When I was five-years-old, my parents and I drove to southern California from Illinois in their light green unairconditioned Oldsmobile. 

I remember quite a bit about being in California and later, the train ride back to Illinois with my mother, but I don’t remember anything at all about the long drive to California except that we stopped and spent the night in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

As a five-year-old, everything about being in Albuquerque was a new and electrifying sensory experience.  Even the name – Albuquerque! — was exotic and lyrical and fun to say.

As I walked with my parents from the motel to a nearby diner I remember that I felt like Dorothy when she woke up and found that the tornado had dropped her house in Oz — I wasn’t in Illinois anymore.  Instead of the familiar horizontal stripes of yellow cornfields and blue sky, this landscape was a hounds tooth pattern of oranges and pinks and browns and other kinds of browns all swirling and mixing together.

While we were eating, a sand storm blew in and when we stepped outside of the diner, hot wind and gritty sand pelted my face and threatened to blow me away.  My dad grabbed one of my hands and my mom the other and then they leaned shoulder into the wind and pressed towards the motel.

As we made our way across the street, each step a staggering effort, a gust of wind blew both of my feet completely out behind me. I clearly remember, at that moment, the sensation of flying.  I remember the feel of the scorching wind slapping my face and the tingling stinging blast of sand on my bare legs and the grainy pixels of desert colors I could see through squinted eyes.

As my feet flew out behind me, I was not afraid of the mighty gritty wind, but exhilarated.  I was fearless.  I knew my parent’s hands that were gentle and comforting were also capable and strong and reliable.  I was secure in the knowledge that neither they nor their grip would fail me.  And because of that I was able to fly without fear, not just in that storm, but in many storms to come.

On the news last night, there was a story of a woman who won a house. A house!

A lot of people say, “I never win anything.” I am one of those people who say that. I never win anything. Except a pumpkin. One time I won a pumpkin.

The year was 1969. It was Friday, October 31^st. Halloween. I was a skinny scrawny fourth grader at St. Cabrini Catholic grade school. The entire month of October, the teacher had a big fat pumpkin sitting on her desk. Just before the bell rang, she decided to hold a drawing for some “lucky” student to take it home, thus relieving her of the task of disposing of a large and soon-to-be rotting pumpkin come Monday morning.

You could have knocked me over with a feather when my name was drawn. I was thrilled! I had won something! My nemesis and rival, Erin Flannigan — who was cuter, smarter, had better hair, was more athletic, wore nicer clothes, had a sister and could do just about everything slightly better than me except possibly jump rope — really wanted that pumpkin. But there was no way I was giving it up, especially not to her!

Intoxicated with the thrill of the win, it did not occur to me that I would have to somehow get that pumpkin home, that I would have to walk nearly a mile schlepping a ginormous pumpkin that weighed not that much less than I did.

I proudly strode up to the front of the classroom like Miss America to claim my prize. I was so thrilled. I slid the orange beauty off the desk and up onto my knee and then I hoisted it up to my tummy, which sent me reeling backwards a few steps. I wrapped my spaghetti arms around my beloved prize and with my back swaying like a pregnant lady, I staggered two or three drunken grapevine steps to the door. Erin made one more generous offer to take the pumpkin off my hands, but I said nothin’ doin’ sister, it’s my pumpkin and I’m keeping it! And then with trembling knees and sweating brow, my pumpkin and I slowly melted to the ground.

But I remained undaunted for I had won a prize! A pumpkin!

For the next half mile, I slowly slogged toward home, repeating the knee-lift/hoist/stagger/squat/rest sequence about every ten steps. I was sitting on my pumpkin on the sidewalk resting up for the next sequence, when I saw Paula Vose’s mom zip by in her little VW Bug. The tail lights turn red.  The car stopped and then whirred back towards me. She rolled down her window. “Wanna ride?” she asked. God bless Mrs. Vose! She had mercy on me. I nodded my head vigorously. She got out, put the pumpkin in her car and took me home — a kindness I have never forgotten.

The next day, I noticed the bottom of the pumpkin was beginning to turn black and soggy. I ceremoniously hauled it out to the burning barrel in the back yard. I lifted it to the edge of the barrel and with an odd sense of satisfaction, I tipped it in. It hit the bottom of the barrel with a resounding thud and sent up a cloud of grey ash. So long prize. And I haven’t won anything since.

* * * * *

Have you ever won anything?

