Bits and Pieces

the creation we become. . .

I often wonder how people become who they are. We have met a wide variety of people over the last few years just in our participation at the Oakwood Farmer’s Market and I find the more we get to know them the more we appreciate their unique personalities and qualities. Invest a few minutes and you’re often surprisingly rewarded.

There’s always a beginning and early defining events along the way that shape us and have a profound effect on the person we become. In my case and at my age I have limited access to the full spectrum of events. Some of them are buried and irretrievably lost by design or is that desire or even perhaps a healthy coating of rust. Others are faded by the years to such an extent that the efforts to resurrect them simply can’t be justified.

My earliest memory is of sitting in an early 50s Ford coupe, parallel parked outside of a downtown row of low slung style offices and retail shops in Fullerton or Santa Ana, California.

It was maybe late morning and in typical Southern California style, the ocean fog had burned off and the sun was shining. I must have been sitting in the car and waiting alone but my imagination would have been running wild as usual - cowboys, the Alamo, Indians, Davy Crockett and ponies. My mother, Cleta, suddenly opened the driver's door and slid in behind the wheel.  She burst into tears and sobbed, “the doctor said I’m going to die!” Her anguish filled the car and to escape, my thoughts leapt back to cowboys and indians racing across the plains.

Sometime later, days I suppose, I arrived home from school and found her sprawled on the couch holding a paper bag against her face. She was gasping and frantically breathing in and out. The bag billowed out and then dramatically collapsed against her face.  When she saw me she lowered the bag and whispered, “go get Mrs. “Smith,” I don’t really remember the name but I do remember she was a large woman and a nurse that lived catty corner from our house.  

I ran, the woman answered her door and told me to sit down and watch her TV and left

Fire trucks. Ambulance. Policemen. . .

At the tiny, solemn funeral I saw Cleta’s face for the last time.  She was sleeping.  I was five. The room was dark and most of the light must have been coming from numerous candles placed about. I remember the flickering yellow/pink walls and then I played tag outside in the dark with a few other kids oblivious to the realities of the moment.

Being passed from one family to the next in what I think was an effort to keep Roe, Cleta’s ex and my father from gaining custody, I finally found myself in rural Arizona. 

The sun is beating down ferociously and I’m running through an open desert.  Sagebrush, lizards and tumbleweeds everywhere then a sharp whistle - and a scolding for such frivolity in the dangerous burning landscape by some ancient boney woman (Cleta’s mother.) Then a huge man in a cowboy hat loads me into his equally large, dusty DeSoto and drives me to a gas and tire station. 

The heat beating down - the desert view about us wobbled and waved in the heat.  The man, I think he was my step grandfather, is talking to the gas station attendant who is busy trying to wipe the grease off his hands with a dusty, faded red shop rag. He finishes, stuffs the rag in the back pocket of his equally greasy overalls and walks us into the garage area.  The smell of gas and oil permeated the space. It was glorious in my view and then the delight of the giant ice chest style Coke machine! The station attendant put a coin into the machine and told me to help myself.  There were what seemed like endless rows of bottles hanging into the cold depths of the box with only the colorful caps exposed.  I chose a Dr. Pepper and I remember the look on the faces of the two adults as they awaited my surprise. No surprise, it was delicious.

At some point a day or two later Mrs. Knottingham, Cleta’s mother, walked out into an area behind her house onto a dirt alley that separated a rustic barn from her tiny ranch style home and began to wring the necks of a couple of the chickens pecking around the area.  I was mesmerized by the grotesque sight of the headless chickens continuing to carom about the alley. Later that night Mrs. Knottingham, her husband and a couple of somewhat younger relatives sat about the darkened living room and watched TV wrestling in black and white.  Lots of hooting and hollering. My mind raced back to the safety of the Alamo.

Roe took over at some point. Looking back I vaguely remember it as some kind of temporary truce and a prisoner exchange. I saw the arrow impaled bodies at Little Bighorn.

A short time later and a 500 mile move from Southern California to Chico, California I found myself playing in the dirt in a carelessly planted garden beside a shack that served as the house of an Italian couple. He was a garbage man by trade and swore prolifically without provocation. Roe thought he was funny and even though I didn’t clearly understand he seemed warm and friendly.  Phyllis, Roe’s wife, didn't care for him.  

The garden was almost exclusively tomatoes which were handy one afternoon when another kid and I had a tomato fight. The garbage man’s wife scolded us gently and I got back to my favorite pastime of inventing cowboy and indian adventures using only twigs, leaves, gravel and various odds and ends I found in the dirt at the foot of the tomato plants. The Italians were babysitting me - I didn’t realize it at the time it was just part of the daily routine.  Creativity and imagination germinated for me in that tomato garden.

At some point near the beginning of our move to Chico Phyllis and I were traveling by car - I’m guessing from the babysitters to home and I made the mistake of calling her mommy.  It wasn't just an arbitrary, off-the-cuff remark.  I had considered it for some time.  How long?  I don’t really know but I remember the courage it took to do it and her response was “don’t call me mommy.” I collapsed inside from embarrassment and looked outside of the car at the passing landscape in humiliation. She amended her remark, “call me mom.”  

That instant in time - that arrow through my heart set the stage for our relationship the rest of my life.  Did I misunderstand? In retrospect and perhaps remembering selectively the various events over the years I might have misunderstood, but I don’t think so.

That encounter left a tiny scarred wound. That instant became a clarion moment of the realities of life after Cleta and served me my first real taste of melancholy. I didn’t much care for the dish and still don’t to this day. I bear no grudge - it was just an instant that changed some little thing in me for all time. Have I learned from it? I may be kinder and a bit more cautious to the little ones for it. . .and I have learned, for the most part, how to erase or at least camouflage the people and discomfort of painful events along the way. But most of all, starting from this tiny beginning up until this very moment I have learned the irreplaceable value of kindness and generosity.

PS: interestingly enough, it was my great granddaughter calling out “mommy, mommy” to her mother in the middle of the night that rattled this memory loose. XOX