The Weirdest Thing I Loved as a Child

It's Wednesday! Hump day! Time for another link-up at Long and Short Reviews. Today's prompt is "the weirdest thing I loved as a child." 

It just happens that I did choose a peculiar object to project love onto, for a few months, maybe a year, as a child. 

The summer before my brother was born, my parents went back to California. Not the southern part where I was born. The air there was too bad. Too many of their friends had moved away--or died! But some of their friends had moved to northern California, where they said the air wasn't quite so bad. Some of them were in Folsom, a town best known for the prison. 

I have some jumbled-up little-kid memories of Folsom. I wouldn't recognize the houses we rented (there were a few different ones) or the faces of the family friends, who were all adults and mostly older than my parents. I might remember the occasional arm or knee. Possibly because Mother had a mysterious short-term case arthritis, probably viral arthritis, that year, at age three I'd picked up the idea that the thing to do when older ladies paid attention to me was to crawl onto their laps and massage their forearms. Some of them liked that and some hated it, but they all wanted to be on good terms with Mother so they all sent me lots of lovely prezzies. 

I had learned to read, so they wanted to teach me to write, or at least print capital letters. I could print the words I could read. I could sign letters to all the cousins. What a lot of cousins there were. None of us in my generation ever wrote to each other. There were just too many of us. The parents wrote to the ones in their generation, about a hundred of their closest living relatives. "Thank you" notes for presents would come later, when my writing was more legible and the stream of packages had dwindled down.

We were the complete stereotype of an American baby-boom family where adults who hadn't had much, during the Depression years, bought their children everything. Department stores' mail-order catalogues featured a hundred or two hundred pages of toys. Usually it seemed to be true that people bought me what they wished they'd had as children, because I remember a battleship, a clunky old model vehicle that ought to have been worth some money by now that we called the Bus Or Truck because nobody was positive which it was meant to be, a fire engine, a train, and lots and lots of cowboy-theme junk, because my grandparents' granddaughter ought to be horsey even if neither of my parents was. There were also dolls, of which I remember mostly the paper dolls, and junk jewelry and doll-sized tableware. There were paintboxes and modelling clay and crayons and models to put together. There were dozens of model horses. What I actually chose to play with, having learned to read, were the books. Three-year-old children like simple stories read over and over again but at least I could read those stories over and over by myself, and not bother the adults. Only when adults wanted to pay attention to me did I want to snuggle up and let them read stories to me. Simple, boring little-kid stories. Over and over. But I did watch their reactions and tryn ot to ask the same adult to read the same story every time.

All the toys were supposed to distract me from the trauma of adults having to pay more attention to the new baby. Probably the strategy worked. I don't remember that year as being especially traumatic. I acted like the spoiled brat I was from time to time. I'd done that before the new baby came into view. 

I had looked forward to the baby. Of course he was a disappointment. I looked into the bassinet where he lay in a tiny red shirt and tiny blue-jean shorts. He would later identify as Cherokee and look like it, but for the first few months of his life he had blue eyes like a kitten. "Hello, baby," I said cheerfully. "You can look at the pictures in my new book." I started to read. Baby didn't even look at me. Baby lay there looking at the ceiling, and then he yelled for our mother. What a rip-off. 

"Could we take him back to the hospital and exchange him for a girl? You know, the kind who can play with their sisters and have fun?" The sister I was imagining was, of course, two or three years old. 

Mother wanted to go back to work almost as soon as the baby was born. Dad was the "house spouse." Nobody dared to laugh. Truth to tell, though, he wasn't very good at homemaking. Mother correctly surmised that he needed practice. Dad kept the house clean enough but cooked like the old-school drill sergeant he was. As for child care, he knew how to hold a baby's bottle and how to change a diaper, and on our best days he stayed in one room, smoking and writing, and left me to ignore my stacks of toys and reread the few of my lovely books that I understood well enough to like. Like most early-reading children, I could sound out a lot of words that I'd heard and even some I hadn't heard, without understanding the words at all.

That was the year I remember asking adults what "passion" was. I'd read it in Alice in Wonderland, where "fly into a passion" meant "make a display of anger." Nobody even seemed to want to ask about the context. People said things like "It's a word that a child your age doesn't need to know!" Nobody even asked how I'd known how the word was pronounced. We didn't go to a church that did anything special about Holy Week, but we lived near some that did. 

Then there was a set of books I liked because they were about hillbillies. Beanie and Tough Enough lived in North Carolina and seemed quite different from people we knew in Virginia--older-fashioned, I was not yet sophisticated enough to say--but they did things I would have liked to be doing, like wading in a cold stream and building little dams and water wheels. I liked reading about that sort of thing while I was moping around indoors, waiting for my nose to start bleeding from the dry heat. For a week or two in summer my nose bled at least once a day. 