Whenever I’ve talked about how that at St. Cabrini, where I attended Catholic grade school, our 4th grade class saved up to buy a pagan baby, I’ve gotten one of two responses.  People who did not attend Catholic school in the 1960s will look at me in stunned silence as though I were from Mars.  People who did attend Catholic school will nod their head knowingly and sigh at the utter absurdity of the notion.

How does a fourth grader go about buying a pagan baby you might wonder?  Well, we brought our scavenged pennies and nickels into school and put them in a jar until we finally had enough to send off for a pagan baby, I guess from the pagan baby store which was probably somewhere in California.  That’s where everything cool was, or at least that’s what mid-western Catholic school kids thought.  If you could get your parents to move to California, then you could automatically be cool.  Anyway, $4 and some box tops later, or something like that, and we were the proud owners of a heathen.  I have no idea how much a pagan baby cost, no one ever told us, and being good Catholic children, we didn’t ask.

Eventually we would get a certificate of some kind in the mail.  The class would vote on a name and afterwards we would have a naming ceremony.  For a baby girl, Sister always pushed us to choose Mary something – Mary Beth, Mary Alice, Mary Margaret, Mary Catherine, Mary Jane, whatever.  The Mary list is endless. For a boy we were expected to choose a name like Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.  But in 1969 the names we fourth graders favored were names like Ringo and Twiggy.

Since it was a class vote with Sister having two votes to our every one, we compromised on Mary Twiggy. We thought it so very funny to exasperate Sister with our zanyness.  As a class, we were supposed to pray for the salvation of little Mary Twiggy throughout the school year. So you see, there was a seed of goodness buried deep deep within such a warped idea.  And somehow?  It made sense at the time.

I wonder what ever became of Mary Twiggy…

Originally published July 2006.

When I was a little girl, my Godparents lived across the street from me. I spent more time at their house than I did my own. They were the grandparents that I never had.

For more than 40 years, on the coffee table in her living room, my Godmother Rose had an inexpensive ceramic donkey that pulled a cart that held an average houseplant of one variety or another. It was one of her few “look but don’t touch” things. I always loved that brightly colored ceramic donkey because it was hers and because it was always wherever she was. When I close my eyes I can still see the cobalt blues and the bright yellows and oranges and the shy smile of the donkey as though it were right in front of me.

The last time I visited my Godmother in the nursing home, we sat on her sofa side by side, hand in hand, with the ceramic donkey on the coffee table in front of us — exactly where it should be, where it had always been. Sometimes we talked about people we knew from long ago and sometimes we just sat and stared at the donkey and listened to the clock ticking. She would nod off for twenty minutes at a time and then wake up delighted to find me sitting on the sofa with her in Florida and not in far away Texas.

We sat there all afternoon. The shadows of the tropical sun grew long and fell across her window. The room grew gray and dim. She asked me what of her things I would like to have. I felt my Adams apple swell in my throat and the deafening sound of the ticking clock in my ears. I didn’t want her to ask me that question. I looked around the tiny room that she lived in, at the few things she was able to bring with her from her house, her house that had always been a haven for me from the world and from big brothers and mean girls. I managed to force enough air into my throat to whisper, “I don’t want your stuff. I want you.”

I stayed with her until just before dark. I wanted to make the drive back to Orlando where I was staying before the sun set on the day. I hugged her. I looked into her brown eyes. I promised that I would come back to see her again soon. “Okay Cupcake,” she said and she squeezed my hand. As I stood to leave she looked so small, as though the sofa could swallow her up. I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead one last time. I walked to the door and when I turned back to blow her a kiss, she had nodded off again. When she awoke, I would be gone. I never saw her again.

Shortly after she died, her attorney contacted me to inform me that I would be receiving a small inheritance from her estate. That news brought me no joy. I didn’t want an inheritance. I wanted the ceramic donkey because it was always wherever she was.

It’s many years later now but I still think about that donkey. And I think about how somewhere in Florida in some thrift shop or on someone else’s coffee table sits a brightly colored ceramic donkey pulling a cart that holds not just an average houseplant, but a big chunk of my life.

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Since my mother’s sister died in January, my cousins have been dealing with the exhausting task of going through their mother’s belongings. There is a lot of agonizing and sorting and deciding that must be done when trying to dismantle the accumulation of a lifetime.

In a package of things they returned to my mother, there was a picture of me when I was about the same age that Sean is now. When my mother came out to visit recently, she gave the picture to me. I hadn’t seen the picture before and when she handed it to me I was struck by how much of Sean I saw in my own face. Not so much in features, although there is certainly some of that, but something beyond that. Something that can’t be described in words or explained by genetics. Something impish behind the eyes, an almost imperceptible curl of the lip or lift of the brow — something so intimate that it can only be discerned from having looked into a mirror for 47 years.

