October 29, 2005

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  The following “essay” or “reminiscence” is the second part to what I originally posted in August here on the blog. This was begun for the “Half Century” tab at the top of the Main Page of AllThingsMike and the original version was written in 2003. I have rewritten Chapter Five, and the rest is brand new. MFN

  
  

  CLICK HERE FOR THE FIRST PART OF THE STORY.

  
  

  
  

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  Chapter Five: Do It Yourself Home

  
  

  Dad never slowed down. He fashioned cabinets for the kitchen. He made a hutch for the hall. The screened in porch was given walls. Water lines were installed in the back yard for faucets to water mother’s flower garden. A cement driveway was poured. I became very familiar with the layout of Ole’s Home Centers and Angel’s Hardware, shopping with my dad. Lumber yards, bags of concrete, nails and hardware. Dad almost singlehandedly rebuilt our home, room by room. He added a new master bedroom and bath, complete with matching blue porcelain tub and toilet. He constructed a two car garage and recreation room. There was constant construction throughout my young life. Because he suffered from arthritis, Dad felt he had to keep busy or else he would eventually cripple. His furniture was more workaday than distinctive or artistic. But it was functional. Our walls were panelled with knotty pine and birchwood. Our floors were carpeted with thick shag. The family helped, and I learned to be a handyman myself from the experience.

  
  

  On Saturday afternoons, which could last forever, we three kids could be found either in the backyard or around the kitchen table with our coloring books and drawing pads. My brother and I loved horror movies, and weren’t content just with watching them on the television. I fashioned a “television” viewing area from a shoebox, and crayoned in the knobs and dials. I would cut strips of paper, draw a series of ovals to match the size of the “screen” in the shoebox TV, and create my own “movies” complete with elaborate credit sequences. The movies were “shown” by inserting the strips of paper through slits cut in the sides of the box. My brother and I would supply our own dialogue.

  
  

  Dad spent Saturdays in his workshop. Originally, the back yard to the house in El Monte had numerous “sheds” which we used as “buildings” for our play, but my dad eventually knocked them all down, and in their place grew a large two car garage, which doubled as a work area for Father’s “projects”. The sound of the buzz saw is one of my sharpest memories from childhood.

  
  

  My parents strived for the “Leave it to Beaver”, “Father Knows Best” type of atmosphere at home, just like the media told countless postwar couples with children how to live in the fifties and sixties. The “suburban ideal” certainly engulfed my parents. Mom was into “arts and crafts” joining Craft of the Month Club, and designing posters and artwork for the elementary school. Dad was the consummate handy man, and poured concrete for our driveway, and eventually redesigned and rebuilt 3/4 of our house, then added a two car garage and recreation room.

  
  

  He even installed the plumbing for the new “Master Bathroom” and laid pipe in the backyard for the spigots for watering the lawn. The back yard was immense. It had two sheds and a berry field on it when we moved in. My dad tore down the berry fields and one of the sheds. My mom planted the perimiter with flowers and shrubs. There were three spigots for attaching hoses. We didn’t have a sprinkler system in those days.

  
  

  My memories of living in El Monte are fond ones. First I and my brother had one bedroom, and my sister had another. Mom and Dad were in the master bedroom. There was one bath, off their bedroom, and the living room and kitchen were the only other rooms. The kids’ bedrooms were really not even rooms at first, but part of a large screened in porch area, which my dad turned into “rooms”. When he built the add-on Master Bedroom and bath, my brother and I moved to the old master bedroom (still together) and my sister moved into our old room. Her bedroom became Mom’s Sewing Room. When the recreation room was finished by the time I was half way through high school, I was able to turn the back end of it into a bedroom of my own. When Dad finished the garage, Mom decided it was time to move. She was afraid of the Mexicans. The town was named “El Monte” and half my class throughout grade school was of Latin American descent, and my mother was chiefly afraid because of the neighbors.

  
  

  
  Chapter Six: 1963: The year I became aware

  
  

