Yeah baby!
Snow
Winter creates such a magical landscape, especially when you're a child, and all that snow in Utah just fed the imagination. I remember walking to school on icy sidewalks where snowdrifts towered over me from either side. The sledding we did down the hill, which probably wasn't the best idea since the hill had cars on it too.
At school during recess, we kids got to work and rolled up massive snowmen, and some of us built igloos and houses while we were at it. Once I built a snow easy chair and a snow television and plopped down on the playground for some real quality time.
After a month or so, the snow got dirty and mushy, and tiring. At that point, spring couldn't come fast enough.
Kindergarten and Meeting my First Bully
I don't remember much of kindergarten. My mother told me later in life that she felt concerned that they weren't stimulating me enough...that the teacher busied herself with the other children and left me alone to read most of the time, so she had me transferred to another class.
Personally, an all-day reading time would feel like heaven to me, so I probably didn't mind very much. Still, I guess the other class did a lot of the same, since I don't remember that class either.
One day I found a worm on the sidewalk and put it in my pocket to keep it safe. It didn't do too well in there, and when I went looking for it again, I found it ground into goop. Still, I tried.
It was in kindergarten and first grade that I first experienced bullying...in most other things I was a late bloomer, but I started early on this. His name was Gilbert Martinez (wherever you are today, Gilbert, that's right - I'm calling you out!) He chased me down a hill, and I fell and my knee got bloodied. He chased me a lot. I had to have my older brother come with me when I wanted to play on the playground if I wanted any peace from him.
Breaking Out My Two Front Teeth
I think this actually happened in first grade - we had this gigantic metal jungle gym on the playground that I would climb on, and go really high. We all loved it.
One day, from up high, I lost my grip on the bar and fell - but no worries! I caught another bar on the way down - with my two front teeth.
Yep. That hurt just as much as you think it would.
My mouth bled everywhere, I cried and screamed. The teacher snatched me up and ran me back into the school, and called my mom. My teeth were horizontal in my mouth instead of vertical, and the dentist had to extract them. Fortunately the adult teeth grew back, but I whistled a lot when I talked for a while, especially on the 's' s.
Birthday Parties, Friends and First Crushes
As shy as I was, I usually managed to make just enough friends to survive socially in school. I think I even had a friend party for my fifth birthday. My friend Norma came, with her big Afro hair that shook when she walked, and my friend Tina, a big girl with blond hair in ringlets. We usually hung out together in school. Some other kids came, whose names I can't now remember, and Troy came.
That made me very happy. Troy, with his straight blond homemade bowl haircut that made him look like Little Lord Fauntleroy - he was so cute. (Why is it that I can only remember people by hairstyle now?)
Bringing up Brothers
Mostly my friends were members of my own family - we did everything together. We loved and hated each other simultaneously, but we needed each other. Even back then, our family dynamics were complex and ran very deep.
Being the only girl in a houseful of boys presented several unique challenges as well. Once my brother (forget which one) got hold of my parents' pepper spray, and decided to spray it in the backyard. He sprayed it up in the air, and the wind blew it right in my face. Very effective stuff.
I choked, couldn't see, and when I did finally open my eyes, I looked in the reflective window to see that my eyes were a light purple instead of blue.
Another thing my brothers liked to do to me was to convince me to take my clothes off.
Now, I know what you're thinking - but there was none of that going on in our family - at least, not in my mind. But anytime you're a girl in a family of five growing boys, that vibe is there, and the girl is running from those brothers. Just a fact.
Once we had a parade around the house (in all fairness, everyone was naked for that, not just me).
Another time, my younger brother got me to take my clothes off in the backyard, and the Lemons, a retired couple next door, saw me and informed my grandmother of my lasciviousness. My grandma laid into me, paddling me good and sent me to my room.
The unfairness of that punishment was unusual in my family - my brothers played their tricks on me, but usually got as good as I did from my parents. My dad believed in equal punishment for all, and none of us escaped his wrath. I do actually believe I might have gotten off a little bit easier than they did over the years. Our shared parental trauma pulled us together, and we grew up very close, but that sense of rivalry never fully went away either.
A Pox Upon You (and Me)
For instance, when we lived in the Quince Street house, my mother took us over to play with the Shirts' kids, who lived down the street from us. It wasn't an unusual happening - we played with the Shirts family a lot (oh joy - more boys!). I think their first baby girl Emily had recently been born.
When we came home, Mom told us that the Shirts had chicken pox, so she took us over there so we could be exposed and 'get it over with'.
Within a day, one or two of my brothers started running fevers and showing lesions, but I felt fine.
I fear I lorded it over them a little - in a girls-rule-and-boys-drool sort of way. The boys had to stay home while my mother took me (just me!) to the store. I even got to pick out the cereal, and I never got to choose the cereal when my brothers came shopping with me before!
I was loving life. We came home, and I got in the bathtub for a bath. My mother came in, looked at my back, and said 'Uh oh.'
So much for girls ruling - I was dropped from my throne and left to struggle with the peasants for the calomine lotion (which DIDN'T work, by the way). Trying not to scratch when everything itches amounted to exquisite torture.
Eventually the chicken pox died out and we were fine. What I didn't realize (what no one really realized at the time) was that it would one day return to me as shingles, which is like chicken pox on steroids in just one spot instead. Not fun.
Very glad for the varicella vaccine when it came around, and my own kids didn't have to go through that.
Bein' Broke
The last thing I have to say about those years was that we spent most of them in the American version of poverty. What protected us more than anything was my grandparents' retirement money, and our church's welfare program.
But I didn't realize this at the time - what kid does? All I wanted as a kid was to go to the library and read. Poverty broke in on my consciousness when I started school, and realized that other people bought food at grocery stores with money they earned from jobs, while we went to our church's storehouse for food instead. But the butcher in the store would never throw you the pig's ear when he cut it off, and the butcher in the storehouse would, so I almost felt sorry for the store shoppers.
Even then, it didn't really register very much. My father must have been under tremendous pressure to earn more with such a large family. He acted angry with us a lot, so we took some of the heat for him, I suppose.
But most of our time was spent with our mother, who had an indefatigable happiness around her nearly all the time. Poverty didn't mean much at all with her around, and we didn't feel deprived - or at least, I never did. Until we went shopping, and she tried to buy clothes for me.
It was in the clothes department that I felt that want the worst. My mother had a talent for finding that clothes that looked okay in the store, but then something happened on the way home, and those same clothes looked hideous in real life.
We would get catalogs in the mail of pretty women wearing pretty clothes, and I yearned for some of those clothes with all my girlish heart. Once I showed my father some of my favorite pictures from one of those catalogs. I thought he would appreciate them, and maybe buy some of them for me. But he got angry, and told me I was vain for wanting those things.
As an adult, I understand now what he felt, that I had expensive tastes and desires he would never be able to satisfy, and that made him feel frustrated and angry. But I didn't understand any of that at age 8 or 9, and that moment screwed me up pretty bad, for a very long time. But it didn't change anything. I still wanted to be one of those models, dressed up and pretty. For me, pretty just wasn't happening, or so I thought.
To me, that's the worst thing about poverty - how it makes the sufferer want to hide themselves away from anyone and everyone's judgement and criticism. It was a painful lesson I'm very glad to have experienced now, and a lesson that's still unfolding in me every day in different ways.
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