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As I held the picture in my hand, peering 44 years back into time, it made my knees weak to see the likeness of my son in my own three-year-old face. I could only think about how in the weaving of the great tapestry of life, God himself picks and chooses tiny filament threads to carry over from parent to child, from one generation to the next, binding us all together through the ages with the double helix of DNA or some other invisible something that is not yet known to man.

I thought about how it is through Sean and the miracle that is his life that I might possibly live beyond my own allotted days on this earth and into a future I will not know and can’t anticipate or comprehend, a time that will be attended to by faces that I will never see, whose names I will never know. I will return to the dust from whence I came. No matter how remarkably I live out my life, sooner rather than later, time will erase every trace and memory that I was here….

Except maybe… at some appointed time in a distant future, God will craft another funny face with something impish behind the eyes and an imperceptible curl of the lip or lift of the brow. And then, even though I might have been forgotten, I will not be gone.

by Wivian

1960 ~ I remember it well, as though it were just 47 years ago.

I was 27-years-old and ripe as a plum with my third child. I hadn’t seen my toes since Christmas. We already had two children, two little boys, who would turn 4 and 2 in March, but my husband wanted a little girl and so I had agreed to try one last time. It was extremely cold and windy that day, even by Illinois standards. Everyone was complaining about the weather and kept telling me, “You’re probably going to have that baby tonight ~ the weather always brings babies early.” Did I listen? Of course not. Was I wrong? Absolutely!

When my water broke, a neighbor came and stayed with my two boys. The night air was frigid and the wind battered our jalopy of a car as we made our way to the hospital. There are two sets of railroad tracks between our home and the nearest hospital, both of which almost always have a train sitting on them, and I believe it was only the power of prayer that kept the roads clear until we got to the hospital.

Three records were set in our town that night. The wind had never blown so hard and it had never been that cold on that date. The other record was the birth of our little daughter. This was the first girl in my husband’s family for many many years! She topped the scales at just over five pounds and looked like a little doll.

AM’s brothers figured their lives were ruined the day we brought her home and likewise, she was always convinced that there was some mix up at the hospital – that those two hellions could not possibly be her brothers, and would we please return her to the rich family across town where she was certain she belonged. Alas, there had been no mix up and after 40-some years, I believe they have finally come to appreciate one another.

The first word most babies say is “Mama”. AM’s first words were, “Where’s my coat?” I didn’t know at the time how prophetic those words were. As soon as she could toddle, she was ready to leave home. Her favorite place to visit was her Godparent’s house, across the street. At two-years-old, she would pack her dolls and nightgown in a brown paper sack and go across the street where she was appreciated ~ and where there were no brothers to pester her. They loved her as if she were their own and the feeling was mutual. Then when she was 21, she packed what few things she had and moved to Texas – where she seldom needs a coat – and she has been there since.

It has been a joy to be her mother and it has been an even greater joy to see her be a mother. Except for the years between 1973 and 1978, I’d love to do it all over again.

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In 1965, I was in Mrs. Kelly’s afternoon kindergarten class at Wanless Elementary School. Because my parents were young and poor, my dad worked nights and my mom worked at a bank during the day. That meant that my dad had to look after me in the morning and get me to school.

My dad has never changed a diaper or gotten involved in the care and feeding of his kids. Most men of his generation just didn’t interact with their kids like they do today and that’s a shame. But that’s just the way it was. In spite of his nearly queasy discomfort with childcare, he took care of me every school day for an entire year. He fixed my lunch, made sure I had on some kind of clothes and then took me to school in our beloved car that we called Clunker #2 (which was later replaced with Clunker #3).

Every day before school, my dad boiled a hot dog, put it on a fork and served it up on a Correlle dinner plate garnished with a splotch of ketchup for dipping. I remember sitting at the kitchen table eating my hot dog in silence and watching my dad read the newspaper. He didn’t pay much attention to me, but I didn’t mind. Our relationship has always been about just hanging out.

After lunch, he would stand me up on the bathroom sink and awkwardly try to wipe ketchup off my face as I flitted and twitched and fidgeted. 41 years later, I now understand the difficulty of this feat. Then in an exercise of futility, he would clumsily try to convince a comb through my unruly hair before we headed out the door for school.