  One afternoon I was invited to go to Lucy’s house, which was on the street where we lived, but across a cross street. My best friend and Lucy pleaded with me to break the bonds of my childhood prison, and I eagerly gave in, unleashed for a fraction of a decisive moment to the wild abandon of disobeying my mother. A lot of children disobey their mothers, but I was particularly afraid of doing anything that would hurt my mother, or her high opinion of me.
  But I went anyway. I had a great time at Lucy’s house. I considered her a girl I “loved” rather than just “liked” but she was a girlfriend already to Greg, my best friend. I learned how to ride a bicycle that afternoon, but in a crash I tore my jeans and cut my leg.
  When confronted with the consequences of the episode, I bravely told my mother the whole story, how I disobeyed her and went across Rose Street to Lucy’s, and cutting my leg riding a bicycle.
  Instead of punishing me, my mother praised me for telling the truth. This incident stands out in my memory because there was no punishment, and I learned a valuable lesson about honesty. I will always tell the truth to this day, and I abhor liars. The truth can’t cause all that much trouble, because it exists.
  I didn’t try to confound my parents, and take chances with my childhood existence with them. I understood the story of life when young. I observed the people I met, young, middle aged, and older, and determined life patterns which instilled in me a deep sense of life and how lucky one was to experience it, and how it only came once, so each person should live deeply in each moment.
  In 1963 I attended the fifth grade at Shirpser School in El Monte. My grades were excellent and while I was not among the most popular kids in the school, resulting from the fact that my mother kept us in our own yard after school hours, I did have quite a few friends and participated in schoolyard games of marbles, foursquare, dodgeball, and handball. In fifth grade my teacher was Miss Burr, a rail thin lesbian with sharp edged glasses and a serious demeanor. We had a reading program that year, with different colored “groups”, each color designating a more difficult level of reading. Four or us streamed through the program all the way to the top color, which was lavender. Because the other kids were still struggling with the program, our group was labelled “advanced” and we pretty much had free time. I used this time to read even more difficult books, which I had checked out of the library, and we also had discourses concerning our little world, and the world spinning around our classroom.
  I have always called this “the year I became aware.” One of the extra credit projects in which I participated involved making a model automobile, and I sent away to GM for project materials. Included was a list of automobiles that GM manufactured from the early years of horseless carriages. I fell in love with the 1963 Corvette Stingray split window coupe and began a love affair with automobiles which has never abated. I was always able to identify the year almost any auto was manufactured after 1963.
  During the summer before the school year began, my mother, father, sister and brother piled in our 1960 Chevrolet Brookwood station wagon and Dad drove us to Idaho to visit my grandmother. We repeated this vactation trip the following year, right before my grandmother died. Although in later years I lost contact with my mother’s family, my grandmother, and aunts and uncles, were very close to our family when I was young, and often visited us. We had large Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts, in which my dad cooked when held at our house in El Monte. Because I was getting a bit older, and doing well in school, Mother did let me visit more of my classmates at their homes. I can clearly remember checking out Glenn’s model castles and knight figures, which were very detailed. I was allowed to visit Greg because his mother and my mother were best friends. I even visited Lucy a few more times during my fifth and sixth year. She was one of the “advanced” students in our reading group.
  When John Kennedy was shot, I was home from school with a cold. That weekend, my “awareness” of the world around me increased tenfold. For three days, our television, along with every other television in the country, broadcast nothing but news and history of the Kennedy administration, the funeral arrangements, and tributes. Slowly but surely, throughout these times, the insular world of my mother’s construction started falling apart. The TV screen brought the world into the house, and nobody could really keep the images away.
  By sixth grade, I had attended my first real funeral. Grandmother had died in Idaho, and the family didn’t travel there. Only my mother took that trip. We were friendly with our neighbors, and it was the man next door, dead of a heart attack, whose funeral I first attended. His skin, pallid in death, looked almost plasticine, and his face was forever in sleep. I reached out to touch the corpse, fascinated by this physical representation of mortality. I learned a lot that year, both in school and out. There was much more to life than our parental nest, and it was strange, fascinating, and horrible.
  One of my mother’s PTA friends had two daughters. One was a year behind me, in my sister’s class, and the other was only in first grade. My siblings and I frequently played with these two girls, since they lived on the same street three doors down. I played “doctor” for the first time with these two girls, hidden in a closet with my sister on the lookout. The youngest even fancied me as her “boyfriend” and we would play handball together on the schoolyard during recess. I also “went steady” with Susan, another school friend, in the sixth grade, although we never even kissed. My memories of the last years of elementary school are somewhat warm ones, interspersed with some rather bad ones concerning some of the rougher boys, who didn’t like my popularity with the teachers, my good grades, and my lack of althleticism. I was one of those boys who wasn’t very good at softball, and although I did participate in the morning games before school, I was always relegated to the right field position, and I was never very good at hitting the ball. Sometimes I was ridiculed by boys who would pitch “easy” and goad me around the bases. My friend Miquel who lived across from Lucy was one of the school’s better athletes, and he befriended me, so I did have one guy “in my corner.” Although not too good a softball or football, I was pretty good at schoolyard games like foursquare and handball. I was also pretty good at marbles. I had lots of large clear “peeries” which I used to collect marbles from a lot of the kids at school. I also loved to read, and could frequently be seen sitting under a tree in the schoolyard, lost in some faraway land.

  
  

  Chapter Seven: Graduation from Childhood

  
  

  My mother never got elected to the Presidency of the PTA, but she was very active, and advanced to Vice President under the Presidency of Greg’s mother, her best friend. When my class was ready to exit grammar school in the early summer days of 1965, Mother planned an actual “graduation” with diplomas, pomp and circumstance, and all the regalia that would become so familiar a few years hence during high school commencement. The “diplomas” were merely mimeographed papers with our names written on a blank line, but they were special, and Mother even wrote an “open letter” to the graduating students: “We are proud of you, and know that you will succeed in whatever you choose to do. Good luck, and may the Lord bless you. A 6th grade mother, and former room mother to many of you.” I recently became reaquanited with a girl who attended Shirpser in my class, and she wrote me about how much my mother had touched her early life. At home, my siblings and I tended to think of my mom as an ogre at times, with strict rules and laws, threatening punishment at the drop of  a hat. But hundreds of children in the school remember her as a sweet and caring person, with a ready smile, and a willing hand. I acknowledge that she was indeed a special person, and she instilled in me a sense of purpose and love which had never left me. That someone from that time still remembered her made me feel especially proud.
  Graduation occurred with all the pomp and circumstance that my mother and her PTA buddies could muster, and a lot of us prepared for our next year at junior high, in a school four miles away. Junior High was to be attended at Gidly School, a K-8 school on the northern border of El Monte. All through elementary school, I walked the two and a half blocks, first with my mother as the doting hen, and then with my siblings. Since Gidley was so far away, I would have to take a school bus for the first time in my life, and the physical fact that the school was farther away caused my life away from home to become a bit more free from the strict bonds of the home. After the summer of 65, I would become a “big kid” at the junior high, and would be tossed into an experience far far away from the two block radius which had been my “life” up to that point. My mother was quite correct in preparing a “graduation” for us, because I was about to pass into another wave of experience, leaving childhood behind me.

  
  

  To Be Continued as it is Written.

  • 12:07 pm
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