had brought back from his service in the Far East, and the scraps from this were also used to make clothes for my cousin's Barbie. For Christmas she sewed a whole set of clothing from the doll pattern collection included in the envelope, which went off to my cousin. I have no idea what happened to the silk dress, or the rest of the scraps. I got the pattern, and began to teach myself how to sew, using the old black Singer portable she had always had. The doll pattern gave basic procedural instructions, but I could read and follow instructions for the full-size patterns too, and began to take more interest in what was available in the fabric stores.
My dad took a big part in housekeeping, which was unusual at that time, as well as with cooking and childcare. I still associate the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcast with memories of him running the vacuum cleaner, a Eureka canister vacuum.
My fourth grade teacher was named Mrs Houlihan. At some point in the year she had us cramming for the Iowa Basics, which are achievement tests still given nationwide to fourth-graders; and it must have been after we had already covered quite a bit of material, because for a while she had us outlining a chapter from our Social Studies textbook every night as homework. It began with the Pacific Northwest (60 inches of rainfall per year) and went on to describe the lives of children in different parts of the U.S. I was keeping up with this work, barely, and there was much indignant discussion among the class, surreptitiously, about how impossible it was. My parents agreed that cramming for such a test was not the point of the test at all. So one afternoon I left on her desk a carefully-composed note suggesting that this was too much work -- and boy did I catch hell the next morning. I walked in, and "boy are you in trouble" my classmates informed me.
The teacher walked in, and first I was in trouble for not having signed the note. (As though there were any doubt who had written it, whether from the evidence of handwriting or my fellows having already given me up.) First she humiliated me in front of the class. Then she took me out in the hall, cast more aspersions on my character and made me cry. Then she took me to the principal's office. There was not much more trouble you could get into in those days, short of being beaten. The principal, who I saw on that one occasion only, showed me a shelf of large books and asked paternally if I knew what a curriculum was, and explained how important it was for the teachers to follow the curriculum. I promised fervently never to obstruct the pursuit of a curriculum again.
This was the same teacher that I got into an argument with when I asserted that apricots were not the same thing as dried peaches. I was pretty sure they were a different fruit, not that I had ever seen or had any. She was drawing a parallel between prunes and plums, grapes and raisins. I was attempting to make a point of information, which was clearly a mistake. She was a bit of a battleaxe. I always liked my teachers, though, so it was fairly painful when they apparently didn't like me.
This was the same teacher who hit Joseph Barr on the head with his dictionary, when she found him reading it behind the raised desk lid instead of paying attention in class. Probably looking up naughty words, knowing him. Joseph Barr was a big boy -- actually not any larger than the rest of us, but one year older was a big deal at the time -- who had been held back a year to repeat the grade.
OMG, this means that this was the same year that I got in another nine kinds of hell from my classmates when the girls were all taken off to see a health film (courtesy of the Kimberly Clark corporation) on Becoming A Woman. "The fun is just beginning!" It was a great secret, that had involved all the girls taking home sealed envelopes explaining to our parents what was up, because it required their signed permission. Times being what they were, the boys were mystified, except for Joseph Barr, who teased me into revealing that the subject of our private girls' lesson was Growing Up. He apparently already knew the word menstration, or something close. This made me a traitor to the girls, because this subject was of such acute embarrassment all around.
I still have in a collage the front page of the little booklet we were given, "Growing Up and Liking It", with the photo of the perky girl in a flip hairdo. Let me not even begin on the stringent procedures required for hair care in those bad old days. It is a subject my hairdresser and I have fun with. Oh, okay: the brush rollers. The hair picks. Trying to sleep on them. The dryers, which cost money, or the putting a big scarf over your head full of curlers and going out as though no one could tell what was under there while your hair air-dried. The permanent wave that would make the set stay in your hair for more than a single day. My mother was going through the whole rigamarole. Fortunately all that was about to change. I had a babysitter who set my hair one night, and it produced nowhere near a big enough improvement in my personal appearance to make me want to go through all that regularly. I already had braces, and glasses. Like Ugly Betty, only it was not considered in any way cute or a joke: it was just ugliness.
The next year I was at the same school, in Miss Jablonsky's class. Miss Jablonsky was a nice pretty young teacher, with blonde hair she wore in a chignon, a French upswept thingy. Unfortunately Miss Jablonsky was in an auto accident in the middle of the year, a fairly serious one, and we spent several winter months in the care of Mrs Tyler, who opened the windows every day for calisthenics by our desks while she played the record "Chicken Fat". A quasi-military ditty, Go you chicken fat! go away! go, you chicken fat! go! with push-ups and so forth. I was informed by a classmate that Mrs Tyler not only had favorites, but I was not one of them. What? what did I do?
Well, I did not win any flashcard competitions in math. This was a common educational technique, and maybe still is in places: making a competition out of simple drills. Two students compete to answer the card first, the one who loses sits down, eliminated, and the other continues on to the next student's desk for more fun. General cheering, commentary and verbal mayhem encouraged. I hated flashcards on the times tables. But I was still winning spelling bees.
Monday, November 03, 2008
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.
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.
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