I had enough picture books I liked to spend the whole day reading. Some of them were school books, some for the middle grades. I didn't quite understand them but I kept going back to them every few days and trying to figure out more. I remember quite a bit of a middle-grade book called Health Trails because I was able, over time, to make sense of quite a bit of it. That was the most interesting thing, to me, that I did that year. I learned not just to sound out words but to understand them.

But on not-so-good days Dad would remember that he was supposed to provide some kind of guidance to the older child too. Then if the weather was bad he'd try to teach me something, and succeed in teaching me that he was the world's worst teacher. He'd start out reasonably enough with addition facts and spelling words, and then, being incapable of staying on grade level, he'd get carried away on some train of thought that might or might not have been too difficult for college students. Or if the weather was good he'd blather about going out to get some exercise. 

The front lawn was boring enough. Dad and I believed we were allergic to grass. Actually it would have been chemicals other people sprayed on their lawns that stuck to our grass too. Any time we walked out on the grass our legs itched. When my legs itched, I scratched them. Also there was beginning to be a feeling in Folsom that children weren't safe on front lawns. Some people in our neighborhood drove under the influence of alcohol and ran over people's front lawns often. 

So I was sent to the back lot, which Dad called a yard out of habit. It was covered in gravel not grass, was about the size of the larger rooms in the house, was surrounded on all sides by ten feet of redwood planks, and was deadly boring. Exercise? What was Dad talking about? There was nothing to do out there. No garden to tend, no stream to splash in, no trees to climb. Drearily I picked out pebbles in the gravel yard, named them after the characters in some of my picture books, and tried to remember and reenact stories I'd read with them. The only pebble that really looked like anything was a pale stone that looked like a very bad representation of a horse's head. I named it Pal, after Beanie Tatum's pony in Beanie and Tough Enough et seq. From day to day I forgot which of the other pebbles had represented which character on previous days, but Pal was unmistakable.

So it came about that I had several boxes of expensive toys I never played with, and don't remember now, but I actually played with, and formed one of those little-kid bonds with, the pebble I called Pal.

The number of books increased steadily. When she could, Mother arranged opportunities for me to do something besides read and mope. One of her friends had a teenaged daughter who had a real horse to ride; I was taken out to ride with the teenager. I remember the horse, a friendly reddish-brown animal who let me walk under him and reach up to fondle his face. Other times we went for walks in parks, or to visit farms we might be able to buy, or on the beach. In the mid-twentieth century, on the beach near Monterey was a big gnarled cypress tree that clung improbably to a bank just above the ocean. I remember that tree, and the prettiness of fresh wet seashells, and getting saltwater stains on every single pair of beach shorts. But in order to go anywhere for exercise we had to go in the car. 

Only Mother ever drove the car. It was a Plymouth, Mother had astigmatism like me, and in theory she disapproved of cars like Dad, but somehow in spite of those things she liked to drive. Long before Lyn St James and Danica Patrick were born, someone had had the idea of putting a glamorous fashion model in a racing car. Mother had been offered the job; while mulling, she'd witnessed a wreck and taken it as a sign that racing was not for her. Dad worried even about her driving. What had convinced him to sell the house outside Los Angeles had been a near miss when another driver, coming around a sharp blind turn as fast as Mother was going round it, had barely been able to stop his car slamming into Mother's. 

In Folsom, on one of those sultry summer days when my brother was almost a year old, there was an actual crash. We all heard the metal crunch and the glass shatter. Mother was inside with the baby. Dad and I were being quiet in other parts of the house. We all sprang up and rushed out to the front window to see one of the local drunk drivers walking away from Mother's beloved Plymouth.

Mother didn't often use Army language, never used some of the words the Hillary Rodham sort of feminists thought it was liberating to say, but she used all of the swearwords she did use. She did not call the drunk driver a female dog. Mother was capable of saying "dam' DRUNK!" in a way that sounded much worse than what the drunk was calling the Plymouth. 

"Don't go out there," Dad said.

"I'm not going out there."

"She's too drunk to know what she's doing."

"I know that!"

"We'll get another car and go back to Virginia," Dad said despondently.

If I'd been ten years older I might have gone out and knocked the drunk down, for what she was doing to the parents...but for me that was a wonderful day. My nose had started bleeding again. I was just one more week of nosebleeds and itching away from home.

The parents packed and made arrangements. I continued rereading Health Trails, tried a few of the Christian magazines Dad wanted me to read with him, was sent out to the back ayrd to try to reenact stories with pebbles. 

At last the day came to climb into our new car, actually a rather heavily used Chevrolet, and--I started back toward the house.

"Where d'you think you're going? Everything's been packed and shipped. The doors are locked. You can't go back into the house.

"I don't want to go into the house," I said. "I wanted to go to the back yard."

"Well, you can't, but why?"

"I want to take Pal." 

"Get in the car now."

"Kids!"

For at least the first fifty miles I missed the pebble I'd named Pal.

Other book reviewers' odd choices of things to "cathect," to practice loving on, are linked at Long and Short Reviews. Other readers? Was there a toy you loved as a child? Why not tell us about it in the comment section?