Looking back, my dad was a pretty sorry mom. He would be the first one to admit that. But I don’t remember it that way. I remember thinking he was a gourmet cook, even after hot dog #83. I remember sitting at the kitchen table and being fascinated with how his soft brown arm hair laid around his wrist watch. I remember sitting beside him on the front seat of Clunker #2 unable to see anything but the dashboard and bumping down North Grand on the way to school. But mostly, I just remember it as being a special time when it was just me and my dad.

And that gives me hope. It gives me hope that Sean won’t remember my many failings and shortcomings and ineptitude as a parent. But that maybe 41 years from now, he will just remember these days as a special time in his life.

I think every child needs someone in their life who thinks they are the cat’s pajamas — someone who, unlike their parents, is not obligated to love them.

I think God made grandparents for just this reason. I grew up in an Italian neighborhood where Nana or Papa lived nearby and were always around to dote effusively on their grandkids. This became my ideal of what grandparents should be like.

My own grandma, my only living grandparent, lived less than a mile away, yet we seldom saw her. When we did, her eyes did not sparkle and her face did not light up in the way the Italian grandma’s did for their grandchildren. There were no hugs or even feigned interest on her part. It was clear to me from an early age, that she saw me as a nuisance, a gnat, a bother. I spent the majority of my growing up years trying to win her friendship and wondering what it was about me that she found so un-loveable.

As an adult, I’ve come to realize that it was her own inability to love and not mine to be loved. I think I know why she was the way she was, but it didn’t change things for me. She lived independently into her mid-90s neither giving nor finding joy in her children or grandchildren. And that is life’s ultimate tragedy – to live so long with so little joy.

Nonetheless, God did not leave me wanting.

There are plenty of things about which to criticize the Catholics, but Godparents is not one of them. It’s one of the best ideas they’ve come up with which kind of makes up for Lent. The couple that my parents chose as my Godparents lived right across the street. It is my belief that that decision was providential, mapped out in the heavens before I was even born.

With no children of their own, John and Rose lavished the full force of unrequited parenthood upon me and I gladly and gratefully soaked it up. They took me on camping and fishing trips, to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, they bought me the Chrissy doll I wanted so badly for Christmas that my own parents couldn’t afford, they taught me how to set a table, how to scramble eggs, how to pick out oranges at the store and so much more. I had my own room in their house and I stayed there often. They couldn’t have loved me more if I were their own. They called me Cupcake.

I remember many times getting out of my bed at their house early in the morning and creeping past their room on my way to the kitchen and seeing my Godmother down on her knees, with her rosary, praying beside her bed. I didn’t know at the time how many of those prayers were for me. Once when I visited her in the nursing home, she told me how she prayed for me when I was little and I flashed upon her kneeling beside her bed. She told me that when I was very small and very sick, that she and John were so worried that they would lose me and her eyes filled with tears, even after all these years. And it was then, at that moment, that I finally understood something of how deeply I was loved by this woman.

Rose and John are both gone, many years now, but they left me with a treasure trove of memories and stories to see me through my life. The imprimatur of their love for me is forever upon my heart – a love bound not by genetics but by something that has no description. They never let me forget that they thought I was the cat’s pajamas. They loved me and they didn’t have to. And in the shaping of my life, it has made all the difference.

A while back, I was talking on the phone to a friend of mine who lived in the neighborhood where I grew up. When he said he always thought our family was rich, I nearly fell out of my chair.  I couldn’t believe it.

Having grown up wearing hand-me-downs and living in a more than 75-year-old-house with one bathroom no bigger than a broom closet, I can’t think of one thing about our house or our family that would lend that impression.  But then again, he was one of nine kids, so maybe from his perspective we did have a lot more.  With only three kids, so we certainly had more room.

However, the family across the street from us lived in a three-bedroom, one-bath 1950’s bungalow style orange brick house. They had four girls, some older and some younger than me, so I played at their house quite a bit.

Occasionally their mom would give us a snack — sometimes strawberries that she had grown in her garden or (cue choir of angels) Keebler Club crackers – or what I called Rich People Crackers.  Crispy and buttery and oh so decadent!  My mom bought store brand saltines.  I grew up thinking that all you had to do to be rich was live in a brick house and buy Keebler Club crackers.

I left that neighborhood more than twenty-five years ago to seek my fortune.  I landed in Texas in the era JR and excess.  I spent my 20s and part of my 30s in pursuit of the expensive things I loved and that the advertisers wanted me to love.  I attained most of things I chased and I enjoyed them thoroughly.

But now that I’m in my mid-40s and the mother of a two-year-old, those material things hold no allure for me anymore. And in many ways I even find them burdensome.

