True story.
I was in kindergarten, which means we were in San Diego. We lived in a
newly-built subdivision in the midst of desert.
The entire neighborhood sprang up in less than a year—in fact, we had
the first completed house. Our neighbors tended to be in the military as well.
Sometimes ringing the doorbell at a friend’s house meant waking up a
newly-returned soldier who, fresh from combat in Vietnam, would answer the door
with a dagger in his hand and a crazed look in his eyes. Sometimes our
neighbors were educated people, engineers who had travelled around the world
with the Army, sometimes they were the enlisted men and their wives and
families. For the most part, all of the men were gone, and the women were left
to run things. There was a war on, after all, and even non-combats like my dad
(Navy radioman) were gone for nine month deployments or longer.
My mom knew most of the ladies in the neighborhood.
They traveled in packs to the PDX, sharing precious resources like cars and lawn
mowers and punch bowls. Not many women drove back in the 60’s and fewer had
access to their own cars. My mother could drive after a fashion, but she
couldn’t drive stick shift, so my father made it a point to only buy stick
shifts. Thus, we had a car, but it sat in the garage awaiting his return. My
mother made do with the bread truck—oh, what a glorious day when the bread
truck came by!---and the gift of a ride to the store when a neighbor offered.
She often bought a month’s worth of food at a time, just in case the next ride
wouldn’t come along for a while. (It was the 60’s, may I remind you, the nadir
of the Canned Food Movement.) We also went out to eat in packs, two or three
fatherless families hitting the Shakey’s together so our mothers could get the
hell out of the house and talk to an adult for a while.
A few families in the neighborhood were non-military,
or had a dad with a “regular” job at the base, such as jet mechanic, which
meant the women’s days revolved around a hot meal on the table promptly at
five-fifteen, when He walked through the door. Evenings were devoted to waiting
on Him hand and foot. The ladies partied among themselves during the day and
scattered like sad little clouds promptly at four, when it was time to Start
Dinner. Since I was in half-day kindergarten (morning session, ugh) I was often
dragged along with my mom to local houses for afternoon Tupperware parties,
teas, and bridal showers.
Many of our neighbors had not, I believe, finished
high school. Many had married quite young—seventeen was considered an “old”
bride—and many were Southern. I remember very clearly one of my favorite
families: they had a fascinating back yard with a fish pond, quail, and a
chopping block for butchering livestock. The mother, Mrs. Cosby, was very sweet to me, with good Appalachian
manners, fresh from what can only be described as the backwoods. Her children
were far older than I was, and everyone in the family had an accent so thick I
often had trouble decoding what they were saying, and often ran to my mother
afterwards to ask the meaning of phrases such as “Thankee” and “Tha’ thur’s a
gra-cee-ous PLENNY!”
On this particular occasion, a bridal shower for a sixteen-year-old,
the women participated in a party game which left me mystified. I’ve asked my
mother about it and she can’t remember much, but I’m still appalled when I
think about it.
One of the older women took a dishtowel (imprinted
with strawberries, the “theme” for the kitchen of the bride-to-be) and did a
bit of mountain origami on it, producing a long thick tube with a funny-looking
knot at the top of it. The women took turns passing it around, carefully
handing it to one another with a funny grip, ensuring that it remained upright,
topknot aloft. As they did so they chanted a poem, carefully typed out on a
piece of paper for the uninitiated. When the towel finally slumped down from
its upright position the women screamed with laughter and the unfortunate
holder of the towel lost. This went on for a while until Mrs. Cosby remembered
my presence and sent me out of the room to watch my favorite soap opera, Dark Shadows. (Two kids were
trying to raise a demon in that episode. Quite wholesome fair compared to
whatever was going on in the other room.)
It was forty years or so before I realized what that
towel was meant to resemble, and another few years before I realized I may have
been witnessing not a party game, but some antiquated bit of backwoods voo-doo.
Mom doesn’t remember, and my source of reliable facts, my sister, wasn’t there.
She was there, however, the day that Mrs Cosby invited my mom over for some
“fancy” drinks. Mrs. C used her best gas station give-away drinking glasses, and when she pulled
out the jug of wine, she filled my mom’s Speedy Gonzalez 16 ouncer to the brim. Now
that’s a gracious plenty.
No comments:
Post a Comment