What I really enjoy in this season of my life is living in my brick house with my little family, going to the pantry and finding a box of Rich People Crackers.  I guess I am rich.

What did you think it meant to be rich when you were growing up?

When I was about six-years-old, my mom was the den mother of my two older brother’s Cub Scout troop. Looking back, I have to really hand it to my mom. For a woman with very few resources at her disposal, she did a lot with and for her kids.

Since there was no place else to put me during troop meetings, I was kind of an unofficial cub and I just did whatever it was my older brothers were doing. And my over protective brothers loved having me around and patiently and proudly looked after me.  No they didn’t. They hated it. I’m sorry, I’m confusing my life with an episode of The Walton’s.

These Cub Scout meetings usually involved some kind of craft or activity. I remember one troop meeting in particular, my mom supervising eight little boys sitting around her kitchen table gluing burnt wooden matchsticks onto cardboard forms in the shape of a cross.  Another one of those “made sense at the time” moments.

Thirty some years later, when this scene comes to mind, several questions spring to mind: First:  Why on earth…? And then the following questions in no particular order: 2) Little white boys making burning crosses? 3) Was there a KKK badge? 4) Eight little boys lighting matches? 5) In the house? 6) Crosses? 7)Why on earth…

Since we were all Catholic kids, making a cross for a craft didn’t raise any eyebrows. Today? The ACLU would be knocking on the front door, right behind the fire department and CPS. Aaah, the 60s! No helmets! No car seats! And Jarts! Good times.

What does this have to do with a tea party you wonder? Very little. It was just a fun little memory I thought I’d share.

Anyway, one time my mom single-handedly chauffeured her den of eight little boys and one little girl to tour the Abraham Lincoln Museum in her station wagon. I’m sure that we were all well-behaved children and that it was an educational and relaxing time for all. As we were leaving the museum, my mom ducked into the gift shop and bought me a little porcelain tea set that had Bambi pictured on each piece. The reason this is such a memorable event in my life is because had I asked for a magic carpet, I would have been as likely to get it as a tea set. Knowing better, I hadn’t asked for anything, let alone a tea set. She just bought it for me for no particular reason. It was a total surprise. I loved that tea set then and I still love it today, although all of the cups and saucers are missing.

Aside: Now that I have a child of my own, I understand how a mother’s heart wells up with love for her baby out of nowhere and for no particular reason and how the impulse to purchase something frivolous solely for the joy of pleasing that little person can be nearly impossible to deny. Had my mother been a rich woman we would have been spoiled beyond measure. Luckily we were poor and were spoiled with love and attention instead. Who needs a Barbie Dream House when you can light matches in the kitchen with your brothers while your mother looks on?

Flash forward thirty years: Not one to contain exciting news very well, my mom called last Friday and told Sean that she had purchased a little tea set for him and that she was sending it in the mail. Obviously the desire to please her babies with impulse purchases has not waned with time. He was quite excited about the prospect of having a tea party. Since he does not yet grasp the concept of time, he ran to the window to wait for UPS to arrive with the tea set and like an obsessive dog I used to have, he pretty much stayed there all weekend.

So that he might remove himself from my dining room windows and get on with life until the UPS guy comes this week, I decided that I would let him play with my tea set until his came. After digging it out of storage, I called him out of the window to see it. As I unfolded the bubble wrap to expose the three tiny pieces, he gasped in awe at such finery.

I explained to him that the tea set was mine, and that my mommy — “Bivian” (what he calls my mother) – had bought it for me a very long time ago when I was a little girl. “Wong, wong ago, like weelly wong ago?” he asked.  “Whatever dude,” I snapped. “When Noah put them maminals on the awk and it wained and wained?” he pressed. I felt it best to end the discussion of my antiqueness, so I hurried on to tell him that it was very special, but that he could play with it if he were very careful.

We spent the afternoon sitting at his little table sipping tea and pouring tea and spilling tea and eating maminal crackers. At some point I will have to teach him that in some circles it’s bad form to drink directly from the creamer. But it was special to see him playing with and enjoying something that I loved so much as a child. That is, until he held up his cup in the air as if to toast my fabulousness and announced, “When I grow up I’m going to be a girl!”

He could have said gorilla.  I’m hoping he said gorilla. His daddy would be happier if his boy grew up to be a gorilla rather than a girl.  When I relayed this scene to Antique Daddy later that evening, he said “Do you think you could get your mom to send him a gun?”

And there you have it.  An excellent example of how to take a very long way to tell a very short story.